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• ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 2 of 2 &ndash; Memory Profiler)

  - by ToStringTheory

  One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS memory profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction – Part 2 In my last post, I reviewed the feature packed Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler.  Separate from the Red Gate Performance Profiler is the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler – a simple, easy to use utility for checking how your application is handling memory management…  A tool that I wish I had had many times in the past.  This post will be focusing on the ANTS Memory Profiler and its tool set. The memory profiler has a large assortment of features just like the Performance Profiler, with the new session looking nearly exactly alike: ANTS Memory Profiler Memory profiling is not something that I have to do very often…  In the past, the few cases I’ve had to find a memory leak in an application I have usually just had to trace the code of the operations being performed to look for oddities…  Sadly, I have come across more undisposed/non-using’ed IDisposable objects, usually from ADO.Net than I would like to ever see.  Support is not fun, however using ANTS Memory Profiler makes this task easier.  For this round of testing, I am going to use the same code from my previous example, using the WPF application. This time, I will choose the ‘Profile Memory’ option from the ANTS menu in Visual Studio, which launches the solution in its currently configured state/start-up project, and then launches the ANTS Memory Profiler to help.  It prepopulates all of the fields with the current project information, and all I have to do is select the ‘Start Profiling’ option. When the window comes up, it is actually quite barren, just giving ideas on how to work the profiler.  You start by getting to the point in your application that you want to profile, and then taking a ‘Memory Snapshot’.  This performs a full garbage collection, and snapshots the managed heap.  Using the same WPF app as before, I will go ahead and take a snapshot now. As you can see, ANTS is already giving me lots of information regarding the snapshot, however this is just a snapshot.  The whole point of the profiler is to perform an action, usually one where a memory problem is being noticed, and then take another snapshot and perform a diff between them to see what has changed.  I am going to go ahead and generate 5000 primes, and then take another snapshot: As you can see, ANTS is already giving me a lot of new information about this snapshot compared to the last.  Information such as difference in memory usage, fragmentation, class usage, etc…  If you take more snapshots, you can use the dropdown at the top to set your actual comparison snapshots. If you beneath the timeline, you will see a breadcrumb trail showing how best to approach profiling memory using ANTS.  When you first do the comparison, you start on the Summary screen.  You can either use the charts at the bottom, or switch to the class list screen to get to the next step.  Here is the class list screen: As you can see, it lists information about all of the instances between the snapshots, as well as at the bottom giving you a way to filter by telling ANTS what your problem is.  I am going to go ahead and select the Int16[] to look at the Instance Categorizer Using the instance categorizer, you can travel backwards to see where all of the instances are coming from.  It may be hard to see in this image, but hopefully the lightbox (click on it) will help: I can see that all of these instances are rooted to the application through the UI TextBlock control.  This image will probably be even harder to see, however using the ‘Instance Retention Graph’, you can trace an objects memory inheritance up the chain to see its roots as well.  This is a simple example, as this is simply a known element.  Usually you would be profiling an actual problem, and comparing those differences.  I know in the past, I have spotted a problem where a new context was created per page load, and it was rooted into the application through an event.  As the application began to grow, performance and reliability problems started to emerge.  A tool like this would have been a great way to identify the problem quickly. Overview Overall, I think that the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler is a great utility for debugging those pesky leaks.  3 Biggest Pros: Easy to use interface with lots of options for configuring profiling session Intuitive and helpful interface for drilling down from summary, to instance, to root graphs ANTS provides an API for controlling the profiler. Not many options, but still helpful. 2 Biggest Cons: Inability to automatically snapshot the memory by interval Lack of complete integration with Visual Studio via an extension panel Ratings Ease of Use (9/10) – I really do believe that they have brought simplicity to the once difficult task of memory profiling.  I especially liked how it stepped you further into the drilldown by directing you towards the best options. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do.  Features (7/10) – A really great set of features all around in the application, however, I would like to see some ability for automatically triggering snapshots based on intervals or framework level items such as events. Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good.  their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (9/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find.  With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (9/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Memory Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel.  Thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead – I told you it would be shorter!  Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think!  I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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• Big data: An evening in the life of an actual buyer

  - by Jean-Pierre Dijcks

  Here I am, and this is an actual story of one of my evenings, trying to spend money with a company and ultimately failing. I just gave up and bought a service from another vendor, not the incumbent. Here is that story and how I think big data could actually fix this (and potentially prevent some of this from happening). In the end this story should illustrate how big data can benefit me (get me what I want without causing grief) and the company I am trying to buy something from. Note: Lots of details left out, I have no intention of being the annoyed blogger moaning about a specific company. What did I want to get? We watch TV, we have internet and we do have a land line. The land line is from a different vendor then the TV and the internet. I have decided that this makes no sense and I was going to get a bundle (no need to infer who this is, I just picked the generic bundle word as this is what I want to get) of all three services as this seems to save me money. I also want to not talk to people, I just want to click on a website when I feel like it and get it all sorted. I do think that is reality. I want to just do my shopping at 9.30pm while watching silly reruns on TV. Problem 1 - Bad links So, I'm an existing customer of the company I want to buy my bundle from. I go to the website, I click on offers. Turns out they are offers for new customers. After grumbling about how good they are, I click on offers for existing customers. Bummer, it goes to offers for new customers, so I click again on the link for offers for existing customers. No cigar... it just does not work. Big data solutions: 1) Do not show an existing customer the offers for new customers unless they are the same => This is only partially doable without login, but if a customer logs in the application should always know that this is an existing customer. But in general, imagine I do this from my home going through the internet service of this vendor to their domain... an instant filter should move me into the "existing customer route". 2) Flag dead or incorrect links => I've clicked the link for "existing customer offers" at least 3 times in under 5 seconds... Identifying patterns like this is easy in Hadoop and can very quickly make a list of potentially incorrect links. No need for realtime fixing, just the fact that this link can be pro-actively fixed across my entire web domain is a good thing. Preventative maintenance! Problem 2 - Purchase cannot be completed Apart from the fact that the browsing pattern to actually get to what I want is poorly designed, my purchase never gets past a specific point. In other words, I put something into my shopping cart and when I want to move on the application either crashes (with me going to an error page) or hangs or goes into something like chat. So I try again, and again and again. I think I tried this entire path (while being logged in!!) at least 10 times over the course of 20 minutes. I also clicked on the feedback button and, frustrated as I was, tried to explain this did not work... Big Data Solutions: 1) This web site does shopping cart analysis. I got an email next day stating I have things in my shopping cart, just click here to complete my purchase. After the above experience, this just added insult to my pain... 2) What should have happened, is a Hadoop job going over all logged in customers that are on the buy flow. It should flag anyone who is trying (multiple attempts from the same user to do the same thing), analyze the shopping card, the clicks to identify what the customers wants, his feedback provided (note: always own your own website feedback, never just farm this out!!) and in a short turn around time (30 minutes to 2 hours or so) email me with a link to complete my purchase. Not with a link to my shopping cart 12 hours later, but a link to actually achieve what I wanted... Why should this company go through the big data effort? I do believe this is relatively easy to do using our Oracle Event Processing and Big Data Appliance solutions combined. It is almost so simple (to my mind) that it makes no sense that this is not in place? But, now I am ranting... Why is this interesting? It is because of $$$$. After trying really hard, I mean I did this all in the evening, and again in the morning before going to work. I kept on failing, But I really wanted this to work... so an email that said, sorry, we noticed you tried to get a bundle (the log knows what I wanted, where I failed, so easy to generate), here is the link to click and complete your purchase. And here is 2 movies on us as an apology would have kept me as a customer, and got the additional $$$$ per month for the next couple of years. It would also lead to upsell on my phone package etc. Instead, I went to a completely different company, bought service from them. Lost money for company A, negative sentiment for company A and me telling this story at the water cooler so I'm influencing more people to think negatively about company A. All in all, a loss of easy money, a ding in sentiment and image where a relatively simple solution exists and can be in place on the software I describe routinely in this blog... For those who are coming to Openworld and maybe see value in solving the above, or are thinking of how to solve this, come visit us in Moscone North - Oracle Red Lounge or in the Engineered Systems Showcase.

