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• Type Casting variables in PHP: Is there a practical example?

  - by Stephen

  PHP, as most of us know, has weak typing. For those who don't, PHP.net says: PHP does not require (or support) explicit type definition in variable declaration; a variable's type is determined by the context in which the variable is used. Love it or hate it, PHP re-casts variables on-the-fly. So, the following code is valid: $var = "10"; $value = 10 + $var; var_dump($value); // int(20) PHP also alows you to explicitly cast a variable, like so: $var = "10"; $value = 10 + $var; $value = (string)$value; var_dump($value); // string(2) "20" That's all cool... but, for the life of me, I cannot conceive of a practical reason for doing this. I don't have a problem with strong typing in languages that support it, like Java. That's fine, and I completely understand it. Also, I'm aware of—and fully understand the usefulness of—type hinting in function parameters. The problem I have with type casting is explained by the above quote. If PHP can swap types at-will, it can do so even after you force cast a type; and it can do so on-the-fly when you need a certain type in an operation. That makes the following valid: $var = "10"; $value = (int)$var; $value = $value . ' TaDa!'; var_dump($value); // string(8) "10 TaDa!" So what's the point? Can anyone show me a practical application or example of type casting—one that would fail if type casting were not involved? I ask this here instead of SO because I figure practicality is too subjective. Edit in response to Chris' comment Take this theoretical example of a world where user-defined type casting makes sense in PHP: You force cast variable $foo as int -- (int)$foo. You attempt to store a string value in the variable $foo. PHP throws an exception!! <--- That would make sense. Suddenly the reason for user defined type casting exists! The fact that PHP will switch things around as needed makes the point of user defined type casting vague. For example, the following two code samples are equivalent: // example 1 $foo = 0; $foo = (string)$foo; $foo = '# of Reasons for the programmer to type cast $foo as a string: ' . $foo; // example 2 $foo = 0; $foo = (int)$foo; $foo = '# of Reasons for the programmer to type cast $foo as a string: ' . $foo;

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• Python PyBluez loses Bluetooth connection after a while

  - by Travis G.

  I am using Python to write a simple serial Bluetooth script that sends information about my computer stats periodically. The receiving device is a Sparkfun BlueSmirf Silver. The problem is that, after the script runs for a few minutes, it stops sending packets to the receiver and fails with the error: (11, 'Resource temporarily unavailable') Noticing that this inevitably happens, I added some code to automatically try to reopen the connection. However, then I get: Could not connect: (16, 'Device or resource busy') Am I doing something wrong with the connection? Do I need to occasionally reopen the socket? I'm not sure how to recover from this type of error. I understand that sometimes the port will be busy and a write operation is deferred to avoid blocking other processes, but I wouldn't expect the connection to fail so regularly. Any thoughts? Here is the script: import psutil import serial import string import time import bluetooth sampleTime = 1 numSamples = 5 lastTemp = 0 TEMP_CHAR = 't' USAGE_CHAR = 'u' SENSOR_NAME = 'TC0D' #gauges = serial.Serial() #gauges.port = '/dev/rfcomm0' #gauges.baudrate = 9600 #gauges.parity = 'N' #gauges.writeTimeout = 0 #gauges.open() filename = '/sys/bus/platform/devices/applesmc.768/temp2_input' def parseSensorsOutputLinux(output): return int(round(float(output) / 1000)) def connect(): while(True): try: gaugeSocket = bluetooth.BluetoothSocket(bluetooth.RFCOMM) gaugeSocket.connect(('00:06:66:42:22:96', 1)) break; except bluetooth.btcommon.BluetoothError as error: print "Could not connect: ", error, "; Retrying in 5s..." time.sleep(5) return gaugeSocket; gaugeSocket = connect() while(1): usage = psutil.cpu_percent(interval=sampleTime) sensorFile = open(filename) temp = parseSensorsOutputLinux(sensorFile.read()) try: #gauges.write(USAGE_CHAR) gaugeSocket.send(USAGE_CHAR) #gauges.write(chr(int(usage))) #write the first byte gaugeSocket.send(chr(int(usage))) #print("Wrote usage: " + str(int(usage))) #gauges.write(TEMP_CHAR) gaugeSocket.send(TEMP_CHAR) #gauges.write(chr(temp)) gaugeSocket.send(chr(temp)) #print("Wrote temp: " + str(temp)) except bluetooth.btcommon.BluetoothError as error: print "Caught BluetoothError: ", error time.sleep(5) gaugeSocket = connect() pass gaugeSocket.close() EDIT: I should add that this code connects fine after I power-cycle the receiver and start the script. However, it fails after the first exception until I restart the receiver. P.S. This is related to my recent question, Why is /dev/rfcomm0 giving PySerial problems?, but that was more about PySerial specifically with rfcomm0. Here I am asking about general rfcomm etiquette.

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• C++ Little Wonders: The C++11 auto keyword redux

  - by James Michael Hare

  I’ve decided to create a sub-series of my Little Wonders posts to focus on C++.  Just like their C# counterparts, these posts will focus on those features of the C++ language that can help improve code by making it easier to write and maintain.  The index of the C# Little Wonders can be found here. This has been a busy week with a rollout of some new website features here at my work, so I don’t have a big post for this week.  But I wanted to write something up, and since lately I’ve been renewing my C++ skills in a separate project, it seemed like a good opportunity to start a C++ Little Wonders series.  Most of my development work still tends to focus on C#, but it was great to get back into the saddle and renew my C++ knowledge.  Today I’m going to focus on a new feature in C++11 (formerly known as C++0x, which is a major move forward in the C++ language standard).  While this small keyword can seem so trivial, I feel it is a big step forward in improving readability in C++ programs. The auto keyword If you’ve worked on C++ for a long time, you probably have some passing familiarity with the old auto keyword as one of those rarely used C++ keywords that was almost never used because it was the default. That is, in the code below (before C++11): 1: int foo() 2: { 3: // automatic variables (allocated and deallocated on stack) 4: int x; 5: auto int y; 6:  7: // static variables (retain their value across calls) 8: static int z; 9:  10: return 0; 11: } The variable x is assumed to be auto because that is the default, thus it is unnecessary to specify it explicitly as in the declaration of y below that.  Basically, an auto variable is one that is allocated and de-allocated on the stack automatically.  Contrast this to static variables, that are allocated statically and exist across the lifetime of the program. Because auto was so rarely (if ever) used since it is the norm, they decided to remove it for this purpose and give it new meaning in C++11.  The new meaning of auto: implicit typing Now, if your compiler supports C++ 11 (or at least a good subset of C++11 or 0x) you can take advantage of type inference in C++.  For those of you from the C# world, this means that the auto keyword in C++ now behaves a lot like the var keyword in C#! For example, many of us have had to declare those massive type declarations for an iterator before.  Let’s say we have a std::map of std::string to int which will map names to ages: 1: std::map<std::string, int> myMap; And then let’s say we want to find the age of a given person: 1: // Egad that's a long type... 2: std::map<std::string, int>::const_iterator pos = myMap.find(targetName); Notice that big ugly type definition to declare variable pos?  Sure, we could shorten this by creating a typedef of our specific map type if we wanted, but now with the auto keyword there’s no need: 1: // much shorter! 2: auto pos = myMap.find(targetName); The auto now tells the compiler to determine what type pos should be based on what it’s being assigned to.  This is not dynamic typing, it still determines the type as if it were explicitly declared and once declared that type cannot be changed.  That is, this is invalid: 1: // x is type int 2: auto x = 42; 3:  4: // can't assign string to int 5: x = "Hello"; Once the compiler determines x is type int it is exactly as if we typed int x = 42; instead, so don’t' confuse it with dynamic typing, it’s still very type-safe. An interesting feature of the auto keyword is that you can modify the inferred type: 1: // declare method that returns int* 2: int* GetPointer(); 3:  4: // p1 is int*, auto inferred type is int 5: auto *p1 = GetPointer(); 6:  7: // ps is int*, auto inferred type is int* 8: auto p2 = GetPointer(); Notice in both of these cases, p1 and p2 are determined to be int* but in each case the inferred type was different.  because we declared p1 as auto *p1 and GetPointer() returns int*, it inferred the type int was needed to complete the declaration.  In the second case, however, we declared p2 as auto p2 which means the inferred type was int*.  Ultimately, this make p1 and p2 the same type, but which type is inferred makes a difference, if you are chaining multiple inferred declarations together.  In these cases, the inferred type of each must match the first: 1: // Type inferred is int 2: // p1 is int* 3: // p2 is int 4: // p3 is int& 5: auto *p1 = GetPointer(), p2 = 42, &p3 = p2; Note that this works because the inferred type was int, if the inferred type was int* instead: 1: // syntax error, p1 was inferred to be int* so p2 and p3 don't make sense 2: auto p1 = GetPointer(), p2 = 42, &p3 = p2; You could also use const or static to modify the inferred type: 1: // inferred type is an int, theAnswer is a const int 2: const auto theAnswer = 42; 3:  4: // inferred type is double, Pi is a static double 5: static auto Pi = 3.1415927; Thus in the examples above it inferred the types int and double respectively, which were then modified to const and static. Summary The auto keyword has gotten new life in C++11 to allow you to infer the type of a variable from it’s initialization.  This simple little keyword can be used to cut down large declarations for complex types into a much more readable form, where appropriate.   Technorati Tags: C++, C++11, Little Wonders, auto

