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• Exploring the Excel Services REST API

  - by jamiet

  Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible.  Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in.   The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet 

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• DialogFX: A New Approach to JavaFX Dialogs

  - by HecklerMark

  How would you like a quick and easy drop-in dialog box capability for JavaFX? That's what I was thinking when a weekend presented itself. And never being one to waste a good weekend...  :-) After doing some "roll-your-own" basic dialog building for a JavaFX app, I recently stumbled across Anton Smirnov's work on GitHub. It was a good start, but it wasn't exactly what I was after, and ideas just kept popping up of things I'd do differently. I wanted something a bit more streamlined, a bit easier to just "drop in and use". And so DialogFX was born. DialogFX wasn't intended to be overly fancy, overly clever - just useful and robust. Here were my goals: Easy to use. A dialog "system" should be so simple to use a new developer can drop it in quickly with nearly no learning curve. A seasoned developer shouldn't even have to think, just tap in a few lines and go. Why should dialogs slow "actual development"?  :-) Defaults. If you don't specify something (dialog type, buttons, etc.), a good dialog system should still work. It may not be pretty, but it shouldn't throw gears. Sharable. It's all open source. Even the icons are in the commons, so they can be reused at will. Let's take a look at some screen captures and the code used to produce them.   DialogFX INFO dialog Screen captures Windows Mac  Sample code         DialogFX dialog = new DialogFX();        dialog.setTitleText("Info Dialog Box Example");        dialog.setMessage("This is an example of an INFO dialog box, created using DialogFX.");        dialog.showDialog(); DialogFX ERROR dialog Screen captures Windows Mac  Sample code         DialogFX dialog = new DialogFX(Type.ERROR);        dialog.setTitleText("Error Dialog Box Example");        dialog.setMessage("This is an example of an ERROR dialog box, created using DialogFX.");        dialog.showDialog(); DialogFX ACCEPT dialog Screen captures Windows Mac  Sample code         DialogFX dialog = new DialogFX(Type.ACCEPT);        dialog.setTitleText("Accept Dialog Box Example");        dialog.setMessage("This is an example of an ACCEPT dialog box, created using DialogFX.");        dialog.showDialog(); DialogFX Question dialog (Yes/No) Screen captures Windows Mac  Sample code         DialogFX dialog = new DialogFX(Type.QUESTION);        dialog.setTitleText("Question Dialog Box Example");        dialog.setMessage("This is an example of an QUESTION dialog box, created using DialogFX. Would you like to continue?");        dialog.showDialog(); DialogFX Question dialog (custom buttons) Screen captures Windows Mac  Sample code         List<String> buttonLabels = new ArrayList<>(2);        buttonLabels.add("Affirmative");        buttonLabels.add("Negative");         DialogFX dialog = new DialogFX(Type.QUESTION);        dialog.setTitleText("Question Dialog Box Example");        dialog.setMessage("This is an example of an QUESTION dialog box, created using DialogFX. This also demonstrates the automatic wrapping of text in DialogFX. Would you like to continue?");        dialog.addButtons(buttonLabels, 0, 1);        dialog.showDialog(); A couple of things to note You may have noticed in that last example the addButtons(buttonLabels, 0, 1) call. You can pass custom button labels in and designate the index of the default button (responding to the ENTER key) and the cancel button (for ESCAPE). Optional parameters, of course, but nice when you may want them. Also, the showDialog() method actually returns the index of the button pressed. Rather than create EventHandlers in the dialog that really have little to do with the dialog itself, you can respond to the user's choice within the calling object. Or not. Again, it's your choice.  :-) And finally, I've Javadoc'ed the code in the main places. Hopefully, this will make it easy to get up and running quickly and with a minimum of fuss. How Do I Get (Git?) It? To try out DialogFX, just point your browser here to the DialogFX GitHub repository and download away! Please take a look, try it out, and let me know what you think. All feedback welcome! All the best, Mark 

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• Generate Strongly Typed Observable Events for the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)

  - by Bobby Diaz

  I must have tried reading through the various explanations and introductions to the new Reactive Extensions for .NET before the concepts finally started sinking in.  The article that gave me the ah-ha moment was over on SilverlightShow.net and titled Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight.  The author did a good job comparing the "normal" way of handling events vs. the new "reactive" methods. Admittedly, I still have more to learn about the Rx Framework, but I wanted to put together a sample project so I could start playing with the new Observable and IObservable<T> constructs.  I decided to throw together a whiteboard application in Silverlight based on the Drawing with Rx example on the aforementioned article.  At the very least, I figured I would learn a thing or two about a new technology, but my real goal is to create a fun application that I can share with the kids since they love drawing and coloring so much! Here is the code sample that I borrowed from the article: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp");       var draggingEvents = from pos in mouseMoveEvent                              .SkipUntil(mouseLeftButtonDown)                              .TakeUntil(mouseLeftButtonUp)                              .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) =>                                  new                                  {                                      X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y,                                      Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y                                  })).Repeat()                          select pos;       draggingEvents.Subscribe(p =>     {         Line line = new Line();         line.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black);         line.StrokeEndLineCap = PenLineCap.Round;         line.StrokeLineJoin = PenLineJoin.Round;         line.StrokeThickness = 5;         line.X1 = p.X1;         line.Y1 = p.Y1;         line.X2 = p.X2;         line.Y2 = p.Y2;         this.LayoutRoot.Children.Add(line);     }); One thing that was nagging at the back of my mind was having to deal with the event names as strings, as well as the verbose syntax for the Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>() method.  I came up with a couple of static/helper classes to resolve both issues and also created a T4 template to auto-generate these helpers for any .NET type.  Take the following code from the above example: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp"); Turns into this with the new static Events class: var mouseMoveEvent = Events.Mouse.Move.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this); Or better yet, just remove the variable declarations altogether:     var draggingEvents = from pos in Events.Mouse.Move.On(this)                              .SkipUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this))                              .TakeUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this))                              .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) =>                                  new                                  {                                      X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y,                                      Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y                                  })).Repeat()                          select pos; The Move, LeftButtonDown and LeftButtonUp members of the Events.Mouse class are readonly instances of the ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> class that provide type-safe access to the events via the On() method.  Here is the code for the class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq;   namespace System.Linq {     /// <summary>     /// Represents an event that can be managed via the <see cref="Observable"/> API.     /// </summary>     /// <typeparam name="TTarget">The type of the target.</typeparam>     /// <typeparam name="TEventArgs">The type of the event args.</typeparam>     public class ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> where TEventArgs : EventArgs     {         /// <summary>         /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="ObservableEvent"/> class.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param>         protected ObservableEvent(String eventName)         {             EventName = eventName;         }           /// <summary>         /// Registers the specified event name.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public static ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> Register(String eventName)         {             return new ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs>(eventName);         }           /// <summary>         /// Creates an enumerable sequence of event values for the specified target.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="target">The target.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public IObservable<IEvent<TEventArgs>> On(TTarget target)         {             return Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>(target, EventName);         }           /// <summary>         /// Gets or sets the name of the event.         /// </summary>         /// <value>The name of the event.</value>         public string EventName { get; private set; }     } } And this is how it's used:     /// <summary>     /// Categorizes <see cref="ObservableEvents"/> by class and/or functionality.     /// </summary>     public static partial class Events     {         /// <summary>         /// Implements a set of predefined <see cref="ObservableEvent"/>s         /// for the <see cref="System.Windows.System.Windows.UIElement"/> class         /// that represent mouse related events.         /// </summary>         public static partial class Mouse         {             /// <summary>Represents the MouseMove event.</summary>             public static readonly ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs> Move =                 ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs>.Register("MouseMove");               // additional members omitted...         }     } The source code contains a static Events class with prefedined members for various categories (Key, Mouse, etc.).  There is also an Events.tt template that you can customize to generate additional event categories for any .NET type.  All you should have to do is add the name of your class to the types collection near the top of the template:     types = new Dictionary<String, Type>()     {         //{ "Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.Map, Microsoft.Maps.MapControl", null }         { "System.Windows.FrameworkElement, System.Windows", null },         { "Whiteboard.MainPage, Whiteboard", null }     }; The template is also a bit rough at this point, but at least it generates code that *should* compile.  Please let me know if you run into any issues with it.  Some people have reported errors when trying to use T4 templates within a Silverlight project, but I was able to get it to work with a little black magic...  You can download the source code for this project or play around with the live demo.  Just be warned that it is at a very early stage so don't expect to find much today.  I plan on adding alot more options like pen colors and sizes, saving, printing, etc. as time permits.  HINT: hold down the ESC key to erase! Enjoy! Additional Resources Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight DevLabs: Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) Rx Framework Part III - LINQ to Events - Generating GetEventName() Wrapper Methods using T4

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• Dynamic Code for type casting Generic Types 'generically' in C#

  - by Rick Strahl

  C# is a strongly typed language and while that's a fundamental feature of the language there are more and more situations where dynamic types make a lot of sense. I've written quite a bit about how I use dynamic for creating new type extensions: Dynamic Types and DynamicObject References in C# Creating a dynamic, extensible C# Expando Object Creating a dynamic DataReader for dynamic Property Access Today I want to point out an example of a much simpler usage for dynamic that I use occasionally to get around potential static typing issues in C# code especially those concerning generic types. TypeCasting Generics Generic types have been around since .NET 2.0 I've run into a number of situations in the past - especially with generic types that don't implement specific interfaces that can be cast to - where I've been unable to properly cast an object when it's passed to a method or assigned to a property. Granted often this can be a sign of bad design, but in at least some situations the code that needs to be integrated is not under my control so I have to make due with what's available or the parent object is too complex or intermingled to be easily refactored to a new usage scenario. Here's an example that I ran into in my own RazorHosting library - so I have really no excuse, but I also don't see another clean way around it in this case. A Generic Example Imagine I've implemented a generic type like this: public class RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> where TBaseTemplateType : RazorTemplateBase, new() You can now happily instantiate new generic versions of this type with custom template bases or even a non-generic version which is implemented like this: public class RazorEngine : RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase> { public RazorEngine() : base() { } } To instantiate one: var engine = new RazorEngine<MyCustomRazorTemplate>(); Now imagine that the template class receives a reference to the engine when it's instantiated. This code is fired as part of the Engine pipeline when it gets ready to execute the template. It instantiates the template and assigns itself to the template: var template = new TBaseTemplateType() { Engine = this } The problem here is that possibly many variations of RazorEngine<T> can be passed. I can have RazorTemplateBase, RazorFolderHostTemplateBase, CustomRazorTemplateBase etc. as generic parameters and the Engine property has to reflect that somehow. So, how would I cast that? My first inclination was to use an interface on the engine class and then cast to the interface.  Generally that works, but unfortunately here the engine class is generic and has a few members that require the template type in the member signatures. So while I certainly can implement an interface: public interface IRazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> it doesn't really help for passing this generically templated object to the template class - I still can't cast it if multiple differently typed versions of the generic type could be passed. I have the exact same issue in that I can't specify a 'generic' generic parameter, since there's no underlying base type that's common. In light of this I decided on using object and the following syntax for the property (and the same would be true for a method parameter): public class RazorTemplateBase :MarshalByRefObject,IDisposable { public object Engine {get;set; } } Now because the Engine property is a non-typed object, when I need to do something with this value, I still have no way to cast it explicitly. What I really would need is: public RazorEngine<> Engine { get; set; } but that's not possible. Dynamic to the Rescue Luckily with the dynamic type this sort of thing can be mitigated fairly easily. For example here's a method that uses the Engine property and uses the well known class interface by simply casting the plain object reference to dynamic and then firing away on the properties and methods of the base template class that are common to all templates:/// <summary> /// Allows rendering a dynamic template from a string template /// passing in a model. This is like rendering a partial /// but providing the input as a /// </summary> public virtual string RenderTemplate(string template,object model) { if (template == null) return string.Empty; // if there's no template markup if(!template.Contains("@")) return template; // use dynamic to get around generic type casting dynamic engine = Engine; string result = engine.RenderTemplate(template, model); if (result == null) throw new ApplicationException("RenderTemplate failed: " + engine.ErrorMessage); return result; } Prior to .NET 4.0  I would have had to use Reflection for this sort of thing which would have a been a heck of a lot more verbose, but dynamic makes this so much easier and cleaner and in this case at least the overhead is negliable since it's a single dynamic operation on an otherwise very complex operation call. Dynamic as  a Bailout Sometimes this sort of thing often reeks of a design flaw, and I agree that in hindsight this could have been designed differently. But as is often the case this particular scenario wasn't planned for originally and removing the generic signatures from the base type would break a ton of other code in the framework. Given the existing fairly complex engine design, refactoring an interface to remove generic types just to make this particular code work would have been overkill. Instead dynamic provides a nice and simple and relatively clean solution. Now if there were many other places where this occurs I would probably consider reworking the code to make this cleaner but given this isolated instance and relatively low profile operation use of dynamic seems a valid choice for me. This solution really works anywhere where you might end up with an inheritance structure that doesn't have a common base or interface that is sufficient. In the example above I know what I'm getting but there's no common base type that I can cast to. All that said, it's a good idea to think about use of dynamic before you rush in. In many situations there are alternatives that can still work with static typing. Dynamic definitely has some overhead compared to direct static access of objects, so if possible we should definitely stick to static typing. In the example above the application already uses dynamics extensively for dynamic page page templating and passing models around so introducing dynamics here has very little additional overhead. The operation itself also fires of a fairly resource heavy operation where the overhead of a couple of dynamic member accesses are not a performance issue. So, what's your experience with dynamic as a bailout mechanism? © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in CSharp   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 06, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 06, 2010New ProjectsActive Worlds Dot Net Wrapper (Based on AwSdk): Active Worlds Dot Net Wrapper (Based on AwSdk)Combina: Smart calculator for large combinatorial calculations.Concurrent Cache: ConcurrentCache is a smart output cache library extending OutputCacheProvider. It consists of in memory, cache files and compressed files modes and...Decay: Personal use. For learningFazTalk: FazTalk is a suite of tools and products that are designed to improve collaboration and workflow interactions. FazTalk takes an innovative approach...grouped: A peer to peer text editor, written in C# [update] I wrote this little thing a while back and even forgot about it, I stopped coding for more tha...HitchARide MVC 2 Sample: An MVC 2 sample written as part of the Microsoft 2010 London Web Camp based on the wireframes at http://schematics.earthware.co.uk/hitcharide. Not...Inspiration.Web: Description: A simple (but entertaining) ASP.NET MVC (C#) project to suggest random code names for projects. Intended audience: People who ne...NetFileBrowser - TinyMCE: tinyMCE file plugin with asp.netOil Slick Live Feeds: All live feeds from BP's Remotely Operated VehiclesParticle Lexer: Parser and Tokenizer libraryPdf Form Tool: Pdf Form Tool demonstrates how the iTextSharp library could be used to fill PDF forms. The input data is provided as a csv file. The application ...Planning Poker Windows Mobile 7: This project is a Planning Poker application for Windows Mobile 7 (and later?). RandomRat: RandomRat is a program for generating random sets that meet specific criteriaScience.NET: A scientific library written in managed code. It supports advanced mathematics (algebra system, sequences, statistics, combinatorics...), data stru...Spider Compiler: Spider Compiler parses the input of a spider programming source file and compiles it (with help of csc.exe; the C#-Compiler) to an exe-file. This p...Sununpro: sunun's project for study by team foundation server.TFS Buddy: An application that manipulates your I-Buddy whenever something happens in your Team Foundation ServerValveSoft: ValveSysWiiMote Physics: WiiMote Physics is an application that allows you to retrieve data from your WiiMote or Balance Board and display it in real-time. It has a number...WinGet: WinGet is a download manager for Windows. You can drag links onto the WinGet Widget and it will download a file on the selected folder. It is dev...XProject.NET: A project management and team collaboration platformNew Releases.NET DiscUtils: Version 0.9 Preview: This release is still under development. New features available in this release: Support for accessing short file names stored in WIM files Incr...Active Worlds Dot Net Wrapper (Based on AwSdk): Active World Dot Net Wrapper (0.0.1.85): Based on AwSdk 85AwSdk UnOfficial Wrapper Howto Use: C# using AwWrapper; VB.Net Import AwWrapperAjaxControlToolkit additional extenders: ZhecheAjaxControls for .NET3.5: Used AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - April 12th 2010 Release Version 40412. Fixed deadlock in long operation canceling Some other fixesAnyCAD: AnyCAD.v1.2.ENU.Install: http://www.anycad.net Parametric Modeling *3D: Sphere, Box, Cylinder, Cone •2D: Line, Rectangle, Arc, Arch, Circle, Spline, Polygon •Feature: Extr...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V29: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Concurrent Cache: 1.0: This is the first release for the ConcurrentCache library.Configuration Section Designer: 2.0.0: This is the first Beta Release for VS 2010 supportDoxygen Browser Addin for VS: Doxygen Browser Addin - v0.1.4 Beta: Support for Visual Studio 2010 improved the logging of errors (Event Logs) Fixed some issues/bugs Hot key for navigation "Control + F1, Contr...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.6.2: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.6.2), with new UI changes. Once you have extracted the file, do not delete any files/folders. They are n...HERB.IQ: Beta 0.1 Source code release 5: Beta 0.1 Source code release 5Inspiration.Web: Initial release (deployment package): Initial release (deployment package)NetFileBrowser - TinyMCE: Demo Project: Demo ProjectNetFileBrowser - TinyMCE: NetFileBrowser: NetImageBrowserNLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.06.05.001: Changes since the last build:2010-06-04 23:29:42 Jarek Kowalski Massive update to documentation generator. 2010-05-28 15:41:42 Jarek Kowalski upda...Oil Slick Live Feeds: Oil Slick Live Feeds 0.1: A the first release, with feeds from the MS Skandi, Boa Deep C, Enterprise and Q4000. They are live streams from the ROV's monitoring the damaged...Pcap.Net: Pcap.Net 0.7.0 (46671): Pcap.Net - June 2010 Release Pcap.Net is a .NET wrapper for WinPcap written in C++/CLI and C#. It Features almost all WinPcap features and includes...sqwarea: Sqwarea 0.0.289.0 (alpha): API supportTFS Buddy: TFS Buddy First release (Beta 1): This is the first release of the TFS Buddy.Visual Studio DSite: Looping Animation (Visual C++ 2008): A solider firing a bullet that loops and displays an explosion everytime it hits the edge of the form.WiiMote Physics: WiiMote Physics v4.0: v4.0.0.1 Recovered from existing compiled assembly after hard drive failure Now requires .NET 4.0 (it seems to make it run faster) Added new c...WinGet: Alpha 1: First Alpha of WinGet. It includes all the planned features but it contains many bugs. Packaged using 7-Zip and ClickOnce.Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)PHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationN2 CMSIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterStyleCopsmark C# LibraryFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and Silverlight

