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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 20, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 20, 2011Popular ReleasesView Layout Replicator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: View Layout Replicator (1.0.119.18): Initial releaseWindows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer: WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer v1.0 Beta: Current release features:WPF desktop explorer client Visual Studio integrated tool window explorer client (Visual Studio 2010 Professional and above) Supported operations: Refresh (isolated storage information), Add Folder, Add Existing Item, Download File, Delete Folder, Delete File Explorer supports operations running on multiple remote applications at the same time Explorer detects application disconnect (1-2 second delay) Explorer confirms operation completed status Explorer d...Advanced Explorer for Wp7: Advanced Explorer for Wp7 Version 1.4 Test8: Added option to run under Lockscreen. Fixed a bug when you open a pdf/mobi file without starting adobe reader/amazon kindle first boost loading time for folders added \Windows directory (all devices) you can now interact with the filesystem while it is loading!Game Files Open - Map Editor: Game Files Open - Map Editor Beta 2 v1.0.0.0: The 2° beta release of the Map Editor, we have fixed a big bug of the files regen.Document.Editor: 2011.6: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.6: New Left to Right and Left to Right support New Indent more/less support Improved Home tab Improved Tooltips/shortcut keys Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsCatel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.2: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com =========== Version 1.2 =========== Release date: ============= 2011/02/17 Added/fixed: ============ (+) DataObjectBase now supports Isolated Storage out of the box: Person.Save(myStream) stores a whole object graph in Silverlight (+) DataObjectBase can now be converted to Json via Person.ToJson(); (+)...??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-02-18: ?????All-In-One Code Framework?2011??????????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????，?????AzureBingMaps??????，??Azure，WCF, Silverlight, Window Phone????????，????????????????????????。 ???： Windows Azure SQL Azure Windows Azure AppFabric Windows Live Messenger Connect Bing Maps ?????： ??????HTML??? ??Windows PC?Mac?Silverlight??? ??Windows Phone?Silverlight??? ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011...Image.Viewer: 2011: First version of 2011Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Feb 2011: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit OverviewSilverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in the Create.msdn.com forum. Add bugs or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Help us shape the Silverlight Toolkit with your feedback! Please clearly indicate that the work items and issues are for the phone t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 29 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 29 (beta)New: Added VsTortoise Solution Explorer integration for Web Project Folder, Web Folder and Web Item. Fix: TortoiseProc was called with invalid parameters, when using TSVN 1.4.x or older #7338 (thanks psifive) Fix: Add-in does not work, when "TortoiseSVN/bin" is not added to PATH environment variable #7357 Fix: Missing error message when ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.3 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.3 Community Edition We are happy to introduce you the latest version of Sense/Net with integrated ECM Workflow capabilities! In the past weeks we have been working hard to migrate the product to .Net 4 and include a workflow framework in Sense/Net built upon Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This brand new feature enables developers to define and develop workflows, and supports users when building and setting up complicated business processes involving content creation and response...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.11): Features Added a new option that allows properties on data contract types to be marked as virtual. Bug Fixes Fixed a bug caused by certain project properties not being available on Web Service Software Factory projects. Fixed a bug that could result in the WrapperName value of the MessageContractAttribute being incorrect when the Adjust Casing option is used. The menu item code now caters for CommandBar instances that are not available. For example the Web Item CommandBar does not exist ...Terminals: Version 2 - RC1: The "Clean Install" will overwrite your log4net configuration (if you have one). If you run in a Portable Environment, you can use the "Clean Install" and target your portable folder. Tested and it works fine. Changes for this release: Re-worked on the Toolstip settings are done, just to avoid the vs.net clash with auto-generating files for .settings files. renamed it to .settings.config Packged both log4net and ToolStripSettings files into the installer Upgraded the version inform...SQL Server Process Info Log: Release: releaseAllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.Jint - Javascript Interpreter for .NET: Jint - 0.9.0: New CLR interoperability features Many bugfixesBuild Version Increment Add-In Visual Studio: Build Version Increment v2.4.11046.2045: v2.4.11046.2045 Fixes and/or Improvements:Major: Added complete support for VC projects including .vcxproj & .vcproj. All padding issues fixed. A project's assembly versions are only changed if the project has been modified. Minor Order of versioning style values is now according to their respective positions in the attributes i.e. Major, Minor, Build, Revision. Fixed issue with global variable storage with some projects. Fixed issue where if a project item's file does not exist, a ...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1 release. Bug fixes and minor feature requests addedNew Projects.NET Core Audio APIs: This project provides a lightweight set of .NET wrappers around each section of the Windows Core Audio APIs.Akwen: Akwen aspirantbigserve: made in load sof languages a serve ralternative to iis and apacheCathedral game framework: (Will eventually be) A framework for creating 2d region-based games in Silverlight.Gmail Like File Uploader In .NET: Many times I wounder, How does gmail uploads files and monitor the upload status. I suppose many of you also have gone through the same experience. Most of you knows that the Choose File button on the Gmail Page is actually a flash button but how about the progressbar? AJAX rightinicomInterface: ????ini???????COM??iOnlineExamCenter - Trung Tâm Thi Tr?c Tuy?n: Tìm hi?u các phuong pháp thi tr?c nghi?m . Áp d?ng xây d?ng trung tâm thi tr?c tuy?n. ?ng d?ng du?c xây d?ng d?a trên n?n t?ng - .NET Framework v4.0 - ASP.NET MVC v3 - Entity Framework v4 - Silverlight v4 - jQueryLee Utility Library: Lee Utility LibrarySocialCore: Social Core is a framework for developing Social applications using a distributed infrastructure. The focus of Social Core is on collaboration, security and transparency. Privacy is not dead, it just is not implemented correctly.TestAmazonCloud: tacTftp.Net: This projects implements the TFTP (Trivial File Transfer) protocol for .NET in an easy-to-use library. It allows you to integrate TFTP client and server functionality into your project. It is s table, unit-tested and comes with a sample TFTP client and server.Using the Repository Pattern and DI to switch between SQL and XML: This is an example application, showing how Dependency Injection and the Repository can be used to allow interchangeable persistence between XML and SQLWebForms Razor converter - WinForms: Telerik developed a command line "WebForms to Razor (CSHTML) conversion tool" and uploaded in git -https://github.com/telerik/razor-converter This project uses the same Telerik API, but the client is the GUI/WinForms and allow developer to convert multiple files in a one go.XNA and Dependency Injection: Test code sample for XNA and Dependency Injection.XNA and IoC Container: Test code sample for XNA and IoC Container.XNA and Unit Testing: Test code sample for XNA and Unit Testing.Xplore World: Xplore World es un navegador web avanzado disponible para Windows Xp/Vista/7 y actualmente solo está disponible en español. Con este navegador puedes hacer cosas maravillosas como ver imágenes de cualquier web a tu estilo, administrar los usuarios, modificar tus marcadores, etc.ZO (ZeroOne): ZeroOne is the editor for programmers who think in binary.

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• SQLAuthority News – Book Review – Beginning T-SQL 2008 by Kathi Kellenberger