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• Making Those PanelBoxes Behave

  - by Duncan Mills

  I have a little problem to solve earlier this week - misbehaving <af:panelBox> components... What do I mean by that? Well here's the scenario, I have a page fragment containing a set of panelBoxes arranged vertically. As it happens, they are stamped out in a loop but that does not really matter. What I want to be able to do is to provide the user with a simple UI to close and open all of the panelBoxes in concert. This could also apply to showDetailHeader and similar items with a disclosed attrubute, but in this case it's good old panelBoxes.  Ok, so the basic solution to this should be self evident. I can set up a suitable scoped managed bean that the panelBoxes all refer to for their disclosed attribute state. Then the open all / close commandButtons in the UI can simply set the state of that bean for all the panelBoxes to pick up via EL on their disclosed attribute. Sound OK? Well that works basically without a hitch, but turns out that there is a slight problem and this is where the framework is attempting to be a little too helpful. The issue is that is the user manually discloses or hides a panelBox then that will override the value that the EL is setting. So for example. I start the page with all panelBoxes collapsed, all set by the EL state I'm storing on the session I manually disclose panelBox no 1. I press the Expand All button - all works as you would hope and all the panelBoxes are now disclosed, including of course panelBox 1 which I just expanded manually. Finally I press the Collapse All button and everything collapses except that first panelBox that I manually disclosed.  The problem is that the component remembers this manual disclosure and that overrides the value provided by the expression. If I change the viewId (navigate away and back) then the panelBox will start to behave again, until of course I touch it again! Now, the more astute amoungst you would think (as I did) Ah, sound like the MDS personalizaton stuff is getting in the way and the solution should simply be to set the dontPersist attribute to disclosed | ALL. Alas this does not fix the issue.  After a little noodling on the best way to approach this I came up with a solution that works well, although if you think of an alternative way do let me know. The principle is simple. In the disclosureListener for the panelBox I take a note of the clientID of the panelBox component that has been touched by the user along with the state. This all gets stored in a Map of Booleans in ViewScope which is keyed by clientID and stores the current disclosed state in the Boolean value.  The listener looks like this (it's held in a request scope backing bean for the page): public void handlePBDisclosureEvent(DisclosureEvent disclosureEvent) { String clientId = disclosureEvent.getComponent().getClientId(FacesContext.getCurrentInstance()); boolean state = disclosureEvent.isExpanded(); pbState.addTouchedPanelBox(clientId, state); } The pbState variable referenced here is a reference to the bean which will hold the state of the panelBoxes that lives in viewScope (recall that everything is re-set when the viewid is changed so keeping this in viewScope is just fine and cleans things up automatically). The addTouchedPanelBox() method looks like this: public void addTouchedPanelBox(String clientId, boolean state) { //create the cache if needed this is just a Map<String,Boolean> if (_touchedPanelBoxState == null) { _touchedPanelBoxState = new HashMap<String, Boolean>(); } // Simply put / replace _touchedPanelBoxState.put(clientId, state); } So that's the first part, we now have a record of every panelBox that the user has touched. So what do we do when the Collapse All or Expand All buttons are pressed? Here we do some JavaScript magic. Basically for each clientID that we have stored away, we issue a client side disclosure event from JavaScript - just as if the user had gone back and changed it manually. So here's the Collapse All button action: public String CloseAllAction() { submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); _uiManager.closeAllBoxes(); return null; }  The _uiManager.closeAllBoxes() method is just manipulating the master-state that all of the panelBoxes are bound to using EL. The interesting bit though is the line:  submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); To break that down, the first part is a call to that viewScoped state holder to ask for a list of clientIDs that need to be "tweaked": public String getTouchedClientIds(boolean targetState) { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); if (_touchedPanelBoxState != null && _touchedPanelBoxState.size() > 0) { for (Map.Entry<String, Boolean> entry : _touchedPanelBoxState.entrySet()) { if (entry.getValue() == targetState) { if (sb.length() > 0) { sb.append(','); } sb.append(entry.getKey()); } } } return sb.toString(); } You'll notice that this method only processes those panelBoxes that will be in the wrong state and returns those as a comma separated list. This is then processed by the submitDiscloseOverride() method: private void submitDiscloseOverride(String clientIdList, boolean targetDisclosureState) { if (clientIdList != null && clientIdList.length() > 0) { FacesContext fctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); StringBuilder script = new StringBuilder(); script.append("overrideDiscloseHandler('"); script.append(clientIdList); script.append("',"); script.append(targetDisclosureState); script.append(");"); Service.getRenderKitService(fctx, ExtendedRenderKitService.class).addScript(fctx, script.toString()); } } This method constructs a JavaScript command to call a routine called overrideDiscloseHandler() in a script attached to the page (using the standard <af:resource> tag). That method parses out the list of clientIDs and sends the correct message to each one: function overrideDiscloseHandler(clientIdList, newState) { AdfLogger.LOGGER.logMessage(AdfLogger.INFO, "Disclosure Hander newState " + newState + " Called with: " + clientIdList); //Parse out the list of clientIds var clientIdArray = clientIdList.split(','); for (var i = 0; i < clientIdArray.length; i++){ var panelBox = flipPanel = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId(clientIdArray[i]); if (panelBox.getComponentType() == "oracle.adf.RichPanelBox"){ panelBox.broadcast(new AdfDisclosureEvent(panelBox, newState)); } }  }  So there you go. You can see how, with a few tweaks the same code could be used for other components with disclosure that might suffer from the same problem, although I'd point out that the behavior I'm working around here us usually desirable. You can download the running example (11.1.2.2) from here. 

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• Azure Task Scheduling Options

  - by charlie.mott

  Currently, the Azure PaaS does not offer a distributed\resilient task scheduling service.  If you do want to host a task scheduling product\solution off-premise (and ideally use Azure), what are your options? PaaS Option 1: Worker Roles Use a worker role to schedule and execute actions at specific time periods.  There are a few frameworks available to assist with this: http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com https://github.com/Lokad/lokad-cloud/wiki/TaskScheduler http://blog.smarx.com/posts/building-a-task-scheduler-in-windows-azure - This addresses a slightly different set of requirements. It’s a more dynamic approach for queuing up tasks, but not repeatable tasks (e.g. daily). I found the Azure Toolkit option the most simple to implement.  Step 1 : Create a domain entity implementing IJob for each job to schedule.  In this sample, I asynchronously call a WCF service method. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole.Jobs 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit; 4: using ScheduledTasksService; 5: 6: public class UploadEmployeesJob : IJob 7: { 8: public void Run() 9: { 10: // Call Tasks Service 11: var client = new ScheduledTasksServiceClient("BasicHttpBinding_IScheduledTasksService"); 12: client.UploadEmployees(); 13: client.Close(); 14: } 15: } 16: } Step 2 : In the worker role run method, add the jobs to the toolkit engine. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit.Engine; 4: using Jobs; 5:   6: public class WorkerRole : WorkerRoleEntryPoint 7: { 8: public override void Run() 9: { 10: var engine = new CloudEngine(); 11:   12: // Add Scheduled Jobs (using CronJob syntax - see http://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference). 13:   14: // 1. Upload Employee job - 8.00 PM every weekday (Mon-Fri) 15: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<UploadEmployeesJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 20 * * 1-5"; }); 16: // 2. Purge Data job - 10 AM every Saturday 17: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<PurgeDataJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 10 * * 6"; }); 18: // 3. Process Exceptions job - Every 5 minutes 19: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<ProcessExceptionsJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "*/5 * * * *"; }); 20:   21: engine.Run(); 22: base.Run(); 23: } 24: } 25: } Pros Cons Azure Toolkit option is simple to implement. For the AzureToolkit option, you are limited to a single worker role.  Otherwise, the jobs will be executed multiple times, once for each worker role instance.   Paying for a continuously running worker role, even if it just processes a single job once a week.  If you only have a few scheduled tasks to run calling asynchronous services hosted in different web roles, an extra small worker role likely to be sufficient.  However, for an extra small worker role this still costs $14.40/month (03/09/2012). Option 2: Use Scheduled Task on Azure Web Role calling a console app Setup a Windows Scheduled Task on the Azure Web Role. This calls a console application that calls the WCF service methods that run the task actions. This design is described here: http://www.ronaldwidha.net/2011/02/23/cron-job-on-azure-using-scheduled-task-on-a-web-role-to-replace-azure-worker-role-for-background-job/ http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/index.php/2011/07/windows-azure-task-scheduler/ http://devlicio.us/blogs/vinull/archive/2011/10/23/moving-to-azure-worker-roles-for-nothing-and-tasks-for-free.aspx Pros Cons Fairly easy to implement. Supportability - I RDC’ed onto the Azure server and stopped the scheduled task. I then rebooted the machine and the task was re-started. I also tried deleting the task and rebooting, the same thing occurred. The only way to permanently guarantee that a task is disabled is to do a fresh deployment. I think this is a major supportability concern.   Saleability - multiple instances would trigger multiple tasks. You can only have one instance for the scheduled task web role. The guidance implements setup of the scheduled task as part of a web role instance. But if you have more than one instance in a web role, the task will be triggered multiple times for each scheduled action (once per machine). Workaround: If we wanted to use scheduled tasks for another client with a saleable WCF service, then we could include the console & tasks scripts in a separate web role (e.g. a empty WCF service with no real purpose to it). SaaS Option 3: Azure Marketplace I thought that someone might be offering this type of service via the Azure marketplace. At the point of writing this blog post, I did not find anyone doing so. https://datamarket.azure.com/ Pros Cons   Nobody currently offers this on the Azure Marketplace. Option 4: Online Job Scheduling Service Provider There are plenty of online providers that offer this type of service on a pay-as-you-go approach.  Some of these are free for small usage.   Many of these providers are listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcron Pros Cons No bespoke development for scheduler. Reliance on third party. IaaS Option 5: Setup Scheduling Software on Azure IaaS VM’s One of job scheduling software offerings could be installed and configured on Azure VM’s.  A list of software options is listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_job_scheduler_software Pros Cons Enterprise distributed\resilient task scheduling service VM Setup and maintenance   Software Licence Costs Option 6: VM Gallery A the time of writing this blog post, I did not spot a VM in the gallery that included pre-installation of any of the above software options. Pros Cons   No current VM template. Summary For my current project that had a small handful of tasks to schedule with a limited project budget I chose option 1 (a worker role using the Azure Toolkit to schedule tasks).  If I was building an enterprise scale solution for the future, options 4 and 5 are currently worthy of consideration. Hopefully, Microsoft will include tasks scheduling in the future as part of their PaaS offerings.