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• API Message Localization

  - by Jesse Taber

  In my post, “Keep Localizable Strings Close To Your Users” I talked about the internationalization and localization difficulties that can arise when you sprinkle static localizable strings throughout the different logical layers of an application. The main point of that post is that you should have your localizable strings reside as close to the user-facing modules of your application as possible. For example, if you’re developing an ASP .NET web forms application all of the localizable strings should be kept in .resx files that are associated with the .aspx views of the application. In this post I want to talk about how this same concept can be applied when designing and developing APIs. An API Facilitates Machine-to-Machine Interaction You can typically think about a web, desktop, or mobile application as a collection “views” or “screens” through which users interact with the underlying logic and data. The application can be designed based on the assumption that there will be a human being on the other end of the screen working the controls. You are designing a machine-to-person interaction and the application should be built in a way that facilitates the user’s clear understanding of what is going on. Dates should be be formatted in a way that the user will be familiar with, messages should be presented in the user’s preferred language, etc. When building an API, however, there are no screens and you can’t make assumptions about who or what is on the other end of each call. An API is, by definition, a machine-to-machine interaction. A machine-to-machine interaction should be built in a way that facilitates a clear and unambiguous understanding of what is going on. Dates and numbers should be formatted in predictable and standard ways (e.g. ISO 8601 dates) and messages should be presented in machine-parseable formats. For example, consider an API for a time tracking system that exposes a resource for creating a new time entry. The JSON for creating a new time entry for a user might look like: 1: { 2: "userId": 4532, 3: "startDateUtc": "2012-10-22T14:01:54.98432Z", 4: "endDateUtc": "2012-10-22T11:34:45.29321Z" 5: }   Note how the parameters for start and end date are both expressed as ISO 8601 compliant dates in UTC. Using a date format like this in our API leaves little room for ambiguity. It’s also important to note that using ISO 8601 dates is a much, much saner thing than the \/Date(<milliseconds since epoch>)\/ nonsense that is sometimes used in JSON serialization. Probably the most important thing to note about the JSON snippet above is the fact that the end date comes before the start date! The API should recognize that and disallow the time entry from being created, returning an error to the caller. You might inclined to send a response that looks something like this: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"message" : "The end date must come after the start date"}] 3: }   While this may seem like an appropriate thing to do there are a few problems with this approach: What if there is a user somewhere on the other end of the API call that doesn’t speak English?  What if the message provided here won’t fit properly within the UI of the application that made the API call? What if the verbiage of the message isn’t consistent with the rest of the application that made the API call? What if there is no user directly on the other end of the API call (e.g. this is a batch job uploading time entries once per night unattended)? The API knows nothing about the context from which the call was made. There are steps you could take to given the API some context (e.g.allow the caller to send along a language code indicating the language that the end user speaks), but that will only get you so far. As the designer of the API you could make some assumptions about how the API will be called, but if we start making assumptions we could very easily make the wrong assumptions. In this situation it’s best to make no assumptions and simply design the API in such a way that the caller has the responsibility to convey error messages in a manner that is appropriate for the context in which the error was raised. You would work around some of these problems by allowing callers to add metadata to each request describing the context from which the call is being made (e.g. accepting a ‘locale’ parameter denoting the desired language), but that will add needless clutter and complexity. It’s better to keep the API simple and push those context-specific concerns down to the caller whenever possible. For our very simple time entry example, this can be done by simply changing our error message response to look like this: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"code": 100}] 3: }   By changing our error error from exposing a string to a numeric code that is easily parseable by another application, we’ve placed all of the responsibility for conveying the actual meaning of the error message on the caller. It’s best to have the caller be responsible for conveying this meaning because the caller understands the context much better than the API does. Now the caller can see error code 100, know that it means that the end date submitted falls before the start date and take appropriate action. Now all of the problems listed out above are non-issues because the caller can simply translate the error code of ‘100’ into the proper action and message for the current context. The numeric code representation of the error is a much better way to facilitate the machine-to-machine interaction that the API is meant to facilitate. An API Does Have Human Users While APIs should be built for machine-to-machine interaction, people still need to wire these interactions together. As a programmer building a client application that will consume the time entry API I would find it frustrating to have to go dig through the API documentation every time I encounter a new error code (assuming the documentation exists and is accurate). The numeric error code approach hurts the discoverability of the API and makes it painful to integrate with. We can help ease this pain by merging our two approaches: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"code": 100, "message" : "The end date must come after the start date"}] 3: }   Now we have an easily parseable numeric error code for the machine-to-machine interaction that the API is meant to facilitate and a human-readable message for programmers working with the API. The human-readable message here is not intended to be viewed by end-users of the API and as such is not really a “localizable string” in my opinion. We could opt to expose a locale parameter for all API methods and store translations for all error messages, but that’s a lot of extra effort and overhead that doesn’t add a lot real value to the API. I might be a bit of an “ugly American”, but I think it’s probably fine to have the API return English messages when the target for those messages is a programmer. When resources are limited (which they always are), I’d argue that you’re better off hard-coding these messages in English and putting more effort into building more useful features, improving security, tweaking performance, etc.

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• Week in Geek: IPv6 Capable Smartphones Compromise User Privacy Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to “clone a disk, resize static windows, and create system function shortcuts”, use 45 different services, sites, and apps to help read favorite sites, add MP3 support to Audacity (for saving in MP3 format), install a Wii game loader for easy backups and fast load times, create a Blue Screen of Death in any color, and more. Photo by legofenris. Weekly News Links Photo by The H Security. IPv6: Smartphones compromise users’ privacy Since version 4 of the iOS operating system, Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPods have been capable of handling IPv6, and most Android devices have been capable since version 2.1. However, the operating systems transfer an ID that discloses information about their users. Dumb phones can be attacked too Much of the discussion of security threats to mobile phones revolves around smartphones, but researchers have found that less advanced “feature phones,” still used by the majority of people around the world, also are vulnerable to attack. SCADA exploit – the dragon awakes The recent publication of an exploit for KingView, a software package for visualising industrial process control systems, appears to be having an effect. Threatpost reports that both the Chinese vendor Wellintech and Chinese CERT (CN-CERT) have now reacted. Sophos: Spam to get more malicious Spam is becoming more malicious in nature as trickery tactics change in line with current user interests, according to a new report released Tuesday by Sophos. Global spam traffic rebounds as Rustock wakes Spam is on the rise after the Rustock botnet awoke from its Christmas slumber, according to Symantec. Cracking WPA keys in the cloud At the forthcoming Black Hat conference, blogger Thomas Roth plans to demonstrate how weak WPA PSKs can be cracked quickly and easily using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer could allow remote code execution Provides a link to more details about the vulnerability and shows a work-around/fix for the problem. Adobe plans to make it easier to delete Flash cookies in web browsers The new API, NPAPI:ClearSiteData, will allow Flash cookies – also known as Local Shared Objects (LSO) – to be deleted directly in the browser’s settings. Firefox beta getting new database standard The ninth beta version of Firefox is set to get support for a standard called IndexedDB that provides a database interface useful for offline data storage and other tasks needing information on a browser’s computer. MetroPCS accused of blocking certain Net content MetroPCS is violating the FCC’s recently approved Net neutrality rules by blocking certain Internet content, say several public interest groups. Server and Tools chief Muglia to leave Microsoft in summer 2011 Microsoft veteran and Server & Tools Business (STB) President Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft, according to an email that CEO Steve Ballmer sent to employees on January 10. Report: DOJ nearing decision on Google-ITA The U.S. Department of Justice is gearing up for a possible formal antitrust investigation into whether or not Google should be allowed to purchase travel software company ITA Software, according to a report. South Korea says Google Street View broke law Police in South Korea reportedly say Google broke the country’s law when its Street View service captured personal data from unsecure Wi-Fi networks. The backlash over Google’s HTML5 video bet Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant. Google answers critics on HTML5 Web video move Google responded to critics of its decision to drop support for a popular HTML5 video codec by declaring that a royalty-supported standard for Web video will hold the Web hostage. Random TinyHacker Links A Special GiveAway: a Great Book & Great Security Software The team from 7 Tutorials has a special giveaway running during the month of January. Signed copies of their latest book, full 1-year licenses of BitDefender Internet Security 2011 and free 3-month trials for everyone willing to participate. One Click Rooting For Android Phones Here’s a nice tool that helps you root your Android phone effortlessly. New Angry Birds Free version 1.0 Available in the App Store. Google Code University Learn programming at Google Code University. Capture and Share Your Favorite Part Of a YouTube Video SnipSnip.it lets you share only the part of the video that you like. Super User Questions More great questions and answers from this past week’s popular topics at Super User. What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? Does OS X support linux-like features? What is the easiest way to make a backup of an entire hard disk? Will shifting from Wireless to Wired network result in better performance? Is it legal to install Windows 7 Home Premium Retail inside VMware virtual machine? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Enjoy reading through our hottest articles from this past week. The 50 Best Ways to Disable Built-in Windows Features You Don’t Want The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal One Year Ago on How-To Geek More great articles from one year ago filled with helpful geeky goodness for you to enjoy. Share Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.it Start Portable Firefox in Safe Mode Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate Available, Here’s How to Fix Your Incompatible Extensions Protect Your Computer from “Little Hands” with KidSafe Lock Prying Eyes Out of Your Minimized Windows Custom Crocheted Cylon-Cthulhu Hybrid What happens when you let your Cylon Centurion figure and your crocheted Cthulhu spend too many lonely nights together? A Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid, of course! You can get your own from the Cthulhu Chick store over on Etsy. Note: This is not an ad…Ruth is a friend of ours, and this Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid makes the perfect guard for the new MVP trophy in our office. The Geek Note Whether it is a geeky indoor project or just getting outside, we hope that you and your families have a terrific fun-filled weekend! Remember to keep sending those great tips in to us at [email protected]. Photo by qwrrty. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Available for Download – Get Your Copy Now The Frustrations of a Computer Literate Watching a Newbie Use a Computer [Humorous Video] Season0nPass Jailbreaks Current Gen Apple TVs IBM’s Jeopardy Playing Computer Watson Shows The Pros How It’s Done [Video] Tranquil Juice Drop Abstract Wallpaper Pulse Is a Sleek Newsreader for iOS and Android Devices

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• SPARC T4-4 Beats 8-CPU IBM POWER7 on TPC-H @3000GB Benchmark

