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• Installing SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7

  - by smisner

  Many people like me want (or need) to do their business intelligence development work on a laptop. As someone who frequently speaks at various events or teaches classes on all subjects related to the Microsoft business intelligence stack, I need a way to run multiple server products on my laptop with reasonable performance. Once upon a time, that requirement meant only that I had to load the current version of SQL Server and the client tools of choice. In today's post, I'll review my latest experience with trying to make the newly released Microsoft BI products work with a Windows 7 operating system.The entrance of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 into the BI stack complicated matters and I started using Virtual Server to establish a "suitable" environment. As part of the team that delivered a lot of education as part of the Yukon pre-launch activities (that would be SQL Server 2005 for the uninitiated), I was working with four - yes, four - virtual servers. That was a pretty brutal workload for a 2GB laptop, which worked if I was very, very careful. It could also be a finicky and unreliable configuration as I learned to my dismay at one TechEd session several years ago when I had to reboot a very carefully cached set of servers just minutes before my session started. Although it worked, it came back to life very, very slowly much to the displeasure of the audience. They couldn't possibly have been less pleased than me.At that moment, I resolved to get the beefiest environment I could afford and consolidate to a single virtual server. Enter the 4GB 64-bit laptop to preserve my sanity and my livelihood. Likewise, for SQL Server 2008, I managed to keep everything within a single virtual server and I could function reasonably well with this approach.Now we have SQL Server 2008 R2 plus Office SharePoint Server 2010. That means a 64-bit operating system. Period. That means no more Virtual Server. That means I must use Hyper-V or another alternative. I've heard alternatives exist, but my few dabbles in this area did not yield positive results. It might have been just me having issues rather than any failure of those technologies to adequately support the requirements.My first run at working with the new BI stack configuration was to set up a 64-bit 4GB laptop with a dual-boot to run Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. However, I was generally not happy with running Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop. For one, I couldn't put it into sleep mode, which is helpful if I want to prepare for a presentation beforehand and then walk to the podium without the need to hold my laptop in its open state along the way (my strategy at the TechEd session long, long ago). Secondly, it was finicky with projectors. I had issues from time to time and while I always eventually got it to work, I didn't appreciate those nerve-wracking moments wondering whether this would be the time that it wouldn't work.Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was possible to load SharePoint 2010 in a Windows 7 which piqued my interest. I had just acquired a new laptop running Windows 7 64-bit, and thought surely running the BI stack natively on my laptop must be better than running Hyper-V. (I have not tried booting to Hyper-V VHD yet, but that's on my list of things to try so the jury of one is still out on this approach.) Recently, I had to build up a server with the RTM versions of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Sharepoint Server 2010 and decided to follow suit on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit laptop. The process is slightly different, but I'm happy to report that it IS possible, although I had some fits and starts along the way.DISCLAIMER: These products are NOT intended to be run in production mode on the Windows 7 operating system. The configuration described in this post is strictly for development or learning purposes and not supported by Microsoft. If you have trouble, you will NOT get help from them. I might be able to help, but I provide no guarantees of my ability or availablity to help. I won't provide the step-by-step instructions in this post as there are other resources that provide these details, but I will provide an overview of my approach, point you to the relevant resources, describe some of the problems I encountered, and explain how I addressed those problems to achieve my desired goal.Because my goal was not simply to set up SharePoint Server 2010 on my laptop, but specifically PowerPivot for SharePoint, I started out by referring to the installation instructions at the PowerPiovt-Info site, but mainly to confirm that I was performing steps in the proper sequence. I didn't perform the steps in Part 1 because those steps are applicable only to a server operating system which I am not running on my laptop. Then, the instructions in Part 2, won't work exactly as written for the same reason. Instead, I followed the instructions on MSDN, Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008. In general, I found the following differences in installation steps from the steps at PowerPivot-Info:You must copy the SharePoint installation media to the local drive so that you can edit the config.xml to allow installation on a Windows client.You also have to manually install the prerequisites. The instructions