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• Adventures in Windows 8: Working around the navigation animation issues in LayoutAwarePage

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  LayoutAwarePage is a pretty cool add-on to Windows 8 apps, which facilitates greatly the implementation of orientation-aware (portrait, landscape) as well as state-aware (snapped, filled, fullscreen) apps. It has however a few issues that are obvious when you use transformed elements on your page. Adding a LayoutAwarePage to your application If you start with a blank app, the MainPage is a vanilla Page, with no such feature. In order to have a LayoutAwarePage into your app, you need to add this class (and a few helpers) with the following operation: Right click on the Solution and select Add, New Item from the context menu. From the dialog, select a Basic Page (not a Blank Page, which is another vanilla page). If you prefer, you can also use Split Page, Items Page, Item Detail Page, Grouped Items Page or Group Detail Page which are all LayoutAwarePages. Personally I like to start with a Basic Page, which gives me more creative freedom. Adding this new page will cause Visual Studio to show a prompt asking you for permission to add additional helper files to the Common folder. One of these helpers in the LayoutAwarePage class, which is where the magic happens. LayoutAwarePage offers some help for the detection of orientation and state (which makes it a pleasure to design for all these scenarios in Blend, by the way) as well as storage for the navigation state (more about that in a future article). Issue with LayoutAwarePage When you use UI elements such as a background picture, a watermark label, logos, etc, it is quite common to do a few things with those: Making them partially transparent (this is especially true for background pictures; for instance I really like a black Page background with a half transparent picture placed on top of it). Transforming them, for instance rotating them a bit, scaling them, etc. Here is an example with a picture of my two beautiful daughters in the Bird Park in Kuala Lumpur, as well as a transformed TextBlock. The image has an opacity of 40% and the TextBlock a simple RotateTransform. If I create an application with a MainPage that navigates to this LayoutAwarePage, however, I will have a very annoying effect: The background picture appears with an Opacity of 100%. The TextBlock is not rotated. This lasts only for less than a second (during the navigation animation) before the elements “snap into place” and get their desired effect. Here is the XAML that cause the annoying effect: <common:LayoutAwarePage x:Name="pageRoot" x:Class="App13.BasicPage1" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:common="using:App13.Common" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d"> <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" Grid.RowSpan="2" /> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" Grid.Row="1" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> </Grid> </common:LayoutAwarePage> Solving the issue In order to solve this “snapping” issue, the solution is to wrap the elements that are transformed into an empty Grid. Honestly, to me it sounds like a bug in the LayoutAwarePage navigation animation, but thankfully the workaround is not that difficult: Simple change the main Grid as follows: <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid Grid.RowSpan="2"> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" /> </Grid> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <Grid Grid.Row="1"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> </Grid> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </Grid> Hopefully this will help a few people, I banged my head on the wall for a while before someone at Microsoft pointed me to the solution ;) Happy coding, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 2 of 3&ndash;Setup)

  - by ToStringTheory

  Welcome to part two in my series covering the LESS CSS language.  In the first post, I covered the two major CSS precompiled languages - LESS and SASS to a small extent, iterating over some of the features that you could expect to find in them.  In this post, I will go a little further in depth into the setup and execution of using the LESS framework. Introduction It really doesn’t take too much to get LESS working in your project.  The basic workflow will be including the necessary translator in your project, defining bundles for the LESS files, add the necessary code to your layouts.cshtml file, and finally add in all your necessary styles to the LESS files!  Lets get started… New Project Just like all great experiments in Visual Studio, start up a File > New Project, and create a new MVC 4 Web Application.  The Base Package After you have the new project spun up, use the Nuget Package Manager to install the Bundle Transformer: LESS package. This will take care of installing the main translator that we will be using for LESS code (dotless which is another Nuget package), as well as the core framework for the Bundle Transformer library.  The installation will come up with some instructions in a readme file on how to modify your web.config to handle all your *.less requests through the Bundle Transformer, which passes the translating onto dotless. Where To Put These LESS Files?! This step isn’t really a requirement, however I find that I don’t like how ASP.Net MVC just has a content directory where they store CSS, content images, css images….  In my project, I went ahead and created a new directory just for styles – LESS files, CSS files, and images that are only referenced in LESS or CSS.  Ignore the MVC directory as this was my testbed for another project I was working on at the same time.  As you can see here, I have: A top level directory for images which contains only images used in a page A top level directory for scripts A top level directory for Styles A few directories for plugins I am using (Colrizr, JQueryUI, Farbtastic) Multiple *.less files for different functions (I’ll go over these in a minute) I find that this layout offers the best separation of content types.  Bring Out Your Bundles! The next thing that we need to do is add in the necessary code for the bundling of these LESS files.  Go ahead and open your BundleConfig.cs file, usually located in the /App_Start/ folder of the project.  As you will see in a minute, instead of using the method Microsoft does in the base MVC 4 project, I change things up a bit.  Define Constants The first thing I do is define constants for each of the virtual paths that will be used in the bundler: The main reason is that I hate magic strings in my program, so the fact that you first defined a virtual path in the BundleConfig file, and then used that path in the _Layout.cshtml file really irked me. Add Bundles to the BundleCollection Next, I am going to define the bundles for my styles in my AddStyleBundles method: That is all it takes to get all of my styles in play with LESS.  The CssTransformer and NullOrderer types come from the Bundle Transformer we grabbed earlier.  If we didn’t use that package, we would have to write our own function (not too hard, but why do it if it’s been done). I use the site.less file as my main hub for LESS - I will cover that more in the next section. Add Bundles To Layout.cshtml File With the constants in the BundleConfig file, instead of having to use the same magic string I defined for the bundle virtual path, I am able to do this: Notice here that besides the RenderSection magic strings (something I am working on in another side project), all of the bundles are now based on const strings.  If I need to change the virtual path, I only have to do it in one place.  Nifty! Get Started! We are now ready to roll!  As I said in the previous section, I use the site.less file as a central hub for my styles: As seen here, I have a reset.css file which is a simple CSS reset.  Next, I have created a file for managing all my color variables – colors.less: Here, you can see some of the standards I started to use, in this case for color variables.  I define all color variables with the @col prefix.  Currently, I am going for verbose variable names. The next file imported is my font.less file that defines the typeface information for the site: Simple enough.  A couple of imports for fonts from Google, and then declaring variables for use throughout LESS.  I also set up the heading sizes, margins, etc..  You can also see my current standardization for font declaration strings – @font. Next, I pull in a mixins.less file that I grabbed from the Twitter Bootstrap library that gives some useful parameterized mixins for use such as border-radius, gradient, box-shadow, etc… The common.less file is a file that just contains items that I will be defining that can be used across all my LESS files.  Kind of like my own mixins or font-helpers: Finally I have my layout.less file that contains all of my definitions for general site layout – width, main/sidebar widths, footer layout, etc: That’s it!  For the rest of my one off definitions/corrections, I am currently putting them into the site.less file beneath my original imports Note Probably my favorite side effect of using the LESS handler/translator while bundling is that it also does a CSS checkup when rendering…  See, when your web.config is set to debug, bundling will output the url to the direct less file, not the bundle, and the http handler intercepts the call, compiles the less, and returns the result.  If there is an error in your LESS code, the CSS file can be returned empty, or may have the error output as a comment on the first couple lines. If you have the web.config set to not debug, then if there is an error in your code, you will end up with the usual ASP.Net exception page (unless you catch the exception of course), with information regarding the failure of the conversion, such as brace mismatch, undefined variable, etc…  I find it nifty. Conclusion This is really just the beginning.  LESS is very powerful and exciting!  My next post will show an actual working example of why LESS is so powerful with its functions and variables…  At least I hope it will!  As for now, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on my current practice, I would love to hear them!  Feel free to drop a comment or shoot me an email using the contact page.  In the mean time, I plan on posting the final post in this series tomorrow or the day after, with my side project, as well as a whole base ASP.Net MVC4 templated project with LESS added in it so that you can check out the layout I have in this post.  Until next time…

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• Controlling the Sizing of the af:messages Dialog