  - by Brian

  Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server delivered a world record TPC-H @3000GB benchmark result for systems with four processors. This result beats eight processor results from IBM (POWER7) and HP (x86). The SPARC T4-4 server also delivered better performance per core than these eight processor systems from IBM and HP. Comparisons below are based upon system to system comparisons, highlighting Oracle's complete software and hardware solution. This database world record result used Oracle's Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays (rotating disk) connected to a SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 demonstrating the power of Oracle's integrated hardware and software solution. The SPARC T4-4 server based configuration achieved a TPC-H scale factor 3000 world record for four processor systems of 205,792 QphH@3000GB with price/performance of $4.10/QphH@3000GB. The SPARC T4-4 server with four SPARC T4 processors (total of 32 cores) is 7% faster than the IBM Power 780 server with eight POWER7 processors (total of 32 cores) on the TPC-H @3000GB benchmark. The SPARC T4-4 server is 36% better in price performance compared to the IBM Power 780 server on the TPC-H @3000GB Benchmark. The SPARC T4-4 server is 29% faster than the IBM Power 780 for data loading. The SPARC T4-4 server is up to 3.4 times faster than the IBM Power 780 server for the Refresh Function. The SPARC T4-4 server with four SPARC T4 processors is 27% faster than the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server with eight x86 processors on the TPC-H @3000GB benchmark. The SPARC T4-4 server is 52% faster than the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server for data loading. The SPARC T4-4 server is up to 3.2 times faster than the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 for the Refresh Function. The SPARC T4-4 server achieved a peak IO rate from the Oracle database of 17 GB/sec. This rate was independent of the storage used, as demonstrated by the TPC-H @3000TB benchmark which used twelve Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays (rotating disk) and the TPC-H @1000TB benchmark which used four Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array devices (flash storage). [*] The SPARC T4-4 server showed linear scaling from TPC-H @1000GB to TPC-H @3000GB. This demonstrates that the SPARC T4-4 server can handle the increasingly larger databases required of DSS systems. [*] The SPARC T4-4 server benchmark results demonstrate a complete solution of building Decision Support Systems including data loading, business questions and refreshing data. Each phase usually has a time constraint and the SPARC T4-4 server shows superior performance during each phase. [*] The TPC believes that comparisons of results published with different scale factors are misleading and discourages such comparisons. Performance Landscape The table lists the leading TPC-H @3000GB results for non-clustered systems. TPC-H @3000GB, Non-Clustered Systems System Processor P/C/T – Memory Composite(QphH) $/perf($/QphH) Power(QppH) Throughput(QthH) Database Available SPARC Enterprise M9000 3.0 GHz SPARC64 VII+ 64/256/256 – 1024 GB 386,478.3 $18.19 316,835.8 471,428.6 Oracle 11g R2 09/22/11 SPARC T4-4 3.0 GHz SPARC T4 4/32/256 – 1024 GB 205,792.0 $4.10 190,325.1 222,515.9 Oracle 11g R2 05/31/12 SPARC Enterprise M9000 2.88 GHz SPARC64 VII 32/128/256 – 512 GB 198,907.5 $15.27 182,350.7 216,967.7 Oracle 11g R2 12/09/10 IBM Power 780 4.1 GHz POWER7 8/32/128 – 1024 GB 192,001.1 $6.37 210,368.4 175,237.4 Sybase 15.4 11/30/11 HP ProLiant DL980 G7 2.27 GHz Intel Xeon X7560 8/64/128 – 512 GB 162,601.7 $2.68 185,297.7 142,685.6 SQL Server 2008 10/13/10 P/C/T = Processors, Cores, Threads QphH = the Composite Metric (bigger is better) $/QphH = the Price/Performance metric in USD (smaller is better) QppH = the Power Numerical Quantity QthH = the Throughput Numerical Quantity The following table lists data load times and refresh function times during the power run. TPC-H @3000GB, Non-Clustered Systems Database Load & Database Refresh System Processor Data Loading(h:m:s) T4Advan RF1(sec) T4Advan RF2(sec) T4Advan SPARC T4-4 3.0 GHz SPARC T4 04:08:29 1.0x 67.1 1.0x 39.5 1.0x IBM Power 780 4.1 GHz POWER7 05:51:50 1.5x 147.3 2.2x 133.2 3.4x HP ProLiant DL980 G7 2.27 GHz Intel Xeon X7560 08:35:17 2.1x 173.0 2.6x 126.3 3.2x Data Loading = database load time RF1 = power test first refresh transaction RF2 = power test second refresh transaction T4 Advan = the ratio of time to T4 time Complete benchmark results found at the TPC benchmark website http://www.tpc.org. Configuration Summary and Results Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server 4 x SPARC T4 3.0 GHz processors (total of 32 cores, 128 threads) 1024 GB memory 8 x internal SAS (8 x 300 GB) disk drives External Storage: 12 x Sun Storage 2540-M2 array storage, each with 12 x 15K RPM 300 GB drives, 2 controllers, 2 GB cache Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition Audited Results: Database Size: 3000 GB (Scale Factor 3000) TPC-H Composite: 205,792.0 QphH@3000GB Price/performance: $4.10/QphH@3000GB Available: 05/31/2012 Total 3 year Cost: $843,656 TPC-H Power: 190,325.1 TPC-H Throughput: 222,515.9 Database Load Time: 4:08:29 Benchmark Description The TPC-H benchmark is a performance benchmark established by the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) to demonstrate Data Warehousing/Decision Support Systems (DSS). TPC-H measurements are produced for customers to evaluate the performance of various DSS systems. These queries and updates are executed against a standard database under controlled conditions. Performance projections and comparisons between different TPC-H Database sizes (100GB, 300GB, 1000GB, 3000GB, 10000GB, 30000GB and 100000GB) are not allowed by the TPC. TPC-H is a data warehousing-oriented, non-industry-specific benchmark that consists of a large number of complex queries typical of decision support applications. It also includes some insert and delete activity that is intended to simulate loading and purging data from a warehouse. TPC-H measures the combined performance of a particular database manager on a specific computer system. The main performance metric reported by TPC-H is called the TPC-H Composite Query-per-Hour Performance Metric (QphH@SF, where SF is the number of GB of raw data, referred to as the scale factor). QphH@SF is intended to summarize the ability of the system to process queries in both single and multiple user modes. The benchmark requires reporting of price/performance, which is the ratio of the total HW/SW cost plus 3 years maintenance to the QphH. A secondary metric is the storage efficiency, which is the ratio of total configured disk space in GB to the scale factor. Key Points and Best Practices Twelve Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays were used for the benchmark. Each Sun Storage 2540-M2 array contains 12 15K RPM drives and is connected to a single dual port 8Gb FC HBA using 2 ports. Each Sun Storage 2540-M2 array showed 1.5 GB/sec for sequential read operations and showed linear scaling, achieving 18 GB/sec with twelve Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays. These were stand alone IO tests. The peak IO rate measured from the Oracle database was 17 GB/sec. Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 required very little system tuning. Some vendors try to make the point that storage ratios are of customer concern. However, storage ratio size has more to do with disk layout and the increasing capacities of disks – so this is not an important metric in which to compare systems. The SPARC T4-4 server and Oracle Solaris efficiently managed the system load of over one thousand Oracle Database parallel processes. Six Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays were mirrored to another six Sun Storage 2540-M2 arrays on which all of the Oracle database files were placed. IO performance was high and balanced across all the arrays. The TPC-H Refresh Function (RF) simulates periodical refresh portion of Data Warehouse by adding new sales and deleting old sales data. Parallel DML (parallel insert and delete in this case) and database log performance are a key for this function and the SPARC T4-4 server outperformed both the IBM POWER7 server and HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server. (See the RF columns above.) See Also Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) Home Page Ideas International Benchmark Page SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN Sun Storage 2540-M2 Array oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement TPC-H, QphH, $/QphH are trademarks of Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). For more information, see www.tpc.org. SPARC T4-4 205,792.0 QphH@3000GB, $4.10/QphH@3000GB, available 5/31/12, 4 processors, 32 cores, 256 threads; IBM Power 780 QphH@3000GB, 192,001.1 QphH@3000GB, $6.37/QphH@3000GB, available 11/30/11, 8 processors, 32 cores, 128 threads; HP ProLiant DL980 G7 162,601.7 QphH@3000GB, $2.68/QphH@3000GB available 10/13/10, 8 processors, 64 cores, 128 threads.

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• Portal And Content - Content Integration - Best Practices

  - by Stefan Krantz

  Lately we have seen an increase in projects that have failed to either get user friendly content integration or non satisfactory performance. Our intention is to mitigate any knowledge gap that our previous post might have left you with, therefore this post will repeat some recommendation or reference back to old useful post. Moreover this post will help you understand ground up how to design, architect and implement business enabled, responsive and performing portals with complex requirements on business centric information publishing. Design the Information Model The key to successful portal deployments is Information modeling, it's a key task to understand the use case you designing for, therefore I have designed a set of question you need to ask yourself or your customer: Question: Who will own the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Who will publish the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Will there be multiple publishers? Answer: YesQuestion: Are the publishers computer scientist?Answer: NoQuestion: How often do the information changes, daily, weekly, monthly?Answer: Daily, weekly If your answers to the questions matches at least 2, we strongly recommend you design your content with following principles: Divide your pages in to logical sections, where each section is marked with its purpose Assign capabilities to each section, does it contain text, images, formatting and/or is it static and is populated through other contextual information Select editor/design element type WYSIWYG - Rich Text Plain Text - non-format text Image - Image object Static List - static list of formatted informationDynamic Data List - assembled information from multiple data files through CMIS query The result of such design map could look like following below examples: Based on the outcome of the required elements in the design column 3 from the left you will now simply design a data model in WebCenter Content - Site Studio by creating a Region Definition structure matching your design requirements.For more information on how to create a Region definition see following post: Region Definition Post - note see instruction 7 for details. Each region definition can now be used to instantiate data files, a data file will hold the actual data for each element in the region definition. Another way you can see this is to compare the region definition as an extension to the metadata model in WebCenter Content for each data file item. Design content templates With a solid dependable information model we can now proceed to template creation and page design, in this phase focuses on how to place the content sections from the region definition on the page via a Content Presenter template. Remember by creating content presenter templates you will leverage the latest and most integrated technology WebCenter has to offer. This phase is much easier since the you already have the information model and design wire-frames to base the logic on, however there is still few considerations to pay attention to: Base the template on ADF and make only necessary exceptions to markup when required Leverage ADF design components for Tabs, Accordions and other similar components, this way the design in the content published areas will comply with other design areas based on custom ADF taskflows There is no performance impact when using meta data or region definition based data All data access regardless of type, metadata or xml data it can be accessed via the Content Presenter - Node. See below for applied examples on how to access data Access metadata property from Document - #{node.propertyMap['myProp'].value}myProp in this example can be for instance (dDocName, dDocTitle, xComments or any other available metadata) Access element data from data file xml - #{node.propertyMap['[Region Definition Name]:[Element name]'].asTextHtml}Region Definition Name is the expect region definition that the current data file is instantiatingElement name is the element value you like to grab from the data file I recommend you read following  useful post on content template topic:CMIS queries and template creation - note see instruction 9 for detailsStatic List template rendering For more information on templates:Single Item Content TemplateMulti Item Content TemplateExpression Language Internationalization Considerations When integrating content assets via content presenter you by now probably understand that the content item/data file is wired to the page, what is also pretty common at this stage is that the content item/data file only support one language since its not practical or business friendly to mix that into a complex structure. Therefore you will be left with a very common dilemma that you will have to either build a complete new portal for each locale, which is not an good option! However with little bit of information modeling and clear naming convention this can be addressed. Basically you can simply make sure that all content item/data file are named with a predictable naming convention like "Content1_EN" for the English rendition and "Content1_ES" for the Spanish rendition. This way through simple none complex customizations you will be able to dynamically switch the actual content item/data file just before rendering. By following proposed approach above you not only enable a simple mechanism for internationalized content you also preserve the functionality in the content presenter to support business accessible run-time publishing of information on existing and new pages. I recommend you read following useful post on Internationalization topics:Internationalize with Content Presenter Integrate with Review & Approval processes Today the Review and approval functionality and configuration is based out of WebCenter Content - Criteria Workflows. Criteria Workflows uses the metadata of the checked in document to evaluate if the document is under any review/approval process. So for instance if a Criteria Workflow is configured to force any documents with Version = "2" or "higher" and Content Type is "Instructions", any matching content item version on check in will now enter the workflow before getting released for general access. Few things to consider when configuring Criteria Workflows: Make sure to not trigger on version one for Content Items that are Data Files - if you trigger on version 1 you will not only approve an empty document you will also have a content presenter pointing to a none existing document - since the document will only be available after successful completion of the workflow Approval workflows sometimes requires more complex criteria, the recommendation if that is the case is that the meta data triggering such criteria is automatically populated, this can be achieved through many approaches including Content Profiles Criteria workflows are configured and managed in WebCenter Content Administration Applets where you can configure one or more workflows. When you configured Criteria workflows the Content Presenter will support the editors with the approval process directly inline in the "Contribution mode" of the portal. In addition to approve/reject and details of the task, the content presenter natively support the user to view the current and future version of the change he/she is approving. See below for example: Architectural recommendation To support review&approval processes - minimize the amount of data files per page Each CMIS query can consume significant time depending on the complexity of the query - minimize the amount of CMIS queries per page Use Content Presenter Templates based on ADF - this way you minimize the design considerations and optimize the usage of caching Implement the page in as few Data files as possible - simplifies publishing process, increases performance and simplifies release process Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages increases performance vs. querying for data Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages enables business centric page creation and publishing and reduces the need for IT department interaction Summary Just because one architectural decision solves a business problem it doesn't mean its the right one, when designing portals all architecture has to be in harmony and not impacting each other. For instance the most technical complex solution is not always the best since it will most likely defeat the business accessibility, performance or both, therefore the best approach is to first design for simplicity that even a non-technical user can operate, after that consider the performance impact and final look at the technology challenges these brings and workaround them first with out-of-the-box features, after that design and develop functions to complement the short comings.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 16, 2010New Projects3D Calculator: 3D Calc is a simple calculator application for Windows Phone 7, the purpose of this project is to demo the 3D animations capabilities of WP7 and sh...azaleas: AzaleasBlueset Studio Opensource Projects: Only for Opensource projects form Blueset Studio.Breck: A Phoenix and Jumper Moneky Production: Breck is a first person non-violent shooter developed in C++ and Dark GDK. After the main game is developed we are looking into making a sequel or...Discuz! Forum SDK: This project is use to login in and post or reply topic on discuz forum.Dominion.NET: Evolving Dominion source code originally written in VB6 and posted by "jatill" on Collectible Card Game Headquarters. Migration of the design and s...EkspSys2010-ITR: A mini project for the course Experimental System devolopment in spring 2010Facebook Graph Toolkit: This project is a .Net implementation of the Facebook Graph API. The aim of this project is to be a replacement to the existing Facebook Toolkit (h...iFree: This is a solution for Vietnamese network socialInfoPath Editor for Developer: InfoPath Editor for developer allows user to modify the html text directly inside InfoPath designer or filler and push the change back to InfoPath ...iZeit: Run your own online calendar, with blog integration, recurrence, todo list and categories.machgos dotNet Tests: Just some little test-projects for learningmim: TBAMinePost: MinePost is a game made for the first 48 hour Reddit Game Jam.Mockina: Mockina is a mock framework. Expression tree syntax is used to specify which members to mock, both public and non-public. The code is easy to under...MSBuild Launch Pad (mPad): This is just another shell extension for MSBuild to enable quick execution of MSBuild scripts via Windows Explorer context menu. (C) 2010 Lex LiPeacock: A browser like tabbed applicationPrimeCalculation: PrimeCalculation is a .NET app to calculate primes in a given range. Speed on Core2Duo 2,4GHZ: Found all primes from 0 to 1 billion in 35 seconds (...Slightly Silverlight: A Framework that leverages Silverlight for processing, business logic but standard HTML for the presentation layer.Stopwatch: Stopwatch is a tool for measuring the time. To start and pause stopwatch you only need to press a key on the keyboard. An additional context menu a...YAXLib: Yet Another XML Serialization Library for the .NET Framework: YAXLib is an XML Serialization library which helps you structure freely the XML result, choose among private and public fields to be serialized, an...New ReleasesActivate Your Glutes: v1.0.3.0: This release is a migration to VS2010, .Net 4, MVC2 and Entity Framework 4. The code has also been considerably cleaned up - taking advantage of E...AnyCAD: AnyCAD.Free.ENU.v1.1: http://www.anycad.net Modeling •2D: Line, Rectangle, Arc, Arch, Circle, Spline, Polygon •Feature: Extrude, Loft, Chamfer, Sweep, Revol •Boolean: ...Blueset Studio Opensource Projects: 多功能计算器 3.5: 稳定版本。Code for Rapid C# Windows Development eBook: LLBLGen LINQPad Data Context Driver Ver 1.0.0.0: First release of a Static LLBLGen Pro Data Context Driver for LINQPad I recommend LINQPad 4 as it seems more stable with this driver than LINQPad 2.DSQLT - Dynamic SQL Templates: Release 1.2. Some behaviour has changed!!: Attention. Some behaviour has changed! Now its necessary to use WildCards in the pattern-parameter for DSQLT.AllSourceContains DSQLT.Databases DSQ...FDS AutoCAD plug-in: FDS to AutoCAD plug-in: Basic functionality was implemented. Some routines like setting fds executable location are still not automated.Feature Builder Guidance Extensions: FBGX 2 - Standalone FX: Background: The Feature Builder Guidance is extensible and displays guidance content supplied by all the Feature Builder Guidance Extensions (FBGX...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R3: - You can now right click on the input box to get options for toggling bold, underline, colors, etc. - The size of the nickname column is now saved...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R4: - A user's channel status now appears next to their nick when they talk (e.g. @Nick or +Nick) - Fixed an error where certain kinds of network probl...HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: HD-Trailers.NET Downloader v1.0: Version 1.0 Thanks to Wolfgang for all his help. I let this project languish for too long while focusing on other things, but his involvement has ...InfoPath Editor for Developer: InfoPath Editor Beta 1: Intial Release: Can load InfoPath inner html. Can edit InfoPath inner html. InfoPath 2007 only.LinkSharp: LinkSharp 0.1.0: First release of LinkSharp. Set up iis, and use the sql script to create a new database.PowerAuras: PowerAuras V3.0.0F: This version adds better integration with GTFO New Flags Added PvP flag In 5-Man Instance In Raid Instance In Battleground In ArenaRx Contrib: V1.4: Add the ability to catch internal exception and the ability to publish error by queue adaptersSEO SiteMap: SEO SiteMap RC1: -SevenZipLib Library: v9.13.2: Stable release associated with 7z.dll 9.13 beta. Ability to create and update archives not implemente yet.Silverlight / WPF Controls: Upload, FlipPanel, DeepZoom, Animation, Encryption: Code Camp Demonstration: This code example demonstrates MVVM/MEF with WPF with attached properties,security and custom ICommand class.SQL Data Capture - Black Box Application Testing: SQLDataCapture V1.2: Added Entity Framework Support to CRUD generator (Insert Stored Procedure) and switched to VS 2010 for development.Stopwatch: Stopwatch 0.1: Stopwatch Release 0.1VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30515.0: Automatic drop of latest buildYet another developer blog - Examples: Asynchronous TreeView in ASP.NET MVC: This sample application shows how to use jQuery TreeView plugin for creating an asynchronous TreeView in ASP.NET MVC. This application is accompani...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrPHPExcelBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersMirror Testing SystemN2 CMSStyleCop