provides links to each item that you must manually install and provides a command-line instruction to execute which enables required Windows features.I will digress for a moment to save you some grief in the sequence of steps to perform. I discovered later that a missing step in the MSDN instructions is to install the November CTP Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint. When I went to test my SharePoint site (I believe I tested after I had a successful PowerPivot installation), I ran into the following error: Could not load file or assembly 'RSSharePointSoapProxy, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. I was rather surprised that Reporting Services was required. Then I found an article by Alan le Marquand, Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010,that instructed readers to install the November add-in. My first reaction was, "Really?!?" But I confirmed it in another TechNet article on hardware and software requirements for SharePoint Server 2010. It doesn't refer explicitly to the November CTP but following the link took me there. (Interestingly, I retested today and there's no longer any reference to the November CTP. Here's the link to download the latest and greatest Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies 2010.) You don't need to download the add-in anymore if you're doing a regular server-based installation of SharePoint because it installs as part of the prerequisites automatically.When it was time to start the installation of SharePoint, I deviated from the MSDN instructions and from the PowerPivot-Info instructions:On the Choose the installation you want page of the installation wizard, I chose Server Farm.On the Server Type page, I chose Complete.At the end of the installation, I did not run the configuration wizard.Returning to the PowerPivot-Info instructions, I tried to follow the instructions in Part 3 which describe installing SQL Server 2008 R2 with the PowerPivot option. These instructions tell you to choose the New Server option on the Setup Role page where you add PowerPivot for SharePoint. However, I ran into problems with this approach and got installation errors at the end.It wasn't until much later as I was investigating an error that I encountered Dave Wickert's post that installing PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7 is unsupported. Uh oh. But he did want to hear about it if anyone succeeded, so I decided to take the plunge. Perseverance paid off, and I can happily inform Dave that it does work so far. I haven't tested absolutely everything with PowerPivot for SharePoint but have successfully deployed a workbook and viewed the PowerPivot Management Dashboard. I have not yet tested the data refresh feature, but I have installed. Continue reading to see how I accomplished my objective.I unintalled SQL Server 2008 R2 and started again. I had different problems which I don't recollect now. However, I uninstalled again and approached installation from a different angle and my next attempt succeeded. The downside of this approach is that you must do all of the things yourself that are done automatically when you install PowerPivot as a new server. Here are the steps that I followed:Install SQL Server 2008 R2 to get a database engine instance installed.Run the SharePoint configuration wizard to set up the SharePoint databases.In Central Administration, create a Web application using classic mode authentication as per a TechNet article on PowerPivot Authentication and Authorization.Then I followed the steps I found at How to: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint on an Existing SharePoint Server. Especially important to note - you must launch setup by using Run as administrator. I did not have to manually deploy the PowerPivot solution as the instructions specify, but it's good to know about this step because it tells you where to look in Central Administration to confirm a successful deployment.I did spot some incorrect steps in the instructions (at the time of this writing) in How To: Configure Stored Credentials for PowerPivot Data Refresh. Specifically, in the section entitled Step 1: Create a target application and set the credentials, both steps 10 and 12 are incorrect. They tell you to provide an actual Windows user name and password on the page where you are simply defining the prompts for your application in the Secure Store Service. To add the Windows user name and password that you want to associate with the application - after you have successfully created the target application - you select the target application and then click Set credentials in the ribbon.Lastly, I followed the instructions at How to: Install Office Data Connectivity Components on a PowerPivot server. However, I have yet to test this in my current environment.I did have several stops and starts throughout this process and edited those out to spare you from reading non-essential information. I believe the explanation I have provided here accurately reflect the steps I followed to produce a working configuration. If you follow these steps and get a different result, please let me know so that together we can work through the issue and correct these instructions. I'm sure there are many other folks in the Microsoft BI community that will appreciate the ability to set up the BI stack in a Windows 7 environment for development or learning purposes. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Preventing duplicate Data with ASP.NET AJAX