  - by Duncan Mills

  Over the last day or so a small change in behaviour between 11.1.2.n releases of ADF and earlier versions has come to my attention. This has concerned the default sizing of the dialog that the framework automatically generates to handle the display of JSF messages being handled by the <af:messages> component. Unlike a normal popup, you don't have a physical <af:dialog> or <af:window> to set the sizing on in your page definition, so you're at the mercy of what the framework provides. In this case the framework now defines a fixed 250x250 pixel content area dialog for these messages, which can look a bit weird if the message is either very short, or very long. Unfortunately this is not something that you can control through the skin, instead you have to be a little more creative. Here's the solution I've come up with.  Unfortunately, I've not found a supportable way to reset the dialog so as to say  just size yourself based on your contents, it is actually possible to do this by tweaking the correct DOM objects, but I wanted to start with a mostly supportable solution that only uses the best practice of working through the ADF client side APIs. The Technique The basic approach I've taken is really very simple.  The af:messages dialog is just a normal richDialog object, it just happens to be one that is pre-defined for you with a particular known name "msgDlg" (which hopefully won't change). Knowing this, you can call the accepted APIs to control the content width and height of that dialog, as our meerkat friends would say, "simples" 1 The JavaScript For this example I've defined three JavaScript functions.   The first does all the hard work and is designed to be called from server side Java or from a page load event to set the default. The second is a utility function used by the first to validate the values you're about to use for height and width. The final function is one that can be called from the page load event to set an initial default sizing if that's all you need to do. Function resizeDefaultMessageDialog() /**  * Function that actually resets the default message dialog sizing.  * Note that the width and height supplied define the content area  * So the actual physical dialog size will be larger to account for  * the chrome containing the header / footer etc.  * @param docId Faces component id of the document  * @param contentWidth - new content width you need  * @param contentHeight - new content height  */ function resizeDefaultMessageDialog(docId, contentWidth, contentHeight) {   // Warning this value may change from release to release   var defMDName = "::msgDlg";   //Find the default messages dialog   msgDialogComponent = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId(docId + defMDName); // In your version add a check here to ensure we've found the right object!   // Check the new width is supplied and is a positive number, if so apply it.   if (dimensionIsValid(contentWidth)){       msgDialogComponent.setContentWidth(contentWidth);   }   // Check the new height is supplied and is a positive number, if so apply it.   if (dimensionIsValid(contentHeight)){       msgDialogComponent.setContentHeight(contentHeight);   } }  Function dimensionIsValid()  /**  * Simple function to check that sensible numeric values are   * being proposed for a dimension  * @param sampleDimension   * @return booolean  */ function dimensionIsValid(sampleDimension){     return (!isNaN(sampleDimension) && sampleDimension > 0); } Function  initializeDefaultMessageDialogSize() /**  * This function will re-define the default sizing applied by the framework   * in 11.1.2.n versions  * It is designed to be called with the document onLoad event  */ function initializeDefaultMessageDialogSize(loadEvent){   //get the configuration information   var documentId = loadEvent.getSource().getProperty('documentId');   var newWidth = loadEvent.getSource().getProperty('defaultMessageDialogContentWidth');   var newHeight = loadEvent.getSource().getProperty('defaultMessageDialogContentHeight');   resizeDefaultMessageDialog(documentId, newWidth, newHeight); } Wiring in the Functions As usual, the first thing we need to do when using JavaScript with ADF is to define an af:resource  in the document metaContainer facet <af:document>   ....     <f:facet name="metaContainer">     <af:resource type="javascript" source="/resources/js/hackMessagedDialog.js"/>    </f:facet> </af:document> This makes the script functions available to call.  Next if you want to use the option of defining an initial default size for the dialog you use a combination of <af:clientListener> and <af:clientAttribute> tags like this. <af:document title="MyApp" id="doc1">   <af:clientListener method="initializeDefaultMessageDialogSize" type="load"/>   <af:clientAttribute name="documentId" value="doc1"/>   <af:clientAttribute name="defaultMessageDialogContentWidth" value="400"/>   <af:clientAttribute name="defaultMessageDialogContentHeight" value="150"/>  ...   Just in Time Dialog Sizing  So  what happens if you have a variety of messages that you might add and in some cases you need a small dialog and an other cases a large one? Well in that case you can re-size these dialogs just before you submit the message. Here's some example Java code: FacesContext ctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();          //reset the default dialog size for this message ExtendedRenderKitService service =              Service.getRenderKitService(ctx, ExtendedRenderKitService.class); service.addScript(ctx, "resizeDefaultMessageDialog('doc1',100,50);");          FacesMessage msg = new FacesMessage("Short message"); msg.setSeverity(FacesMessage.SEVERITY_ERROR); ctx.addMessage(null, msg);  So there you have it. This technique should, at least, allow you to control the dialog sizing just enough to stop really objectionable whitespace or scrollbars. 1 Don't worry if you don't get the reference, lest's just say my kids watch too many adverts.

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• Adding multiple data importers support to web applications

  - by DigiMortal

  I’m building web application for customer and there is requirement that users must be able to import data in different formats. Today we will support XLSX and ODF as import formats and some other formats are waiting. I wanted to be able to add new importers on the fly so I don’t have to deploy web application again when I add new importer or change some existing one. In this posting I will show you how to build generic importers support to your web application. Importer interface All importers we use must have something in common so we can easily detect them. To keep things simple I will use interface here. public interface IMyImporter {     string[] SupportedFileExtensions { get; }     ImportResult Import(Stream fileStream, string fileExtension); } Our interface has the following members: SupportedFileExtensions – string array of file extensions that importer supports. This property helps us find out what import formats are available and which importer to use with given format. Import – method that does the actual importing work. Besides file we give in as stream we also give file extension so importer can decide how to handle the file. It is enough to get started. When building real importers I am sure you will switch over to abstract base class. Importer class Here is sample importer that imports data from Excel and Word documents. Importer class with no implementation details looks like this: public class MyOpenXmlImporter : IMyImporter {     public string[] SupportedFileExtensions     {         get { return new[] { "xlsx", "docx" }; }     }     public ImportResult Import(Stream fileStream, string extension)     {         // ...     } } Finding supported import formats in web application Now we have importers created and it’s time to add them to web application. Usually we have one page or ASP.NET MVC controller where we need importers. To this page or controller we add the following method that uses reflection to find all classes that implement our IMyImporter interface. private static string[] GetImporterFileExtensions() {     var types = from a in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()                 from t in a.GetTypes()                 where t.GetInterfaces().Contains(typeof(IMyImporter))                 select t;       var extensions = new Collection<string>();     foreach (var type in types)     {         var instance = (IMyImporter)type.InvokeMember(null,                        BindingFlags.CreateInstance, null, null, null);           foreach (var extension in instance.SupportedFileExtensions)         {             if (extensions.Contains(extension))                 continue;               extensions.Add(extension);         }     }       return extensions.ToArray(); } This code doesn’t look nice and is far from optimal but it works for us now. It is possible to improve performance of web application if we cache extensions and their corresponding types to some static dictionary. We have to fill it only once because our application is restarted when something changes in bin folder. Finding importer by extension When user uploads file we need to detect the extension of file and find the importer that supports given extension. We add another method to our page or controller that uses reflection to return us importer instance or null if extension is not supported. private static IMyImporter GetImporterForExtension(string extensionToFind) {     var types = from a in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()                 from t in a.GetTypes()                 where t.GetInterfaces().Contains(typeof(IMyImporter))                 select t;     foreach (var type in types)     {         var instance = (IMyImporter)type.InvokeMember(null,                        BindingFlags.CreateInstance, null, null, null);           if (instance.SupportedFileExtensions.Contains(extensionToFind))         {             return instance;         }     }       return null; } Here is example ASP.NET MVC controller action that accepts uploaded file, finds importer that can handle file and imports data. Again, this is sample code I kept minimal to better illustrate how things work. public ActionResult Import(MyImporterModel model) {     var file = Request.Files[0];     var extension = Path.GetExtension(file.FileName).ToLower();     var importer = GetImporterForExtension(extension.Substring(1));     var result = importer.Import(file.InputStream, extension);     if (result.Errors.Count > 0)     {         foreach (var error in result.Errors)             ModelState.AddModelError("file", error);           return Import();     }     return RedirectToAction("Index"); } Conclusion That’s it. Using couple of ugly methods and one simple interface we were able to add importers support to our web application. Example code here is not perfect but it works. It is possible to cache mappings between file extensions and importer types to some static variable because changing of these mappings means that something is changed in bin folder of web application and web application is restarted in this case anyway.

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• LINQ – SequenceEqual() method