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• SQL SERVER – An Efficiency Tool to Compare and Synchronize SQL Server Databases

  - by Pinal Dave

  There is no need to reinvent the wheel if it is already invented and if the wheel is already available at ease, there is no need to wait to grab it. Here is the similar situation. I came across a very interesting situation and I had to look for an efficient tool which can make my life easier and solve my business problem. Here is the scenario. One of the developers had deleted few rows from the very important mapping table of our development server (thankfully, it was not the production server). Though it was a development server, the entire development team had to stop working as the application started to crash on every page. Think about the lost of manpower and efficiency which we started to loose.  Pretty much every department had to stop working as our internal development application stopped working. Thankfully, we even take a backup of our development server and we had access to full backup of the entire database at 6 AM morning. We do not take as a frequent backup of development server as production server (naturally!). Even though we had a full backup, the solution was not to restore the database. Think about it, there were plenty of the other operations since the last good full backup and if we restore a full backup, we will pretty much overwrite on the top of the work done by developers since morning. Now, as restoring the full backup was not an option we decided to restore the same database on another server. Once we had restored our database to another server, the challenge was to compare the table from where the database was deleted. The mapping table from where the data were deleted contained over 5000 rows and it was humanly impossible to compare both the tables manually. Finally we decided to use efficiency tool dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server from DevArt. dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server is a powerful, fast and easy to use SQL compare tool, capable of using native SQL Server backups as metadata source. (FYI we Downloaded dbForge Data Compare) Once we discovered the product, we immediately downloaded the product and installed on our development server. After we installed the product, we were greeted with the following screen. We clicked on the New Data Comparision to start our new comparison project. It brought up following screen. Here is the best part of the product, we just had to enter our database connection username and password along with source and destination details and we are done. The entire process is very simple and self intuiting. The best part was that for the source, we can either select database or even backup. This was indeed fantastic feature. Think about this, if you have a very big database, it will take long time to restore on the server. Once it is restored, you will be able to work with it. However, when you are working with dbForge Data Compare it will accept database backup as your source or destination. Once I click on the execute it brought up following screen where it displayed an excellent summary of the data compare. It has dedicated tabs for the what is changing in what table as well had details of the changed data. The best part is that, once we had reviewed the change. We click on the Synchronize button in the menu bar and it brought up following screen. You can see that the screen has very simple straight forward but very powerful features. You can generate a script to synchronize from target to source or even from source to target. Additionally, the database is a very complicated world and there are extensive options to configure various database options on the next screen. We also have the option to either generate script or directly execute the script to target server. I like to play on the safe side and I generated the script for my synchronization and later on after review I deployed the scripts on the server. Well, my team and we were able to get going from our disaster in less than 10 minutes. There were few people in our team were indeed disappointed as they were thinking of going home early that day but in less than 10 minutes they had to get back to work. There are so many other features in  dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server, I am already planning to make this product company wide recommended product for Data Compare tool. Hats off to the team who have build this product. Here are few of the features salient features of the dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server Perform SQL Server database comparison to detect changes Compare SQL Server backups with live databases Analyze data differences between two databases Synchronize two databases that went out of sync Restore data of a particular table from the backup Generate data comparison reports in Excel and HTML formats Copy look-up data from development database to production Automate routine data synchronization tasks with command-line interface Go Ahead and Download the dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server right away. It is always a good idea to get familiar with the important tools before hand instead of learning it under pressure of disaster. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

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• StackWrap4J Java wrapper

  - by Bill the Lizard

  The StackWrap4J 1.0.1 jar is now available! (See the changelog) Sample Code / Screen Shot The following code snippet was used to test the wrapper in the Android emulator: TextView text = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.output); StackWrapper stackWrap = new StackOverflow(); String displayText = null; try { Stats stats = stackWrap.getStats(); displayText = "Stack Overflow Statistics"; displayText += "\nTotal Questions: " + stats.getTotalQuestions(); displayText += "\nTotal Unanswered: " + stats.getTotalUnanswered(); displayText += "\nTotal Answers: " + stats.getTotalAnswers(); displayText += "\nTotal Comments: " + stats.getTotalComments(); displayText += "\nTotal Votes: " + stats.getTotalVotes(); displayText += "\nTotal Users: " + stats.getTotalUsers(); } catch(Exception e){ displayText = e.getMessage(); } text.setText(displayText); About StackWrap4J is a Java wrapper for the Stack Exchange API. It is designed to be easy to use, and intuitive to learn while providing the full functionality of the API. License StackWrap4J is available under the MIT license. Download StackWrap4J Platform StackWrap4J was built using Java 1.5 and tested on Sun's JVM. It should run on any implementation of the JVM (1.5 or later). It's also been tested on the Android emulator. It also runs under the Google App Engine. Code You can download the code from our SVN repository hosted on SourceForge. Documentation for the code is also available on the SourceForge site. Authors Bill Cruise Justin Nelson Contact Please feel free to leave feedback here in the Answers section or on the StackWrap4J project discussion forum. Alternatively: Bill is available at: lizard.bill (at) gmail.com Justin can be reached at: jjnguy13 (at) gmail.com Future Currently we are focusing on adding more tests and fixing bugs. We are also working on adding serialization so that our objects can be easily persisted, and throttling so that users of our library don't have to worry about breaking the terms of use of the API. Notes The latest build was tested against version 1.0 of the API on July 28th.

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• C# 4.0: Covariance And Contravariance In Generics

  - by Paulo Morgado

  C# 4.0 (and .NET 4.0) introduced covariance and contravariance to generic interfaces and delegates. But what is this variance thing? According to Wikipedia, in multilinear algebra and tensor analysis, covariance and contravariance describe how the quantitative description of certain geometrical or physical entities changes when passing from one coordinate system to another.(*) But what does this have to do with C# or .NET? In type theory, a the type T is greater (>) than type S if S is a subtype (derives from) T, which means that there is a quantitative description for types in a type hierarchy. So, how does covariance and contravariance apply to C# (and .NET) generic types? In C# (and .NET), variance applies to generic type parameters and not to the resulting generic type. A generic type parameter is: covariant if the ordering of the generic types follows the ordering of the generic type parameters: Generic<T> = Generic<S> for T = S. contravariant if the ordering of the generic types is reversed from the ordering of the generic type parameters: Generic<T> = Generic<S> for T = S. invariant if neither of the above apply. If this definition is applied to arrays, we can see that arrays have always been covariant because this is valid code: object[] objectArray = new string[] { "string 1", "string 2" }; objectArray[0] = "string 3"; objectArray[1] = new object(); However, when we try to run this code, the second assignment will throw an ArrayTypeMismatchException. Although the compiler was fooled into thinking this was valid code because an object is being assigned to an element of an array of object, at run time, there is always a type check to guarantee that the runtime type of the definition of the elements of the array is greater or equal to the instance being assigned to the element. In the above example, because the runtime type of the array is array of string, the first assignment of array elements is valid because string = string and the second is invalid because string = object. This leads to the conclusion that, although arrays have always been covariant, they are not safely covariant – code that compiles is not guaranteed to run without errors. In C#, the way to define that a generic type parameter as covariant is using the out generic modifier: public interface IEnumerable<out T> { IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator<out T> { T Current { get; } bool MoveNext(); } Notice the convenient use the pre-existing out keyword. Besides the benefit of not having to remember a new hypothetic covariant keyword, out is easier to remember because it defines that the generic type parameter can only appear in output positions — read-only properties and method return values. In a similar way, the way to define a type parameter as contravariant is using the in generic modifier: public interface IComparer<in T> { int Compare(T x, T y); } Once again, the use of the pre-existing in keyword makes it easier to remember that the generic type parameter can only be used in input positions — write-only properties and method non ref and non out parameters. Because covariance and contravariance apply only to the generic type parameters, a generic type definition can have both covariant and contravariant generic type parameters in its definition: public delegate TResult Func<in T, out TResult>(T arg); A generic type parameter that is not marked covariant (out) or contravariant (in) is invariant. All the types in the .NET Framework where variance could be applied to its generic type parameters have been modified to take advantage of this new feature. In summary, the rules for variance in C# (and .NET) are: Variance in type parameters are restricted to generic interface and generic delegate types. A generic interface or generic delegate type can have both covariant and contravariant type parameters. Variance applies only to reference types; if you specify a value type for a variant type parameter, that type parameter is invariant for the resulting constructed type. Variance does not apply to delegate combination. That is, given two delegates of types Action<Derived> and Action<Base>, you cannot combine the second delegate with the first although the result would be type safe. Variance allows the second delegate to be assigned to a variable of type Action<Derived>, but delegates can combine only if their types match exactly. If you want to learn more about variance in C# (and .NET), you can always read: Covariance and Contravariance in Generics — MSDN Library Exact rules for variance validity — Eric Lippert Events get a little overhaul in C# 4, Afterward: Effective Events — Chris Burrows Note: Because variance is a feature of .NET 4.0 and not only of C# 4.0, all this also applies to Visual Basic 10.