  - by Yousef_Jadallah

    Some times you need to prevent  User names ,E-mail ID's or other values from being duplicated by a new user during Registration or any other cases,So I will add a simple approach to make the page more user-friendly. Instead the user filled all the Registration fields then press submit after that received a message as a result of PostBack that "THIS USERNAME IS EXIST", Ajax tidies this up by allowing asynchronous querying while the user is still completing the registration form.   ASP.NET enables you to create Web services can be accessed from client script in Web pages by using AJAX technology to make Web service calls. Data is exchanged asynchronously between client and server, typically in JSON format. I’ve added an article to show you step by step  how to use ASP.NET AJAX with Web Services , you can find it here .   Lets go a head with the steps :   1-Create a new project , if you are using VS 2005 you have to create ASP.NET Ajax Enabled Web site.   2-Create your own Database which contain user table that have User_Name field. for Testing I’ve added SQL Server Database that come with Dot Net 2008: Then I’ve created tblUsers:   This table and this structure just for our example, you can use your own table to implement this approach.   3-Add new Item to your project or website, Choose Web Service file, lets say  WebService.cs  .In this Web Service file import System.Data.SqlClient Namespace, Then Add your web method that contain string parameter which received the Username parameter from the Script , Finally don’t forget to qualified the Web Service Class with the ScriptServiceAttribute attribute ([System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService])     using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Services; using System.Data.SqlClient;     [WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] [System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptService] public class WebService : System.Web.Services.WebService {     [WebMethod] public int CheckDuplicate(string User_Name) { string strConn = @"Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|\TestDB.mdf;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True"; string strQuery = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tblUsers WHERE User_Name = @User_Name"; SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection(strConn); SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(strQuery, con); cmd.Parameters.Add("User_Name", User_Name); con.Open(); int RetVal= (int)cmd.ExecuteScalar(); con.Close(); return RetVal; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Our Web Method here is CheckDuplicate Which accept User_Name String as a parameter and return number of the rows , if the name will found in the database this method will return 1 else it will return 0. I’ve applied  [WebMethod] Attribute to our method CheckDuplicate, And applied the ScriptService attribute to a Web Service class named WebService.   4-Add this simple Registration form : <fieldset> <table id="TblRegistratoin" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td> User Name </td> <td> <asp:TextBox ID="txtUserName" onblur="CallWebMethod();" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> </td> <td> <asp:Label ID="lblDuplicate" runat="server" ForeColor="Red" Text=""></asp:Label> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="3"> <asp:Button ID="btnRegistration" runat="server" Text="Registration" /> </td> </tr> </table> </fieldset> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   onblur event is added to the Textbox txtUserName, This event Fires when the Textbox loses the input focus, That mean after the user get focus out from the Textbox CallWebMethod function will be fired. CallWebMethod will be implemented in step 6.   5-Add ScriptManager Control to your aspx file then reference the Web service by adding an asp:ServiceReference child element to the ScriptManager control and setting its path attribute to point to the Web service, That generate a JavaScript proxy class for calling the specified Web service from client script.   <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" ID="scriptManager"> <Services> <asp:ServiceReference Path="WebService.asmx" /> </Services> </asp:ScriptManager> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }     6-Define the JavaScript code to call the Web Service :   <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">   // This function calls the Web service method // passing simple type parameters and the // callback function function CallWebMethod() { var User_Name = document.getElementById('<%=txtUserName.ClientID %>').value; WebService.CheckDuplicate(User_Name, OnSucceeded, OnError); }   // This is the callback function invoked if the Web service // succeeded function OnSucceeded(result) { var rsltElement = document.getElementById("lblDuplicate"); if (result == 1) rsltElement.innerHTML = "This User Name is exist"; else rsltElement.innerHTML = "";   }   function OnError(error) { // Display the error. alert("Service Error: " + error.get_message()); } </script> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   This call references the WebService Class and CheckDuplicate Web Method defined in the service. It passes a User_Name value obtained from a textbox as well as a callback function named OnSucceeded that should be invoked when the asynchronous Web Service call returns. If the Web Service in different Namespace you can refer it before the class name this Main formula may help you :  NameSpaceName.ClassName.WebMethdName(Parameters , Success callback function, Error callback function); Parameters: you can pass one or many parameters. Success callback function :handles returned data from the service . Error callback function :Any errors that occur when the Web Service is called will trigger in this function. Using Error Callback function is optional.   Hope these steps help you to understand this approach.