  - by nmarun

  I have been looking at LINQ extension methods and have blogged about what I learned from them in my blog space. Next in line is the SequenceEqual() method. Here’s the description about this method: “Determines whether two sequences are equal by comparing the elements by using the default equality comparer for their type.” Let’s play with some code: 1: int[] numbers = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 }; 2: // int[] numbersCopy = numbers; 3: int[] numbersCopy = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 }; 4:  5: Console.WriteLine(numbers.SequenceEqual(numbersCopy)); This gives an output of ‘True’ – basically compares each of the elements in the two arrays and returns true in this case. The result is same even if you uncomment line 2 and comment line 3 (I didn’t need to say that now did I?). So then what happens for custom types? For this, I created a Product class with the following definition: 1: class Product 2: { 3: public int ProductId { get; set; } 4: public string Name { get; set; } 5: public string Category { get; set; } 6: public DateTime MfgDate { get; set; } 7: public Status Status { get; set; } 8: } 9:  10: public enum Status 11: { 12: Active = 1, 13: InActive = 2, 14: OffShelf = 3, 15: } In my calling code, I’m just adding a few product items: 1: private static List<Product> GetProducts() 2: { 3: return new List<Product> 4: { 5: new Product 6: { 7: ProductId = 1, 8: Name = "Laptop", 9: Category = "Computer", 10: MfgDate = new DateTime(2003, 4, 3), 11: Status = Status.Active, 12: }, 13: new Product 14: { 15: ProductId = 2, 16: Name = "Compact Disc", 17: Category = "Water Sport", 18: MfgDate = new DateTime(2009, 12, 3), 19: Status = Status.InActive, 20: }, 21: new Product 22: { 23: ProductId = 3, 24: Name = "Floppy", 25: Category = "Computer", 26: MfgDate = new DateTime(1993, 3, 7), 27: Status = Status.OffShelf, 28: }, 29: }; 30: } Now for the actual check: 1: List<Product> products1 = GetProducts(); 2: List<Product> products2 = GetProducts(); 3:  4: Console.WriteLine(products1.SequenceEqual(products2)); This one returns ‘False’ and the reason is simple – this one checks for reference equality and the products in the both the lists get different ‘memory addresses’ (sounds like I’m talking in ‘C’). In order to modify this behavior and return a ‘True’ result, we need to modify the Product class as follows: 1: class Product : IEquatable<Product> 2: { 3: public int ProductId { get; set; } 4: public string Name { get; set; } 5: public string Category { get; set; } 6: public DateTime MfgDate { get; set; } 7: public Status Status { get; set; } 8:  9: public override bool Equals(object obj) 10: { 11: return Equals(obj as Product); 12: } 13:  14: public bool Equals(Product other) 15: { 16: //Check whether the compared object is null. 17: if (ReferenceEquals(other, null)) return false; 18:  19: //Check whether the compared object references the same data. 20: if (ReferenceEquals(this, other)) return true; 21:  22: //Check whether the products' properties are equal. 23: return ProductId.Equals(other.ProductId) 24: && Name.Equals(other.Name) 25: && Category.Equals(other.Category) 26: && MfgDate.Equals(other.MfgDate) 27: && Status.Equals(other.Status); 28: } 29:  30: // If Equals() returns true for a pair of objects 31: // then GetHashCode() must return the same value for these objects. 32: // read why in the following articles: 33: // http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2010/02/28/138234.aspx 34: // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/371328/why-is-it-important-to-override-gethashcode-when-equals-method-is-overriden-in-c 35: public override int GetHashCode() 36: { 37: //Get hash code for the ProductId field. 38: int hashProductId = ProductId.GetHashCode(); 39:  40: //Get hash code for the Name field if it is not null. 41: int hashName = Name == null ? 0 : Name.GetHashCode(); 42:  43: //Get hash code for the ProductId field. 44: int hashCategory = Category.GetHashCode(); 45:  46: //Get hash code for the ProductId field. 47: int hashMfgDate = MfgDate.GetHashCode(); 48:  49: //Get hash code for the ProductId field. 50: int hashStatus = Status.GetHashCode(); 51: //Calculate the hash code for the product. 52: return hashProductId ^ hashName ^ hashCategory & hashMfgDate & hashStatus; 53: } 54:  55: public static bool operator ==(Product a, Product b) 56: { 57: // Enable a == b for null references to return the right value 58: if (ReferenceEquals(a, b)) 59: { 60: return true; 61: } 62: // If one is null and the other not. Remember a==null will lead to Stackoverflow! 63: if (ReferenceEquals(a, null)) 64: { 65: return false; 66: } 67: return a.Equals((object)b); 68: } 69:  70: public static bool operator !=(Product a, Product b) 71: { 72: return !(a == b); 73: } 74: } Now THAT kinda looks overwhelming. But lets take one simple step at a time. Ok first thing you’ve noticed is that the class implements IEquatable<Product> interface – the key step towards achieving our goal. This interface provides us with an ‘Equals’ method to perform the test for equality with another Product object, in this case. This method is called in the following situations: when you do a ProductInstance.Equals(AnotherProductInstance) and when you perform actions like Contains<T>, IndexOf() or Remove() on your collection Coming to the Equals method defined line 14 onwards. The two ‘if’ blocks check for null and referential equality using the ReferenceEquals() method defined in the Object class. Line 23 is where I’m doing the actual check on the properties of the Product instances. This is what returns the ‘True’ for us when we run the application. I have also overridden the Object.Equals() method which calls the Equals() method of the interface. One thing to remember is that anytime you override the Equals() method, its’ a good practice to override the GetHashCode() method and overload the ‘==’ and the ‘!=’ operators. For detailed information on this, please read this and this. Since we’ve overloaded the operators as well, we get ‘True’ when we do actions like: 1: Console.WriteLine(products1.Contains(products2[0])); 2: Console.WriteLine(products1[0] == products2[0]); This completes the full circle on the SequenceEqual() method. See the code used in the article here.

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• IIS: No Session being handed out, but only in production

  - by Wayne

  I've reproduced this in a simple project - details below. It's a WCF service in ASP.NET compatibility mode. What I'm seeing is that when run on the dev machine (Win7), a HTTP session id is available inside the service operation (HttpContext.Current.Session is non-null). But when deployed to the server (Win2k8R2), I get "No session". On both machines the app is configured to use the classic app pool, and the app pools themselves are configured identically as far as I can tell. The only differences I can discern between the two applications is that on the dev box, under "Handler Mappings", ISAPI-dll is disabled (not on the server), and on the server there's a spurious handler called "AboMapperCustom-7105160" (does not exist on the dev box). What should I be looking at next? Am I missing something head-slappingly simple? Service is this: [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class Service2 { [OperationContract] public string DoWork() { if (HttpContext.Current != null) { if (HttpContext.Current.Session != null) { return "SessionId: " + HttpContext.Current.Session.SessionID; } else { return "No Session"; } } else { return "No Context"; } } } Config is: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <configSections> <section name="log4net" type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler,log4net, Version=1.2.9.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b32731d11ce58905" /> <sectionGroup name="system.web.extensions" type="System.Web.Configuration.SystemWebExtensionsSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"> <sectionGroup name="scripting" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"> <section name="scriptResourceHandler" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingScriptResourceHandlerSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" /> <sectionGroup name="webServices" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingWebServicesSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"> <section name="jsonSerialization" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingJsonSerializationSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="Everywhere" /> <section name="profileService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingProfileServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" /> <section name="authenticationService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingAuthenticationServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" /> <section name="roleService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingRoleServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" /> </sectionGroup> </sectionGroup> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <log4net> <appender name="LogFile" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender"> <file value="C:\Temp\Test.log4net.log" /> <rollingStyle value="Once" /> <maxSizeRollBackups value="10" /> <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout"> <conversionPattern value="%d{ISO8601} [%5t] %-5p %c{1} %m%n" /> </layout> </appender> <root> <level value="DEBUG" /> <appender-ref ref="LogFile" /> </root> </log4net> <appSettings /> <connectionStrings /> <system.web> <compilation debug="true"> <assemblies> <add assembly="System.Core, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089" /> <add assembly="System.Data.DataSetExtensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089" /> <add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add assembly="System.Xml.Linq, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089" /> </assemblies> </compilation> <!-- The <authentication> section enables configuration of the security authentication mode used by ASP.NET to identify an incoming user. --> <authentication mode="Windows" /> <!-- The <customErrors> section enables configuration of what to do if/when an unhandled error occurs during the execution of a request. Specifically, it enables developers to configure html error pages to be displayed in place of a error stack trace. --> <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="GenericErrorPage.htm"> <error statusCode="403" redirect="NoAccess.htm" /> <error statusCode="404" redirect="FileNotFound.htm" /> </customErrors> <pages> <controls> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI.WebControls" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </controls> </pages> <httpHandlers> <remove verb="*" path="*.asmx" /> <add verb="*" path="*.asmx" validate="false" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add verb="*" path="*_AppService.axd" validate="false" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" validate="false" /> </httpHandlers> <httpModules> <add name="ScriptModule" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </httpModules> </system.web> <system.codedom> <compilers> <compiler language="c#;cs;csharp" extension=".cs" warningLevel="4" type="Microsoft.CSharp.CSharpCodeProvider, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"> <providerOption name="CompilerVersion" value="v3.5" /> <providerOption name="WarnAsError" value="false" /> </compiler> </compilers> </system.codedom> <!-- The system.webServer section is required for running ASP.NET AJAX under Internet Information Services 7.0. It is not necessary for previous version of IIS. --> <system.webServer> <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" /> <modules> <remove name="ScriptModule" /> <add name="ScriptModule" preCondition="managedHandler" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </modules> <handlers> <remove name="WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated" /> <remove name="ScriptHandlerFactory" /> <remove name="ScriptHandlerFactoryAppServices" /> <remove name="ScriptResource" /> <add name="ScriptHandlerFactory" verb="*" path="*.asmx" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add name="ScriptHandlerFactoryAppServices" verb="*" path="*_AppService.axd" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <add name="ScriptResource" preCondition="integratedMode" verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> </handlers> </system.webServer> <runtime> <assemblyBinding appliesTo="v2.0.50727" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1"> <dependentAssembly> <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Extensions" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" /> <bindingRedirect oldVersion="1.0.0.0-1.1.0.0" newVersion="3.5.0.0" /> </dependentAssembly> <dependentAssembly> <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Extensions.Design" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" /> <bindingRedirect oldVersion="1.0.0.0-1.1.0.0" newVersion="3.5.0.0" /> </dependentAssembly> </assemblyBinding> </runtime> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="BasicHttpBinding_Service2" maxBufferSize="2147483647" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647"> <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> <transport clientCredentialType="Windows" /> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" /> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="WebApplication3.Service2Behavior"> <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" /> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> <services> <service behaviorConfiguration="WebApplication3.Service2Behavior" name="WebApplication3.Service2"> <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="BasicHttpBinding_Service2" contract="WebApplication3.Service2" /> </service> </services> </system.serviceModel> <system.diagnostics> <sources> <source name="System.ServiceModel" switchValue="Information, ActivityTracing" propagateActivity="true"> <listeners> <add name="traceListener" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener" initializeData="c:\Temp\Test2.svclog" /> </listeners> </source> </sources> <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="4"> <listeners> <add name="traceListener2" type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" initializeData="c:\Temp\Test.log" traceOutputOptions="DateTime" /> </listeners> </trace> </system.diagnostics> </configuration> Testing with a simple console app: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { ServiceReference1.Service2Client client = new ServiceReference1.Service2Client(); Console.WriteLine(client.DoWork()); Console.ReadKey(); } }