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• Who Are the BI Users in Your Neighborhood?

  - by Brian Dayton

  Forrester's Boris Evelson recently wrote a blog titled "Who are the BI Personas?" that I enjoyed for a number of reasons. It's a quick read, easy to grasp and (refreshingly) focuses on the users of technology VS the technology. As Evelson admits, he meant to keep the reference chart at a high-level because there are too many different permutations and additional sub-categories to make such a chart useful. For me, I wouldn't head into the technical permutations but more the contextual use of BI and the issues that users experience.  My thoughts brought up more questions than answers such as: Context: -          HOW: With the exception of the "Power User" persona--likely some sort of business or operations analyst? -          WHEN: Are they using the information to make real-time decisions on the front lines (a customer service manager or shipping/logistics VP) or are they using this information for cumulative analysis and business planning? Or both? -          WHERE: What areas of the business are more or less likely to rely on BI across an organization? Human Resources, Operations, Facilities, Finance--- and why are some more prone to use data-driven analysis than others? Issues: -          DELAYS & DRAG ON IT?: One of the persona characteristics Evelson calls out is a reliance on IT. Every persona except for the "Power User" has a heavy reliance on IT for support. What business issues or delays does that cause to users? What is the drag on IT resources who could potentially be creating instead of reporting? -          HOW MANY CLICKS: If BI is being used within the context of a transaction (sales manager looking for upsell opportunities as an example) is that person getting the information within the context of that action or transaction? Or are they minimizing screens, logging into another application or reporting tool, running queries, etc.?   Who are the BI Users in your neighborhood or line of business? Do Evelson's personas resonate--and do the tools that he calls out (he refers to it as "BI Style") resonate with what your personas have or need? Finally, I'm very interested if BI use is viewed as  a bolt-on...or an integrated part of your daily enterprise processes?

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• Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Passing the CAML thru the EY of the NEEDL Definitions: CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language) is an XML based markup language used in Microsoft SharePoint technologies  Anonymous: A camel is a horse designed by committee  Dov Trietsch: A CAML is a HORS designed by Microsoft  I was advised against putting any Camel and Sphinx rhymes in here. Look it up in Google!  _____ Now that we have dispensed with the dromedary jokes (BTW, I have many more, but they are not fit to print!), here is an interesting problem and its solution.  We have built a list where the title must be kept unique so I needed to verify the existence (or absence) of a list item with a particular title. Two methods came to mind:  1: Span the list until the title is found (result = found) or until the list ends (result = not found). This is an algorithm of complexity O(N) and for long lists it is a performance sucker. 2: Use a CAML query instead. Here, for short list we’ll encounter some overhead, but because the query results in an SQL query on the content database, it is of complexity O(LogN), which is significantly better and scales perfectly. Obviously I decided to go with the latter and this is where the CAML s--t hit the fan.   A CAML query returns a SPListItemCollection and I simply checked its Count. If it was 0, the item did not already exist and it was safe to add a new item with the given title. Otherwise I cancelled the operation and warned the user. The trouble was that I always got a positive. Most of the time a false positive. The count was greater than 0 regardles of the title I checked (except when the list was empty, which happens only once). This was very disturbing indeed. To solve my immediate problem which was speedy delivery, I reverted to the “Span the list” approach, but the problem bugged me, so I wrote a little console app by which I tested and tweaked and tested, time and again, until I found the solution. Yes, one can pass the proverbial CAML thru the ey of the needle (e’s missing on purpose).  So here are my conclusions:  CAML that does not work:  Note: QT is my quote:  char QT = Convert.ToChar((int)34); string titleQuery = "<Query>><Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where></Query>"; titleQuery += "<ViewFields><FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/></ViewFields>";  Why? Even though U2U generates it, the <Query> and </Query> tags do not belong in the query that you pass. Start your query with the <Where> clause.  Also the <ViewFiels> clause does not belong. I used this clause to limit the returned collection to a single column, and I still wish to do it. I’ll show how this is done a bit later.   When you use the <Query> </Query> tags in you query, it’s as if you did not specify the query at all. What you get is the all inclusive default query for the list. It returns evey column and every item. It is expensive for both server and network because it does all the extra processing and eats plenty of bandwidth.   Now, here is the CAML that works  string titleQuery = "<Where><Eq>"; titleQuery += "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; titleQuery += "<Value Type=" + QT + "Text" + QT + ">" + uniqueID + "</Value></Eq></Where>";  You’ll also notice that inside the unusable <ViewFields> clause above, we have a <FieldRef> clause. This is what we pass to the SPQuery object. Here is how:  SPQuery query = new SPQuery(); query.Query = titleQuery; query.ViewFields = "<FieldRef Name=" + QT + "Title" + QT + "/>"; query.RowLimit = 1; SPListItemCollection col = masterList.GetItems(query);  Two thing to note: we enter the view fields into the SPQuery object and we also limited the number of rows that the query returns. The latter is not always done, but in an existence test, there is no point in returning hundreds of rows. The query will now return one item or none, which is all we need in order to verify the existence (or non-existence) of items. Limiting the number of columns and the number of rows is a great performance enhancer. That’s all folks!!

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• Certificate Revocation checking affecting system performance [migrated]

  - by Colm Clarke

  I have a .NET 3.5 desktop application that had been showing periodic slow downs in functionality whenever the test machine it was on was out of the office. I managed to replicate the error on a machine in the office without an internet connection, but it was only when i used ANTS performance profiler that i got a clearer picture of what was going on. In ANTS I saw a "Waiting for synchronization" taking up to 16 seconds that corresponded to the delay I could see in the application when NHibernate tried to load the System.Data.SqlServerCE.dll assembly. If I tried the action again immediately it would work with no delay but if I left it for 5 minutes then it would be slow to load again the next time I tried it. From my research so far it appears to be because the SqlServerCE dll is signed and so the system is trying to connect to get the certificate revocation lists and timing out. Disabling the "Automatically detect settings" setting in the Internet Options LAN settings makes the problem go away, as does disabling the "Check for publishers certificate revocation". But the admins where this application will be deployed are not going to be happy with the idea of disabling certificate checking on a per machine or per user basis so I really need to get the application level disabling of the CRL check working. There is the well documented bug in .net 2.0 which describes this behaviour, and offers a possible fix with a config file element. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <configuration> <runtime> <generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false"/> </runtime> </configuration> This is NOT working for me however even though I am using .net 3.5. The SQLServerCE dll is being loaded dynamically by NHibernate and I wonder if the fact that it's dynamic could somehow be why the setting isn't working, but I don't know how I could check that. Can anyone offer suggestions as to why the config setting might not work? Or is there another way I could disable the check at the application level, perhaps a CAS policy setting that I can use to set an exception for the application when it's installed? Or is there something I can change in the application to up the trust level or something like that? I have also tried using to no advantage ServicePointManager.CheckCertificateRevocationList = false; http://rusanu.com/2009/07/24/fix-slow-application-startup-due-to-code-sign-validation/ I have also tried those registry settings out and unfortunately they didn't help. The dlls that appear to be the cause of the hold up are native SQL Server CE dlls, and looking at the stack traces in ProcMon mscorwks.dll doesn't appear to be involved even though the checks on crypto and cert registry keys are being done under the .NET application. It's definitely still something to do with publisher certificate checking because unticking "Check for publisher revocation certificate" still works but something odd is going on.