  - by pinaldave

  Beginning T-SQL 2008 by Kathi Kellenberger Amazon Link Detail Review: Beginning T-SQL 2008 is one of the best books on the market if you are just beginning to work with Microsoft SQL, or have a little bit of experience and need to learn more quickly. Each chapter of the book introduces a new subject, and builds upon topics covered in previous chapters.  The author of the book, Kathi Kellenberger understands that you need to form a solid foundation of knowledge before moving on to new topics, and sets up each subject nicely.  Because the chapters move in an orderly progression, you continue to use skills you learned earlier. One of the best features of Beginning T-SQL 2008 is that each chapter has multiple examples and exercises.  Many books introduce a topic and then never go back to it.  This book gives enough examples that you will be familiar with the subject when you come across it in real life.  The exercises at the end of the chapter mean that you will be using the skills you learned – and there is no better way to cement a subject in your brain. The book also includes discussions of the common errors that programmers will come across, how to avoid them, and how to fix them if they happen.  Ms. Kellenberger understands that not only do mistakes happen, but they are bound to happen if you aren’t trained properly.  Mistakes are part of the learning process! The book begins by discussions relational theory, so that programmers will understand the way T-SQL works from the ground up.  It also walks readers through writing accurate queries, combining set-based and procedural processing, embedding logic in stored functions, and so much more. Overall, the main goal of Beginning T-SQL 2008 is to introduce novices to SQL programming, and quickly familiarize them with the basics of running the program.  The book is written with the idea that readers will not know any of the technical terms or vocabulary.  However, if you are a little more familiar with SQL and looking to become better, you will still find this book very helpful. Ratting: 4.5+ Stars Summary: I must recommend Beginning T-SQL 2008 highly enough.  If you are going to buy any beginners guide to Transect-SQL, this is the one you should spend your money on.  You can save yourself a lot of time and effort later by using this very affordable manual to learn the basics, which will allow you to become an expert much faster. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• April 2013 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I’m excited to announce the April 2013 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. For this release, we focused on improving two controls: the AjaxFileUpload and the MaskedEdit controls. You can download the latest release from CodePlex at http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com or, better yet, you can execute the following NuGet command within Visual Studio 2010/2012: There are three builds of the Ajax Control Toolkit: .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, and .NET 4.5. A Better AjaxFileUpload Control We completely rewrote the AjaxFileUpload control for this release. We had two primary goals. First, we wanted to support uploading really large files. In particular, we wanted to support uploading multi-gigabyte files such as video files or application files. Second, we wanted to support showing upload progress on as many browsers as possible. The previous version of the AjaxFileUpload could show upload progress when used with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox but not when used with Apple Safari or Microsoft Internet Explorer. The new version of the AjaxFileUpload control shows upload progress when used with any browser. Using the AjaxFileUpload Control Let me walk-through using the AjaxFileUpload in the most basic scenario. And then, in following sections, I can explain some of its more advanced features. Here’s how you can declare the AjaxFileUpload control in a page: <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager runat="server" /> <ajaxToolkit:AjaxFileUpload ID="AjaxFileUpload1" AllowedFileTypes="mp4" OnUploadComplete="AjaxFileUpload1_UploadComplete" runat="server" /> The exact appearance of the AjaxFileUpload control depends on the features that a browser supports. In the case of Google Chrome, which supports drag-and-drop upload, here’s what the AjaxFileUpload looks like: Notice that the page above includes two Ajax Control Toolkit controls: the AjaxFileUpload and the ToolkitScriptManager control. You always need to include the ToolkitScriptManager with any page which uses Ajax Control Toolkit controls. The AjaxFileUpload control declared in the page above includes an event handler for its UploadComplete event. This event handler is declared in the code-behind page like this: protected void AjaxFileUpload1_UploadComplete(object sender, AjaxControlToolkit.AjaxFileUploadEventArgs e) { // Save uploaded file to App_Data folder AjaxFileUpload1.SaveAs(MapPath("~/App_Data/" + e.FileName)); } This method saves the uploaded file to your website’s App_Data folder. I’m assuming that you have an App_Data folder in your project – if you don’t have one then you need to create one or you will get an error. There is one more thing that you must do in order to get the AjaxFileUpload control to work. The AjaxFileUpload control relies on an HTTP Handler named AjaxFileUploadHandler.axd. You need to declare this handler in your application’s root web.config file like this: <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.5" /> <httpRuntime targetFramework="4.5" maxRequestLength="42949672" /> <httpHandlers> <add verb="*" path="AjaxFileUploadHandler.axd" type="AjaxControlToolkit.AjaxFileUploadHandler, AjaxControlToolkit"/> </httpHandlers> </system.web> <system.webServer> <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false"/> <handlers> <add name="AjaxFileUploadHandler" verb="*" path="AjaxFileUploadHandler.axd" type="AjaxControlToolkit.AjaxFileUploadHandler, AjaxControlToolkit"/> </handlers> <security> <requestFiltering> <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="4294967295"/> </requestFiltering> </security> </system.webServer> </configuration> Notice that the web.config file above also contains configuration settings for the maxRequestLength and maxAllowedContentLength. You need to assign large values to these configuration settings — as I did in the web.config file above — in order to accept large file uploads. Supporting Chunked File Uploads Because one of our primary goals with this release was support for large file uploads, we added support for client-side chunking. When you upload a file using a browser which fully supports the HTML5 File API — such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox — then the file is uploaded in multiple chunks. You can see chunking in action by opening F12 Developer Tools in your browser and observing the Network tab: Notice that there is a crazy number of distinct post requests made (about 360 distinct requests for a 1 gigabyte file). Each post request looks like this: http://localhost:24338/AjaxFileUploadHandler.axd?contextKey={DA8BEDC8-B952-4d5d-8CC2-59FE922E2923}&fileId=B7CCE31C-6AB1-BB28-2940-49E0C9B81C64 &fileName=Sita_Sings_the_Blues_480p_2150kbps.mp4&chunked=true&firstChunk=false Each request posts another chunk of the file being uploaded. Notice that the request URL includes a chunked=true parameter which indicates that the browser is breaking the file being uploaded into multiple chunks. Showing Upload Progress on All Browsers The previous version of the AjaxFileUpload control could display upload progress only in the case of browsers which fully support the HTML5 File API. The new version of the AjaxFileUpload control can display upload progress in the case of all browsers. If a browser does not fully support the HTML5 File API then the browser polls the server every few seconds with an Ajax request to determine the percentage of the file that has been uploaded. This technique of displaying progress works with any browser which supports making Ajax requests. There is one catch. Be warned that this new feature only works with the .NET 4.0 and .NET 4.5 versions of the AjaxControlToolkit. To show upload progress, we are taking advantage of the new ASP.NET HttpRequest.GetBufferedInputStream() and HttpRequest.GetBufferlessInputStream() methods which are not supported by .NET 3.5. For example, here is what the Network tab looks like when you use the AjaxFileUpload with Microsoft Internet Explorer: Here’s what the requests in the Network tab look like: GET /WebForm1.aspx?contextKey={DA8BEDC8-B952-4d5d-8CC2-59FE922E2923}&poll=1&guid=9206FF94-76F9-B197-D1BC-EA9AD282806B HTTP/1.1 Notice that each request includes a poll=1 parameter. This parameter indicates that this is a polling request to get the size of the file buffered on the server. Here’s what the response body of a request looks like when about 20% of a file has been uploaded: Buffering to a Temporary File When you upload a file using the AjaxFileUpload control, the file upload is buffered to a temporary file located at Path.GetTempPath(). When you call the SaveAs() method, as we did in the sample page above, the temporary file is copied to a new file and then the temporary file is deleted. If you don’t call the SaveAs() method, then you must ensure that the temporary file gets deleted yourself. For example, if you want to save the file to a database then you will never call the SaveAs() method and you are responsible for deleting the file. The easiest way to delete the temporary file is to call the AjaxFileUploadEventArgs.DeleteTemporaryData() method in the UploadComplete handler: protected void AjaxFileUpload1_UploadComplete(object sender, AjaxControlToolkit.AjaxFileUploadEventArgs e) { // Save uploaded file to a database table e.DeleteTemporaryData(); } You also can call the static AjaxFileUpload.CleanAllTemporaryData() method to delete all temporary data and not only the temporary data related to the current file upload. For example, you might want to call this method on application start to ensure that all temporary data is removed whenever your application restarts. A Better MaskedEdit Extender This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit contains bug fixes for the top-voted issues related to the MaskedEdit control. We closed over 25 MaskedEdit issues. Here is a complete list of the issues addressed with this release: · 17302 MaskedEditExtender MaskType=Date, Mask=99/99/99 Undefined JS Error · 11758 MaskedEdit causes error in JScript when working with 2-digits year · 18810 Maskededitextender/validator Date validation issue · 23236 MaskEditValidator does not work with date input using format dd/mm/yyyy · 23042 Webkit based browsers (Safari, Chrome) and MaskedEditExtender · 26685 MaskedEditExtender@(ClearMaskOnLostFocus=false) adds a zero character when you each focused to target textbox · 16109 MaskedEditExtender: Negative amount, followed by decimal, sets value to positive · 11522 MaskEditExtender of AjaxtoolKit-1.0.10618.0 does not work properly for Hungarian Culture · 25988 MaskedEditExtender – CultureName (HU-hu) > DateSeparator · 23221 MaskedEditExtender date separator problem · 15233 Day and month swap in Dynamic user control · 15492 MaskedEditExtender with ClearMaskOnLostFocus and with MaskedEditValidator with ClientValidationFunction · 9389 MaskedEditValidator – when on no entry · 11392 MaskedEdit Number format messed up · 11819 MaskedEditExtender erases all values beyond first comma separtor · 13423 MaskedEdit(Extender/Validator) combo problem · 16111 MaskedEditValidator cannot validate date with DayMonthYear in UserDateFormat of MaskedEditExtender · 10901 MaskedEdit: The months and date fields swap values when you hit submit if UserDateFormat is set. · 15190 MaskedEditValidator can’t make use of MaskedEditExtender’s UserDateFormat property · 13898 MaskedEdit Extender with custom date type mask gives javascript error · 14692 MaskedEdit error in “yy/MM/dd” format. · 16186 MaskedEditExtender does not handle century properly in a date mask · 26456 MaskedEditBehavior. ConvFmtTime : function(input,loadFirst) fails if this._CultureAMPMPlaceholder == “” · 21474 Error on MaskedEditExtender working with number format · 23023 MaskedEditExtender’s ClearMaskOnLostFocus property causes problems for MaskedEditValidator when set to false · 13656 MaskedEditValidator Min/Max Date value issue Conclusion This latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit required many hours of work by a team of talented developers. I want to thank the members of the Superexpert team for the long hours which they put into this release.

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• Silverlight Cream for April 02, 2010 -- #828

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Phil Middlemiss, Robert Kozak, Kathleen Dollard, Avi Pilosof, Nokola, Jeff Wilcox, David Anson, Timmy Kokke, Tim Greenfield, and Josh Smith. Shoutout: SmartyP has additional info up on his WP7 Pivot app: Preview of My Current Windows Phone 7 Pivot Work From SilverlightCream.com: A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part I Phil Middlemiss is starting a tutorial series on building a new theme for Silverlight, in this first one we define some gradients and color resources... good stuff Phil Intercepting INotifyPropertyChanged This is Robert Kozak's first post on this blog, but it's a good one about INotifyPropertyChanged and MVVM and has a solution in the post with lots of code and discussion. How do I Display Data of Complex Bound Criteria in Horizontal Lists in Silverlight? Kathleen Dollard's latest article in Visual Studio magazine is in answer to a question about displaying a list of complex bound criteria including data, child data, and photos, and displaying them horizontally one at a time. Very nice-looking result, and all the code. Windows Phone: Frame/Page navigation and transitions using the TransitioningContentControl Avi Pilosof discusses the built-in (boring) navigation on WP7, and then shows using the TransitionContentControl from the Toolkit to apply transitions to the navigation. EasyPainter: Cloud Turbulence and Particle Buzz Nokola returns with a couple more effects for EasyPainter: Cloud Turbulence and Particle Buzz ... check out the example screenshots, then go grab the code. Property change notifications for multithreaded Silverlight applications Jeff Wilcox is discussing the need for getting change notifications to always happen on the UI thread in multi-threaded apps... great diagrams to see what's going on. Tip: The default value of a DependencyProperty is shared by all instances of the class that registers it David Anson has a tip up about setting the default value of a DependencyProperty, and the consequence that may have depending upon the type. Building a “real” extension for Expression Blend Timmy Kokke's code is WPF, but the subject is near and dear to us all, Timmy has a real-world Expression Blend extension up... a search for controls in the Objects and Timelines pane ... and even if that doesn't interest you... it's the source to a Blend extension! XPath support in Silverlight 4 + XPathPad Tim Greenfield not only talks about XPath in SL4RC, but he has produced a tool, XPathPad, and provided the source... if you've used XPath, you either are a higher thinker than me(not a big stretch), or you need this :) Using a Service Locator to Work with MessageBoxes in an MVVM Application Josh Smith posted about a question that comes up a lot: showing a messagebox from a ViewModel object. This might not work for custom message boxes or unit testing. This post covers the Unit Testing aspect. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Tips on Migrating from AquaLogic .NET Accelerator to WebCenter WSRP Producer for .NET