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• Fun with Aggregates

  - by Paul White

  There are interesting things to be learned from even the simplest queries.  For example, imagine you are given the task of writing a query to list AdventureWorks product names where the product has at least one entry in the transaction history table, but fewer than ten. One possible query to meet that specification is: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.TransactionHistory AS th ON p.ProductID = th.ProductID GROUP BY p.ProductID, p.Name HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10; That query correctly returns 23 rows (execution plan and data sample shown below): The execution plan looks a bit different from the written form of the query: the base tables are accessed in reverse order, and the aggregation is performed before the join.  The general idea is to read all rows from the history table, compute the count of rows grouped by ProductID, merge join the results to the Product table on ProductID, and finally filter to only return rows where the count is less than ten. This ‘fully-optimized’ plan has an estimated cost of around 0.33 units.  The reason for the quote marks there is that this plan is not quite as optimal as it could be – surely it would make sense to push the Filter down past the join too?  To answer that, let’s look at some other ways to formulate this query.  This being SQL, there are any number of ways to write logically-equivalent query specifications, so we’ll just look at a couple of interesting ones.  The first query is an attempt to reverse-engineer T-SQL from the optimized query plan shown above.  It joins the result of pre-aggregating the history table to the Product table before filtering: SELECT p.Name FROM ( SELECT th.ProductID, cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th GROUP BY th.ProductID ) AS q1 JOIN Production.Product AS p ON p.ProductID = q1.ProductID WHERE q1.cnt < 10; Perhaps a little surprisingly, we get a slightly different execution plan: The results are the same (23 rows) but this time the Filter is pushed below the join!  The optimizer chooses nested loops for the join, because the cardinality estimate for rows passing the Filter is a bit low (estimate 1 versus 23 actual), though you can force a merge join with a hint and the Filter still appears below the join.  In yet another variation, the < 10 predicate can be ‘manually pushed’ by specifying it in a HAVING clause in the “q1” sub-query instead of in the WHERE clause as written above. The reason this predicate can be pushed past the join in this query form, but not in the original formulation is simply an optimizer limitation – it does make efforts (primarily during the simplification phase) to encourage logically-equivalent query specifications to produce the same execution plan, but the implementation is not completely comprehensive. Moving on to a second example, the following query specification results from phrasing the requirement as “list the products where there exists fewer than ten correlated rows in the history table”: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Unfortunately, this query produces an incorrect result (86 rows): The problem is that it lists products with no history rows, though the reasons are interesting.  The COUNT_BIG(*) in the EXISTS clause is a scalar aggregate (meaning there is no GROUP BY clause) and scalar aggregates always produce a value, even when the input is an empty set.  In the case of the COUNT aggregate, the result of aggregating the empty set is zero (the other standard aggregates produce a NULL).  To make the point really clear, let’s look at product 709, which happens to be one for which no history rows exist: -- Scalar aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709;   -- Vector aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709 GROUP BY th.ProductID; The estimated execution plans for these two statements are almost identical: You might expect the Stream Aggregate to have a Group By for the second statement, but this is not the case.  The query includes an equality comparison to a constant value (709), so all qualified rows are guaranteed to have the same value for ProductID and the Group By is optimized away. In fact there are some minor differences between the two plans (the first is auto-parameterized and qualifies for trivial plan, whereas the second is not auto-parameterized and requires cost-based optimization), but there is nothing to indicate that one is a scalar aggregate and the other is a vector aggregate.  This is something I would like to see exposed in show plan so I suggested it on Connect.  Anyway, the results of running the two queries show the difference at runtime: The scalar aggregate (no GROUP BY) returns a result of zero, whereas the vector aggregate (with a GROUP BY clause) returns nothing at all.  Returning to our EXISTS query, we could ‘fix’ it by changing the HAVING clause to reject rows where the scalar aggregate returns zero: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) BETWEEN 1 AND 9 ); The query now returns the correct 23 rows: Unfortunately, the execution plan is less efficient now – it has an estimated cost of 0.78 compared to 0.33 for the earlier plans.  Let’s try adding a redundant GROUP BY instead of changing the HAVING clause: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY th.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Not only do we now get correct results (23 rows), this is the execution plan: I like to compare that plan to quantum physics: if you don’t find it shocking, you haven’t understood it properly :)  The simple addition of a redundant GROUP BY has resulted in the EXISTS form of the query being transformed into exactly the same optimal plan we found earlier.  What’s more, in SQL Server 2008 and later, we can replace the odd-looking GROUP BY with an explicit GROUP BY on the empty set: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); I offer that as an alternative because some people find it more intuitive (and it perhaps has more geek value too).  Whichever way you prefer, it’s rather satisfying to note that the result of the sub-query does not exist for a particular correlated value where a vector aggregate is used (the scalar COUNT aggregate always returns a value, even if zero, so it always ‘EXISTS’ regardless which ProductID is logically being evaluated). The following query forms also produce the optimal plan and correct results, so long as a vector aggregate is used (you can probably find more equivalent query forms): WHERE Clause SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) < 10; APPLY SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT NULL FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ) AS ca (dummy); FROM Clause SELECT q1.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q1 WHERE q1.cnt < 10; This last example uses SUM(1) instead of COUNT and does not require a vector aggregate…you should be able to work out why :) SELECT q.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT SUM(1) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q WHERE q.cnt < 10; The semantics of SQL aggregates are rather odd in places.  It definitely pays to get to know the rules, and to be careful to check whether your queries are using scalar or vector aggregates.  As we have seen, query plans do not show in which ‘mode’ an aggregate is running and getting it wrong can cause poor performance, wrong results, or both. © 2012 Paul White Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi email: [email protected]

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• Parallel LINQ - PLINQ

  - by nmarun

  Turns out now with .net 4.0 we can run a query like a multi-threaded application. Say you want to query a collection of objects and return only those that meet certain conditions. Until now, we basically had one ‘control’ that iterated over all the objects in the collection, checked the condition on each object and returned if it passed. We obviously agree that if we can ‘break’ this task into smaller ones, assign each task to a different ‘control’ and ask all the controls to do their job - in-parallel, the time taken the finish the entire task will be much lower. Welcome to PLINQ. Let’s take some examples. I have the following method that uses our good ol’ LINQ. 1: private static void Linq(int lowerLimit, int upperLimit) 2: { 3: // populate an array with int values from lowerLimit to the upperLimit 4: var source = Enumerable.Range(lowerLimit, upperLimit); 5:  6: // Start a timer 7: Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); 8: stopwatch.Start(); 9:  10: // set the expectation => build the expression tree 11: var evenNumbers =   from num in source 12: where IsDivisibleBy(num, 2) 13: select num; 14: 15: // iterate over and print the returned items 16: foreach (var number in evenNumbers) 17: { 18: Console.WriteLine(string.Format("** {0}", number)); 19: } 20:  21: stopwatch.Stop(); 22:  23: // check the metrics 24: Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Elapsed {0}ms", stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds)); 25: } I’ve added comments for the major steps, but the only thing I want to talk about here is the IsDivisibleBy() method. I know I could have just included the logic directly in the where clause. I called a method to add ‘delay’ to the execution of the query - to simulate a loooooooooong operation (will be easier to compare the results). 1: private static bool IsDivisibleBy(int number, int divisor) 2: { 3: // iterate over some database query 4: // to add time to the execution of this method; 5: // the TableB has around 10 records 6: for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) 7: { 8: DataClasses1DataContext dataContext = new DataClasses1DataContext(); 9: var query = from b in dataContext.TableBs select b; 10: 11: foreach (var row in query) 12: { 13: // Do NOTHING (wish my job was like this) 14: } 15: } 16:  17: return number % divisor == 0; 18: } Now, let’s look at how to modify this to PLINQ. 1: private static void Plinq(int lowerLimit, int upperLimit) 2: { 3: // populate an array with int values from lowerLimit to the upperLimit 4: var source = Enumerable.Range(lowerLimit, upperLimit); 5:  6: // Start a timer 7: Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); 8: stopwatch.Start(); 9:  10: // set the expectation => build the expression tree 11: var evenNumbers = from num in source.AsParallel() 12: where IsDivisibleBy(num, 2) 13: select num; 14:  15: // iterate over and print the returned items 16: foreach (var number in evenNumbers) 17: { 18: Console.WriteLine(string.Format("** {0}", number)); 19: } 20:  21: stopwatch.Stop(); 22:  23: // check the metrics 24: Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Elapsed {0}ms", stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds)); 25: } That’s it, this is now in PLINQ format. Oh and if you haven’t found the difference, look line 11 a little more closely. You’ll see an extension method ‘AsParallel()’ added to the ‘source’ variable. Couldn’t be more simpler right? So this is going to improve the performance for us. Let’s test it. So in my Main method of the Console application that I’m working on, I make a call to both. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: // set lower and upper limits 4: int lowerLimit = 1; 5: int upperLimit = 20; 6: // call the methods 7: Console.WriteLine("Calling Linq() method"); 8: Linq(lowerLimit, upperLimit); 9: 10: Console.WriteLine(); 11: Console.WriteLine("Calling Plinq() method"); 12: Plinq(lowerLimit, upperLimit); 13:  14: Console.ReadLine(); // just so I get enough time to read the output 15: } YMMV, but here are the results that I got:    It’s quite obvious from the above results that the Plinq() method is taking considerably less time than the Linq() version. I’m sure you’ve already noticed that the output of the Plinq() method is not in order. That’s because, each of the ‘control’s we sent to fetch the results, reported with values as and when they obtained them. This is something about parallel LINQ that one needs to remember – the collection cannot be guaranteed to be undisturbed. This could be counted as a negative about PLINQ (emphasize ‘could’). Nevertheless, if we want the collection to be sorted, we can use a SortedSet (.net 4.0) or build our own custom ‘sorter’. Either way we go, there’s a good chance we’ll end up with a better performance using PLINQ. And there’s another negative of PLINQ (depending on how you see it). This is regarding the CPU cycles. See the usage for Linq() method (used ResourceMonitor): I have dual CPU’s and see the height of the peak in the bottom two blocks and now compare to what happens when I run the Plinq() method. The difference is obvious. Higher usage, but for a shorter duration (width of the peak). Both these points make sense in both cases. Linq() runs for a longer time, but uses less resources whereas Plinq() runs for a shorter time and consumes more resources. Even after knowing all these, I’m still inclined towards PLINQ. PLINQ rocks! (no hard feelings LINQ)

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• UppercuT &ndash; Custom Extensions Now With PowerShell and Ruby