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• Optimized OCR black/white pixel algorithm

  - by eagle

  I am writing a simple OCR solution for a finite set of characters. That is, I know the exact way all 26 letters in the alphabet will look like. I am using C# and am able to easily determine if a given pixel should be treated as black or white. I am generating a matrix of black/white pixels for every single character. So for example, the letter I (capital i), might look like the following: 01110 00100 00100 00100 01110 Note: all points, which I use later in this post, assume that the top left pixel is (0, 0), bottom right pixel is (4, 4). 1's represent black pixels, and 0's represent white pixels. I would create a corresponding matrix in C# like this: CreateLetter("I", new List<List<bool>>() { new List<bool>() { false, true, true, true, false }, new List<bool>() { false, false, true, false, false }, new List<bool>() { false, false, true, false, false }, new List<bool>() { false, false, true, false, false }, new List<bool>() { false, true, true, true, false } }); I know I could probably optimize this part by using a multi-dimensional array instead, but let's ignore that for now, this is for illustrative purposes. Every letter is exactly the same dimensions, 10px by 11px (10px by 11px is the actual dimensions of a character in my real program. I simplified this to 5px by 5px in this posting since it is much easier to "draw" the letters using 0's and 1's on a smaller image). Now when I give it a 10px by 11px part of an image to analyze with OCR, it would need to run on every single letter (26) on every single pixel (10 * 11 = 110) which would mean 2,860 (26 * 110) iterations (in the worst case) for every single character. I was thinking this could be optimized by defining the unique characteristics of every character. So, for example, let's assume that the set of characters only consists of 5 distinct letters: I, A, O, B, and L. These might look like the following: 01110 00100 00100 01100 01000 00100 01010 01010 01010 01000 00100 01110 01010 01100 01000 00100 01010 01010 01010 01000 01110 01010 00100 01100 01110 After analyzing the unique characteristics of every character, I can significantly reduce the number of tests that need to be performed to test for a character. For example, for the "I" character, I could define it's unique characteristics as having a black pixel in the coordinate (3, 0) since no other characters have that pixel as black. So instead of testing 110 pixels for a match on the "I" character, I reduced it to a 1 pixel test. This is what it might look like for all these characters: var LetterI = new OcrLetter() { Name = "I", BlackPixels = new List<Point>() { new Point (3, 0) } } var LetterA = new OcrLetter() { Name = "A", WhitePixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(2, 4) } } var LetterO = new OcrLetter() { Name = "O", BlackPixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(3, 2) }, WhitePixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(2, 2) } } var LetterB = new OcrLetter() { Name = "B", BlackPixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(3, 1) }, WhitePixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(3, 2) } } var LetterL = new OcrLetter() { Name = "L", BlackPixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(1, 1), new Point(3, 4) }, WhitePixels = new List<Point>() { new Point(2, 2) } } This is challenging to do manually for 5 characters and gets much harder the greater the amount of letters that are added. You also want to guarantee that you have the minimum set of unique characteristics of a letter since you want it to be optimized as much as possible. I want to create an algorithm that will identify the unique characteristics of all the letters and would generate similar code to that above. I would then use this optimized black/white matrix to identify characters. How do I take the 26 letters that have all their black/white pixels filled in (e.g. the CreateLetter code block) and convert them to an optimized set of unique characteristics that define a letter (e.g. the new OcrLetter() code block)? And how would I guarantee that it is the most efficient definition set of unique characteristics (e.g. instead of defining 6 points as the unique characteristics, there might be a way to do it with 1 or 2 points, as the letter "I" in my example was able to). An alternative solution I've come up with is using a hash table, which will reduce it from 2,860 iterations to 110 iterations, a 26 time reduction. This is how it might work: I would populate it with data similar to the following: Letters["01110 00100 00100 00100 01110"] = "I"; Letters["00100 01010 01110 01010 01010"] = "A"; Letters["00100 01010 01010 01010 00100"] = "O"; Letters["01100 01010 01100 01010 01100"] = "B"; Now when I reach a location in the image to process, I convert it to a string such as: "01110 00100 00100 00100 01110" and simply find it in the hash table. This solution seems very simple, however, this still requires 110 iterations to generate this string for each letter. In big O notation, the algorithm is the same since O(110N) = O(2860N) = O(N) for N letters to process on the page. However, it is still improved by a constant factor of 26, a significant improvement (e.g. instead of it taking 26 minutes, it would take 1 minute). Update: Most of the solutions provided so far have not addressed the issue of identifying the unique characteristics of a character and rather provide alternative solutions. I am still looking for this solution which, as far as I can tell, is the only way to achieve the fastest OCR processing. I just came up with a partial solution: For each pixel, in the grid, store the letters that have it as a black pixel. Using these letters: I A O B L 01110 00100 00100 01100 01000 00100 01010 01010 01010 01000 00100 01110 01010 01100 01000 00100 01010 01010 01010 01000 01110 01010 00100 01100 01110 You would have something like this: CreatePixel(new Point(0, 0), new List<Char>() { }); CreatePixel(new Point(1, 0), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'B', 'L' }); CreatePixel(new Point(2, 0), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'A', 'O', 'B' }); CreatePixel(new Point(3, 0), new List<Char>() { 'I' }); CreatePixel(new Point(4, 0), new List<Char>() { }); CreatePixel(new Point(0, 1), new List<Char>() { }); CreatePixel(new Point(1, 1), new List<Char>() { 'A', 'B', 'L' }); CreatePixel(new Point(2, 1), new List<Char>() { 'I' }); CreatePixel(new Point(3, 1), new List<Char>() { 'A', 'O', 'B' }); // ... CreatePixel(new Point(2, 2), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'A', 'B' }); CreatePixel(new Point(3, 2), new List<Char>() { 'A', 'O' }); // ... CreatePixel(new Point(2, 4), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'O', 'B', 'L' }); CreatePixel(new Point(3, 4), new List<Char>() { 'I', 'A', 'L' }); CreatePixel(new Point(4, 4), new List<Char>() { }); Now for every letter, in order to find the unique characteristics, you need to look at which buckets it belongs to, as well as the amount of other characters in the bucket. So let's take the example of "I". We go to all the buckets it belongs to (1,0; 2,0; 3,0; ...; 3,4) and see that the one with the least amount of other characters is (3,0). In fact, it only has 1 character, meaning it must be an "I" in this case, and we found our unique characteristic. You can also do the same for pixels that would be white. Notice that bucket (2,0) contains all the letters except for "L", this means that it could be used as a white pixel test. Similarly, (2,4) doesn't contain an 'A'. Buckets that either contain all the letters or none of the letters can be discarded immediately, since these pixels can't help define a unique characteristic (e.g. 1,1; 4,0; 0,1; 4,4). It gets trickier when you don't have a 1 pixel test for a letter, for example in the case of 'O' and 'B'. Let's walk through the test for 'O'... It's contained in the following buckets: // Bucket Count Letters // 2,0 4 I, A, O, B // 3,1 3 A, O, B // 3,2 2 A, O // 2,4 4 I, O, B, L Additionally, we also have a few white pixel tests that can help: (I only listed those that are missing at most 2). The Missing Count was calculated as (5 - Bucket.Count). // Bucket Missing Count Missing Letters // 1,0 2 A, O // 1,1 2 I, O // 2,2 2 O, L // 3,4 2 O, B So now we can take the shortest black pixel bucket (3,2) and see that when we test for (3,2) we know it is either an 'A' or an 'O'. So we need an easy way to tell the difference between an 'A' and an 'O'. We could either look for a black pixel bucket that contains 'O' but not 'A' (e.g. 2,4) or a white pixel bucket that contains an 'O' but not an 'A' (e.g. 1,1). Either of these could be used in combination with the (3,2) pixel to uniquely identify the letter 'O' with only 2 tests. This seems like a simple algorithm when there are 5 characters, but how would I do this when there are 26 letters and a lot more pixels overlapping? For example, let's say that after the (3,2) pixel test, it found 10 different characters that contain the pixel (and this was the least from all the buckets). Now I need to find differences from 9 other characters instead of only 1 other character. How would I achieve my goal of getting the least amount of checks as possible, and ensure that I am not running extraneous tests?