  - by user647124

  This year I embarked on a journey to migrate a group of ASP.NET web applications developed to integrate with WebLogic Portal 9.2 via the AquaLogic® Interaction .NET Application Accelerator 1.0 to instead use the Oracle WebCenter WSRP Producer for .NET and integrated with WebLogic Portal 10.3.4. It has been a very winding path and this blog entry is intended to share both the lessons learned and relevant approaches that led to those learnings. Like most journeys of discovery, it was not a direct path, and there are notes to let you know when it is practical to skip a section if you are in a hurry to get from here to there. For the Curious From the perspective of necessity, this section would be better at the end. If it were there, though, it would probably be read by far fewer people, including those that are actually interested in these types of sections. Those in a hurry may skip past and be none the worst for it in dealing with the hands-on bits of performing a migration from .NET Accelerator to WSRP Producer. For others who want to talk about why they did what they did after they did it, or just want to know for themselves, enjoy. A Brief (and edited) History of the WSRP for .NET Technologies (as Relevant to the this Post) Note: This section is for those who are curious about why the migration path is not as simple as many other Oracle technologies. You can skip this section in its entirety and still be just as competent in performing a migration as if you had read it. The currently deployed architecture that was to be migrated and upgraded achieved initial integration between .NET and J2EE over the WSRP protocol through the use of The AquaLogic Interaction .NET Application Accelerator. The .NET Accelerator allowed the applications that were written in ASP.NET and deployed on a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) to interact with a WebLogic Portal application deployed on a WebLogic (J2EE application) Server (both version 9.2, the state of the art at the time of its creation). At the time this architectural decision for the application was made, both the AquaLogic and WebLogic brands were owned by BEA Systems. The AquaLogic brand included products acquired by BEA through the acquisition of Plumtree, whose flagship product was a portal platform available in both J2EE and .NET versions. As part of this dual technology support an adaptor was created to facilitate the use of WSRP as a communication protocol where customers wished to integrate components from both versions of the Plumtree portal. The adapter evolved over several product generations to include a broad array of both standard and proprietary WSRP integration capabilities. Later, BEA Systems was acquired by Oracle. Over the course of several years Oracle has acquired a large number of portal applications and has taken the strategic direction to migrate users of these myriad (and formerly competitive) products to the Oracle WebCenter technology stack. As part of Oracle’s strategic technology roadmap, older portal products are being schedule for end of life, including the portal products that were part of the BEA acquisition. The .NET Accelerator has been modified over a very long period of time with features driven by users of that product and developed under three different vendors (each a direct competitor in the same solution space prior to merger). The Oracle WebCenter WSRP Producer for .NET was introduced much more recently with the key objective to specifically address the needs of the WebCenter customers developing solutions accessible through both J2EE and .NET platforms utilizing the WSRP specifications. The Oracle Product Development Team also provides these insights on the drivers for developing the WSRP Producer: ***************************************** Support for ASP.NET AJAX. Controls using the ASP.NET AJAX script manager do not function properly in the Application Accelerator for .NET. Support 2 way SSL in WLP. This was not possible with the proxy/bridge set up in the existing Application Accelerator for .NET. Allow developers to code portlets (Web Parts) using the .NET framework rather than a proprietary framework. Developers had to use the Application Accelerator for .NET plug-ins to Visual Studio to manage preferences and profile data. This is now replaced with the .NET Framework Personalization (for preferences) and Profile providers. The WSRP Producer for .NET was created as a new way of developing .NET portlets. It was never designed to be an upgrade path for the Application Accelerator for .NET. .NET developers would create new .NET portlets with the WSRP Producer for .NET and leave any existing .NET portlets running in the Application Accelerator for .NET. ***************************************** The advantage to creating a new solution for WSRP is a product that is far easier for Oracle to maintain and support which in turn improves quality, reliability and maintainability for their customers. No changes to J2EE applications consuming the WSRP portlets previously rendered by the.NET Accelerator is required to migrate from the Aqualogic WSRP solution. For some customers using the .NET Accelerator the challenge is adapting their current .NET applications to work with the WSRP Producer (or any other WSRP adapter as they are proprietary by nature). Part of this adaptation is the need to deploy the .NET applications as a child to the WSRP producer web application as root. Differences between .NET Accelerator and WSRP Producer Note: This section is for those who are curious about why the migration is not as pluggable as something such as changing security providers in WebLogic Server. You can skip this section in its entirety and still be just as competent in performing a migration as if you had read it. The basic terminology used to describe the participating applications in a WSRP environment are the same when applied to either the .NET Accelerator or the WSRP Producer: Producer and Consumer. In both cases the .NET application serves as what is referred to as a WSRP environment as the Producer. The difference lies in how the two adapters create the WSRP translation of the .NET application. The .NET Accelerator, as the name implies, is meant to serve as a quick way of adding WSRP capability to a .NET application. As such, at a high level, the .NET Accelerator behaves as a proxy for requests between the .NET application and the WSRP Consumer. A WSRP request is sent from the consumer to the .NET Accelerator, the.NET Accelerator transforms this request into an ASP.NET request, receives the response, then transforms the response into a WSRP response. The .NET Accelerator is deployed as a stand-alone application on IIS. The WSRP Producer is deployed as a parent application on IIS and all ASP.NET modules that will be made available over WSRP are deployed as children of the WSRP Producer application. In this manner, the WSRP Producer acts more as a Request Filter than a proxy in the WSRP transactions between Producer and Consumer. Highly Recommended Enabling Logging Note: You can skip this section now, but you will most likely want to come back to it later, so why not just read it now? Logging is very helpful in tracking down the causes of any anomalies during testing of migrated portlets. To enable the WSRP Producer logging, update the Application_Start method in the Global.asax.cs for your .NET application by adding log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure(); IIS logs will usually (in a standard configuration) be in a sub folder under C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\W3SVC. WSRP Producer logs will be found at C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdefault\Logs\WSRPProducer.log InputTrace.webinfo and OutputTrace.webinfo are located under C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdefault and can be useful in debugging issues related to markup transformations. Things You Must Do Merge Web.Config Note: If you have been skipping all the sections that you can, now is the time to stop and pay attention J Because the existing .NET application will become a sub-application to the WSRP Producer, you will want to merge required settings from the existing Web.Config to the one in the WSRP Producer. Use the WSRP Producer Master Page The Master Page installed for the WSRP Producer provides common, hiddenform fields and JavaScripts to facilitate portlet instance management and display configuration when the child page is being rendered over WSRP. You add the Master Page by including it in the <@ Page declaration with MasterPageFile="~/portlets/Resources/MasterPages/WSRP.Master" . You then replace: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" > <HTML> <HEAD> With <asp:Content ID="ContentHead1" ContentPlaceHolderID="wsrphead" Runat="Server"> And </HEAD> <body> <form id="theForm" method="post" runat="server"> With </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="ContentBody1" ContentPlaceHolderID="Main" Runat="Server"> And finally </form> </body> </HTML> With </asp:Content> In the event you already use Master Pages, adapt your existing Master Pages to be sub masters. See Nested ASP.NET Master Pages for a detailed reference of how to do this. It Happened to Me, It Might Happen to You…Or Not Watch for Use of Session or Request in OnInit In the event the .NET application being modified has pages developed to assume the user has been authenticated in an earlier page request there may be direct or indirect references in the OnInit method to request or session objects that may not have been created yet. This will vary from application to application, so the recommended approach is to test first. If there is an issue with a page running as a WSRP portlet then check for potential references in the OnInit method (including references by methods called within OnInit) to session or request objects. If there are, the simplest solution is to create a new method and then call that method once the necessary object(s) is fully available. I find doing this at the start of the Page_Load method to be the simplest solution. Case Sensitivity .NET languages are not case sensitive, but Java is. This means it is possible to have many variations of SRC= and src= or .JPG and .jpg. The preferred solution is to make these mark up instances all lower case in your .NET application. This will allow the default Rewriter rules in wsrp-producer.xml to work as is. If this is not practical, then make duplicates of any rules where an issue is occurring due to upper or mixed case usage in the .NET application markup and match the case in use with the duplicate rule. For example: <RewriterRule> <LookFor>(href=\"([^\"]+)</LookFor> <ChangeToAbsolute>true</ChangeToAbsolute> <ApplyTo>.axd,.css</ApplyTo> <MakeResource>true</MakeResource> </RewriterRule> May need to be duplicated as: <RewriterRule> <LookFor>(HREF=\"([^\"]+)</LookFor> <ChangeToAbsolute>true</ChangeToAbsolute> <ApplyTo>.axd,.css</ApplyTo> <MakeResource>true</MakeResource> </RewriterRule> While it is possible to write a regular expression that will handle mixed case usage, it would be long and strenous to test and maintain, so the recommendation is to use duplicate rules. Is it Still Relative? Some .NET applications base relative paths with a fixed root location. With the introduction of the WSRP Producer, the root has moved up one level. References to ~/ will need to be updated to ~/portlets and many ../ paths will need another ../ in front. I Can See You But I Can’t Find You This issue was first discovered while debugging modules with code that referenced the form on a page from the code-behind by name and/or id. The initial error presented itself as run-time error that was difficult to interpret over WSRP but seemed clear when run as straight ASP.NET as it indicated that the object with the form name did not exist. Since the form name was no longer valid after implementing the WSRP Master Page, the likely fix seemed to simply update the references in the code. However, as the WSRP Master Page is external to the code, a compile time error resulted: Error      155         The name 'form1' does not exist in the current context                C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdefault\portlets\legacywebsite\module\Screens \Reporting.aspx.cs                51           52           legacywebsite.module Much hair-pulling research later it was discovered that it was the use of the FindControl method causing the issue. FindControl doesn’t work quite as expected once a Master Page has been introduced as the controls become embedded in controls, require a recursion to find them that is not part of the FindControl method. In code where the page form is referenced by name, there are two steps to the solution. First, the form needs to be referenced in code generically with Page.Form. For example, this: ToggleControl ctrl = new ToggleControl(frmManualEntry, FunctionLibrary.ParseArrayLst(userObj.Roles)); Becomes this: ToggleControl ctrl = new ToggleControl(Page.Form, FunctionLibrary.ParseArrayLst(userObj.Roles)); Generally the form id is referenced in most ASP.NET applications as a path to a control on the form. To reach the control once a MasterPage has been added requires an additional method to recurse through the controls collections within the form and find the control ID. The following method (found at Rick Strahl's Web Log) corrects this very nicely: public static Control FindControlRecursive(Control Root, string Id) { if (Root.ID == Id) return Root; foreach (Control Ctl in Root.Controls) { Control FoundCtl = FindControlRecursive(Ctl, Id); if (FoundCtl != null) return FoundCtl; } return null; } Where the form name is not referenced, simply using the FindControlRecursive method in place of FindControl will be all that is necessary. Following the second part of the example referenced earlier, the method called with Page.Form changes its value extraction code block from this: Label lblErrMsg = (Label)frmRef.FindControl("lblBRMsg" To this: Label lblErrMsg = (Label) FunctionLibrary.FindControlRecursive(frmRef, "lblBRMsg" The Master That Won’t Step Aside In most migrations it is preferable to make as few changes as possible. In one case I ran across an existing Master Page that would not function as a sub-Master Page. While it would probably have been educational to trace down why, the expedient process of updating it to take the place of the WSRP Master Page is the route I took. The changes are highlighted below: … <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="wsrphead" runat="server"></asp:ContentPlaceHolder> </head> <body leftMargin="0" topMargin="0"> <form id="TheForm" runat="server"> <input type="hidden" name="key" id="key" value="" /> <input type="hidden" name="formactionurl" id="formactionurl" value="" /> <input type="hidden" name="handle" id="handle" value="" /> <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server" EnablePartialRendering="true" > </asp:ScriptManager> This approach did not work for all existing Master Pages, but fortunately all of the other existing Master Pages I have run across worked fine as a sub-Master to the WSRP Master Page. Moving On In Enterprise Portals, even after you get everything working, the work is not finished. Next you need to get it where everyone will work with it. Migration Planning Providing that the server where IIS is running is adequately sized, it is possible to run both the .NET Accelerator and the WSRP Producer on the same server during the upgrade process. The upgrade can be performed incrementally, i.e., one portlet at a time, if server administration processes support it. Those processes would include the ability to manage a second producer in the consuming portal and to change over individual portlet instances from one provider to the other. If processes or requirements demand that all portlets be cut over at the same time, it needs to be determined if this cut over should include a new producer, updating all of the portlets in the consumer, or if the WSRP Producer portlet configuration must maintain the naming conventions used by the .NET Accelerator and simply change the WSRP end point configured in the consumer. In some enterprises it may even be necessary to maintain the same WSDL end point, at which point the IIS configuration will be where the updates occur. The downside to such a requirement is that it makes rolling back very difficult, should the need arise. Location, Location, Location Not everyone wants the web application to have the descriptively obvious wsrpdefault location, or needs to create a second WSRP site on the same server. The instructions below are from the product team and, while targeted towards making a second site, will work for creating a site with a different name and then remove the old site. You can also change just the name in IIS. Manually Creating a WSRP Producer Site Instructions (NOTE: all executables used are the same ones used by the installer and “wsrpdev” will be the name of the new instance): 1. Copy C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdefault to C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdev. 2. Bring up a command window as an administrator 3. Run C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\uninstall_resources\IISAppAccelSiteCreator.exe install WSRPProducers wsrpdev "C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdev" 8678 2.0.50727 4. Run C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\uninstall_resources\PermManage.exe add FileSystem C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdev "NETWORK SERVICE" 3 1 5. Run C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\uninstall_resources\PermManage.exe add FileSystem C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdev EVERYONE 1 1 6. Open up C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsdl\1.0\WSRPService.wsdl and replace wsrpdefault with wsrpdev 7. Open up C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsdl\2.0\WSRPService.wsdl and replace wsrpdefault with wsrpdev Tests: 1. Bring up a browser on the host itself and go to http://localhost:8678/wsrpdev/wsdl/1.0/WSRPService.wsdl and make sure that the URLs in the XML returned include the wsrpdev changes you made in step 6. 2. Bring up a browser on the host itself and see if the default sample comes up: http://localhost:8678/wsrpdev/portlets/ASPNET_AJAX_sample/default.aspx 3. Register the producer in WLP and test the portlet. Changing the Port used by WSRP Producer The pre-configured port for the WSRP Producer is 8678. You can change this port by updating both the IIS configuration and C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\[WSRP_APP_NAME]\wsdl\1.0\WSRPService.wsdl. Do You Need to Migrate? Oracle Premier Support ended in November of 2010 for AquaLogic Interaction .NET Application Accelerator 1.x and Extended Support ends in November 2012 (see http://www.oracle.com/us/support/lifetime-support/lifetime-support-software-342730.html for other related dates). This means that integration with products released after November of 2010 is not supported. If having such support is the policy within your enterprise, you do indeed need to migrate. If changes in your enterprise cause your current solution with the .NET Accelerator to no longer function properly, you may need to migrate. Migration is a choice, and if the goals of your enterprise are to take full advantage of newer technologies then migration is certainly one activity you should be planning for.