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Arguably, one of the most powerful features of UppercuT (UC) is the ability to extend any step of the build process with a pre, post, or replace hook. This customization is done in a separate location from the build so you can upgrade without wondering if you broke the build. There is a hook before each step of the build has run. There is a hook after. And back to power again, there is a replacement hook. If you don’t like what the step is doing and/or you want to replace it’s entire functionality, you just drop a custom replacement extension and UppercuT will perform the custom step instead. Up until recently all custom hooks had to be written in NAnt. Now they are a little sweeter because you no longer need to use NAnt to extend UC if you don’t want to. You can use PowerShell. Or Ruby.   Let that sink in for a moment. You don’t have to even need to interact with NAnt at all now. Extension Points On the wiki, all of the extension points are shown. The basic idea is that you would put whatever customization you are doing in a separate folder named build.custom. Each step Let’s take a look at all we can customize: The start point is default.build. It calls build.custom/default.pre.build if it exists, then it runs build/default.build (normal tasks) OR build.custom/default.replace.build if it exists, and finally build.custom/default.post.build if it exists. Every step below runs with the same extension points but changes on the file name it is looking for. NOTE: If you include default.replace.build, nothing else will run because everything is called from default.build.    * policyChecks.step    * versionBuilder.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/versionBuilder.replace.step, the items below will not run.      - svn.step, tfs.step, or git.step (the custom tasks for these need to go in build.custom/versioners)    * generateBuildInfo.step    * compile.step    * environmentBuilder.step    * analyze.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/analyze.replace.step, the items below will not run.      - test.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers) NOTE: If you include build.custom/analyzers/test.replace.step, the items below will not run.        + mbunit2.step, gallio.step, or nunit.step (the custom tasks for these need to go in build.custom/analyzers)      - ncover.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers)      - ndepend.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers)      - moma.step (the custom tasks for this need to go in build.custom/analyzers)    * package.step NOTE: If you include build.custom/package.replace.step, the items below will not run.      - deploymentBuilder.step Customize UppercuT Builds With PowerShell UppercuT can now be extended with PowerShell (PS). To customize any extension point with PS, just add .ps1 to the end of the file name and write your custom tasks in PowerShell. If you are not signing your scripts you will need to change a setting in the UppercuT.config file. This does impose a security risk, because this allows PS to now run any PS script. This setting stays that way on ANY machine that runs the build until manually changed by someone. I’m not responsible if you mess up your machine or anyone else’s by doing this. You’ve been warned. Now that you are fully aware of any security holes you may open and are okay with that, let’s move on. Let’s create a file called default.replace.build.ps1 in the build.custom folder. Open that file in notepad and let’s add this to it: write-host "hello - I'm a custom task written in Powershell!" Now, let’s run build.bat. You could get some PSake action going here. I won’t dive into that in this post though. Customize UppercuT Builds With Ruby If you want to customize any extension point with Ruby, just add .rb to the end of the file name and write your custom tasks in Ruby.  Let’s write a custom ruby task for UC. If you were thinking it would be the same as the one we just wrote for PS, you’d be right! In the build.custom folder, lets create a file called default.replace.build.rb. Open that file in notepad and let’s put this in there: puts "I'm a custom ruby task!" Now, let’s run build.bat again. That’s chunky bacon. UppercuT and Albacore.NET Just for fun, I wanted to see if I could replace the compile.step with a Rake task. Not just any rake task, Albacore’s msbuild task. Albacore is a suite of rake tasks brought about by Derick Bailey to make building .NET with Rake easier. It has quite a bit of support with developers that are using Rake to build code. In my build.custom folder, I drop a compile.replace.step.rb. I also put in a separate file that will contain my Albacore rake task and I call that compile.rb. What are the contents of compile.replace.step.rb? rake = 'rake' arguments= '-f ' + Dir.pwd + '/../build.custom/compile.rb' #puts "Calling #{rake} " + arguments system("#{rake} " + arguments) Since the custom extensions call ruby, we have to shell back out and call rake. That’s what we are doing here. We also realize that ruby is called from the build folder, so we need to back out and dive into the build.custom folder to find the file that is technically next to us. What are the contents of compile.rb? require 'rubygems' require 'fileutils' require 'albacore' task :default => [:compile] puts "Using Ruby to compile UppercuT with Albacore Tasks" desc 'Compile the source' msbuild :compile do |msb| msb.properties = { :configuration => :Release, :outputpath => '../../build_output/UppercuT' } msb.targets [:clean, :build] msb.verbosity = "quiet" msb.path_to_command = 'c:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v3.5/MSBuild.exe' msb.solution = '../uppercut.sln' end We are using the msbuild task here. We change the output path to the build_output/UppercuT folder. The output path has “../../” because this is based on every project. We could grab the current directory and then point the task specifically to a folder if we have projects that are at different levels. We want the verbosity to be quiet so we set that as well. So what kind of output do you get for this? Let’s run build.bat custom_tasks_replace:      [echo] Running custom tasks instead of normal tasks if C:\code\uppercut\build\..\build.custom\compile.replace.step exists.      [exec] (in C:/code/uppercut/build)      [exec] Using Ruby to compile UppercuT with Albacore Tasks      [exec] Microsoft (R) Build Engine Version 3.5.30729.4926      [exec] [Microsoft .NET Framework, Version 2.0.50727.4927]      [exec] Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2007. All rights reserved. If you think this is awesome, you’d be right!   With this knowledge you shall build.

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• MIX 2010 Covert Operations Day 2 Silverlight + Windows 7 Phone

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  Left the Circus Circus and headed to the geek circus at Mandalay Bay.  Got in, got some breakfast, met a few more people and headed to the keynote. Upon arriving the crew I was hanging with at the event; Erik Mork, Beth Murray, and Brian Henderson and I were entertained with several other thousand geeks by the wicked yo-yoing. The first video demo of something was of Bing Maps and various aspects of Microsoft Research integrated together.  Namely the pictures, put in place, on real 3d element maps of various environments. Silverlight Scott Guthrie, as one would guess, kicked off the keynote.  His first point was that user experience has become a priority at Microsoft.  This can be seen by any observant soul with the release and push of Expression, Silverlight, and the other tools.  This is even more apparent when one takes note of Microsoft bringing in people that can actually do good design and putting them at the forefront. The next thing Scott brought up was a few key points about Silverlight.  Currently Silverlight is a little over 2 years old and has achieved a pretty solid 60% penetration.  Silverlight has all sorts of capabilities that have been developed and are now provided as open source including;  ad injection, smoothing, playback editing, and more.  Another thing he showed, which really struck me as awesome being in the analytics space, was the Olympics and a quick glimpse of the ad statistics, viewer experience, video playback performance, audience trends, and overall viewer participation.  All of it rendered in Silverlight in beautiful detail. The key piece of Scott's various points were all punctuated with the fact that all of this code is available as open source.  Not only is Microsoft really delving into this design element of things, they're getting involved in the right ways. One of the last points I'll bring up about Silverlight 4 is the ability to have HD video on a monitor, and an entirely different activity being done on the other monitor, effectively making Silverlight the only RIA framework that supports multi-monitor support.  Overall, Silverlight is continuing to impress – providing superior capabilities tit-for-tat with the competition. Windows 7 Phone The Windows 7 Phone has 3 primary buttons (yes, more than the iPhone, don't let your mind explode!!).  Start, Search, and Back control all of the needed functionality of the phone.  At the same time, of course, there is the multi-touch, touch, and other interactive abilities of the interface.  The intent, once start is pressed is to have all the information that a phone owner wants displayed immediately.  Avoiding the scrolling through pages of apps or rolling a ball to get through multitudes of other non-interactive phone interfaces.  The Windows 7 Phone simply has the data right in front of you, basically a phone dashboard.  From there it is easy to dive into the interactive areas of the phone. Each area of the interface of the phone is broken into hubs.  These hubs include applications, data, and other things based on a relative basis.  This basis being determined by the user.  These applications interact on many other levels, and form a kind of relationship between each other adding more and more meta-data to the phone user, their interactions between the applications, and of course the social element of their interactions on the phone.  This makes this phone a practical must have for a marketer involved in social media.  The level of wired together interaction is massive, and of course, if you've seen Office Outlook 2010 you know that the power that is pulled into the phone by being tied to Outlook is massive. Joe Belfiore also showed several UI & specifically UX elements of the phone interface that allows paging to be instinctual by simple clipped items, flipping page to page, and other excellent user experience advances for phone devices.  Belfiore's also showed how his people hub had a massive list of people, with pictures, all from various different social networks and other associated relations.  The rendering, speed, and viewing of these people's, their pictures, their social network information, and other characteristics was smooth and in some situations unbelievably rendered.  This demo showed some of the great power of the beta phone, which isn't even as powerful as the planned end device. Joe finished up by jumping into the music, videos, and other media with the Zune Component of the Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This was all good stuff, but I'll get to what really sold me on the media element in a moment. When Joe was done, Scott Guthrie stepped back up to walk through building a Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This is were I have to give serious props.  He built this application, in Visual Studio 2010, in front of 2000+ people.  That was cool, but what really was amazing that he build the application in about 2 minutes.  The IDE, side by side design that is standard in Visual Studio is light years ahead of x-Code or any of the iPhone IDEs.  The Windows 7 Mobile System, if it can get market penetration, poses a technologically superior development and phone platform over anything on the market right now.  The biggest problem with the phone, is it just isn't available yet.  I personally can't wait for a chance to build some apps for the new Windows Phone. Netflix, I May Start Up an Account Again! When I get my Windows 7 Phone device, I am absolutely getting a Netflix account again.  The Vertigo crew, as I wrote on Twitter "#MIX10 Props @seesharp on @netflix demo", displayed an application on the phone for Netflix that actually ran HD Video of Rescue Me (with Dennis Leary).  The video played back smooth as it would on a dedicated computer, I was instantly sold.  So this didn't actually sell me on the phone, because I'm already sold, but it did sell me whole heartedly on the media capabilities of the pending phone. Anyway, I try not to do this but I may double post today.  Lunch is over and I'm off to another session very near and dear to the heart of my occupation, Analytics Tracking.  Stay tuned and I should have that post up by the end of the day. Original Post – Check out my other blog for even more technical ramblings and reads.

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• ASP.NET MVC 2 throws exception for ‘favicon.ico’

  - by nmarun

  I must be on fire or something – third blog in 2 days… awesome! Before I begin, in case you’re wondering, favicon.ico is the small image that appears to the left of your web address, once the page loads. In order to learn more about MVC or any thing for that matter, it’s better to look at the source itself. Since MVC is open source (at least some part of it is), I started looking at the source code that’s available for download. While doing so, I hit Steve Sanderson’s blog site where he explains in great detail the way to debug your app using ASP.NET MVC source code. For those who are not aware, Steve Sanderson’s book - Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, is one of the best books to learn about MVC. Alrighty, I followed the article and I hit F5 to debug the default / unchanged MVC project. I put a breakpoint in the DefaultControllerFactory.cs, CreateController() method. To know a little more about this class and the method, read this. Sure enough, the control stopped at the breakpoint and I hit F5 again and the page rendered just fine. But then what’s this? The breakpoint was hit again, as if something else was being requested. I now hovered my mouse over the ‘controllerName’ parameter and it says – favicon.ico. This by itself was more than enough for me to raise my eye-brows, but what happened next just took the ground below my feet. Oh, oh, I’m sorry I’m just typing, no code, no image, so here are a couple of screen captures. The first one shows the request for the Home controller; I get ‘Home’ when I hover over the parameter: And here’s the one that shows the same for call for ‘favicon.ico’. So, I step through the code and when the control reaches line 91 – GetControllerInstance() method, I step in. This is when I had the ‘ground-losing’ experience. Wow, an exception is being thrown for this file and that too in RTM. For some reason MVC thinks, this as a controller and tries to run it through the MvcHandler and it hits this snag. So it seems like this will happen for any MVC 2 site and this did not happen for me in the previous version of MVC. Before I get to how to resolve it, here’s another way of reproducing this exception. Revert back all your changes that you did as mentioned in Steve’s blog above. Now, add a class to your MVC project and call it say, MyControllerFactory and let this inherit from DefaultControllerFactory class. (Read this for details on the DefaultControllerFactory class is and how it is used in a different context). Add an override for the CreateController() method and for the sake of this blog, just copy the same content from the DefaultControllerFactory class. The last step is to tell your MVC app to use the MyControllerFactory class instead of the default one. To do this, go to your Global.asax.cs file and add line 6 of the snippet below: 1: protected void Application_Start() 2: { 3: AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); 4:   5: RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); 6: ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new MyControllerFactory()); 7: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now, you’re ready to reproduce the issue. Just F5 the project and when you hit the overridden CreateController() method for the second time, this is what it looks like for me: And continuing further gives me the same exception. I believe this is something that MS should fix, as not having ‘favicon.ico’ file will be common for most of the applications. So I think the when you create an MVC project, line 6 should be added by default by Visual Studio itself: 1: public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication 2: { 3: public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) 4: { 5: routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); 6: routes.IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico"); 7:   8: routes.MapRoute( 9: "Default", // Route name 10: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters 11: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults 12: ); 13: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } There it is, that’s the solution to avoid the exception altogether. I tried this both IE8 and Firefox browsers and was able to successfully reproduce the error. Hope someone will look at this issue and find a fix. Just before I finish up, I found another ‘bug’, if you want to call it, with Visual Studio 2008. Remember how you could change what browser you want your application to run in by just right clicking on the .aspx file and choosing ‘Browse with…’? Seems like that’s missing when you’re working with an MVC project. In order to test the above bug in the other browser, I had to load a classic ASP.NET project, change the settings and then run my MVC project. Felt kinda ‘icky’, for lack of a better word.