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• Is your test method self-validating ?

  - by mehfuzh

  Writing state of art unit tests that can validate your every part of the framework is challenging and interesting at the same time, its like becoming a samurai. One of the key concept in this is to keep our test synced all the time as underlying code changes and thus breaking them to the furthest unit as possible.  This also means, we should avoid  multiple conditions embedded in a single test. Let’s consider the following example of transfer funds. [Fact] public void ShouldAssertTranserFunds() {     var currencyService = Mock.Create<ICurrencyService>();     //// current rate     Mock.Arrange(() => currencyService.GetConversionRate("AUS", "CAD")).Returns(0.88f);       Account to = new Account { Currency = "AUS", Balance = 120 };     Account from = new Account { Currency = "CAD" };       AccountService accService = new AccountService(currencyService);       Assert.Throws<InvalidOperationException>(() => accService.TranferFunds(to, from, 200f));       accService.TranferFunds(to, from, 100f);       Assert.Equal(from.Balance, 88);     Assert.Equal(20, to.Balance); } At first look,  it seems ok but as you look more closely , it is actually doing two tasks in one test. At line# 10 it is trying to validate the exception for invalid fund transfer and finally it is asserting if the currency conversion is successfully made. Here, the name of the test itself is pretty vague. The first rule for writing unit test should always reflect to inner working of the target code, where just by looking at their names it is self explanatory. Having a obscure name for a test method not only increase the chances of cluttering the test code, but it also gives the opportunity to add multiple paths into it and eventually makes things messy as possible. I would rater have two test methods that explicitly describes its intent and are more self-validating. ShouldThrowExceptionForInvalidTransferOperation ShouldAssertTransferForExpectedConversionRate Having, this type of breakdown also helps us pin-point reported bugs easily rather wasting any time on debugging for something more general and can minimize confusion among team members. Finally, we should always make our test F.I.R.S.T ( Fast.Independent.Repeatable.Self-validating.Timely) [ Bob martin – Clean Code]. Only this will be enough to ensure, our test is as simple and clean as possible.   Hope that helps

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• Issues with timed out downloads via TomCat?

  - by Ira Baxter

  We get, in our opinion, a lot of failed download attempts and want to understand why. We offer downloads via an email link (typical): http://www.semanticdesigns.com/deliverEval/<productname> This is processed by Tomcat on Linux via a jsp file, with the following code: response.addHeader( "Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" + fileTail ); response.addHeader( "Content-Type", "application/x-msdos-program" ); byte[] buf = new byte[8192]; int read; try { java.io.FileInputStream input = new java.io.FileInputStream( filename ); java.io.OutputStream o = response.getOutputStream(); while( ( read = input.read( buf, 0, 8192 ) ) != -1 ){ o.write( buf, 0, read ); } o.flush(); } catch( Exception e ){ util.fatalError( request.getRequestURI(), "Error sending file '" + filename + "' to client", e ); throw e; } We get a lot of reported errors (about 50% error rate): URI --- /deliverEval/download.jsp Code Message: Error sending file '/home/sd/ShippingMasters/DMS/Domains/C/GCC3/Tools/TestCoverage/SD_C~GCC3_TestCoverage.1.6.12.exe' to client Stack Trace ----------- null at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.OutputBuffer.realWriteBytes(byte[], int, int) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.ByteChunk.append(byte[], int, int) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.OutputBuffer.writeBytes(byte[], int, int) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.OutputBuffer.write(byte[], int, int) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.coyote.tomcat5.CoyoteOutputStream.write(byte[], int, int) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.jsp.deliverEval.download_jsp._jspService(javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest, javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest, javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse) (Unknown Source) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(javax.servlet.ServletRequest, javax.servlet.ServletResponse) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.service(javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest, javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse, boolean) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.serviceJspFile(javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest, javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse, java.lang.String, java.lang.Throwable, boolean) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.service(javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest, javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse) (Unknown Source) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(javax.servlet.ServletRequest, javax.servlet.ServletResponse) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(javax.servlet.ServletRequest, javax.servlet.ServletResponse) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(javax.servlet.ServletRequest, javax.servlet.ServletResponse) (Unknown Source) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(org.apache.catalina.Request, org.apache.catalina.Response, org.apache.catalina.ValveContext) (Unknown Source) We don't understand why this rate should be so high. Is there any way to get more information about the cause of the error? It is useful to know that these are pretty big documents, 3-50 megabytes. They reside on the Linux server so reading them is just a local disk read, and is unlikely to be a contributor to the problem. But sheer size might be an issue for the recipients browser? Is this kind of error rate typical for downloads? My personal experience downloading other's documents suggests no; our internal attempts show this to be very reliable, but we're operating on our internal network for such experiments so we're missing the complexity of the intervening internet.

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• SQL SERVER – Replace a Column Name in Multiple Stored Procedure all together

  - by pinaldave

  I receive a lot of emails every day. I try to answer each and every email and comments on Facebook and Twitter. I prefer communication on social media as this gives opportunities to others to read the questions and participate along with me. There is always some question which everyone likes to read and remember. Here is one of the questions which I received in email. I believe the same question will be there any many developers who are beginning with SQL Server. I decided to blog about it so everyone can read it and participate. “I am beginner in SQL Server. I have a very interesting situation and need your help. I am beginner to SQL Server and that is why I do not have access to the production server and I work entirely on the development server. The project I am working on is also in the infant stage as well. In product I had to create a multiple tables and every table had few columns. Later on I have written Stored Procedures using those tables. During a code review my manager has requested to change one of the column which I have used in the table. As per him the naming convention was not accurate. Now changing the columname in the table is not a big issue. I figured out that I can do it very quickly either using T-SQL script or SQL Server Management Studio. The real problem is that I have used this column in nearly 50+ stored procedure. This looks like a very mechanical task. I believe I can go and change it in nearly 50+ stored procedure but is there a better solution I can use. Someone suggested that I should just go ahead and find the text in system table and update it there. Is that safe solution? If not, what is your solution. In simple words, How to replace a column name in multiple stored procedure efficiently and quickly? Please help me here with keeping my experience and non-production server in mind.” Well, I found this question very interesting. Honestly I would have preferred if this question was asked on my social media handles (Facebook and Twitter) as I am very active there and quite often before I reach there other experts have already answered this question. Anyway I am now answering the same question on the blog so all of us can participate here and come up with an appropriate answer. Here is my answer - “My Friend, I do not advice to touch system table. Please do not go that route. It can be dangerous and not appropriate. The issue which you faced today is what I used to face in early career as well I still face it often. There are two sets of argument I have observed – there are people who see no value in the name of the object and name objects like obj1, obj2 etc. There are sets of people who carefully chose the name of the object where object name is self-explanatory and almost tells a story. I am not here to take any side in this blog post – so let me go to a quick solution for your problem. Note: Following should not be directly practiced on Production Server. It should be properly tested on development server and once it is validated they should be pushed to your production server with your existing deployment practice. The answer is here assuming you have regular stored procedures and you are working on the Development NON Production Server. Go to Server Note >> Databases >> DatabaseName >> Programmability >> Stored Procedure Now make sure that Object Explorer Details are open (if not open it by clicking F7). You will see the list of all the stored procedures there. Now you will see a list of all the stored procedures on the right side list. Select either all of them or the one which you believe are relevant to your query. Now… Right click on the stored procedures >> SELECT DROP and CREATE to >> Now select New Query Editor Window or Clipboard. Paste the complete script to a new window if you have selected Clipboard option. Now press Control+H which will bring up the Find and Replace Screen. In this screen insert the column to be replaced in the “Find What”box and new column name into “Replace With” box. Now execute the whole script. As we have selected DROP and CREATE to, it will created drop the old procedure and create the new one. Another method would do all the same procedure but instead of DROP and CREATE manually replace the CREATE word with ALTER world. There is a small advantage in doing this is that if due to any reason the error comes up which prevents the new stored procedure to be created you will have your old stored procedure in the system as it is. “ Well, this was my answer to the question which I have received. Do you see any other workaround or solution? Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Stored Procedure, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• BAM design pointers