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• NINE Questions with Michelle Juett

  - by NINEQuestions

  Michelle Juett is one of the more interesting people I know, even though we’ve never met face to face. She’s part artist, part techie and all cool. We “met” via my good buddy George Clingerman and have plotting to take over the world, errr… I mean “collaborating” ever since. If you happen to live in the Seattle area, you can catch her and her work at Sakura Con on April 2-4, 2010 and various other gamer and art cons throughout the year. You can also find her on Twitter as @Shelldragon. Now that you know a little bit, I’ll let her tell you the rest of the story in these NINE Questions: 1. Where are you from? I was born in Clearwater, Florida. I like to tell people I'm from the Bermuda Triangle, it just makes explaining myself so much easier. My family moved to Washington when I was 5 and I've been in the Pacific Northwest ever since. We like to QQ about the rain but we really love the green trees and clean water. 2. What do you do? I fight evil by moonlight and win love by daylight.. or something like that.  I’ve been in quality assurance for games during the day since January 2008 and an artist for life. I currently work in QA for a really awesome game company in Bellevue.  At home, I work on personal digital art, making game assets as well as other random freelance projects as they pop up. 3. How did you get to where you are now? I'm still not where I want to be but I'm getting closer. The biggest piece of advice I can give is to work hard and never settle for the minimum required. I tend to overwork myself but I've never regretted it. You can want something really bad but if you aren't willing to work for it, then you can't expect it to just happen. I've always drawn and had an unhealthy love for video games that I was told I’d grow out of.  I knew I would not ‘grow out’ of games and that real adults make them and I could too. After I graduated, in searching for jobs, I discovered game testing. I figured this would be a good way to get my foot in the door and start networking. I’ve worked with consoles, websites and now, PC games.  I stuck with my journey, although it has been a rocky one, daylighting as a tester and moonlighting as an artist. I'm still on that journey but I wouldn't have it any other way. Test has given me a perspective that is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain any other way. It gives an unconditional respect for other hard working testers and an insight into creative problem solving. 4. So video game testing probably sounds WAY cooler than the reality. What's it like? What's a given day for you? Game testers don't get a lot of respect because of their stigmas and the fact most people don't actually know what we do.  People hear about the opening and closing disc trays all day. Many places do treat their testers like numbers. It all depends on where you work and how awesome your company is. I've had to deal with a lot of bad work situations to get to a really good one. QA exists to ensure the game is as flawless and enjoyable as it can be by the time it has to leave the nest and go out into the world. This includes everything obvious: “can I beat the level and save the princess?” to the more obscure: ‘What happens when I lose internet connection while trying to save right before falling into a pit to my death while holding the jump key then my cat pulls out my memory card and hides it in her litter box?” On the dev side, for developers, testers can be very scary people. Especially when the test team is not in house and you can’t see each other’s faces.  I've seen both sides. We don't mean to hurt your feelings. We really DO love you and want your game to be the best it can be! It can be some serious tough love. 5. You are also an accomplished artist. Got any major projects right now you'd like to talk about? LOL, I don't know if I’d say I'm an accomplished artist just yet. I’m still a long way from where I want to be. I figure that’s what makes you grow though: the desire to never stop improving. I like QA but I want to be a full time artist. I was lucky enough to register for a table at Sakura Con in the 11 second window that the tables sold out. As such, I’ll be selling my wares in the Artist Alley April 2-4th. Part of preparing for this is actually making the art to be sold there. Anime is a fun pass time but I don’t draw a whole lot of it so I’m making up for lost time. As I seem to enjoy burying myself in work, I’m an art lead for a secret project that’s so secret I might be killed tonight for even mentioning it. I also take on various freelance projects and do what I can to help out indie games. I discovered the XNA community a year and a half ago and developed a love for Indies when I was writing a weekly newsletter on XBLA news. I’m a little late to the party but I find myself in a unique position where I am an artist and also have technical skills in games. While not programmer myself, I have a lot of game sense and experience. I hope to make some awesome happen. Lastly, I have an ongoing web comic Shell’s Angels) that tends to get neglected when I get busy. I still love drawing comics and keep a little book with me to sketch down ideas as they pop into my head. I may pick it back up again as a larger project sometime in the future. 6. Can you talk about any of the other freelance projects you're doing or are you sworn to secrecy on those too? We wouldn't want a team of game developer ninjas to take you out or anything. All my projects are currently 2d. I have personal projects such as the ongoing comic as well as a graphic novel I've been picking at here and there. My main focus until April is Sakura Con, Sakura Con, Sakura Con.  I see it as a great way to get exposure and convention experience. I found out I love conventions a couple years ago and I want to get more involved in them. 7. As an artist, what is your weapon of choice? What do you use to get most of your stuff done? I am a Photoshop Hero and I have the hoodie to prove it. (http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pah090011.html) I've dabbled in other paint programs but I always gravitate back to Photoshop. She is my one true love. I'd like to learn programs like Flash or Anime Studio when I get a bit more time because of their animation abilities. I've worked on frame by frame animation forever but I would love to learn 2d rigging. Still, nothing can compare to a simple sketchpad and a pencil. I always have one on me in case I come across or think of something interesting and can't get to a computer. If the Courier ever comes to exist it will be an ideal weapon for me. 8. You did some videos too, depicting the art creation process. What was the motivation behind those? The creative process is just as important as the final product, if not more so.  I've always loved watching speed paint videos and wanted to try it out myself. Turns out it's a lot of work and time but it's definitely fun to go back and rewatch them. Art isn't always the end result and is more often the process itself. 9. Got any interesting tattoos? Designed any for yourself or other people? Not yet, but not for lack of desire. I've toiled over what and where for years. Last year, I finally decided the back of my shoulders would be the place. Like anything permanent, I want it to have meaning. I thought of somehow incorporating games but I couldn't find something I felt would stand the test of time even with all the classic sprite games. I'm very picky so we'll see if I can get something solid decided. Come see me at Sakura Con April 2 -4!!!

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• Take Control Of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4.0

  Each server-side Web control in an ASP.NET Web Forms application has an <code>ID</code> property that identifies the Web control and is name by which the Web control is accessed in the code-behind class. When rendered into HTML, the Web control turns its server-side <code>ID</code> value into a client-side <code>id</code> attribute. Ideally, there would be a one-to-one correspondence between the value of the server-side <code>ID</code> property and the generated client-side <code>id</code>, but in reality things aren't so simple. By default, the rendered client-side <code>id</code> is formed by taking the Web control's <code>ID</code> property and prefixed it with the <code>ID</code>

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• The Low Down Dirty Azure Blues

  - by SGWellens

  Remember the SETI screen savers that used to be on everyone's computer? As far I as know, it was the first bona-fide use of "Cloud" computing…albeit an ad hoc cloud. I still think it was a brilliant leveraging of computing power. My interest in clouds was re-piqued when I went to a technical seminar at the local .Net User Group. The speaker was Mike Benkovitch and he expounded magnificently on the virtues of the Azure platform. Mike always does a good job. One killer reason he gave for cloud computing is instant scalability. Not applicable for most applications, but it is there if needed. I have a bunch of files stored on Microsoft's SkyDrive platform which is cloud storage. It is painfully slow. Accessing a file means going through layers and layers of software, redirections and security. Am I complaining? Hell no! It's free! So my opinions of Cloud Computing are both skeptical and appreciative. What intrigued me at the seminar, in addition to its other features, is that Azure can serve as a web hosting platform. I have a client with an Asp.Net web site I developed who is not happy with the performance of their current hosting service. I checked the cost of Azure and since the site has low bandwidth/space requirements the cost would be competitive with the existing host provider: Azure Pricing Calculator. And, Azure has a three month free trial. Perfect! I could try moving the website and see how it works for free. I went through the signup process. Everything was proceeding fine until I went to the MS SQL database management screen. A popup window informed me that I needed to install Silverlight on my machine. Silverlight? No thanks. Buh-Bye. I half-heartedly found the Azure support button and logged a ticket telling them I didn't want Silverlight on my machine. Within 4 to 6 hours (and a myriad (5) of automated support emails) they sent me a link to a database management page that did not require Silverlight. Thanks! I was able to create a database immediately. One really nice feature was that after creating the database, I was given a list of connection strings. I went to the current host provider, made a backup of the database and saved it to my machine. I attached to the remote database using SQL Server Studio 2012 and looked for the Restore menu item. It was missing. So I tried using the SQL command: RESTORE DATABASE MyDatabase FROM DISK ='C:\temp\MyBackup.bak' Msg 40510, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Statement 'RESTORE DATABASE' is not supported in this version of SQL Server. Are you kidding me? Why on earth…? This can't be happening! I opened both the source database and destination database in SQL Management Studio. I right clicked the source database, selected "Tasks" and noticed a menu selection called "Deploy Database to SQL Azure" Are you kidding me? Could it be? Oh yes, it be! There was a small problem because the database already existed on the Azure machine, I deployed to a new name, deleted the existing database and renamed the deployed database to what I needed. It was ridiculously easy. Being able to attach SQL Management Studio to remote databases is an awesome but scary feature. You can limit the IP addresses that can access the database which enhances security but when you give people, any people, me included, that much power, one errant mouse click could bring a live system down. My Advice: Tread softly and carry a large backup thumb-drive. Then I created a web site, the URL it returned look something like this: http://MyWebSite.azurewebsites.net/ Azure supports FTP, but I couldn't figure out the settings until I downloaded the publishing profile. It was an XML file that contained the needed information. I still couldn't connect with my FTP client (FileZilla). After about an hour of messing around, I deleted the port number from the FileZilla setup page….and voila, I was in like Flynn.   There are other options of deploying directly from Visual Studio, TFS, etc. but I do not like integrated tools that do things without my asking: It's usually hard to figure out what they did and how to undo it. I uploaded the aspx , cs , webconfig, etc. files. Bu it didn't run. The site I ported was in .NET 3.5. The Azure website configuration page gave me a choice between .NET 2.0 and 4.0. So, I switched to Visual Studio 2010, chose .NET 4.0 and upgraded the site. Of course I have the original version completely backed up and stored in a granite cave beneath the Nevada desert. And I have a backup CD under my pillow. The site uses ReportViewer to generate PDF documents. Of course it was the wrong version. I removed the old references to version 9 and added new references to version 10 (*see note below). Since the DLLs were not on the Azure Server, I uploaded them to the bin directory, crossed my fingers, burned some incense and gave it a try. After some fiddling around it ran. I don't know if I did anything particular to make it work or it just needed time to sort things out. However, one critical feature didn't work: ReportViewer could not programmatically generate PDF documents. I was getting this exception: "An error occurred during local report processing. Parameter is not valid." Rats. I did some searching and found other people were having the same problem, so I added a post saying I was having the same problem: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazurewebsitespreview/thread/b4a6eb43-0013-435f-9d11-00ee26a8d017 Currently they are looking into this problem and I am waiting for the results. Hence I had the time to write this BLOG entry. How lucky you are. This was the last message I got from the Microsoft person: Hi Steve, Windows Azure Web Sites is a multi-tenant environment. For security issue, we limited some API calls. Unfortunately, some GDI APIS required by the PDF converting function are in this list. We have noticed this issue, and still investigation the best way to go. At this moment, there is no news to share. Sorry about this. Will keep you posted. If I had to guess, I would say they are concerned with people uploading images and doing intensive graphics programming which would hog CPU time.  But that is just a guess. Another problem. While trying to resolve the ReportViewer problem, I tried to write a file to the PDF directory to see if there was a permissions problem with some test code: String MyPath = MapPath(@"~\PDFs\Test.txt"); File.WriteAllText(MyPath, "Hello Azure");     I got this message: Access to the path <my path> is denied. After some research, I understood that since Azure is a cloud based platform, it can't allow web applications to save files to local directories. The application could be moved or replicated as scaling occurs and trying to manage local files would be problematic to say the least. There are other options: Use the Azure APIs to get a path. That way the location of the storage is separated from the application. However, the web site is then tied Azure and can't be moved to another hosting platform. Use the ApplicationData folder (not recommended). Write to BLOB storage. Or, I could try and stream the PDF output directly to the email and not save a file. I'm not going to work on a final solution until the ReportViewer is fixed. I am just sharing some of the things you need to be aware of if you decide to use Azure. I got this information from here. (Note the author of the BLOG added a comment saying he has updated his entry). Is my memory faulty? While getting this BLOG ready, I tried to write the test file again. And it worked. My memory is incorrect, or much more likely, something changed on the server…perhaps while they are trying to get ReportViewer to work. (Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it). *Note: Since Visual Studio 2010 Express doesn't include a Report Editor, I downloaded and installed SQL Server Report Builder 2.0. It is a standalone Report Editor to replace the one not in Visual Studio 2010 Express. I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens CodeProject