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• Granular Clipboard Control in Oracle IRM

  - by martin.abrahams

  One of the main leak prevention controls that customers are looking for is clipboard control. After all, there is little point in controlling access to a document if authorised users can simply make unprotected copies by use of the cut and paste mechanism. Oddly, for such a fundamental requirement, many solutions only offer very simplistic clipboard control - and require the customer to make an awkward choice between usability and security. In many cases, clipboard control is simply an ON-OFF option. By turning the clipboard OFF, you disable one of the most valuable edit functions known to man. Try working for any length of time without copying and pasting, and you'll soon appreciate how valuable that function is. Worse, some solutions disable the clipboard completely - not just for the protected document but for all of the various applications you have open at the time. Normal service is only resumed when you close the protected document. In this way, policy enforcement bleeds out of the particular assets you need to protect and interferes with the entire user experience. On the other hand, turning the clipboard ON satisfies a fundamental usability requirement - but also makes it really easy for users to create unprotected copies of sensitive information, maliciously or otherwise. All they need to do is paste into another document. If creating unprotected copies is this simple, you have to question how much you are really gaining by applying protection at all. You may not be allowed to edit, forward, or print the protected asset, but all you need to do is create a copy and work with that instead. And that activity would not be tracked in any way. So, a simple ON-OFF control creates a real tension between usability and security. If you are only using IRM on a small scale, perhaps security can outweigh usability - the business can put up with the restriction if it only applies to a handful of important documents. But try extending protection to large numbers of documents and large user communities, and the restriction rapidly becomes really unwelcome. I am aware of one solution that takes a different tack. Rather than disable the clipboard, pasting is always permitted, but protection is automatically applied to any document that you paste into. At first glance, this sounds great - protection travels with the content. However, at any scale this model may not be so appealing once you've had to deal with support calls from users who have accidentally applied protection to documents that really don't need it - which would be all too easily done. This may help control leakage, but it also pollutes the system with documents that have policies applied with no obvious rhyme or reason, and it can seriously inconvenience the business by making non-sensitive documents difficult to access. And what policy applies if you paste some protected content into an already protected document? Which policy applies? There are no prizes for guessing that Oracle IRM takes a rather different approach. The Oracle IRM Approach Oracle IRM offers a spectrum of clipboard controls between the extremes of ON and OFF, and it leverages the classification-based rights model to give granular control that satisfies both security and usability needs. Firstly, we take it for granted that if you have EDIT rights, of course you can use the clipboard within a given document. Why would we force you to retype a piece of content that you want to move from HERE... to HERE...? If the pasted content remains in the same document, it is equally well protected whether it be at the beginning, middle, or end - or all three. So, the first point is that Oracle IRM always enables the clipboard if you have the right to edit the file. Secondly, whether we enable or disable the clipboard, we only affect the protected document. That is, you can continue to use the clipboard in the usual way for unprotected documents and applications regardless of whether the clipboard is enabled or disabled for the protected document(s). And if you have multiple protected documents open, each may have the clipboard enabled or disabled independently, according to whether you have Edit rights for each. So, even for the simplest cases - the ON-OFF cases - Oracle IRM adds value by containing the effect to the protected documents rather than to the whole desktop environment. Now to the granular options between ON and OFF. Thanks to our classification model, we can define rights that enable pasting between documents in the same classification - ie. between documents that are protected by the same policy. So, if you are working on this month's financial report and you want to pull some data from last month's report, you can simply cut and paste between the two documents. The two documents are classified the same way, subject to the same policy, so the content is equally safe in both documents. However, if you try to paste the same data into an unprotected document or a document in a different classification, you can be prevented. Thus, the control balances legitimate user requirements to allow pasting with legitimate information security concerns to keep data protected. We can take this further. You may have the right to paste between related classifications of document. So, the CFO might want to copy some financial data into a board document, where the two documents are sealed to different classifications. The CFO's rights may well allow this, as it is a reasonable thing for a CFO to want to do. But policy might prevent the CFO from copying the same data into a classification that is accessible to external parties. The above option, to copy between classifications, may be for specific classifications or open-ended. That is, your rights might enable you to go from A to B but not to C, or you might be allowed to paste to any classification subject to your EDIT rights. As for so many features of Oracle IRM, our classification-based rights model makes this type of granular control really easy to manage - you simply define that pasting is permitted between classifications A and B, but omit C. Or you might define that pasting is permitted between all classifications, but not to unprotected locations. The classification model enables millions of documents to be controlled by a few such rules. Finally, you MIGHT have the option to paste anywhere - such that unprotected copies may be created. This is rare, but a legitimate configuration for some users, some use cases, and some classifications - but not something that you have to permit simply because the alternative is too restrictive. As always, these rights are defined in user roles - so different users are subject to different clipboard controls as required in different classifications. So, where most solutions offer just two clipboard options - ON-OFF or ON-but-encrypt-everything-you-touch - Oracle IRM offers real granularity that leverages our classification model. Indeed, I believe it is the lack of a classification model that makes such granularity impractical for other IRM solutions, because the matrix of rules for controlling pasting would be impossible to manage - there are so many documents to consider, and more are being created all the time.

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• MySQL Cluster 7.2: Over 8x Higher Performance than Cluster 7.1

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 893 5092 Homework 42 11 5974 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Summary The scalability enhancements delivered by extensions to multi-threaded data nodes enables MySQL Cluster 7.2 to deliver over 8x higher performance than the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release on a recent benchmark What’s New in MySQL Cluster 7.2 MySQL Cluster 7.2 was released as GA (Generally Available) in February 2012, delivering many enhancements to performance on complex queries, new NoSQL Key / Value API, cross-data center replication and ease-of-use. These enhancements are summarized in the Figure below, and detailed in the MySQL Cluster New Features whitepaper Figure 1: Next Generation Web Services, Cross Data Center Replication and Ease-of-Use Once of the key enhancements delivered in MySQL Cluster 7.2 is extensions made to the multi-threading processes of the data nodes. Multi-Threaded Data Node Extensions The MySQL Cluster 7.2 data node is now functionally divided into seven thread types: 1) Local Data Manager threads (ldm). Note – these are sometimes also called LQH threads. 2) Transaction Coordinator threads (tc) 3) Asynchronous Replication threads (rep) 4) Schema Management threads (main) 5) Network receiver threads (recv) 6) Network send threads (send) 7) IO threads Each of these thread types are discussed in more detail below. MySQL Cluster 7.2 increases the maximum number of LDM threads from 4 to 16. The LDM contains the actual data, which means that when using 16 threads the data is more heavily partitioned (this is automatic in MySQL Cluster). Each LDM thread maintains its own set of data partitions, index partitions and REDO log. The number of LDM partitions per data node is not dynamically configurable, but it is possible, however, to map more than one partition onto each LDM thread, providing flexibility in modifying the number of LDM threads. The TC domain stores the state of in-flight transactions. This means that every new transaction can easily be assigned to a new TC thread. Testing has shown that in most cases 1 TC thread per 2 LDM threads is sufficient, and in many cases even 1 TC thread per 4 LDM threads is also acceptable. Testing also demonstrated that in some instances where the workload needed to sustain very high update loads it is necessary to configure 3 to 4 TC threads per 4 LDM threads. In the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release, only one TC thread was available. This limit has been increased to 16 TC threads in MySQL Cluster 7.2. The TC domain also manages the Adaptive Query Localization functionality introduced in MySQL Cluster 7.2 that significantly enhanced complex query performance by pushing JOIN operations down to the data nodes. Asynchronous Replication was separated into its own thread with the release of MySQL Cluster 7.1, and has not been modified in the latest 7.2 release. To scale the number of TC threads, it was necessary to separate the Schema Management domain from the TC domain. The schema management thread has little load, so is implemented with a single thread. The Network receiver domain was bound to 1 thread in MySQL Cluster 7.1. With the increase of threads in MySQL Cluster 7.2 it is also necessary to increase the number of recv threads to 8. This enables each receive thread to service one or more sockets used to communicate with other nodes the Cluster. The Network send thread is a new thread type introduced in MySQL Cluster 7.2. Previously other threads handled the sending operations themselves, which can provide for lower latency. To achieve highest throughput however, it has been necessary to create dedicated send threads, of which 8 can be configured. It is still possible to configure MySQL Cluster 7.2 to a legacy mode that does not use any of the send threads – useful for those workloads that are most sensitive to latency. The IO Thread is the final thread type and there have been no changes to this domain in MySQL Cluster 7.2. Multiple IO threads were already available, which could be configured to either one thread per open file, or to a fixed number of IO threads that handle the IO traffic. Except when using compression on disk, the IO threads typically have a very light load. Benchmarking the Scalability Enhancements The scalability enhancements discussed above have made it possible to scale CPU usage of each data node to more than 5x of that possible in MySQL Cluster 7.1. In addition, a number of bottlenecks have been removed, making it possible to scale data node performance by even more than 5x. Figure 2: MySQL Cluster 7.2 Delivers 8.4x Higher Performance than 7.1 The flexAsynch benchmark was used to compare MySQL Cluster 7.2 performance to 7.1 across an 8-node Intel Xeon x5670-based cluster of dual socket commodity servers (6 cores each). As the results demonstrate, MySQL Cluster 7.2 delivers over 8x higher performance per data nodes than MySQL Cluster 7.1. More details of this and other benchmarks will be published in a new whitepaper – coming soon, so stay tuned! In a following blog post, I’ll provide recommendations on optimum thread configurations for different types of server processor. You can also learn more from the Best Practices Guide to Optimizing Performance of MySQL Cluster Conclusion MySQL Cluster has achieved a range of impressive benchmark results, and set in context with the previous 7.1 release, is able to deliver over 8x higher performance per node. As a result, the multi-threaded data node extensions not only serve to increase performance of MySQL Cluster, they also enable users to achieve significantly improved levels of utilization from current and future generations of massively multi-core, multi-thread processor designs.

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• Building KPIs to monitor your business Its not really about the Technology

  When I have discussions with people about Business Intelligence, one of the questions the inevitably come up is about building KPIs and how to accomplish that. From a technical level the concept of a KPI is very simple, almost too simple in that it is like the tip of an iceberg floating above the water. The key to that iceberg is not really the tip, but the mass of the iceberg that is hidden beneath the surface upon which the tip sits. The analogy of the iceberg is not meant to indicate that the foundation of the KPI is overly difficult or complex. The disparity in size in meant to indicate that the larger thing that needs to be defined is not the technical tip, but the underlying business definition of what the KPI means. From a technical perspective the KPI consists of primarily the following items: Actual Value This is the actual value data point that is being measured. An example would be something like the amount of sales. Target Value This is the target goal for the KPI. This is a number that can be measured against Actual Value. An example would be $10,000 in monthly sales. Target Indicator Range This is the definition of ranges that define what type of indicator the user will see comparing the Actual Value to the Target Value. Most often this is defined by stoplight, but can be any indicator that is going to show a status in a quick fashion to the user. Typically this would be something like: Red Light = Actual Value more than 5% below target; Yellow Light = Within 5% of target either direction; Green Light = More than 5% higher than Target Value Status\Trend Indicator This is an optional attribute of a KPI that is typically used to show some kind of trend. The vast majority of these indicators are used to show some type of progress against a previous period. As an example, the status indicator might be used to show how the monthly sales compare to last month. With this type of indicator there needs to be not only a definition of what the ranges are for your status indictor, but then also what value the number needs to be compared against. So now we have an idea of what data points a KPI consists of from a technical perspective lets talk a bit about tools. As you can see technically there is not a whole lot to them and the choice of technology is not as important as the definition of the KPIs, which we will get to in a minute. There are many different types of tools in the Microsoft BI stack that you can use to expose your KPI to the business. These include Performance Point, SharePoint, Excel, and SQL Reporting Services. There are pluses and minuses to each technology and the right technology is based a lot on your goals and how you want to deliver the information to the users. Additionally, there are other non-Microsoft tools that can be used to expose KPI indicators to your business users. Regardless of the technology used as your front end, the heavy lifting of KPI is in the business definition of the values and benchmarks for that KPI. The discussion about KPIs is very dependent on the history of an organization and how much they are exposed to the attributes of a KPI. Often times when discussing KPIs with a business contact who has not been exposed to KPIs the discussion tends to also be a session educating the business user about what a KPI is and what goes into the definition of a KPI. The majority of times the business user has an idea of what their actual values are and they have been tracking those numbers for some time, generally in Excel and all manually. So they will know the amount of sales last month along with sales two years ago in the same month. Where the conversation tends to get stuck is when you start discussing what the target value should be. The actual value is answering the What and How much questions. When you are talking about the Target values you are asking the question Is this number good or bad. Typically, the user will know whether or not the value is good or bad, but most of the time they are not able to quantify what is good or bad. Their response is usually something like I just know. Because they have been watching the sales quantity for years now, they can tell you that a 5% decrease in sales this month might actually be a good thing, maybe because the salespeople are all waiting until next month when the new versions come out. It can sometimes be very hard to break the business people of this habit. One of the fears generally is that the status indicator is not subjective. Thus, in the scenario above, the business user is going to be fearful that their boss, just looking at a negative red indicator, is going to haul them out to the woodshed for a bad month. But, on the flip side, if all you are displaying is the amount of sales, only a person with knowledge of last month sales and the target amount for this month would have any idea if $10,000 in sales is good or not. Here is where a key point about KPIs needs to be communicated to both the business user and any user who might be viewing the results of that KPI. The KPI is just one tool that is used to report on business performance. The KPI is meant as a quick indicator of one business statistic. It is not meant to tell the entire story. It does not answer the question Why. Its primary purpose is to objectively and quickly expose an area of the business that might warrant more review. There is always going to be the need to do further analysis on any potential negative or neutral KPI. So, hopefully, once you have convinced your business user to come up with some target numbers and ranges for status indicators, you then need to take the next step and help them answer the Why question. The main question here to ask is, Okay, you see the indicator and you need to discover why the number is what is, where do you go?. The answer is usually a combination of sources. A sales manager might have some of the following items at their disposal (Marketing report showing a decrease in the promotional discounts for the month, Pricing Report showing the reduction of prices of older models, an Inventory Report showing the discontinuation of a particular product line, or a memo showing the ending of a large affiliate partnership. The answers to the question Why are never as simple as a single indicator value. Bring able to quickly get to this information is all about designing how a user accesses the KPIs and then also how easily they can get to the additional information they need. This is where a Dashboard mentality can come in handy. For example, the business user can have a dashboard that shows their KPIs, but also has links to some of the common reports that they run regarding Sales Data. The users boss may have the same KPIs on their dashboard, but instead of links to individual reports they are going to have a link to a status report that was created by the user that pulls together all the data about the KPI in a summary format the users boss can review. So some of the key things to think about when building or evaluating KPIs for your organization: Technology should not be the driving factor KPIs are of little value without some indicator for whether a value is good, bad or neutral. KPIs only give an answer to the Is this number good\bad? question Make sure the ability to drill into the Why of a KPI is close at hand and relevant to the user who is viewing the KPI. The KPI is a key business tool when defined properly to help monitor business performance across the enterprise in an objective and consistent manner. At times it might feel like the process of defining the business aspects of a KPI can sometimes be arduous, the payoff in the end can far outweigh the costs. Some of the benefits of going through this process are a better understanding of the key metrics for an organization and the measure of those metrics and a consistent snapshot of business performance that can be utilized across the organization. And I think that these are benefits to any organization regardless of the technology or the implementation.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Exploring the Excel Services REST API

  - by jamiet

  Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible.  Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in.   The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet 

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• Lessons from rewriting POP Forums for MVC, open source-like