  - by Kavitha Srinivasan

  In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discovered that some BAM best practices are not quite well known as I had always assumed ! There is a doc bug out to formally incorporate those learnings but here are a few notes..  EMS-DO parity When using EMS (Enterprise Message Source) as a BAM feed, the best practice is to use one EMS to write to one Data Object. There is a possibility of collisions and duplicates when multiple EMS write to the same row of a DO at the same time. This customer had 17 EMS writing to one DO at the same time. Every sensor in their BPEL process writes to one topic but the Topic was read by 1 EMS corresponding to one sensor. They then used XSL within BAM to transform the payload into the BAM DO format. And hence for a given BPEL instance, 17 sensors fired, populated 1 JMS topic, was consumed by 17 EMS which in turn wrote to 1 DataObject.(You can image what would happen for later versions of the application that needs to send more information to BAM !).  We modified their design to use one Master XSL based on sensorname for all sensors relating to a DO- say Data Object 'Orders' and were able to thus reduce the 17 EMS to 1 with a master XSL. For those of you wondering about how squeaky clean this design is, you are right ! This is indeed not squeaky clean and that brings us to yet another 'inferred' best practice. (I try very hard not to state the obvious in my blogs with the hope that everytime I blog, it is very useful but this one is an exception.) Transformations and Calculations It is optimal to do transformations within an engine like BPEL. Not only does this provide modelling ease with a nice GUI XSL mapper in JDeveloper, the XSL engine in BPEL is quite efficient at runtime as well. And so, doing XSL transformations in BAM is not quite prudent.  The same is true for any non-trivial calculations as well. It is best to do all transformations,calcuations and sanitize the data in a BPEL or like layer and then send this to BAM (via JMS, WS etc.) This then delegates simply the function of report rendering and mechanics of real-time reporting to the Oracle BAM reporting tool which it is most suited to do. All nulls are not created equal Here is yet another possibly known fact but reiterated here. For an EMS with an Upsert operation: a) If Empty tags or tags with no value are sent like <Tag1/> or <Tag1></Tag1>, the DO will be overwritten with --null-- b) If Empty tags are suppressed ie not generated at all, the corresponding DO field will NOT be overwritten. The field will have whatever value existed previously.  For an EMS with an Insert operation, both tags with an empty value and no tags result in –null-- being written to the DO. Hope this helps .. Happy 4th!

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• Creating a Reverse Proxy with URL Rewrite for IIS

  - by OWScott

  There are times when you need to reverse proxy through a server. The most common example is when you have an internal web server that isn’t exposed to the internet, and you have a public web server accessible to the internet. If you want to serve up traffic from the internal web server, you can do this through the public web server by creating a tunnel (aka reverse proxy). Essentially, you can front the internal web server with a friendly URL, even hiding custom ports. For example, consider an internal web server with a URL of http://10.10.0.50:8111. You can make that available through a public URL like http://tools.mysite.com/ as seen in the following image. The URL can be made public or it can be used for your internal staff and have it password protected and/or locked down by IP address. This is easy to do with URL Rewrite and IIS. You will also need Application Request Routing (ARR) installed even though for a simple reverse proxy you won’t use most of ARR’s functionality. If you don’t already have URL Rewrite and ARR installed you can do so easily with the Web Platform Installer. A lot can be said about reverse proxies and many different situations and ways to route the traffic and handle different URL patterns. However, my goal here is to get you up and going in the easiest way possible. Then you can dig in deeper after you get the base configuration in place. URL Rewrite makes a reverse proxy very easy to set up. Note that the URL Rewrite Add Rules template doesn’t include Reverse Proxy at the server level. That’s not to say that you can’t create a server-level reverse proxy, but the URL Rewrite rules template doesn’t help you with that. Getting Started First you must create a website on your public web server that has the public bindings that you need. Alternately, you can use an existing site and route using conditions for certain traffic. After you’ve created your site then open up URL Rewrite at the site level. Using the “Add Rule(s)…” template that is opened from the right-hand actions pane, create a new Reverse Proxy rule. If you receive a prompt (the first time) that the proxy functionality needs to be enabled, select OK. This is telling you that a proxy can route traffic outside of your web server, which happens to be our goal in this case. Be aware that reverse proxy rules can be dangerous if you open sites from inside you network to the world, so just be aware of what you’re doing and why. The next and final step of the template asks a few questions. The first textbox asks the name of the internal web server. In our example, it’s 10.10.0.50:8111. This can be any URL, including a subfolder like internal.mysite.com/blog. Don’t include the http or https here. The template assumes that it’s not entered. You can choose whether to perform SSL Offloading or not. If you leave this checked then all requests to the internal server will be over HTTP regardless of the original web request. This can help with performance and SSL bindings if all requests are within a trusted network. If the network path between the two web servers is not completely trusted and safe then uncheck this. Next, the template enables you to create an outbound rule. This is used to rewrite links in the page to look like your public domain name rather than the internal domain name. Outbound rules have a lot of CPU overhead because the entire web content needs to be parsed and updated. However, if you need it, then it’s well worth the extra CPU hit on the web server. If you check the “Rewrite the domain names of the links in HTTP responses” checkbox then the From textbox will be filled in with what you entered for the inbound rule. You can enter your friendly public URL for the outbound rule. This will essentially replace any reference to 10.10.0.50:8111 (or whatever you enter) with tools.mysite.com in all <a>, <form>, and <img> tags on your site. That’s it! Well, there is a lot more that you can do, this but will give you the base configuration. You can now visit www.mysite.com on your public web server and it will serve up the site from your internal web server. You should see two rules show up; one inbound and one outbound. You can edit these, add conditions, and tweak them further as needed. One common issue that can occur without outbound rules has to do with compression. If you run into errors with the new proxied site, try turning off compression to confirm if that’s the issue. Here’s a link with details on how to deal with compression and outbound rules. I hope this was helpful to get started and to see how easy it is to create a simple reverse proxy using URL Rewrite for IIS.

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• Forcing an External Activation with Service Broker

  - by Davide Mauri

  In these last days I’ve been working quite a lot with Service Broker, a technology I’m really happy to work with, since it can give a lot of satisfaction. The scale-out solution one can easily build is simply astonishing. I’m helping a company to build a very scalable and – yet almost inexpensive – invoicing system that has to be able to scale out using commodity hardware. To offload the work from the main server to satellite “compute nodes” (yes, I’ve borrowed this term from PDW) we’re using Service Broker and the External Activator application available in the SQL Server Feature Pack. For those who are not used to work with SSB, the External Activation is a feature that allows you to intercept the arrival of a message in a queue right from your application code. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171617.aspx (Look for “Event-Based Activation”) In order to make life even more easier, Microsoft released the External Activation application that saves you even from writing even this code. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_service_broker/archive/tags/external+activator/ The External Activator application can be configured to execute your own application so that each time a message – an invoice in my case – arrives in the target queue, the invoking application is executed and the invoice is calculated. The very nice feature of External Activator is that it can automatically execute as many configured application in order to process as many messages as your system can handle.  This also a lot of create a scale-out solution, leaving to the developer only a fraction of the problems that usually came with asynchronous programming. Developers are also shielded from Service Broker since everything can be encapsulated in Stored Procedures, so that – for them – developing such scale-out asynchronous solution is not much more complex than just executing a bunch of Stored Procedures. Now, if everything works correctly, you don’t have to bother of anything else. You put messages in the queue and your application, invoked by the External Activator, process them. But what happen if for some reason your application fails to process the messages. For examples, it crashes? The message is safe in the queue so you just need to process it again. But your application is invoked by the External Activator application, so now the question is, how do you wake up that app? Service Broker will engage the activation process only if certain conditions are met: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171601.aspx But how we can invoke the activation process manually, without having to wait for another message to arrive (the arrival of a new message is a condition that can fire the activation process)? The “trick” is to do manually with the activation process does: sending a system message to a queue in charge of handling External Activation messages: declare @conversationHandle uniqueidentifier; declare @n xml = N' <EVENT_INSTANCE>   <EventType>QUEUE_ACTIVATION</EventType>   <PostTime>' + CONVERT(CHAR(24),GETDATE(),126) + '</PostTime>   <SPID>' + CAST(@@SPID AS VARCHAR(9)) + '</SPID>   <ServerName>[your_server_name]</ServerName>   <LoginName>[your_login_name]</LoginName>   <UserName>[your_user_name]</UserName>   <DatabaseName>[your_database_name]</DatabaseName>   <SchemaName>[your_queue_schema_name]</SchemaName>   <ObjectName>[your_queue_name]</ObjectName>   <ObjectType>QUEUE</ObjectType> </EVENT_INSTANCE>' begin dialog conversation     @conversationHandle from service        [<your_initiator_service_name>] to service          '<your_event_notification_service>' on contract         [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification] with     encryption = off,     lifetime = 6000 ; send on conversation     @conversationHandle message type     [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/EventNotification] (@n) ;     end conversation @conversationHandle; That’s it! Put the code in a Stored Procedure and you can add to your application a button that says “Force Queue Processing” (or something similar) in order to start the activation process whenever you need it (which should not occur too frequently but it may happen). PS I know that the “fire-and-forget” (ending the conversation without waiting for an answer) technique is not a best practice, but in this case I don’t see how it can hurts so I decided to stay very close to the KISS principle []