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• GWB | 30 Posts in 60 Days Update

  - by Staff of Geeks

  One month after the contest started, we definitely have some leaders and one blogger who has reached the mark.  Keep up the good work guys, I have really enjoyed the content being produced by our bloggers. Current Winners: Enrique Lima (37 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/enriquelima Almost There: Stuart Brierley (28 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/StuartBrierley Dave Campbell (26 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/WynApseTechnicalMusings Eric Nelson (23 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable Coming Along: Liam McLennan (17 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/liammclennan Christopher House (13 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/13DaysaWeek mbcrump (13 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/mbcrump Steve Michelotti (10 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti Michael Freidgeim (9 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/mnf MarkPearl (9 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/MarkPearl Brian Schroer (8 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/brians Chris Williams (8 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams CatherineRussell (7 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/CatherineRussell Shawn Cicoria (7 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/cicorias Matt Christian (7 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/CodeBlog James Michael Hare (7 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder John Blumenauer (7 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/jblumenauer Scott Dorman (7 posts) - http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman   Technorati Tags: Standings,Geekswithblogs,30 in 60

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• Quotas - Using quotas on ZFSSA shares and projects and users

  - by Steve Tunstall

  So you don't want your users to fill up your entire storage pool with their MP3 files, right? Good idea to make some quotas. There's some good tips and tricks here, including a helpful workflow (a script) that will allow you to set a default quota on all of the users of a share at once. Let's start with some basics. I mad a project called "small" and inside it I made a share called "Share1". You can set quotas on the project level, which will affect all of the shares in it, or you can do it on the share level like I am here. Go the the share's General property page. First, I'm using a Windows client, so I need to make sure I have my SMB mountpoint. Do you know this trick yet? Go to the Protocol page of the share. See the SMB section? It needs a resource name to make the UNC path for the SMB (Windows) users. You do NOT have to type this name in for every share you make! Do this at the Project level. Before you make any shares, go to the Protocol properties of the Project, and set the SMB Resource name to "On". This special code will automatically make the SMB resource name of every share in the project the same as the share name. Note the UNC path name I got below. Since I did this at the Project level, I didn't have to lift a finger for it to work on every share I make in this project. Simple. So I have now mapped my Windows "Z:" drive to this Share1. I logged in as the user "Joe". Note that my computer shows my Z: drive as 34GB, which is the entire size of my Pool that this share is in. Right now, Joe could fill this drive up and it would fill up my pool.  Now, go back to the General properties of Share1. In the "Space Usage" area, over on the right, click on the "Show All" text under the Users & Groups section. Sure enough, Joe and some other users are in here and have some data. Note this is also a handy window to use just to see how much space your users are using in any given share.  Ok, Joe owes us money from lunch last week, so we want to give him a quota of 100MB. Type his name in the Users box. Notice how it now shows you how much data he's currently using. Go ahead and give him a 100M quota and hit the Apply button. If I go back to "Show All", I can see that Joe now has a quota, and no one else does. Sure enough, as soon as I refresh my screen back on Joe's client, he sees that his Z: drive is now only 100MB, and he's more than half way full.  That was easy enough, but what if you wanted to make the whole share have a quota, so that the share itself, no matter who uses it, can only grow to a certain size? That's even easier. Just use the Quota box on the left hand side. Here, I use a Quota on the share of 300MB.  So now I log off as Joe, and log in as Steve. Even though Steve does NOT have a quota, it is showing my Z: drive as 300MB. This would effect anyone, INCLUDING the ROOT user, becuase you specified the Quota to be on the SHARE, not on a person.  Note that back in the Share, if you click the "Show All" text, the window does NOT show Steve, or anyone else, to have a quota of 300MB. Yet we do, because it's on the share itself, not on any user, so this panel does not see that. Ok, here is where it gets FUN.... Let's say you do NOT want a quota on the SHARE, because you want SOME people, like Root and yourself, to have FULL access to it and you want the ability to fill the whole thing up if you darn well feel like it. HOWEVER, you want to give the other users a quota. HOWEVER you have, say, 200 users, and you do NOT feel like typing in each of their names and giving them each a quota, and they are not all members of a AD global group you could use or anything like that.  Hmmmmmm.... No worries, mate. We have a handy-dandy script that can do this for us. Now, this script was written a few years back by Tim Graves, one of our ZFSSA engineers out of the UK. This is not my script. It is NOT supported by Oracle support in any way. It does work fine with the 2011.1.4 code as best as I can tell, but Oracle, and I, are NOT responsible for ANYTHING that you do with this script. Furthermore, I will NOT give you this script, so do not ask me for it. You need to get this from your local Oracle storage SC. I will give it to them. I want this only going to my fellow SCs, who can then work with you to have it and show you how it works.  Here's what it does...Once you add this workflow to the Maintenance-->Workflows section, you click it once to run it. Nothing seems to happen at this point, but something did.   Go back to any share or project. You will see that you now have four new, custom properties on the bottom.  Do NOT touch the bottom two properties, EVER. Only touch the top two. Here, I'm going to give my users a default quota of about 40MB each. The beauty of this script is that it will only effect users that do NOT already have any kind of personal quota. It will only change people who have no quota at all. It does not effect the Root user.  After I hit Apply on the Share screen. Nothing will happen until I go back and run the script again. The first time you run it, it creates the custom properties. The second and all subsequent times you run it, it checks the shares for any users, and applies your quota number to each one of them, UNLESS they already have one set. Notice in the readout below how it did NOT apply to my Joe user, since Joe had a quota set.  Sure enough, when I go back to the "Show All" in the share properties, all of the users who did not have a quota, now have one for 39.1MB. Hmmm... I did my math wrong, didn't I?    That's OK, I'll just change the number of the Custom Default quota again. Here, I am adding a zero on the end.  After I click Apply, and then run the script again, all of my users, except Joe, now have a quota of 391MB  You can customize a person at any time. Here, I took the Steve user, and specifically gave him a Quota of zero. Now when I run the script again, he is different from the rest, so he is no longer effected by the script. Under Show All, I see that Joe is at 100, and Steve has no Quota at all. I can do this all day long. es, you will have to re-run the script every time new users get added. The script only applies the default quota to users that are present at the time the script is ran. However, it would be a simple thing to schedule the script to run each night, or to make an alert to run the script when certain events occur.  For you power users, if you ever want to delete these custom properties and remove the script completely, you will find these properties under the "Schema" section under the Shares section. You can remove them here. There's no need to, however, they don't hurt a thing if you just don't use them.  I hope these tips have helped you out there. Quotas can be fun. 

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• Review of Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7

  - by mbcrump

  I recently acquired a Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7 device from AT&T and wanted to share what I thought of it as an end-user. Before I get started, here are several of my write-ups for the Windows Phone 7. You may want to check out the second article titled: Hands-on WP7 Review of Prototype Hardware. From start to finish with the final version of Visual Studio Tools for Windows Phone 7 Hands-on : Windows Phone 7 Review on Prototype Hardware. Deploying your Windows Phone 7 Application to the actual hardware. Profile your Windows Phone 7 Application for Free Submitting a Windows Phone 7 Application to the Market. Samsung Focus i917 Phone Size: Perfect! I have been carrying around a Dell Streak (Android) and it is about half the size. It is really nice to have a phone that fits in your pocket without a lot of extra bulk. I bought a case for the Focus and it is still a perfect size.  The phone just feels right. Screen: It has a beautiful Super AMOLED 480x800 screen. I only wish it supported a higher resolution. The colors are beautiful especially in an Xbox Live Game.   3G: I use AT&T and I've had spotty reception. This really can't be blamed on the phone as much as the actual carrier. Battery: I've had excellent battery life compared to my iPhone and Android devices. I usually use my phone throughout the day on and off and still have a charge at the end of the day.  Camera/Video: I'm still looking for the option to send the video to YouTube or the Image to Twitter. The images look good, but the phone needs a forward facing camera. I like the iPhone/Android (Dell Streak) camera better. Built-in Speaker: Sounds great. It’s not a wimpy speaker that you cannot hear.  CPU: Very smooth transitioning from one screen to another. The prototype Windows Phone 7 that I had, was no where near as smooth. (It was also running a slower processor though). OS: I actually like the OS but a few things could be better. CONS: Copy and Paste (Supposed to come in the next update) We need more apps (Pandora missing was a big one for me and Slacker’s advertisement sucks!). As time passes, and more developers get on board then this will be fixed. The browser needs some major work. I have tried to make cross-platform (WP7, Android, iPhone and iPad) web apps and the browser that ships with WP7 just can’t handle it.  Apps need to be organized better. Instead of throw them all on one screen, it would help to allow the user to create categories. PROS: Hands down the best gaming experience on a phone. I have all three major phones (iphone, android and wp7). Nothing compares to the gaming experience on the WP7. The phone just works. I’ve had a LOT of glitches with my Android device. I’ve had maybe 2 with my WP7 device. Exchange and Office support are great. Nice integration with Twitter/Facebook and social media. Easy to navigate and find the information you need on one screen. Let’s look at a few pictures and we will wrap up with my final thoughts on the phone. WP7 Home Screen. Back of the phone is as stylish. It is hard to see due to the shadow but it is a very thin phone. What’s included? Manuals Ear buds Data Cable plus Power Adapter Phone Click a picture to enlarge So, what are my final thoughts on the Phone/OS? I love the Samsung Focus and would recommend it to anyone looking for a WP7 device. Like any first generation product, you need to give it a little while to mature. Right now the phone is missing several features that we are all used to using. That doesn’t mean a year from now it will be in the same situation. (I sure hope we won’t). If you are looking to get into mobile development, I believe WP7 is the easiest platform to develop from. This is especially true if you have a background in Silverlight or WPF.    Subscribe to my feed