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• Tip/Trick: Fix Common SEO Problems Using the URL Rewrite Extension

  - by ScottGu

  Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site’s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries.  This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have.  It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site.  The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites.  They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we’ve shipped.  This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites (www.scottgu.com) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I’ll cover later in this blog post:   Search Relevancy and URL Splitting Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site’s “search relevancy” are: How many other sites link to your content.  Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site.  If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site.  Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above.  In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL).  Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in theory – but you might wonder what exactly this means in practice and how you avoid it. 4 Really Common SEO Problems Your Sites Might Have Below are 4 really common scenarios that can cause your site to inadvertently expose multiple URLs for the same content.  When this happens external sites linking to yours will end up splitting their page links across multiple URLs - and as a result cause you to have a lower page ranking with search engines than you deserve. SEO Problem #1: Default Document IIS (and other web servers) supports the concept of a “default document”.  This allows you to avoid having to explicitly specify the page you want to serve at either the root of the web-site/application, or within a sub-directory.  This is convenient – but means that by default this content is available via two different publically exposed URLs (which is bad).  For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx SEO Problem #2: Different URL Casings Web developers often don’t realize URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web.  This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx SEO Problem #3: Trailing Slashes Consider the below two URLs – they might look the same at first, but they are subtly different. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ SEO Problem #4: Canonical Host Names Sometimes sites support scenarios where they support a web-site with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself.  This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ How to Easily Fix these SEO Problems in 10 minutes (or less) using IIS Rewrite If you haven’t been careful when coding your sites, chances are you are suffering from one (or more) of the above SEO problems.  Addressing these issues will improve your search engine relevancy ranking and drive more traffic to your site. The “good news” is that fixing the above 4 issues is really easy using the URL Rewrite Extension.  This is a completely free Microsoft extension available for IIS 7.x (on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and Windows Vista).  The great thing about using the IIS Rewrite extension is that it allows you to fix the above problems *without* having to change any code within your applications.  You can easily install the URL Rewrite Extension in under 3 minutes using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (a free tool we ship that automates setting up web servers and development machines).  Just click the green “Install Now” button on the URL Rewrite Spotlight page to install it on your Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 or Windows Vista machine: Once installed you’ll find that a new “URL Rewrite” icon is available within the IIS 7 Admin Tool: Double-clicking the icon will open up the URL Rewrite admin panel – which will display the list of URL Rewrite rules configured for a particular application or site: Notice that our rewrite rule list above is currently empty (which is the default when you first install the extension).  We can click the “Add Rule…” link button in the top-right of the panel to add and enable new URL Rewriting logic for our site.  Scenario 1: Handling Default Document Scenarios One of the SEO problems I discussed earlier in this post was the scenario where the “default document” feature of IIS causes you to inadvertently expose two URLs for the same content on your site.  For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the second URL to instead go to the first one.  We will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  Let’s look at how we can create such a rule.  We’ll begin by clicking the “Add Rule” link in the screenshot above.  This will cause the below dialog to display: We’ll select the “Blank Rule” template within the “Inbound rules” section to create a new custom URL Rewriting rule.  This will display an empty pane like below: Don’t worry – setting up the above rule is easy.  The following 4 steps explain how to do so: Step 1: Name the Rule Our first step will be to name the rule we are creating.  Naming it with a descriptive name will make it easier to find and understand later.  Let’s name this rule our “Default Document URL Rewrite” rule: Step 2: Setup the Regular Expression that Matches this Rule Our second step will be to specify a regular expression filter that will cause this rule to execute when an incoming URL matches the regex pattern.   Don’t worry if you aren’t good with regular expressions - I suck at them too. The trick is to know someone who is good at them or copy/paste them from a web-site.  Below we are going to specify the following regular expression as our pattern rule: (.*?)/?Default\.aspx$ This pattern will match any URL string that ends with Default.aspx. The "(.*?)" matches any preceding character zero or more times. The "/?" part says to match the slash symbol zero or one times. The "$" symbol at the end will ensure that the pattern will only match strings that end with Default.aspx.  Combining all these regex elements allows this rule to work not only for the root of your web site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/default.aspx) but also for any application or subdirectory within the site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx.  Because the “ignore case” checkbox is selected it will match both “Default.aspx” as well as “default.aspx” within the URL.   One nice feature built-into the rule editor is a “Test pattern” button that you can click to bring up a dialog that allows you to test out a few URLs with the rule you are configuring: Above I've added a “products/default.aspx” URL and clicked the “Test” button.  This will give me immediate feedback on whether the rule will execute for it.  Step 3: Setup a Permanent Redirect Action We’ll then setup an action to occur when our regular expression pattern matches the incoming URL: In the dialog above I’ve changed the “Action Type” drop down to be a “Redirect” action.  The “Redirect Type” will be a HTTP 301 Permanent redirect – which means search engines will follow it. I’ve also set the “Redirect URL” property to be: {R:1}/ This indicates that we want to redirect the web client requesting the original URL to a new URL that has the originally requested URL path - minus the "Default.aspx" in it.  For example, requests for http://scottgu.com/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/, and requests for http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/photos/ The "{R:N}" regex construct, where N >= 0, is called a back-reference and N is the back-reference index. In the case of our pattern "(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$", if the input URL is "products/Default.aspx" then {R:0} will contain "products/Default.aspx" and {R:1} will contain "products".  We are going to use this {R:1}/ value to be the URL we redirect users to.  Step 4: Apply and Save the Rule Our final step is to click the “Apply” button in the top right hand of the IIS admin tool – which will cause the tool to persist the URL Rewrite rule into our application’s root web.config file (under a <system.webServer/rewrite> configuration section): <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Because IIS 7.x and ASP.NET share the same web.config files, you can actually just copy/paste the above code into your web.config files using Visual Studio and skip the need to run the admin tool entirely.  This also makes adding/deploying URL Rewrite rules with your ASP.NET applications really easy. Step 5: Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx Notice that the second URL automatically redirects to the first one.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and should update the page ranking of http://scottgu.com to include links to http://scottgu.com/default.aspx as well. Scenario 2: Different URL Casing Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is that URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web.  This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL to instead go to the second (all lower-case) one.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: Unlike the previous scenario (where we created a “Blank Rule”), with this scenario we can take advantage of a built-in “Enforce lowercase URLs” rule template.  When we click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that enforces the use of lowercase letters in URLs: When we click the “Yes” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if an incoming URL has upper-case characters in it – and automatically send users to a lower-case version of the URL: We can click the “Apply” button to use this rule “as-is” and have it apply to all incoming URLs to our site.  Because my www.scottgu.com site uses ASP.NET Web Forms, I’m going to make one small change to the rule we generated above – which is to add a condition that will ensure that URLs to ASP.NET’s built-in “WebResource.axd” handler are excluded from our case-sensitivity URL Rewrite logic.  URLs to the WebResource.axd handler will only come from server-controls emitted from my pages – and will never be linked to from external sites.  While my site will continue to function fine if we redirect these URLs to automatically be lower-case – doing so isn’t necessary and will add an extra HTTP redirect to many of my pages.  The good news is that adding a condition that prevents my URL Rewriting rule from happening with certain URLs is easy.  We simply need to expand the “Conditions” section of the form above We can then click the “Add” button to add a condition clause.  This will bring up the “Add Condition” dialog: Above I’ve entered {URL} as the Condition input – and said that this rule should only execute if the URL does not match a regex pattern which contains the string “WebResource.axd”.  This will ensure that WebResource.axd URLs to my site will be allowed to execute just fine without having the URL be re-written to be all lower-case. Note: If you have static resources (like references to .jpg, .css, and .js files) within your site that currently use upper-case characters you’ll probably want to add additional condition filter clauses so that URLs to them also don’t get redirected to be lower-case (just add rules for patterns like .jpg, .gif, .js, etc).  Your site will continue to work fine if these URLs get redirected to be lower case (meaning the site won’t break) – but it will cause an extra HTTP redirect to happen on your site for URLs that don’t need to be redirected for SEO reasons.  So setting up a condition clause makes sense to add. When I click the “ok” button above and apply our lower-case rewriting rule the admin tool will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has a capital “A”) automatically does a redirect to a lower-case version of the URL.  Scenario 3: Trailing Slashes Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is the scenario of trailing slashes within URLs.  The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that does not have a trailing slash) to instead go to the second one that does.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Append or remove the trailing slash symbol” rule template.  When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that automatically redirects users to a URL with a trailing slash if one isn’t present: Like within our previous lower-casing rewrite rule we’ll add one additional condition clause that will exclude WebResource.axd URLs from being processed by this rule.  This will avoid an unnecessary redirect for happening for those URLs. When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL doesn’t have a trailing slash – and if the URL is not processed by either a directory or a file.  This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*[^/])$" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ Notice that the first URL (which has no trailing slash) automatically does a redirect to a URL with the trailing slash.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. Scenario 4: Canonical Host Names The final SEO problem I discussed earlier are scenarios where a site works with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself.  This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that has a www prefix) to instead go to the second URL.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Canonical domain name” rule template.  When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a redirect rule that automatically redirects users to a primary host name URL: Above I’m entering the primary URL address I want to expose to the web: scottgu.com.  When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL has another leading domain name prefix.  This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Cannonical Hostname">                     <match url="(.*)" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^scottgu\.com$" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="http://scottgu.com/{R:1}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*[^/])$" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has the “www” prefix) now automatically does a redirect to the second URL which does not have the www prefix.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. 4 Simple Rules for Improved SEO The above 4 rules are pretty easy to setup and should take less than 15 minutes to configure on existing sites you already have.  The beauty of using a solution like the URL Rewrite Extension is that you can take advantage of it without having to change code within your web-site – and without having to break any existing links already pointing at your site.  Users who follow existing links will be automatically redirected to the new URLs you wish to publish.  And search engines will start to give your site a higher search relevancy ranking – which will list your site higher in search results and drive more traffic to it. Customizing your URL Rewriting rules further is easy to-do either by editing the web.config file directly, or alternatively, just double click the URL Rewrite icon within the IIS 7.x admin tool and it will list all the active rules for your web-site or application: Clicking any of the rules above will open the rules editor back up and allow you to tweak/customize/save them further. Summary Measuring and improving SEO is something every developer building a public-facing web-site needs to think about and focus on.  If you haven’t already, download and use the SEO Toolkit to analyze the SEO of your sites today. New URL Routing features in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms 4 make it much easier to build applications that have more control over the URLs that are published.  Tools like the URL Rewrite Extension that I’ve talked about in this blog post make it much easier to improve the URLs that are published from sites you already have built today – without requiring you to change a lot of code. The URL Rewrite Extension provides a bunch of additional great capabilities – far beyond just SEO - as well.  I’ll be covering these additional capabilities more in future blog posts. Hope this helps, Scott