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• SharePoint 2010 Field Expression Builder

  - by Ricardo Peres

  OK, back to two of my favorite topics, expression builders and SharePoint. This time I wanted to be able to retrieve a field value from the current page declaratively on the markup so that I can assign it to some control’s property, without the need for writing code. Of course, the most straight way to do it is through an expression builder. Here’s the code: 1: [ExpressionPrefix("SPField")] 2: public class SPFieldExpressionBuilder : ExpressionBuilder 3: { 4: #region Public static methods 5: public static Object GetFieldValue(String fieldName, PropertyInfo propertyInfo) 6: { 7: Object fieldValue = SPContext.Current.ListItem[fieldName]; 8:  9: if (fieldValue != null) 10: { 11: if ((fieldValue is IConvertible) && (typeof(IConvertible).IsAssignableFrom(propertyInfo.PropertyType) == true)) 12: { 13: if (propertyInfo.PropertyType.IsAssignableFrom(fieldValue.GetType()) != true) 14: { 15: fieldValue = Convert.ChangeType(fieldValue, propertyInfo.PropertyType); 16: } 17: } 18: } 19:  20: return (fieldValue); 21: } 22:  23: #endregion 24:  25: #region Public override methods 26: public override Object EvaluateExpression(Object target, BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 27: { 28: return (GetFieldValue(entry.Expression, entry.PropertyInfo)); 29: } 30:  31: public override CodeExpression GetCodeExpression(BoundPropertyEntry entry, Object parsedData, ExpressionBuilderContext context) 32: { 33: if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(entry.Expression) == true) 34: { 35: return (new CodePrimitiveExpression(String.Empty)); 36: } 37: else 38: { 39: return (new CodeMethodInvokeExpression(new CodeMethodReferenceExpression(new CodeTypeReferenceExpression(this.GetType()), "GetFieldValue"), new CodePrimitiveExpression(entry.Expression), new CodePropertyReferenceExpression(new CodeArgumentReferenceExpression("entry"), "PropertyInfo"))); 40: } 41: } 42:  43: #endregion 44:  45: #region Public override properties 46: public override Boolean SupportsEvaluate 47: { 48: get 49: { 50: return (true); 51: } 52: } 53: #endregion 54: } You will notice that it will even try to convert the field value to the target property’s type, through the use of the IConvertible interface and the Convert.ChangeType method. It must be placed on the Global Assembly Cache or you will get a security-related exception. The other alternative is to change the trust level of your web application to full trust. Here’s how to register it on Web.config: 1: <expressionBuilders> 2: <!-- ... --> 3: <add expressionPrefix="SPField" type="MyNamespace.SPFieldExpressionBuilder, MyAssembly, Culture=neutral, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=29186a6b9e7b779f" /> 4: </expressionBuilders> And finally, here’s how to use it on an ASPX or ASCX file inside a publishing page: 1: <asp:Label runat="server" Text="<%$ SPField:Title %>"/>

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• Sqlite &amp; Entity Framework 4

  - by Dane Morgridge

  I have been working on a few client app projects in my spare time that need to persist small amounts of data and have been looking for an easy to use embedded database.  I really like db4o but I'm not wanting to open source this particular project so it was not an option.  Then I remembered that there was an ADO.NET provider for sqlite.  Being a fan of sqlite in general, I downloaded it and gave it an install.  The installer added tooling support for both Visual Studio 2008 & 2010 which is nice because I am working almost exclusively in 2010 at the moment.  I noticed that the provider also had support for Entity Framework, but not specifically v4.  I created a database using the tools that get installed with Visual Studio and all seemed to work fine.  I went on to create an Entity Framework context and selected the sqlite database and to my surprise it worked with out any problems.  The model showed up just like it would for any database and so I started to write a little code to test and then.. BAM!.. Exception. "Mixed mode assembly is built against version 'v2.0.50727' of the runtime and cannot be loaded in the 4.0 runtime without additional configuration information." A quick bit of searching on Bing found the answer.  To get it working, you need to include the following code in your web.config file: 1: <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> 2: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" /> 3: </startup> And then everything magically works.  Entity Framework 4 features worked, like lazy loading and even the POCO templates worked.  The only thing that didn't work was the model first development.  The SQL generated was for SQL Server and of course wouldn't run on sqlite without some modifications. The only other oddity I found was that in order to have an auto incrementing id, you have to use the full integer data type for sqlite; a regular int won't do the trick.  This translates to an Int64, or a long when working with it in Entity Framework.  Not a big deal, but something you need to be aware of. All in all, I am quite impressed with the Entity Framework support I found with sqlite.  I wasn't really expecting much at all, and I was pleasantly surprised. I downloaded the ADO.NET sqlite provider from http://sqlite.phxsoftware.com/.  If you want to use an embedded database with Entity Framework, give it a look.  It will be well worth your time.

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• 3 Ways to Make Steam Even Faster

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Have you ever noticed how slow Steam’s built-in web browser can be? Do you struggle with slow download speeds? Or is Steam just slow in general? These tips will help you speed it up. Steam isn’t a game itself, so there are no 3D settings to change to achieve maximum performance. But there are some things you can do to speed it up dramatically. Speed Up the Steam Web Browser Steam’s built-in web browser — used in both the Steam store and in Steam’s in-game overlay to provide a web browser you can quickly use within games – can be frustratingly slow on many systems. Rather than the typical speed we’ve come to expect from Chrome, Firefox, or even Internet Explorer, Steam seems to struggle. When you click a link or go to a new page, there’s a noticeable delay before the new page appears — something that doesn’t happen in desktop browsers. Many people seem to have made peace with this slowness, accepting that Steam’s built-in browser is just bad. However, there’s a trick that will eliminate this delay on many systems and make the Steam web browser fast. This problem seems to arise from an incompatibility with the Automatically Detect Proxy Settings option, which is enabled by default on Windows. This is a compatibility option that very few people should actually need, so it’s safe to disable it. To disable this option, open the Internet Options dialog — press the Windows key to access the Start menu or Start screen, type Internet Options, and click the Internet Options shortcut. Select the Connections tab in the Internet Options window and click the LAN settings button. Uncheck the Automatically detect settings option here, then click OK to save your settings. If you experienced a significant delay every time a web page loaded in Steam’s web browser, it should now be gone. In the unlikely event that you encounter some sort of problem with your network connection, you could always re-enable this option. Increase Steam’s Game Download Speed Steam attempts to automatically select the nearest download server to your location. However, it may not always select the ideal download server. Or, in the case of high-traffic events like big seasonal sales and huge game launches, you may benefit from selecting a less-congested server. To do this, open Steam’s settings by clicking the Steam menu in Steam and selecting Settings. Click over to the Downloads tab and select the closest download server from the Download Region box. You should also ensure that Steam’s download bandwidth isn’t limited from here. You may want to restart Steam and see if your download speeds improve after changing this setting. In some cases, the closest server might not be the fastest. One a bit farther away could be faster if your local server is more congested, for example. Steam once provided information about content server load, which allowed you to select a regional server that wasn’t under high-load, but this information no longer seems to be available. Steam still provides a page that shows you the amount of download activity happening in different regions, including statistics about the difference in download speeds in different US states, but this information isn’t as useful. Accelerate Steam and Your Games One way to speed up all your games — and Steam itself —  is by getting a solid-state drive and installing Steam to it. Steam allows you to easily move your Steam folder — at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam by default — to another hard drive. Just move it like you would any other folder. You can then launch the Steam.exe program as if you had never moved Steam’s files. Steam also allows you to configure multiple game library folders. This means that you can set up a Steam library folder on a solid-state drive and one on your larger magnetic hard drive. Install your most frequently played games to the solid-state drive for maximum speed and your less frequently played ones to the slower magnetic hard drive to save SSD space. To set up additional library folders, open Steam’s Settings window and click the Downloads tab. You’ll find the Steam Library Folders option here. Click the Add Library Folder button and create a new game library on another hard drive. When you install a game in Steam, you’ll be asked which library folder you want to install it to. With the proxy compatibility option disabled, the correct download server chosen, and Steam installed to a fast SSD, it should be a speed demon. There’s not much more you can do to speed up Steam, short of upgrading other hardware like your computer’s CPU. Image Credit: Andrew Nash on Flickr     

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• “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on GDSE and also on the regular Stackoverflow site, and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? (* With the exception of Flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with Flash, but I'm worried that Flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.) For simple & short games the Newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "OK, I'm going to download and play that"?