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• Best development architecture for a small team of programmers

  - by Tio

  Hi all.. I'm in the first month of work in a new company.. and after I met the two programmer's and asked how things are organized in terms of projects inside the company, they simply shrug their shoulders, and said that nothing is organized.. I think my jaw hit the ground that same time.. ( I know some, of you think I should quit, but I'm on a privileged position, I'm the most experienced there, so there's room for me to grow inside the company, and I'm taking the high road ).. So I talked to the IT guy, and one of the programmers, and maybe this week I'm going to get a server all to myself to start organizing things. I've used various architectures in my previous work experiences, on one I was developing in a server on the network ( no source control of course ).. another experience I had was developing in my local computer, with no server on the network, just source control. And at home, I have a mix of the two, everything I code is on a server on the network, and I have those folders under source control, and I also have a no-ip account configured on that server so I can access it everywhere and I can show the clients anything. For me I think this last solution ( the one I have at home ) is the best: Network server with LAMP stack. The server as a public IP so we can access it by domain name. And use subdomains for each project. Everybody works directly on the network server. I think the problem arises, when two or more people want to work on the same project, in this case the only way to do this is by using source control and local repositories, this is great, but I think this turns development a lot more complicated. In the example I gave, to make a change to the code, I would simply need to open the file in my favorite editor, make the change, alter the database, check in the changes into source control and presto all done. Using local repositories, I would have to get the latest version, run the scripts on the local database to update it, alter the file, alter the database, check in the changes to the network server, update the database on the network server, see if everything is running well on the network server, and presto all done, to me this seems overcomplicated for a change on a simple php page. I could share the database for the local development and for the network server, that sure would help. Maybe the best way to do this is just simply: Network server with LAMP stack ( test server so to speak ), public server accessible trough the web. LAMP stack on every developer computer ( minus the database ) We develop locally, test, then check in the changes into the server test and presto. What do you think? Maybe I should start doing this at home.. Thanks and best regards...

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• Silverlight Cream for June 13, 2010 -- #881

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mark Monster. Shoutouts: Adam Kinney has moved his blog, and his first post there is to announce New tutorials on .toolbox on PathListBox and Fluid UI Awesome graphics for the MEF'ed Video Player by Alan Beasley: New MEF Video Player Controls (1st Draft – Article to follow…) It must be a slow relaxing summer weekend, because I only found one post... and Mark submitted this one to me :) From SilverlightCream.com: How to improve the Windows Phone 7 Licensing development experience? Mark Monster is ahead of all of us if he's already programming his WP7 apps for 'trial versions'... but maybe it's time to start learning how to do that stuff :) Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Review quality of code

  - by magol

  I have been asked to quality review two code bases. I've never done anything like that, and need advice on how to perform it and report it. Background There are two providers of code, one in VB and one in C (ISO 9899:1999 (C99)). These two programs do not work so well together, and of course, the two suppliers blames each other. I will therefore as a independent person review both codes, on a comprehensive level review the quality of the codes to find out where it is most likely that the problem lies. I will not try to find problems, but simply review the quality and how simple it is to manage and understand the code. Edit: I have yet not received much information about what the problem consists of. I've just been told that I will examine the code in terms of quality. Not so much more. I do not know the background to why they took this decision.

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• Stopping by the Store

  - by [email protected]

  Registrants Get Online Savings on Oracle Products Have you heard about the Oracle Store? It's the one-stop online shop for buying Oracle software and support at significant savings. Better yet, when you register for Oracle OpenWorld 2010 by April 30, you can get an additional 10% off your next purchase. The 10% discount applies to a one-time "click and buy" checkout, so load up as many items as you can. To get started, you'll need to visit the Oracle OpenWorld registration page to get more information about the promotion, including the promo code and link. It's another great way to turn your early bird registration into a long-term gain for your organization.

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• BizTalk host throttling &ndash; Singleton pattern and High database size

  - by S.E.R.

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/SERivas/archive/2013/06/30/biztalk-host-throttling-ndash-singleton-pattern-and-high-database-size.aspxI have worked for some days around the singleton pattern (for those unfamiliar with it, read this post by Victor Fehlberg) and have come across a few very interesting posts, among which one dealt with performance issues (here, also by Victor Fehlberg). Simply put: if you have an orchestration which implements the singleton pattern, then performances will continuously decrease as the orchestration receives and consumes messages, and that behavior is more obvious when the orchestration never ends (ie : it keeps looping and never terminates or completes). As I experienced the same kind of problem (actually I was alerted by SCOM, which told me that the host was being throttled because of High database size), I thought it would be a good idea to dig a little bit a see what happens deep inside BizTalk and thus understand the reasons for this behavior. NOTE: in this article, I will focus on this High database size throttling condition. I will try and work on the other conditions in some not too distant future… Test conditions The singleton orchestration For the purpose of this study, I have created the following orchestration, which is a very basic implementation of a singleton that piles up incoming messages, then does something else when a certain timeout has been reached without receiving another message: Throttling settings I have two distinct hosts : one that hosts the receive port (basic FILE port) : Ports_ReceiveHostone that hosts the orchestration : ProcessingHost In order to emphasize the throttling mechanism, I have modified the throttling settings for each of these hosts are as follows (all other parameters are set to the default value): [Throttling thresholds] Message count in database: 500 (default value : 50000) Evolution of performance counters when submitting messages Since we are investigating the High database size throttling condition, here are the performance counter that we should take a look at (all of them are in the BizTalk:Message Agent performance object): Database sizeHigh database sizeMessage delivery throttling stateMessage publishing throttling stateMessage delivery delay (ms)Message publishing delay (ms)Message delivery throttling state durationMessage publishing throttling state duration (If you are not used to Perfmon, I strongly recommend that you start using it right now: it is a wonderful tool that allows you to open the hood and see what is going on inside BizTalk – and other systems) Database size It is quite obvious that we will start by watching the database size and high database size counters, just to see when the first reaches the configured threshold (500) and when the second rings the alarm. NOTE : During this test I submitted 600 messages, one message at a time every 10ms to see the evolution of the counters we have previously selected. It might not show very well on this screenshot, but here is what happened: From 15:46:50 to 15:47:50, the database size for the Ports_ReceiveHost host (blue line) kept growing until it reached a maximum of 504.At 15:47:50, the high database size alert fires At first I was surprised by this result: why is it the database size of the receiving host that keeps growing since it is the processing host that piles up messages? Actually, it makes total sense. This counter measures the size of the database queue that is being filled by the host, not consumed. Therefore, the high database size alert is raised on the host that fills the queue: Ports_ReceiveHost. More information is available on the Public MPWiki page. Now, looking at the Message publishing throttling state for the receiving host (green line), we can see that a throttling condition has been reached at 15:47:50: We can also see that the Message publishing delay(ms) (blue line) has begun growing slowly from this point. All of this explains why performances keep decreasing when a singleton keeps processing new messages: the database size grows and when it has exceeded the Message count in database threshold, the host is throttled and the publishing delay keeps increasing. Digging further So, what happens to the database queue then? Is it flushed some day or does it keep growing and growing indefinitely? The real question being: will the host be throttled forever because of this singleton? To answer this question, I set the Message count in database threshold to 20 (this value is very low in order not to wait for too long, otherwise I certainly would have fallen asleep in front of my screen) and I submitted 30 messages. The test was started at 18:26. At 18:56 (ie : exactly 30min later) the throttling was stopped and the database size was divided by 2. 30 min later again, the database size had dropped to almost zero: I guess I’ll have to find some documentation and do some more testing before I sort this out! My guess is that some maintenance job is at work here, though I cannot tell which one Digging even further If we take a look at the Message delivery throttling state counter for the processing host, we can see that this host was also throttled during the submission of the 600 documents: The value for the counter was 1, meaning that Message delivery incoming rate for the host instance exceeds the Message delivery outgoing rate * the specified Rate overdrive factor (percent) value. We will see this another day… :) A last word Let’s end this article with a warning: DO NOT CHANGE THE THROTTLING SETTINGS LIGHTLY! The temptation can be great to just bypass throttling by setting very high values for each parameter (or zero in some cases, which simply disables throttling). Nevertheless, always keep in mind that this mechanism is here for a very good reason: prevent your BizTalk infrastructure from exploding!! So whatever you do with those settings, do a lot of testing and benchmarking!

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• Selling Solutions, Not Products

  - by David Dorf

  When I think about next-generation retailers, the names that come to mind are Apple, Whole Foods, Lulu Lemon, and IKEA.  They may not be the biggest retailers, but they are certainly growing fast. Success is never defined by just one dimension, and these retailers execute well across many dimensions, but the one that stands out for me is customer experience.  These stores feel...approachable...part of the community...local.  Customers are not intimidated to ask questions, and staff seem to go out of their way to help. What's makes these retailers stand out in the industry?  These retailers aren't selling products -- they're selling solutions.  Think about that.  You think you're going to the Apple store to buy a phone, but you're actually buying a communications solution that handles much, much more.  If you carry an iPhone, your life has changed.  The way you do things is different.  The impacts go much beyond a simple phone. Solutions start with a problem, which is why these retailers greet customers with "what brought you in today," or "can I answer any questions for you?"  Good retailers establish a relationship, even if it lasts only a few minutes. You don't walk into Whole Foods looking for cans of soup.  You are looking for meals: healthy snacks, interesting lunches, exotic dinners.  Its a learning experience where you might discover solutions to problems you didn't know you had.  Mention what foods you like, and you'll get a list of similar items you had not considered.  I didn't know I needed a closet organizer until I visited an IKEA and learned about all the options.  They were able to customize the solution to meet my needs, and now I'm much more organized. One of the differences between selling products and selling solutions is training.  Visit any of these retailers' sites and you'll see a long list of in-store events for the benefit of customers.  You can buy exercise clothing from Lulu Lemon, and also learn new yoga techniques, meet like-minded people, and branch off to other fitness regimes via their ambassadors.  You can visit the Geek Bar at Apple, eat lunch at IKEA, and learn to cook at Whole Foods. These retailers are making an investment in a relationship with their customers.  They are showing loyalty to their customers before asking for it back.  In the long-run, this strategic approach will outlive any scan-and-bag mentality.