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• "CB Monitor Windows" proccess blocks XP shutdown

  - by Shiki

  I've got a home server. Simple, low-power-consumption Intel Atom based PC built by me. It runs XP since Win7 was an overkill for this poor thing. Everything was OK, always used Avast! antivirus + Spybot. However, it stopped shutting down after a while. Few days ago I noticed a "CB Monitor Windows" proccess is blocking this (didn't quit from rdp after sending the shutdown command). What is this proccess? How can I disable/remove it? Tried Malwarebytes, found ONE malware, removed it, did a reboot, no change. Avast is up-to-date, Spybot is the same. What could I do?

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• Best Practice for captcha based protection against D.O.S to Nginx Proxy

  - by user325320

  The idea is explained here In simple words, Nginx Proxy plays the role of load balance and transmits the HTTP/HTTPS requests to servers. If the number of request times within a certain period from an individual IP exceeds a threshold, it will trigger a captcha for the upcoming requests. And the end-user must input the correct captcha code before he can continue to access the site. Do you know any open source / free NGINX module for this usage? I searched on the Internet and here is one of them: https://github.com/snbuback/nginx seems it needs modification. Any suggestion / experience is welcome, thank you

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• Fix for: Xlib: extension "XINERAMA" missing on display

  - by obeliksz

  I am using Xming 6.9 with putty trying to run libreoffice remotely. It works well, but an error line appears in the terminal from where I launch it: Xlib: extension "XINERAMA" missing on display "localhost:12.0". Looks like it needs this extension but I can't find the necessary dll file (libXinerama-1.dll) for it as it is not included in the package. I ask for a link from where I could download this file (I accept a hit with a lmgtfy if you can do it) or the source code of it and how to complie it on my win7 machine... or just a surface fix could do it also if it is really clean and simple: hide the error line.

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• powershell: use variable with wildcard with get-aduser

  - by user179037

  powershell newbie here. I am building a simple bit of code to help me find user's by entering letters of user names. How do I get a wildcard to work w/ a variable? this works: $name=read-host -prompt "enter user's first or last initial" $userInput=get-aduser -f {givenname -like 'A*' } cmd /c echo "output: $userInput" this does not: $name=read-host -prompt "enter user's first or last initial" $userInput=get-aduser -f {givenname -like '$name*' } cmd /c echo "output: $userInput" The first bit of code delivers a list of users with "A" in their name. Any suggestions woudl be appreciated. thanks

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• IIS7.5 Domain Account Application Pool Identity for SQL Server Authentication

  - by Gareth Hill

  In Windows Server 2003/IIS6 land we typically create an app pool that runs as the identity of an AD account created with minimal privileges simply for that purpose. This same domain user would also be granted access to SQL Server so that any ASP.NET application in that app pool would be able to connect to SQL Server with Integrated Security=SSPI. We are making a brave move to the world of Windows Server 2008 R2/IIS7.5 and are looking to replicate this model, but I am struggling with how to make the application pool in IIS7.5 run as the identity of an AD account? I know this sounds simple and hopefully it is, but my attempts so far have been fruitless. Should the application pool identity be a 'Custom account' for a domain account? Does the domain account need to be added to any groups?

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• MDAC 2.8/WDAC 6.0 on Windows Server 2008 IIS 7

  - by ajdams

  What I am trying to do is simple. I have some Classic ASP with include headers like the following referencing MDAC 2.5: METADATA TYPE="TypeLib" NAME="Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects 2.5 Library" UUID="{00000205-0000-0010-8000-00AA006D2EA4}" VERSION="2.5" Now I am trying to call this same include file on a Windows 2008 box with IIS 7 using MDAC 2.8 with this: METADATA TYPE="typelib" NAME="Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects 2.8 Library" UUID="{2A75196C-D9EB-4129-B803-931327F72D5C}" VERSION="2.8" My question is, why does this not work anymore? Has the tag reference changed? I ran MDAC checker and everything is installed correctly. What am I missing? Thanks in advance!

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• How to remove Analog and Webalizer from my WHM?

  - by GaVrA

  Hello! Really simple question, we had some issues analog, and decided to turn it off since noone is using it. Now, in "Statistics Software Configuration" page in WHM we have disabled all statistics software, but we want to completely remove every trace of analog and webalizer. We have logs for about 2 years in them, but, like i said, we never used them(using google analytics) so why leaving something that have a lot of data if we are not gonna use it... So how to remove analog and webalizer from whm and how to prune every data they generated? Thanks!

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• How to target SCOM 2007 R2 monitor to monitor only one server

  - by Trondh

  Hi, This might be basic, but hopefully someone can help me: We have a well-working SCOM 2007 R2 implementation monitoring our Microsoft infrastructure. Now, on one of these servers there's an event (logged to the eventlog) that I need to be alerted on. I have created a group and put this one windows server in it. Then, I created a monitor with simple event detection, entered the event id and used the group name as "monitor target". This doesnt work - the monitor doesn't show up in health explorer at all. However, If I create the monitor with "Windows computers" as target it works, but that means I'll have to disable the monitor, and then enable it for the group, which is cumbersome and slightly illogical to me. Is this by design, or am I doing something wrong?

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• Unable to format disk: 'The system cannot find the file specified'

  - by ACarter

  I have a USB flash drive, which I may have mucked up, so I used DISKPART's CLEAN to clean it up. I created a simple volume, and tried to format it. (This is all using Windows' disk management.) I was told The system cannot find the file specified. So I tried using DISKPART (as an admin): DISKPART select volume 9 Volume 9 is the selected volume. DISKPART format recommended DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified. See the System Event Log for more information. DISKPART As you can see, no luck. When I plug the drive in, the computer makes a beep noise as though it has recognised something, but nothing appears in My Computer How can I format the disk so I can use it again?

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• Microsoft Office documents collaboration - Open Source alternative

  - by Saggi Malachi

  I am looking for a good solution to collaborate on Microsoft Office documents, we currently just edit directly on a Samba share but it's one big mess because sometimes people leave the office with their laptops while docs are open so swap files remain there and then you nobody is sure what's going on. Is there any good and simple open source solution based on Linux? I've tried Alfresco but it is much more than what I need, we got an internal wiki for most collaboration and I just need some solution for the stuff we need to do in Microsoft Office (mostly Excel files, the rest is in the wiki) EDIT: Some more info as requested - we are very small group, 4 full time employees and a few freelancers. The best idea I've got so far is just managing it in a subversion repository with a Lock-Modify-Lock policy but I'd love to hear about better solutions. Thanks!

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• Any problems usinga GoDaddy SSL certificate on a Cisco ASA firewall?

  - by Richard West

  I need to purchase and install a SSL certificate on my Cisco ASA firewall. This will allow my VPN users to connect to my ASA without receiving the certificate error from the untrusted self assigned SSL certificate that is currently on the ASA. I had good experiences with the SSL certificates that GoDaddy sells. However, I'm concerned about using them. On my web servers I have to also install GoDaddy's "intermediate certificate bundle". On the ASA I do not think that I will be able to preform anything like this. I do not fully understand what the "intermediate certificate bundle" does, but obviously it's important. So my question is can I use a GoDaddy SSL certificate on an ASA without my users getting any type of warning or error about connecting to a site that using an untrusted SSL certificate. I need this to be as simple as possible for my end users and warning messages are always scary :) Thanks!

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• Windows 7 Windows XP mode cannot run - it says "Require Hardware Assisted Virtualization"

  - by Jian Lin

  After installing the 2 files for Windows 7 Windows XP mode, the Start Menu now has Windows Virtual PC Windows XP Mode but clicking on the first merely brings out a folder, and clicking on the second brings out a dialog box that says: "Require Hardware Assisted Virtualization" Does that mean the machine cannot support Windows 7 Windows XP mode? I am running Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit edition. This is the dialog box: Update: the computer is an HP TouchSmart, with American Megatrends BIOS v02.61. I looked into the BIOS set up but it is quite simple and dosen't have something for "hardware assisted virtualization". The CPU is Intel Core 2 Duo T5750.

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• Migrate SBS 2008 with Exchange 2007 to new hardware

  - by MikeT505

  Hello, We have run out of hard disk space on our existing Small Business Server 2008 and simply wish to upgrade both of the hard drives (currently raid 1) - without too much hassle. My main concern is how to copy across the embedded version of Microsoft Exchange 2007. Is there a simple way to copy all the data across and upgrade? Or is it best to backup and do a clean install? - The difficulty is that it's the same server, so we can't replicate mailboxes for exchange. Any hints or tips welcomed!?

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