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• Dynamically switching the theme in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  It may sound a little puzzling at first, but in Orchard CMS, more than one theme can be active at any given time. The reason for that is that we have an extensibility point that allows a module (or a theme) to participate in the choice of the theme to use, for each request. The motivation for building the theme engine this way was to enable developers to switch themes based on arbitrary criteria, such as user preferences or the user agent (if you want to serve a mobile theme for phones for example). The choice is made between the active themes, which is why there is a difference between the default theme and the active themes. In order to have a say in the choice of the theme, all you have to do is implement IThemeSelector. That interface is quite simple as it only has one method, GetTheme, that takes the current RequestContext and returns a ThemeSelectorResult or null if the implementation of the interface does not want to participate in the current request (we'll see an example in a moment). ThemeSelectorResult itself is just a ThemeName string property and an integer Priority. We're using a priority so that an arbitrary number of implementations of IThemeSelector can contribute to the choice of a theme. If you look for existing implementations of the interface in Orchard, you'll find four: AdminThemeSelector: selects the TheAdmin theme with a very high priority (100) if the current request is for a page that is part of the admin. Otherwise, null is returned, which enables other implementations to choose the theme. PreviewThemeSelector: selects the preview theme if there is one, with a high priority (90), and null otherwise. This enables administrators to view the site under a different theme while everybody else continues to see the current default theme. SiteThemeSelector: this is the implementation that is doing what you expect most of the time, which is to get the current theme from site settings and set it with a priority of –5. SafeModeThemeSelector: this is the fallback implementation, which should almost never win. It sets the theme as the safe mode theme, which has no style and just uses the default templates for everything. The priority is very low (-100). While this extensibility mechanism is great to have, I wanted to bring that level of choice into the hands of the site administrator rather than just developers. In order to achieve that, I built the Vandelay Theme Picker module. The module provides administration UI to create rules for theme selection. It provides its own extensibility point (the IThemeSelectionRule interface) and one implementation of a rule: UserAgentThemeSelectorRule. This rule gets the current user agent from the context and tries to match it with a regular expression that the administrator can configure in the admin UI. You can for example configure a rule with a regular expression that matches IE6 and serve a different subtheme where the stylesheet has been tweaked for such an antique browser. Another possible configuration is to detect mobile devices from their agent string and serve the mobile theme. All those operations can be done with this module entirely from the admin UI, without writing a line of code. The module also offers the administrator the opportunity to inject a link into the front-end in a specific zone and with a specific position that enables the user to switch to the default theme if he wishes to. This is especially useful for sites that use a mobile theme but still want to allow users to use the full desktop site. While the module is nice and flexible, it may be overkill. On my own personal blog, I have only two active themes: the desktop theme and the mobile theme. I'm fine with going into code to change the criteria on which to switch the theme, so I'm not using my own Theme Picker module. Instead, I made the mobile theme a theme with code (in other words there is a csproj file in the theme). The project includes a single C# file, my MobileThemeSelector for which the code is the following: public class MobileThemeSelector : IThemeSelector { private static readonly Regex _Msie678 = new Regex(@"^Mozilla\/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE [678]" + @"\.0; Windows NT \d\.\d(.*)\)$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); private ThemeSelectorResult _requestCache; private bool _requestCached; public ThemeSelectorResult GetTheme(RequestContext context) { if (_requestCached) return _requestCache; _requestCached = true; var userAgent = context.HttpContext.Request.UserAgent; if (userAgent.IndexOf("phone", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1 || _Msie678.IsMatch(userAgent) || userAgent.IndexOf("windows live writer", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1) { _requestCache = new ThemeSelectorResult { Priority = 10, ThemeName = "VuLuMobile" }; } return _requestCache; } } .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; } The theme selector selects the current theme for Internet Explorer versions 6 to 8, for phones, and for Windows Live Writer (so that the theme that is used when I write posts is as simple as possible). What's interesting here is that it's the theme that selects itself here, based on its own criteria. This should give you a good panorama of what's possible in terms of dynamic theme selection in Orchard. I hope you find some fun uses for it. As usual, I can't wait to see what you're going to come up with…

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• Eclipse has multiple issues after JRE-6 (OpenJDK) upgrade

  - by Eusebius

  I'm on 12.04 LTS, and trying to use Eclipse Indigo. This morning Ubuntu made me update the following packages: Preparing to replace icedtea-6-jre-cacao 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../icedtea-6-jre-cacao_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ... Unpacking replacement icedtea-6-jre-cacao ... Preparing to replace openjdk-6-jre-lib 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../openjdk-6-jre-lib_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_all.deb) ... Unpacking replacement openjdk-6-jre-lib ... Preparing to replace icedtea-6-jre-jamvm 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../icedtea-6-jre-jamvm_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ... Unpacking replacement icedtea-6-jre-jamvm ... Preparing to replace openjdk-6-jre-headless 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../openjdk-6-jre-headless_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ... Unpacking replacement openjdk-6-jre-headless ... Preparing to replace openjdk-6-jre 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../openjdk-6-jre_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ... Unpacking replacement openjdk-6-jre ... After that (but I cannot swear it is the root cause), I have the following issues in Eclipse: When trying to launch the simplest HelloWorld program (which behaves fine with manual javac/java), I get either nothing or: An internal error occurred during: "Launching HelloWorld". org/eclipse/jdt/debug/core/JDIDebugModel I get an "Error log" tab in the console panel, with an error: Could not create the view: An unexpected exception was thrown. (Follows a consequent NullPointerException stacktrace between sun.util.calendar.ZoneInfoFile.getZoneIDs(ZoneInfoFile.java:785) and org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.main(Main.java:1386)) When trying to access the Installed JREs part of the preferences, I get a popup saying: Unable to create the selected preference page. An error occurred while automatically activating bundle org.eclipse.jdt.debug.ui (162). And the preference tab says An error has occurred when creating this preference page. Until today I had a manually installed Eclipse (one of the official bundles available on their site), I've tried to replace it by the repository version and I get the same errors. What should I do to make Eclipse work again? Another person reports: Same happened to me after updating last night. Already tried reinstalling Eclipse and Java, starting Eclipse with -clean and starting new workspace and new .eclipse dir, but nothing helps.

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• how to send trackback and pingback using c# script

  - by anirudha

  This is a very interesting topic because if you want to search about them. you find much useless stuff even you use c# as prefix. 1. how trackback works ? Every blog who have support to trackback that in their every post they have some text comment like <rdf:/rdf></rdf:rdf>  inside this tag the attribute “trackback:ping” have a url where we can send trackback. 2. you need some information about your blog to post where you want to trackback like 1. URL where you want to send the trackback 2. your post title [may be page title] 3. your post URL [may be page url] 4.  Excerpt : information you want to send. 5. you blogname [may be sitename if you use site not blog] make the information like querystring just we use in asp.net ex: title=”pingpost&url=pingurl&excerpt=it’s me&blog=myblog” ; the information look like asp.net Querystring if you unsure that you can HTMLencode the information who you use in parameters. you need to be sure that your post have URL of post where you want to send trackback. make  a request to pingurl set the following property request.Method = “POST”; //because they support only POST request.ContentLength = param.length // choose the length of parameters we create for sending ping. request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"; // required to set. now when you send the request then server respond you something about your request check that the request.statuscode is verify that’s work or not if (response.StatusCode < HttpStatusCode.OK && response.StatusCode >= HttpStatusCode.Ambiguous)                     throw new Exception(string.Format(response.StatusCode.ToString())); because you have the response in XML format you can parse the response that’s have Error tag inside them or not. i put here information not code the reason is that “i see some other blog from a week on the topic but i found that they[blogger] post code not the method and all their code are useless and not worked”. because i thing to be more declarative i post here the definition not code.