  - by Jeff

  It has been a ton of work, interrupted over the last two years by unemployment, moving, a baby, failing to sell houses and other life events, but it's really exciting to see POP Forums v9 coming together. I'm not even sure when I decided to really commit to it as an open source project, but working on the same team as the CodePlex folks probably had something to do with it. Moving along the roadmap I set for myself, the app is now running on a quasi-production site... we launched MouseZoom last weekend. (That's a post-beta 1 build of the forum. There's also some nifty Silverlight DeepZoom goodness on that site.)I have to make a point to illustrate just how important starting over was for me. I started this forum thing for my sites in old ASP more than ten years ago. What a mess that stuff was, including SQL injection vulnerabilities and all kinds of crap. It went to ASP.NET in 2002, but even then, it felt a little too much like script. More than a year later, in 2003, I did an honest to goodness rewrite. If you've been in this business of writing code for any amount of time, you know how much you hate what you wrote a month ago, so just imagine that with seven years in between. The subsequent versions still carried a fair amount of crap, and that's why I had to start over, to make a clean break. Mind you, much of that crap is still running on some of my production sites in a stable manner, but it's a pain in the ass to maintain.So with that clean break, there is much that I have learned. These are a few of those lessons, in no particular order...Avoid shiny object syndromeOver the years, I've embraced new things without bothering to ask myself why. I remember spending the better part of a year trying to adapt this app to use the membership and profile API's in ASP.NET, just because they were there. They didn't solve any known problem. Early on in this version, I dabbled in exotic ORM's, even though I already had the fundamental SQL that I knew worked. I bloated up the client side code with all kinds of jQuery UI and plugins just because, and it got in the way. All the new shiny can be distracting, and I've come to realize that I've allowed it to be a distraction most of my professional life.Just query what you needI've spent a lot of time over-thinking how to query data. In the SQL world, this means exotic joins, special caches, the read-update-commit loop of ORM's, etc. There are times when you have to remind yourself that you aren't Facebook, you'll never be Facebook, and that databases are in fact intended to serve data. In a lot of projects, back in the day, I used to have these big, rich data objects and pass them all over the place, through various application tiers, when in reality, all I needed was some ID from the entity. I try to be mindful of how many queries hit the database on a given request, but I don't obsess over it. I just get what I need.Don't spend too much time worrying about your unit testsIf you've looked at any of the tests for POP Forums, you might offer an audible WTF. That's OK. There's a whole lot of mocking going on. In some cases, it points out where you're doing too much, and that's good for improving your design. In other cases it shows where your design sucks. But the biggest trap of unit testing is that you worry it should be prettier. That's a waste of time. When you write a test, in many cases before the production code, the important part is that you're testing the right thing. If you have to mock up a bunch of stuff to test the outcome, so be it, but it's not wasted time. You're still doing up the typical arrange-action-assert deal, and you'll be able to read that later if you need to.Get back to your HTTP rootsASP.NET Webforms did a reasonably decent job at abstracting us away from the stateless nature of the Web. A lot of people criticize it, but I think it all worked pretty well. These days, with MVC, jQuery, REST services, and what not, we've gone back to thinking about the wire. The nuts and bolts passing between our Web browser and server matters. This doesn't make things harder, in my opinion, it makes them easier. There is something incredibly freeing about how we approach development of Web apps now. HTTP is a really simple protocol, and the stuff we push through it, in particular HTML and JSON, are pretty simple too. The debugging points are really easy to trap and trace.Premature optimization is prematureI'll go back to the data thing for a moment. I've been known to look at a particular action or use case and stress about the number of calls that are made to the database. I'm not suggesting that it's a bad thing to keep these in mind, but if you worry about it outside of the context of the actual impact, you're wasting time. For example, I query the database for last read times in a forum separately of the user and the list of forums. The impact on performance barely exists. If I put it under load, exceeding the kind of load I expect, it still barely has an impact. Then consider it only counts for logged in users. The context of this "inefficient" action is that it doesn't matter. Did I mention I won't be Facebook?Solve your own problems firstThis is another trap I've fallen into. I've often thought about what other people might need for some feature or aspect of the app. In other words, I was willing to make design decisions based on non-existent data. How stupid is that? When I decided to truly open source this thing, building for myself first was a stated design goal. This app has to server the audiences of CoasterBuzz, MouseZoom and other sites first. In this development scenario, you don't have access to mountains of usability studies or user focus groups. You have to start with what you know.I'm sure there are other points I could make too. It has been a lot of fun to work on, and I look forward to evolving the UI as time goes on. That's where I hope to see more magic in the future.

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• Physical Directories vs. MVC View Paths

  - by Rick Strahl

  This post falls into the bucket of operator error on my part, but I want to share this anyway because it describes an issue that has bitten me a few times now and writing it down might keep it a little stronger in my mind. I've been working on an MVC project the last few days, and at the end of a long day I accidentally moved one of my View folders from the MVC Root Folder to the project root. It must have been at the very end of the day before shutting down because tests and manual site navigation worked fine just before I quit for the night. I checked in changes and called it a night. Next day I came back, started running the app and had a lot of breaks with certain views. Oddly custom routes to these controllers/views worked, but stock /{controller}/{action} routes would not. After a bit of spelunking I realized that "Hey one of my View Folders is missing", which made some sense given the error messages I got. I looked in the recycle bin - nothing there, so rather than try to figure out what the hell happened, just restored from my last SVN checkin. At this point the folders are back… but… view access  still ends up breaking for this set of views. Specifically I'm getting the Yellow Screen of Death with: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current context Here's the full error: Server Error in '/ClassifiedsWeb' Application. Compilation ErrorDescription: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.Compiler Error Message: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current contextSource Error: Line 1: @model ClassifiedsWeb.EntryViewModel Line 2: @{ Line 3: ViewBag.Title = Model.Entry.Title + " - " + ClassifiedsBusiness.App.Configuration.ApplicationName; Source File: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml    Line: 1 Compiler Warning Messages: Show Detailed Compiler Output: Show Complete Compilation Source: Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.272 Here's what's really odd about this error: The views now do exist in the /Views/Classifieds folder of the project, but it appears like MVC is trying to execute the views directly. This is getting pretty weird, man! So I hook up some break points in my controllers to see if my controller actions are getting fired - and sure enough it turns out they are not - but only for those views that were previously 'lost' and then restored from SVN. WTF? At this point I'm thinking that I must have messed up one of the config files, but after some more spelunking and realizing that all the other Controller views work, I give up that idea. Config's gotta be OK if other controllers and views are working. Root Folders and MVC Views don't mix As I mentioned the problem was the fact that I inadvertantly managed to drag my View folder to the root folder of the project. Here's what this looks like in my FUBAR'd project structure after I copied back /Views/Classifieds folder from SVN: There's the actual root folder in the /Views folder and the accidental copy that sits of the root. I of course did not notice the /Classifieds folder at the root because it was excluded and didn't show up in the project. Now, before you call me a complete idiot remember that this happened by accident - an accidental drag probably just before shutting down for the night. :-) So why does this break? MVC should be happy with views in the /Views/Classifieds folder right? While MVC might be happy, IIS is not. The fact that there is a physical folder on disk takes precedence over MVC's routing. In other words if a URL exists that matches a route the pysical path is accessed first. What happens here is that essentially IIS is trying to execute the .cshtml pages directly without ever routing to the Controller methods. In the error page I showed above my clue should have been that the view was served as: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml rather than c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Views\Classifieds\Show.cshtml But of course I didn't notice that right away, just skimming to the end and looking at the file name. The reason that /classifieds/list actually fires that file is that the ASP.NET Web Pages engine looks for physical files on disk that match a path. IOW, when calling Web Pages you drop the .cshtml off the Razor page and IIS will serve that just fine. So: /classifieds/list looks and tries to find /classifieds/list.cshtml and executes that script. And that is exactly what's happening. Web Pages is trying to execute the .cshtml file and it fails because Web Pages knows nothing about the @model tag which is an MVC specific template extension. This is why my breakpoints in the controller methods didn't fire and it also explains why the error mentions that the @model key word is invalid (@model is an MVC provided template enhancement to the Razor Engine). The solution of course is super simple: Delete the accidentally created root folder and the problem is solved. Routing and Physical Paths I've run into problems with this before actually. In the past I've had a number of applications that had a physical /Admin folder which also would conflict with an MVC Admin controller. More than once I ended up wondering why the index route (/Admin/) was not working properly. If a physical /Admin folder exists /Admin will not route to the Index action (or whatever default action you have set up, but instead try to list the directory or show the default document in the folder. The only way to force the index page through MVC is to explicitly use /Admin/Index. Makes perfect sense once you realize the physical folder is there, but that's easy to forget in an MVC application. As you might imagine after a few times of running into this I gave up on the Admin folder and moved everything into MVC views to handle those operations. Still it's one of those things that can easily bite you, because the behavior and error messages seem to point at completely different  problems. Moral of the story is: If you see routing problems where routes are not reaching obvious controller methods, always check to make sure there's isn't a physical path being mapped by IIS instead. That way you won't feel stupid like I did after trying a million things for about an hour before discovering my sloppy mousing behavior :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC   IIS7   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• C#: LINQ vs foreach - Round 1.

  - by James Michael Hare

  So I was reading Peter Kellner's blog entry on Resharper 5.0 and its LINQ refactoring and thought that was very cool.  But that raised a point I had always been curious about in my head -- which is a better choice: manual foreach loops or LINQ?    The answer is not really clear-cut.  There are two sides to any code cost arguments: performance and maintainability.  The first of these is obvious and quantifiable.  Given any two pieces of code that perform the same function, you can run them side-by-side and see which piece of code performs better.   Unfortunately, this is not always a good measure.  Well written assembly language outperforms well written C++ code, but you lose a lot in maintainability which creates a big techncial debt load that is hard to offset as the application ages.  In contrast, higher level constructs make the code more brief and easier to understand, hence reducing technical cost.   Now, obviously in this case we're not talking two separate languages, we're comparing doing something manually in the language versus using a higher-order set of IEnumerable extensions that are in the System.Linq library.   Well, before we discuss any further, let's look at some sample code and the numbers.  First, let's take a look at the for loop and the LINQ expression.  This is just a simple find comparison:       // find implemented via LINQ     public static bool FindViaLinq(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.Any(item => item == target);     }         // find implemented via standard iteration     public static bool FindViaIteration(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         foreach (var i in list)         {             if (i == target)             {                 return true;             }         }           return false;     }   Okay, looking at this from a maintainability point of view, the Linq expression is definitely more concise (8 lines down to 1) and is very readable in intention.  You don't have to actually analyze the behavior of the loop to determine what it's doing.   So let's take a look at performance metrics from 100,000 iterations of these methods on a List<int> of varying sizes filled with random data.  For this test, we fill a target array with 100,000 random integers and then run the exact same pseudo-random targets through both searches.                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     Any         10       26          0.00046             30.00%     Iteration   10       20          0.00023             -     Any         100      116         0.00201             18.37%     Iteration   100      98          0.00118             -     Any         1000     1058        0.01853             16.78%     Iteration   1000     906         0.01155             -     Any         10,000   10,383      0.18189             17.41%     Iteration   10,000   8843        0.11362             -     Any         100,000  104,004     1.8297              18.27%     Iteration   100,000  87,941      1.13163             -   The LINQ expression is running about 17% slower for average size collections and worse for smaller collections.  Presumably, this is due to the overhead of the state machine used to track the iterators for the yield returns in the LINQ expressions, which seems about right in a tight loop such as this.   So what about other LINQ expressions?  After all, Any() is one of the more trivial ones.  I decided to try the TakeWhile() algorithm using a Count() to get the position stopped like the sample Pete was using in his blog that Resharper refactored for him into LINQ:       // Linq form     public static int GetTargetPosition1(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.TakeWhile(item => item != target).Count();     }       // traditionally iterative form     public static int GetTargetPosition2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if(i == target)             {                 break;             }               ++count;         }           return count;     }   Once again, the LINQ expression is much shorter, easier to read, and should be easier to maintain over time, reducing the cost of technical debt.  So I ran these through the same test data:                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile   10       41          0.00041             128%     Iteration   10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile   100      171         0.00171             88%     Iteration   100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile   1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Iteration   1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile   10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Iteration   10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile   100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Iteration   100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Wow!  I expected some overhead due to the state machines iterators produce, but 90% slower?  That seems a little heavy to me.  So then I thought, well, what if TakeWhile() is not the right tool for the job?  The problem is TakeWhile returns each item for processing using yield return, whereas our for-loop really doesn't care about the item beyond using it as a stop condition to evaluate. So what if that back and forth with the iterator state machine is the problem?  Well, we can quickly create an (albeit ugly) lambda that uses the Any() along with a count in a closure (if a LINQ guru knows a better way PLEASE let me know!), after all , this is more consistent with what we're trying to do, we're trying to find the first occurence of an item and halt once we find it, we just happen to be counting on the way.  This mostly matches Any().       // a new method that uses linq but evaluates the count in a closure.     public static int TakeWhileViaLinq2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;         list.Any(item =>             {                 if(item == target)                 {                     return true;                 }                   ++count;                 return false;             });         return count;     }     Now how does this one compare?                         List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method         Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile      10       41          0.00041             128%     Any w/Closure  10       23          0.00023             28%     Iteration      10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile      100      171         0.00171             88%     Any w/Closure  100      116         0.00116             27%     Iteration      100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile      1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Any w/Closure  1000     1101        0.01101             33%     Iteration      1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile      10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Any w/Closure  10,000   10802       0.10802             32%     Iteration      10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile      100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Any w/Closure  100,000  108378      1.08378             33%     Iteration      100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Much better!  It seems that the overhead of TakeAny() returning each item and updating the state in the state machine is drastically reduced by using Any() since Any() iterates forward until it finds the value we're looking for -- for the task we're attempting to do.   So the lesson there is, make sure when you use a LINQ expression you're choosing the best expression for the job, because if you're doing more work than you really need, you'll have a slower algorithm.  But this is true of any choice of algorithm or collection in general.     Even with the Any() with the count in the closure it is still about 30% slower, but let's consider that angle carefully.  For a list of 100,000 items, it was the difference between 1.01 ms and 0.82 ms roughly in a List<T>.  That's really not that bad at all in the grand scheme of things.  Even running at 90% slower with TakeWhile(), for the vast majority of my projects, an extra millisecond to save potential errors in the long term and improve maintainability is a small price to pay.  And if your typical list is 1000 items or less we're talking only microseconds worth of difference.   It's like they say: 90% of your performance bottlenecks are in 2% of your code, so over-optimizing almost never pays off.  So personally, I'll take the LINQ expression wherever I can because they will be easier to read and maintain (thus reducing technical debt) and I can rely on Microsoft's development to have coded and unit tested those algorithm fully for me instead of relying on a developer to code the loop logic correctly.   If something's 90% slower, yes, it's worth keeping in mind, but it's really not until you start get magnitudes-of-order slower (10x, 100x, 1000x) that alarm bells should really go off.  And if I ever do need that last millisecond of performance?  Well then I'll optimize JUST THAT problem spot.  To me it's worth it for the readability, speed-to-market, and maintainability.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 01, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 01, 2013Popular ReleasesQuickMon: Version 2.10.3: Mainly just a service release - no major changes. Toolbar buttons on main and config window can now be re-arrange (using ALT key) Added property to disable corrective scriptsDotNetNuke® IFrame: IFrame 04.05.00: New DNN6/7 Manifest file and Azure Compatibility.VidCoder: 1.5.2 Beta: Fixed crash on presets with an invalid bitrate.Roadkill - .NET Wiki engine: Roadkill v1.7: New features in 1.7: New file manager: Multiple file uploads Drag and drop uploads Delete folders (admins only) Delete files (admins only) (Experimental) Syntaxhighlighting custom variable (using https://github.com/alexgorbatchev/SyntaxHighlighter) - use [[[code lang=c#|your code here]]] (Experimental) MathJax custom variable - use [[[Mathjax]]] and $$your tex$$ on the page. Improved black bar theme Site speed improvements for Javascript/CSS files - now just two files files ea...Download Sharepoint Solution package: Release 4: version updated for SP2013WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.5: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8.0 and 8.1 Preview SDKs. Do not download the source code from here if you are looking for latest updates! You can download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Composition library for visual tree rende...Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.1: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.1 has new facilities for defining and manipulating character classes. These changes make the construction of large Unicode character classes more convenient. The runtime code for performing automaton backup has been re-implemented, and is now faster for scanners that need backup. Source CodeThe distribution contains a complete VS2010 project for the appli...ZXMAK2: Version 2.7.5.7: - fix TZX emulation (Bruce Lee, Zynaps) - fix ATM 16 colors for border - add memory module PROFI 512K; add PROFI V03 rom image; fix PROFI 3.XX configTwitter image Downloader: Twitter Image Downloader 2 with Installer: Application file with Install shield and Dot Net 4.0 redistributableUltimate Music Tagger: Ultimate Music Tagger 1.0.0.0: First release of Ultimate Music TaggerBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.2: 2013.06.28 Ver5.9.2 (1) ??????????(????SMTP?????)?????????? (2) HTTPS???????????Outlook 2013 Add-In: Configuration Form: This new version includes the following changes: - Refactored code a bit. - Removing configuration from main form to gain more space to display items. - Moved configuration to separate form. You can click the little "gear" icon to access the configuration form (still very simple). - Added option to show past day appointments from the selected day (previous in time, that is). - Added some tooltips. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it ...Terminals: Version 3.0 - Release: Changes since version 2.0:Choose 100% portable or installed version Removed connection warning when running RDP 8 (Windows 8) client Fixed Active directory search Extended Active directory search by LDAP filters Fixed single instance mode when running on Windows Terminal server Merged usage of Tags and Groups Added columns sorting option in tables No UAC prompts on Windows 7 Completely new file persistence data layer New MS SQL persistence layer (Store data in SQL database)...NuGet: NuGet 2.6: Released June 26, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.6Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0 Beta: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, and cross platform debugging support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuewiStN...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for Windows Azure Media Services Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expectin...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.95: update parser to allow for CSS3 calc( function to nest. add recognition of -pponly (Preprocess-Only) switch in AjaxMinManifestTask build task. Fix crashing bug in EXE when processing a manifest file using the -xml switch and an error message needs to be displayed (like a missing input file). Create separate Clean and Bundle build tasks for working with manifest files (AjaxMinManifestCleanTask and AjaxMinBundleTask). Removed the IsCleanOperation from AjaxMinManifestTask -- use AjaxMinMan...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.44: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImgChili.net" links FIXED: Auto UpdaterDocument.Editor: 2013.25: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.25: Improved Spell Check support Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsNew ProjectsAerCloud.net Client - Java, Linux & Windows: This project source code provides a step by step guide for using AerCloud.net Framework as a Service API. For more information please visit http://www.aercloudAmiClient – Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) client based on the Rx Framework: Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) client based on the Rx Frameworkbaidupan: cdcddddC#??????: C#??????ImageHelper: imagehelperIP switcher: IP switcher is a simple tool for switching settings, and store presets, on networkadapters.MastersProject: A MS project with a goal of creating a fully Code Contracts verified physics engine and a relatively simple game that uses it.Multiplatform card game: Example multipatform project.PhoneTools: A collection of tools designed to help developers create beautiful Windows Phone 8 apps.rodidexter: lllSharePoint 2013 List Item Encryption: This coding exercise project enables you to encrypt/decrypt list item text field in the browser using industry standard algorithms.tvaSoft: simulation, rotor dynamics, Finite Element Analisys, FEM, ODE, torsional vibration, flexural vibrationX3DML Project: X3DML is an xml-based markup language that defines rules for modeling 3D scenes from a tag-based document. It may be usefull in 3D web design and VR.zhuang-tfs: zhuang tfs