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• The Winds of Change are a Blowin&rsquo;

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now.  Not the fan part, but the paying customer part.  I’m still a huge fan.  I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often).  I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books.  I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do.  But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team.  I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools.  Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more.  (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it.  Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools.  They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum).  I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video).  I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime.  Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited.  I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up.  So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool.  This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with.  When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to.  The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route.  Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford:  Team Foundation Server.  And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now.  So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools.  I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny).  Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction.  As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching.  So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant.  It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry).  As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company.  This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with.  We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now.  This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time.  We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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• Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC Review

  - by Ben Griswold

  A few years back I started dallying with test-driven development, but I never fully committed to the practice. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the value of TDD; it was more a matter of not completely understanding how to incorporate “test first” into my everyday development. Back in my web forms days, I could point fingers at the framework for my ignorance and laziness. After all, web forms weren’t exactly designed for testability so who could blame me for not embracing TDD in those conditions, right? But when I switched to ASP.NET MVC and quickly found myself fresh out of excuses and it became instantly clear that it was time to get my head around red-green-refactor once and for all or I would regretfully miss out on one of the biggest selling points the new framework had to offer. I have previously written about how I learned ASP.NET MVC. It was primarily hands on learning but I did read a couple of ASP.NET MVC books along the way. The books I read dedicated a chapter or two to TDD and they certainly addressed the benefits of TDD and how MVC was designed with testability in mind, but TDD was merely an afterthought compared to, well, teaching one how to code the model, view and controller. This approach made some sense, and I learned a bunch about MVC from those books, but when it came to TDD the books were just a teaser and an opportunity missed.  But then I got lucky – Jonathan McCracken contacted me and asked if I’d review his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, and it was just what I needed to get over the TDD hump. As the title suggests, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC takes a different approach to learning MVC as it focuses on testing right from the very start. McCracken wastes no time and swiftly familiarizes us with the framework by building out a trivial Quote-O-Matic application and then dedicates the better part of his book to testing first – first by explaining TDD and then coding a full-featured Getting Organized application inspired by David Allen’s popular book, Getting Things Done. If you are a learn-by-example kind of coder (like me), you will instantly appreciate and enjoy McCracken’s style – its fast-moving, pragmatic and focused on only the most relevant information required to get you going with ASP.NET MVC and TDD. The book continues with the test-first theme but McCracken moves away from the sample application and incorporates other practical skills like persisting models with NHibernate, leveraging Inversion of Control with the IControllerFactory and building a RESTful web service. What I most appreciated about this section was McCracken’s use of and praise for open source libraries like Rhino Mocks, SQLite and StructureMap (to name just a few) and productivity tools like ReSharper, Web Platform Installer and ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard.  McCracken’s emphasis on real world, pragmatic development was clearly demonstrated in every tool choice, straight-forward code block and developer tip. Whether one is already familiar with the tools/tips or not, McCracken’s thought process is easily understood and appreciated. The final section of the book walks the reader through security and deployment – everything from error handling and logging with ELMAH, to ASP.NET Health Monitoring, to using MSBuild with automated builds, to the deployment  of ASP.NET MVC to various web environments. These chapters, like those prior, offer enough information and explanation to simply help you get the job done.  Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will turn you into an expert MVC developer overnight?  Well, no.  I don’t think any book can make that claim.  If that were possible, I think book list prices would skyrocket!  That said, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC provides a solid foundation and a unique (and dare I say necessary) approach to learning ASP.NET MVC.  Along the way McCracken shares loads of very practical software development tips and references numerous tools and libraries. The bottom line is it’s a great ASP.NET MVC primer – if you’re new to ASP.NET MVC it’s just what you need to get started.  Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will give you everything you need to start employing TDD in your everyday development?  Well, I used to think that learning TDD required a lot of practice and, if you’re lucky enough, the guidance of a mentor or coach.  I used to think that one couldn’t learn TDD from a book alone. Well, I’m still no pro, but I’m testing first now and Jonathan McCracken and his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, played a big part in making this happen.  If you are an MVC developer and a TDD newb, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC is just the book for you.

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• Is the “jQuery programming style” a kind of Reactive programming?

  - by Peter Krauss

  jQuery is a Javascript library and framework, but when we are programming with jQuery into DOM problems/solutions, we can practice a style quite different of programming... We can read about jQuery at Wikipedia, The set of jQuery core features — DOM element selections, traversal and manipulation —, enabled by its selector engine (...), created a new "programming style", fusing algorithms and DOM-data-structures This question is similar to the "subquestion-3" of this question but not so generic. The focus here is about this new kind of "programming style"... So, the question: Is the "jQuery programming style in DOM context" a new paradign? Or it is more one example of reactive programming (not "cell-oriented" but "DOM-node oriented") or another one? We have no "standard taxonomy of paradigms", so, please, in your answer, indicate also your "best choice for Wikipedia Paradign". Example: if you understand that "jQuery programming DOM" is like "awk filtering data", your choice can be event-driven.

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 8, PLINQ’s ForAll Method

  - by Reed

  Parallel LINQ extends LINQ to Objects, and is typically very similar.  However, as I previously discussed, there are some differences.  Although the standard way to handle simple Data Parellelism is via Parallel.ForEach, it’s possible to do the same thing via PLINQ. PLINQ adds a new method unavailable in standard LINQ which provides new functionality… LINQ is designed to provide a much simpler way of handling querying, including filtering, ordering, grouping, and many other benefits.  Reading the description in LINQ to Objects on MSDN, it becomes clear that the thinking behind LINQ deals with retrieval of data.  LINQ works by adding a functional programming style on top of .NET, allowing us to express filters in terms of predicate functions, for example. PLINQ is, generally, very similar.  Typically, when using PLINQ, we write declarative statements to filter a dataset or perform an aggregation.  However, PLINQ adds one new method, which provides a very different purpose: ForAll. The ForAll method is defined on ParallelEnumerable, and will work upon any ParallelQuery<T>.  Unlike the sequence operators in LINQ and PLINQ, ForAll is intended to cause side effects.  It does not filter a collection, but rather invokes an action on each element of the collection. At first glance, this seems like a bad idea.  For example, Eric Lippert clearly explained two philosophical objections to providing an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method, one of which still applies when parallelized.  The sole purpose of this method is to cause side effects, and as such, I agree that the ForAll method “violates the functional programming principles that all the other sequence operators are based upon”, in exactly the same manner an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method would violate these principles.  Eric Lippert’s second reason for disliking a ForEach extension method does not necessarily apply to ForAll – replacing ForAll with a call to Parallel.ForEach has the same closure semantics, so there is no loss there. Although ForAll may have philosophical issues, there is a pragmatic reason to include this method.  Without ForAll, we would take a fairly serious performance hit in many situations.  Often, we need to perform some filtering or grouping, then perform an action using the results of our filter.  Using a standard foreach statement to perform our action would avoid this philosophical issue: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action foreach (var item in filteredItems) { // These will now run serially item.DoSomething(); } .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; } This would cause a loss in performance, since we lose any parallelism in place, and cause all of our actions to be run serially. We could easily use a Parallel.ForEach instead, which adds parallelism to the actions: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action once the filter completes Parallel.ForEach(filteredItems, item => { // These will now run in parallel item.DoSomething(); }); This is a noticeable improvement, since both our filtering and our actions run parallelized.  However, there is still a large bottleneck in place here.  The problem lies with my comment “perform an action once the filter completes”.  Here, we’re parallelizing the filter, then collecting all of the results, blocking until the filter completes.  Once the filtering of every element is completed, we then repartition the results of the filter, reschedule into multiple threads, and perform the action on each element.  By moving this into two separate statements, we potentially double our parallelization overhead, since we’re forcing the work to be partitioned and scheduled twice as many times. This is where the pragmatism comes into play.  By violating our functional principles, we gain the ability to avoid the overhead and cost of rescheduling the work: // Perform an action on the results of our filter collection .AsParallel() .Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ) .ForAll( i => i.DoSomething() ); The ability to avoid the scheduling overhead is a compelling reason to use ForAll.  This really goes back to one of the key points I discussed in data parallelism: Partition your problem in a way to place the most work possible into each task.  Here, this means leaving the statement attached to the expression, even though it causes side effects and is not standard usage for LINQ. This leads to my one guideline for using ForAll: The ForAll extension method should only be used to process the results of a parallel query, as returned by a PLINQ expression. Any other usage scenario should use Parallel.ForEach, instead.

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• An Honest look at SharePoint Web Services