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• Post Crosstalk 2012

  - by David Dorf

  This year the Oracle Retail users conference, Crosstalk, had a 20% increase in attendees, which was driven by both new customers and those acquired via Endeca.  As the product assets of Oracle have grown, so has the completeness of the solution set.  This year was marked by the breadth of omni-channel stories. Rose Spicer and her marketing team (see photo on left) always strive for an equal balance of retailer presentations, networking opportunities, and unique experiences -- this year was no exception.  We had 41 different retailers from China, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, US, Canada and the UK sharing their insights with one another. In all there were 251 executives from 120 iconic brands such as Daphne, Kohl's, Morrisons, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hot Topic, Talbots, Petco, Deckers, Sportmaster, Mr. Price, Falabella, and Disney to name a few. From a product perspective, there were a few new developments from Oracle Retail: Endeca's search engine has been integrated into the ATG commerce platform. The latest Retail Analytics application, Oracle Retail Customer Analytics, is generally available. Oracle Retail previewed a new fully-integrated mobile POS. But the real benefit of attending Crosstalk was hearing about the experiences of retailers and partners.  Here are are a few interesting facts I picked up: At Kohl's, the most popular website accessed by customers within their stores is Facebook.  With all the buzz about showrooming, I was really expecting it to be Amazon. Daphne, a Chinese shoe retailer, is opening 3 new stores per day.  Being located near the factories allows them to have a very agile supply chain as well. Disney Stores have increased sales by 25% at stores upgraded to include Mobile POS.  They continue to lead the pack with excellent customer experiences. Quicksilver reported that 1 in 5 visits to their website comes from a tablet.  More evidence that tablets are replacing traditional PCs in households. By tagging shoes with RFID, Saks is able to ensure all shoe models are on display.  If a model is not being displayed, it has no chance of being sold. Additionally, there were awards, store tours on Michigan Avenue, fireworks at Navy Pier, and the Oracle Retail house band, Bolo313, performing at Solider Field.  Speaking of which, a few retailers got on stage and jammed with band -- possible rival to Rock & Roll Retail? You can always find the latest info from us at the Retail Rack. The next events on tap are the Partner Summit followed by OpenWorld.

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• So you want a French Site?

  - by juanlarios

  I thought I would write a quick write up of how to create a french site in SharePoint 2007. I'm not talking about a Variation but just a plain French Site from the ground up. There were some gotchas that I felt were worth blogging about. First:  go to Microsoft Telnet Article and follow the install instructions. Make sure that when you get to the download page that you select "French" as part of the drop down and you download and install the right language pack. I noticed that if you did not click the "change" button enven though I selected the 'french' language pack, it reverted back to the english language pack.   Second: You will notice a couple of things. When you go to central admin you will see the following:    Now you can pick between french site or english. You will get this if you install other language packs and they will be listed in the drop down. You will notice that you now have french headings and frech listings of sites. You see "Publishing" as a heading because I have a custom site definition that I deployed as a french site. Third: As you start navigating around and trying to create document libraries or sites you will start getting errors. Errors like the following: "Cannot make a cache safe URL for "SelectorControls.js", file not found. Please verify that the file exists under the layouts directory. " Troubleshoot issues with Windows SharePoint Services. Once you resolve the issue with this "js" file, you will find that there are other js files that are missing. The only problem is that if you are not fluent in French or the language you are trying to deploy, Well, you'll have a tough time understanding error messages as they will all be in the new language you are trying to deploy. So let's just talk about what happened when you installed the language pack. In the 12 Hive:  12/Template    you will now see a 1033 folder and a 1036 folder. The 1036 folder is the folder that was created and added as part of the language pack. What the above error is saying is that now that it's looking at the 1036 folder, well, it's missing some files. The nice thing is that these files are included in the 1033 folder (which is the English Language Pack). Simply copy and paste the controls from the one folder to the other. There will be more than one conflict so you will have to move serveral controls over. Can't remember how many but simply add them as error messages come up. I had to add some navigation controls and some content selectors.   Now that's all that you need to install the Frech Language pack anc reate site collections that are entirely in a another language. Do not mistake this with Variations, where you can have multiple language sites. For those of you doing a little bit extra with this, let me share what I was doing extra and what I needed to get it working for me. I had had a custom site definition which was obviously not showing up in my selection of french sites. I was under the impression that all sites in English would show up in french and that the sites were simply routed to a new Resource file for french content. And that is the case but there is a little extra that needs to be done if you have a custom site definition deployed:  First: Under hive 12/Template/1033/XML  there is a listing of site definition files that are deployed to the English side of things. If you navigate to 12/Template/1036/XML  and open one of the site definitions you will see that they are similar and reference the existing site definitions installed on the server, except that they have some french added to descriptions and names. Simply copy the xml file of your custom template to the 1036 folder to have it show up as a selection when you select French as the dropdown entry when create a site colleciton. You can go ahead and change the description and name to suit the language it's under.    Second: As part of my site definition, I packaed up several list templates, that were saved as STP files. When you navigate to the list template listing, well, the templates are for English sites, not French so I cannot create document libraries based on the template. What now? well here comes KWIzCom to the rescue! They seem to have put out a "STP language converter" where you can take a site template or list template and convert it to any target language you are after. It's a free download, Use it and you're good to go.  One thing I will mention is that when I convereted the English documents I whent ahead and converted them to French-Canadien. And it didn't work! so I finally figured out that the French Version it was expecting in the french site was "French-France". Don't know why that is, it's just what needs to be done to get that working. When I did that, I was able to use the List templates that I created in the English site for the French Site.   Hope it helps , good luck!

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• links for 2011-02-09

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Tech Cast Live - Java and Oracle, One Year Later - February 15th 10AM PST (Oracle Technology Network Blog (aka TechBlog)) (tags: ping.fm) The impact of IT decisions on organizational culture - O'Reilly Radar "While I believe we recognize the limiting qualities of IT decisions, I'd suggest we've insufficiently studied the degree to which those decisions in aggregate can have a large influence on organizational culture." - Jonathan Reichental, Ph.D. (tags: ITgovernance organizationalculture enterprisearchitecture) Women "computers" of World War II - Boing Boing "Before it came to mean laptops, PCs, or even room-sized machines, "computer" was what you called a person who did mathematical calculations for a living. That job was vitally important during World War II. And, like many vital jobs on the homefront, it was turned over to women..." (tags: computers history worldwar2) InfoQ: Book Excerpt and Interview: 100 SOA Questions Asked and Answered A new "100 SOA Questions Asked and Answered " book by Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani provides a deep insight into SOA covering a wide spectrum of topics from SOA basics to its business and organizational impact, to SOA methods and architecture to SOA future. InfoQ spoke with Kerrie Holley and Ali Arsanjani about their book. (tags: ping.fm) @myfear: GlassFish City - Another view onto your favorite application server Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele runs GlassFish through CodeCity. (tags: oracle otn oracleace glassfish codecity) The Ron Batra Blog: Technology Whispers: Upcoming Presentations Oracle ACE Director Ron Batra shares details on upcoming presentations at OAUG events in the US and Dubai. (tags: oaug c11 oracle otn oracleace) Free ADF Training Event in the UK (Grant Ronald's Blog) Gobsmack survivor Grant Ronald with the details on an Oracle ADF training session he'll conduct on 11 May 2011 at the UK Oracle office in Reading. (tags: oracle otn adf) Java Spotlight Episode 16 - Richar Bair - The Java Spotlight Podcast The latest Java Spotlight podcast features an interview with Java Client Architect Richar Bair. (tags: oracle java podcast) Stewart Bryson: OBIEE 11g Migrations "[Rittman Mead's] Mark and Venkat have covered OBIEE migration methodologies in the past (see here, here and here), but I decided to throw my hat in the ring on the subject, as I had to develop a methodology for a client recently and wanted to share my experiences." - Stewart Bryson (tags: oracle otn obiee businessintelligence) Dr. Chris Harding: The golden thread of interoperability | Open Group Blog "There are so many things going on at every Conference by The Open Group that it is impossible to keep track of all of them, and this week’s Conference in San Diego, California, is no exception. The main themes are Cybersecurity, Enterprise Architecture, SOA and Cloud Computing." - Dr. Chris Harding (tags: entarch soa interoperability cloud) Marc Kelderman: OSB: Creating an Asynchronous / Fire-Forget WebService Call Creating a fire-and-forget call via OSB is simple, according to solution architect Marc Kelderman. "The trick is to send NO response back to the caller, only an HTTP response code, 200 or any other." (tags: oracle otn servicebus)

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