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• CI Deployment Of Azure Web Roles Using TeamCity

  - by srkirkland

  After recently migrating an important new website to use Windows Azure “Web Roles” I wanted an easier way to deploy new versions to the Azure Staging environment as well as a reliable process to rollback deployments to a certain “known good” source control commit checkpoint.  By configuring our JetBrains’ TeamCity CI server to utilize Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets to create new automated deployments, I’ll show you how to take control of your Azure publish process. Step 0: Configuring your Azure Project in Visual Studio Before we can start looking at automating the deployment, we should make sure manual deployments from Visual Studio are working properly.  Detailed information for setting up deployments can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683672.aspx#PublishAzure or by doing some quick Googling, but the basics are as follows: Install the prerequisite Windows Azure SDK Create an Azure project by right-clicking on your web project and choosing “Add Windows Azure Cloud Service Project” (or by manually adding that project type) Configure your Role and Service Configuration/Definition as desired Right-click on your azure project and choose “Publish,” create a publish profile, and push to your web role You don’t actually have to do step #4 and create a publish profile, but it’s a good exercise to make sure everything is working properly.  Once your Windows Azure project is setup correctly, we are ready to move on to understanding the Azure Publish process. Understanding the Azure Publish Process The actual Windows Azure project is fairly simple at its core—it builds your dependent roles (in our case, a web role) against a specific service and build configuration, and outputs two files: ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg: This is just the file containing your package configuration info, for example Instance Count, OsFamily, ConnectionString and other Setting information. ProjectName.Azure.cspkg: This is the package file that contains the guts of your deployment, including all deployable files. When you package your Azure project, these two files will be created within the directory ./[ProjectName].Azure/bin/[ConfigName]/app.publish/.  If you want to build your Azure Project from the command line, it’s as simple as calling MSBuild on the “Publish” target: msbuild.exe /target:Publish Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets The last pieces of the puzzle that make CI automation possible are the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156055.aspx).  These cmdlets are what will let us create deployments without Visual Studio or other user intervention. Preparing TeamCity for Azure Deployments Now we are ready to get our TeamCity server setup so it can build and deploy Windows Azure projects, which we now know requires the Azure SDK and the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets. Installing the Azure SDK is easy enough, just go to https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/ and click “Install” Once this SDK is installed, I recommend running a test build to make sure your project is building correctly.  You’ll want to setup your build step using MSBuild with the “Publish” target against your solution file.  Mine looks like this: Assuming the build was successful, you will now have the two *.cspkg and *cscfg files within your build directory.  If the build was red (failed), take a look at the build logs and keep an eye out for “unsupported project type” or other build errors, which will need to be addressed before the CI deployment can be completed. With a successful build we are now ready to install and configure the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets: Follow the instructions at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj554332 to install the Cmdlets and configure PowerShell After installing the Cmdlets, you’ll need to get your Azure Subscription Info using the Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile command. Store the resulting *.publishsettings file somewhere you can get to easily, like C:\TeamCity, because you will need to reference it later from your deploy script. Scripting the CI Deploy Process Now that the cmdlets are installed on our TeamCity server, we are ready to script the actual deployment using a TeamCity “PowerShell” build runner.  Before we look at any code, here’s a breakdown of our deployment algorithm: Setup your variables, including the location of the *.cspkg and *cscfg files produced in the earlier MSBuild step (remember, the folder is something like [ProjectName].Azure/bin/[ConfigName]/app.publish/ Import the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets Import and set your Azure Subscription information (this is basically your authentication/authorization step, so protect your settings file Now look for a current deployment, and if you find one Upgrade it, else Create a new deployment Pretty simple and straightforward.  Now let’s look at the code (also available as a gist here: https://gist.github.com/3694398): $subscription = "[Your Subscription Name]" $service = "[Your Azure Service Name]" $slot = "staging" #staging or production $package = "[ProjectName]\bin\[BuildConfigName]\app.publish\[ProjectName].cspkg" $configuration = "[ProjectName]\bin\[BuildConfigName]\app.publish\ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg" $timeStampFormat = "g" $deploymentLabel = "ContinuousDeploy to $service v%build.number%"   Write-Output "Running Azure Imports" Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\*.psd1" Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile "C:\TeamCity\[PSFileName].publishsettings" Set-AzureSubscription -CurrentStorageAccount $service -SubscriptionName $subscription   function Publish(){ $deployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot -ErrorVariable a -ErrorAction silentlycontinue   if ($a[0] -ne $null) { Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - No deployment is detected. Creating a new deployment. " } if ($deployment.Name -ne $null) { #Update deployment inplace (usually faster, cheaper, won't destroy VIP) Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Deployment exists in $servicename. Upgrading deployment." UpgradeDeployment } else { CreateNewDeployment } }   function CreateNewDeployment() { write-progress -id 3 -activity "Creating New Deployment" -Status "In progress" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Creating New Deployment: In progress"   $opstat = New-AzureDeployment -Slot $slot -Package $package -Configuration $configuration -label $deploymentLabel -ServiceName $service   $completeDeployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot $completeDeploymentID = $completeDeployment.deploymentid   write-progress -id 3 -activity "Creating New Deployment" -completed -Status "Complete" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Creating New Deployment: Complete, Deployment ID: $completeDeploymentID" }   function UpgradeDeployment() { write-progress -id 3 -activity "Upgrading Deployment" -Status "In progress" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Upgrading Deployment: In progress"   # perform Update-Deployment $setdeployment = Set-AzureDeployment -Upgrade -Slot $slot -Package $package -Configuration $configuration -label $deploymentLabel -ServiceName $service -Force   $completeDeployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot $completeDeploymentID = $completeDeployment.deploymentid   write-progress -id 3 -activity "Upgrading Deployment" -completed -Status "Complete" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Upgrading Deployment: Complete, Deployment ID: $completeDeploymentID" }   Write-Output "Create Azure Deployment" Publish   Creating the TeamCity Build Step The only thing left is to create a second build step, after your MSBuild “Publish” step, with the build runner type “PowerShell”.  Then set your script to “Source Code,” the script execution mode to “Put script into PowerShell stdin with “-Command” arguments” and then copy/paste in the above script (replacing the placeholder sections with your values).  This should look like the following:   Wrap Up After combining the MSBuild /target:Publish step (which creates the necessary Windows Azure *.cspkg and *.cscfg files) and a PowerShell script step which utilizes the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets, we have a fully deployable build configuration in TeamCity.  You can configure this step to run whenever you’d like using build triggers – for example, you could even deploy whenever a new master branch deploy comes in and passes all required tests. In the script I’ve hardcoded that every deployment goes to the Staging environment on Azure, but you could deploy straight to Production if you want to, or even setup a deployment configuration variable and set it as desired. After your TeamCity Build Configuration is complete, you’ll see something that looks like this: Whenever you click the “Run” button, all of your code will be compiled, published, and deployed to Windows Azure! One additional enormous benefit of automating the process this way is that you can easily deploy any specific source control changeset by clicking the little ellipsis button next to "Run.”  This will bring up a dialog like the one below, where you can select the last change to use for your deployment.  Since Azure Web Role deployments don’t have any rollback functionality, this is a critical feature.   Enjoy!

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• Changing an HTML Form's Target with jQuery

  - by Rick Strahl

  This is a question that comes up quite frequently: I have a form with several submit or link buttons and one or more of the buttons needs to open a new Window. How do I get several buttons to all post to the right window? If you're building ASP.NET forms you probably know that by default the Web Forms engine sends button clicks back to the server as a POST operation. A server form has a <form> tag which expands to this: <form method="post" action="default.aspx" id="form1"> Now you CAN change the target of the form and point it to a different window or frame, but the problem with that is that it still affects ALL submissions of the current form. If you multiple buttons/links and they need to go to different target windows/frames you can't do it easily through the <form runat="server"> tag. Although this discussion uses ASP.NET WebForms as an example, realistically this is a general HTML problem although likely more common in WebForms due to the single form metaphor it uses. In ASP.NET MVC for example you'd have more options by breaking out each button into separate forms with its own distinct target tag. However, even with that option it's not always possible to break up forms - for example if multiple targets are required but all targets require the same form data to the be posted. A common scenario here is that you might have a button (or link) that you click where you still want some server code to fire but at the end of the request you actually want to display the content in a new window. A common operation where this happens is report generation: You click a button and the server generates a report say in PDF format and you then want to display the PDF result in a new window without killing the content in the current window. Assuming you have other buttons on the same Page that need to post to base window how do you get the button click to go to a new window? Can't  you just use a LinkButton or other Link Control? At first glance you might think an easy way to do this is to use an ASP.NET LinkButton to do this - after all a LinkButton creates a hyper link that CAN accept a target and it also posts back to the server, right? However, there's no Target property, although you can set the target HTML attribute easily enough. Code like this looks reasonable: <asp:LinkButton runat="server" ID="btnNewTarget" Text="New Target" target="_blank" OnClick="bnNewTarget_Click" /> But if you try this you'll find that it doesn't work. Why? Because ASP.NET creates postbacks with JavaScript code that operates on the current window/frame: <a id="btnNewTarget" target="_blank" href="javascript:__doPostBack(&#39;btnNewTarget&#39;,&#39;&#39;)">New Target</a> What happens with a target tag is that before the JavaScript actually executes a new window is opened and the focus shifts to the new window. The new window of course is empty and has no __doPostBack() function nor access to the old document. So when you click the link a new window opens but the window remains blank without content - no server postback actually occurs. Natch that idea. Setting the Form Target for a Button Control or LinkButton So, in order to send Postback link controls and buttons to another window/frame, both require that the target of the form gets changed dynamically when the button or link is clicked. Luckily this is rather easy to do however using a little bit of script code and jQuery. Imagine you have two buttons like this that should go to another window: <asp:LinkButton runat="server" ID="btnNewTarget" Text="New Target" OnClick="ClickHandler" /> <asp:Button runat="server" ID="btnButtonNewTarget" Text="New Target Button" OnClick="ClickHandler" /> ClickHandler in this case is any routine that generates the output you want to display in the new window. Generally this output will not come from the current page markup but is generated externally - like a PDF report or some report generated by another application component or tool. The output generally will be either generated by hand or something that was generated to disk to be displayed with Response.Redirect() or Response.TransmitFile() etc. Here's the dummy handler that just generates some HTML by hand and displays it: protected void ClickHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Perform some operation that generates HTML or Redirects somewhere else Response.Write("Some custom output would be generated here (PDF, non-Page HTML etc.)"); // Make sure this response doesn't display the page content // Call Response.End() or Response.Redirect() Response.End(); } To route this oh so sophisticated output to an alternate window for both the LinkButton and Button Controls, you can use the following simple script code: <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnButtonNewTarget,#btnNewTarget").click(function () { $("form").attr("target", "_blank"); }); </script> So why does this work where the target attribute did not? The difference here is that the script fires BEFORE the target is changed to the new window. When you put a target attribute on a link or form the target is changed as the very first thing before the link actually executes. IOW, the link literally executes in the new window when it's done this way. By attaching a click handler, though we're not navigating yet so all the operations the script code performs (ie. __doPostBack()) and the collection of Form variables to post to the server all occurs in the current page. By changing the target from within script code the target change fires as part of the form submission process which means it runs in the correct context of the current page. IOW - the input for the POST is from the current page, but the output is routed to a new window/frame. Just what we want in this scenario. Voila you can dynamically route output to the appropriate window.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  HTML  jQuery  

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