  - by juanlarios

  INTRODUCTION If you are a SharePoint developer you know that there are two basic ways to develop against SharePoint. 1) The object Model 2) Web services. SharePoint object model has the advantage of being quite rich. Anything you can do through the SharePoint UI as an administrator or end user, you can do through the object model. In fact everything that is done through the UI is done through the object model behind the scenes. The major disadvantage to getting at SharePoint this way is that the code needs to run on the server. This means that all web parts, event receivers, features, etc… all of this is code that is deployed to the server. The second way to get to SharePoint is through the built in web services. There are many articles on how to manipulate web services, how to authenticate to them and interact with them. The basic idea is that a remote application or process can contact SharePoint through a web service. Lots has been written about how great these web services are. This article is written to document the limitations, some of the issues and frustrations with working with SharePoint built in web services. Ultimately, for the tasks I was given to , SharePoint built in web services did not suffice. My evaluation of SharePoint built in services was compared against creating my own WCF Services to do what I needed. The current project I'm working on right now involved several "integration points". A remote application, installed on a separate server was to contact SharePoint and perform an task or operation. So I decided to start up Visual Studio and built a DLL and basically have 2 layers of logic. An integration layer and a data layer. A good friend of mine pointed me to SOLID principles and referred me to some videos and tutorials about it. I decided to implement the methodology (although a lot of the principles are common sense and I already incorporated in my coding practices). I was to deliver this dll to the application team and they would simply call the methods exposed by this dll and voila! it would do some task or operation in SharePoint. SOLUTION My integration layer implemented an interface that defined some of the basic integration tasks that I was to put together. My data layer was about the same, it implemented an interface with some of the tasks that I was going to develop. This gave me the opportunity to develop different data layers, ultimately different ways to get at SharePoint if I needed to. This is a classic SOLID principle. In this case it proved to be quite helpful because I wrote one data layer completely implementing SharePoint built in Web Services and another implementing my own WCF Service that I wrote. I should mention there is another layer underneath the data layer. In referencing SharePoint or WCF services in my visual studio project I created a class for every web service call. So for example, if I used List.asx. I created a class called "DocumentRetreival" this class would do the grunt work to connect to the correct URL, It would perform the basic operation of contacting the service and so on. If I used a view.asmx, I implemented a class called "ViewRetrieval" with the same idea as the last class but it would now interact with all he operations in view.asmx. This gave my data layer the ability to perform multiple calls without really worrying about some of the grunt work each class performs. This again, is a classic SOLID principle. So, in order to compare them side by side we can look at both data layers and with is involved in each. Lets take a look at the "Create Project" task or operation. The integration point is described as , "dll is to provide a way to create a project in SharePoint". Projects , in this case are basically document libraries. I am to implement a way in which a remote application can create a document library in SharePoint. Easy enough right? Use the list.asmx Web service in SharePoint. So here we go! Lets take a look at the code. I added the List.asmx web service reference to my project and this is the class that contacts it:  class DocumentRetrieval     {         private ListsSoapClient _service;      d   private bool _impersonation;         public DocumentRetrieval(bool impersonation, string endpt)         {             _service = new ListsSoapClient();             this.SetEndPoint(string.Format("{0}/{1}", endpt, ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["List"]));             _impersonation = impersonation;             if (_impersonation)             {                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.Password = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["password"];                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.UserName = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["username"];                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel =                     System.Security.Principal.TokenImpersonationLevel.Impersonation;             }     private void SetEndPoint(string p)          {             _service.Endpoint.Address = new EndpointAddress(p);          }          /// <summary>         /// Creates a document library with specific name and templateID         /// </summary>         /// <param name="listName">New list name</param>         /// <param name="templateID">Template ID</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public XmlElement CreateLibrary(string listName, int templateID, ref ExceptionContract exContract)         {             XmlDocument sample = new XmlDocument();             XmlElement viewCol = sample.CreateElement("Empty");             try             {                 _service.Open();                 viewCol = _service.AddList(listName, "", templateID);             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/CreateLibrary", ex.GetType(), "Connection Error", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error);                             }finally             {                 _service.Close();             }                                      return viewCol;         } } There was a lot more in this class (that I am not including) because i was reusing the grunt work and making other operations with LIst.asmx, For example, updating content types, changing or configuring lists or document libraries. One of the first things I noticed about working with the built in services is that you are really at the mercy of what is available to you. Before creating a document library (Project) I wanted to expose a IsProjectExisting method. This way the integration or data layer could recognize if a library already exists. Well there is no service call or method available to do that check. So this is what I wrote:   public bool DocLibExists(string listName, ref ExceptionContract exContract)         {             try             {                 var allLists = _service.GetListCollection();                                return allLists.ChildNodes.OfType<XmlElement>().ToList().Exists(x => x.Attributes["Title"].Value ==listName);             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/GetList/GetListWSCall", ex.GetType(), "Unable to Retrieve List Collection", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error);             }             return false;         } This really just gets an XMLElement with all the lists. It was then up to me to sift through the clutter and noise and see if Document library already existed. This took a little bit of getting used to. Now instead of working with code, you are working with XMLElement response format from web service. I wrote a LINQ query to go through and find if the attribute "Title" existed and had a value of the listname then it would return True, if not False. I didn't particularly like working this way. Dealing with XMLElement responses and then having to manipulate it to get at the exact data I was looking for. Once the check for the DocLibExists, was done, I would either create the document library or send back an error indicating the document library already existed. Now lets examine the code that actually creates the document library. It does what you are really after, it creates a document library. Notice how the template ID is really an integer. Every document library template in SharePoint has an ID associated with it. Document libraries, Image Library, Custom List, Project Tasks, etc… they all he a unique integer associated with it. Well, that's great but the client came back to me and gave me some specifics that each "project" or document library, should have. They specified they had 3 types of projects. Each project would have unique views, about 10 views for each project. Each Project specified unique configurations (auditing, versioning, content types, etc…) So what turned out to be a simple implementation of creating a document library as a repository for a project, turned out to be quite involved.  The first thing I thought of was to create a template for document library. There are other ways you can do this too. Using the web Service call, you could configure views, versioning, even content types, etc… the only catch is, you have to be working quite extensively with CAML. I am not fond of CAML. I can do it and work with it, I just don't like doing it. It is quite touchy and at times it is quite tough to understand where errors were made with CAML statements. Working with Web Services and CAML proved to be quite annoying. The service call would return a generic error message that did not particularly point me to a CAML statement syntax error, or even a CAML error. I was not sure if it was a security , performance or code based issue. It was quite tough to work with. At times it was difficult to work with because of the way SharePoint handles metadata. There are "Names", "Display Name", and "StaticName" fields. It was quite tough to understand at times, which one to use. So it took a lot of trial and error. There are tools that can help with CAML generation. There is also now intellisense for CAML statements in Visual Studio that might help but ultimately I'm not fond of CAML with Web Services.   So I decided on the template. So my plan was to create create a document library, configure it accordingly and then use The Template Builder that comes with the SharePoint SDK. This tool allows you to create site templates, list template etc… It is quite interesting because it does not generate an STP file, it actually generates an xml definition and a feature you can activate and make that template available on a site or site collection. The first issue I experienced with this is that one of the specifications to this template was that the "All Documents" view was to have 2 web parts on it. Well, it turns out that using the template builder , it did not include the web parts as part of the list template definition it generated. It backed up the settings, the views, the content types but not the custom web parts. I still decided to try this even without the web parts on the page. This new template defined a new Document library definition with a unique ID. The problem was that the service call accepts an int but it only has access to the built in library int definitions. Any new ones added or created will not be available to create. So this made it impossible for me to approach the problem this way.     I should also mention that one of the nice features about SharePoint is the ability to create list templates, back them up and then create lists based on that template. It can all be done by end user administrators. These templates are quite unique because they are saved as an STP file and not an xml definition. I also went this route and tried to see if there was another service call where I could create a document library based no given template name. Nope! none.      After some thinking I decide to implement a WCF service to do this creation for me. I was quite certain that the object model would allow me to create document libraries base on a template in which an ID was required and also templates saved as STP files. Now I don't want to bother with posting the code to contact WCF service because it's self explanatory, but I will post the code that I used to create a list with custom template. public ServiceResult CreateProject(string name, string templateName, string projectId)         {             string siteurl = SPContext.Current.Site.Url;             Guid webguid = SPContext.Current.Web.ID;                        using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteurl))             {                 using (SPWeb rootweb = site.RootWeb)                 {                     SPListTemplateCollection temps = site.GetCustomListTemplates(rootweb);                     ProcessWeb(siteurl, webguid, web => Act_CreateProject(web, name, templateName, projectId, temps));                 }//SpWeb             }//SPSite              return _globalResult;                   }         private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) {                         var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName));             if (temp != null)             {                             try                 {                                         Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp);                     SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid];                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success");                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString());                 }                                       }        private void ProcessWeb(string siteurl, Guid webguid, Action<SPWeb> action) {                        using (SPSite sitecollection = new SPSite(siteurl)) {                 using (SPWeb web = sitecollection.AllWebs[webguid]) {                     action(web);                 }                     }                  } This code is actually some of the code I implemented for the service. there was a lot more I did on Project Creation which I will cover in my next blog post. I implemented an ACTION method to process the web. This allowed me to properly dispose the SPWEb and SPSite objects and not rewrite this code over and over again. So I implemented a WCF service to create projects for me, this allowed me to do a lot more than just create a document library with a template, it now gave me the flexibility to do just about anything the client wanted at project creation. Once this was implemented , the client came back to me and said, "we reference all our projects with ID's in our application. we want SharePoint to do the same". This has been something I have been doing for a little while now but I do hope that SharePoint 2010 can have more of an answer to this and address it properly. I have been adding metadata to SPWebs through property bag. I believe I have blogged about it before. This time it required metadata added to a document library. No problem!!! I also mentioned these web parts that were to go on the "All Documents" View. I took the opportunity to configure them to the appropriate settings. There were two settings that needed to be set on these web parts. One of them was a Project ID configured in the webpart properties. The following code enhances and replaces the "Act_CreateProject " method above:  private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) {                         var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName));             if (temp != null)             {                 SPLimitedWebPartManager wpmgr = null;                               try                 {                                         Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp);                     SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid];                     SPFolder rootFolder = newList.RootFolder;                     rootFolder.Properties.Add(KEY, projectId);                     rootFolder.Update();                     if (rootFolder.ParentWeb != targetsite)                         rootFolder.ParentWeb.Dispose();                     if (!templateName.Contains("Natural"))                     {                         SPView alldocumentsview = newList.Views.Cast<SPView>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Title.Equals(ALLDOCUMENTS));                         SPFile alldocfile = targetsite.GetFile(alldocumentsview.ServerRelativeUrl);                         wpmgr = alldocfile.GetLimitedWebPartManager(PersonalizationScope.Shared);                         ConfigureWebPart(wpmgr, projectId, CUSTOMWPNAME);                                              alldocfile.Update();                     }                                        if (newList.ParentWeb != targetsite)                         newList.ParentWeb.Dispose();                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success");                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString());                 }                 finally                 {                     if (wpmgr != null)                     {                         wpmgr.Web.Dispose();                         wpmgr.Dispose();                     }                 }             }                         }       private void ConfigureWebPart(SPLimitedWebPartManager mgr, string prjId, string webpartname)         {             var wp = mgr.WebParts.Cast<System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.DisplayTitle.Equals(webpartname));             if (wp != null)             {                           (wp as ListRelationshipWebPart.ListRelationshipWebPart).ProjectID = prjId;                 mgr.SaveChanges(wp);             }         }   This Shows you how I was able to set metadata on the document library. It has to be added to the RootFolder of the document library, Unfortunately, the SPList does not have a Property bag that I can add a key\value pair to. It has to be done on the root folder. Now everything in the integration will reference projects by ID's and will not care about names. My, "DocLibExists" will now need to be changed because a web service is not set up to look at property bags.  I had to write another method on the Service to do the equivalent but with ID's instead of names.  The second thing you will notice about the code is the use of the Webpartmanager. I have seen several examples online, and also read a lot about memory leaks, The above code does not produce memory leaks. The web part manager creates an SPWeb, so just dispose it like I did. CONCLUSION This is a long long post so I will stop here for now, I will continue with more comparisons and limitations in my next post. My conclusion for this example is that Web Services will do the trick if you can suffer through CAML and if you are doing some simple operations. For Everything else, there's WCF! **** fireI apologize for the disorganization of this post, I was on a bus on a 12 hour trip to IOWA while I wrote it, I was half asleep and half awake, hopefully it makes enough sense to someone.

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• Unable to install scanner software for Cannon Scanner

  - by Gerrie Jooste

  I am getting the following message when I am trying to do a CanonScan 5600F installation and setup from CD-ROM Archive: /media/CANOSCAN/MSETUP4.EXE [/media/CANOSCAN/MSETUP4.EXE] End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on the last disk(s) of this archive. zipinfo: cannot find zipfile directory in one of /media/CANOSCAN/MSETUP4.EXE or /media/CANOSCAN/MSETUP4.EXE.zip, and cannot find /media/CANOSCAN/MSETUP4.EXE.ZIP, period.

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• DIY Arcade Build Packed into an IKEA Console Table

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you checked out the Raspberry Pi-powered arcade table we shared earlier this week but want an all-in-one solution that doesn’t require as much configuration, this table uses a pre-programmed board that comes loaded with arcade classics. Courtesy of tinker Casper36, we’re treated to a compact build hidden inside an IKEA console table. One of the most polished aspects of this build is how well hidden the flush-mounted screen is under the dark glass tabletop–when the screen it just looks like the table has a patterned glass insert. Hit up the link below for the full photo build-log. IKEA Console Arcade Build [via Make] 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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• SQL SERVER – Weekend Project – Visiting Friend’s Company – Koenig Solutions

  - by pinaldave

  I have decided to do some interesting experiments every weekend and share it next week as a weekend project on the blog. Many times our business lives and personal lives are very separate, however this post will talk about one instance where my two lives connect. This weekend I visited my friend’s company. My friend owns Koenig, so of course I am very interested so see that they are doing well.  I have been very impressed this year, as they have expanded into multiple cities and are offering more and more classes about Business Intelligence, Project Management, networking, and much more. Koenig Solutions originally were a company that focused on training IT professionals – from topics like databases and even English language courses.  As the company grew more popular, Koenig began their blog to keep fans updated, and gradually have added more and more courses. I am very happy for my friend’s success, but as a technology enthusiast I am also pleased with Koenig Solutions’ success.  Whenever anyone in our field improves, the field as a whole does better.  Koenig offers high quality classes on a variety of topics at a variety of levels, so anyone can benefit from browsing this blog. I am a big fan of technology (obviously), and I feel blessed to have gotten in on the “ground floor,” even though there are some people out there who think technology has advanced as far as possible – I believe they will be proven wrong.  And that is why I think companies like Koenig Solutions are so important – they are providing training and support in a quickly growing field, and providing job skills in this tough economy. I believe this particular post really highlights how I, and Koenig, feel about the IT industry.  It is quickly expanding, and job opportunities are sure to abound – but how can the average person get started in this exciting field?  This post emphasizes that knowledge is power – know what interests you in the IT field, get an education, and continue your training even after you’ve gotten your foot in the door. Koenig Solutions provides what I feel is one of the most important services in the modern world – in person training.  They obviously offer many online courses, but you can also set up physical, face-to-face training through their website.  As I mentioned before, they offer a wide variety of classes that cater to nearly every IT skill you can think of.  If you have more specific needs, they also offer one of the best English language training courses.  English is turning into the language of technology, so these courses can ensure that you are keeping up the pace. Koenig Solutions and I agree about how important training can be, and even better – they provide some of the best training around.  We share ideals and I am very happy see the success of my friend. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLAuthority Author Visit, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Developer Training

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