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 5, Partitioning of Work

  - by Reed

  When parallelizing any routine, we start by decomposing the problem.  Once the problem is understood, we need to break our work into separate tasks, so each task can be run on a different processing element.  This process is called partitioning. Partitioning our tasks is a challenging feat.  There are opposing forces at work here: too many partitions adds overhead, too few partitions leaves processors idle.  Trying to work the perfect balance between the two extremes is the goal for which we should aim.  Luckily, the Task Parallel Library automatically handles much of this process.  However, there are situations where the default partitioning may not be appropriate, and knowledge of our routines may allow us to guide the framework to making better decisions. First off, I’d like to say that this is a more advanced topic.  It is perfectly acceptable to use the parallel constructs in the framework without considering the partitioning taking place.  The default behavior in the Task Parallel Library is very well-behaved, even for unusual work loads, and should rarely be adjusted.  I have found few situations where the default partitioning behavior in the TPL is not as good or better than my own hand-written partitioning routines, and recommend using the defaults unless there is a strong, measured, and profiled reason to avoid using them.  However, understanding partitioning, and how the TPL partitions your data, helps in understanding the proper usage of the TPL. I indirectly mentioned partitioning while discussing aggregation.  Typically, our systems will have a limited number of Processing Elements (PE), which is the terminology used for hardware capable of processing a stream of instructions.  For example, in a standard Intel i7 system, there are four processor cores, each of which has two potential hardware threads due to Hyperthreading.  This gives us a total of 8 PEs – theoretically, we can have up to eight operations occurring concurrently within our system. In order to fully exploit this power, we need to partition our work into Tasks.  A task is a simple set of instructions that can be run on a PE.  Ideally, we want to have at least one task per PE in the system, since fewer tasks means that some of our processing power will be sitting idle.  A naive implementation would be to just take our data, and partition it with one element in our collection being treated as one task.  When we loop through our collection in parallel, using this approach, we’d just process one item at a time, then reuse that thread to process the next, etc.  There’s a flaw in this approach, however.  It will tend to be slower than necessary, often slower than processing the data serially. The problem is that there is overhead associated with each task.  When we take a simple foreach loop body and implement it using the TPL, we add overhead.  First, we change the body from a simple statement to a delegate, which must be invoked.  In order to invoke the delegate on a separate thread, the delegate gets added to the ThreadPool’s current work queue, and the ThreadPool must pull this off the queue, assign it to a free thread, then execute it.  If our collection had one million elements, the overhead of trying to spawn one million tasks would destroy our performance. The answer, here, is to partition our collection into groups, and have each group of elements treated as a single task.  By adding a partitioning step, we can break our total work into small enough tasks to keep our processors busy, but large enough tasks to avoid overburdening the ThreadPool.  There are two clear, opposing goals here: Always try to keep each processor working, but also try to keep the individual partitions as large as possible. When using Parallel.For, the partitioning is always handled automatically.  At first, partitioning here seems simple.  A naive implementation would merely split the total element count up by the number of PEs in the system, and assign a chunk of data to each processor.  Many hand-written partitioning schemes work in this exactly manner.  This perfectly balanced, static partitioning scheme works very well if the amount of work is constant for each element.  However, this is rarely the case.  Often, the length of time required to process an element grows as we progress through the collection, especially if we’re doing numerical computations.  In this case, the first PEs will finish early, and sit idle waiting on the last chunks to finish.  Sometimes, work can decrease as we progress, since previous computations may be used to speed up later computations.  In this situation, the first chunks will be working far longer than the last chunks.  In order to balance the workload, many implementations create many small chunks, and reuse threads.  This adds overhead, but does provide better load balancing, which in turn improves performance. The Task Parallel Library handles this more elaborately.  Chunks are determined at runtime, and start small.  They grow slowly over time, getting larger and larger.  This tends to lead to a near optimum load balancing, even in odd cases such as increasing or decreasing workloads.  Parallel.ForEach is a bit more complicated, however. When working with a generic IEnumerable<T>, the number of items required for processing is not known in advance, and must be discovered at runtime.  In addition, since we don’t have direct access to each element, the scheduler must enumerate the collection to process it.  Since IEnumerable<T> is not thread safe, it must lock on elements as it enumerates, create temporary collections for each chunk to process, and schedule this out.  By default, it uses a partitioning method similar to the one described above.  We can see this directly by looking at the Visual Partitioning sample shipped by the Task Parallel Library team, and available as part of the Samples for Parallel Programming.  When we run the sample, with four cores and the default, Load Balancing partitioning scheme, we see this: The colored bands represent each processing core.  You can see that, when we started (at the top), we begin with very small bands of color.  As the routine progresses through the Parallel.ForEach, the chunks get larger and larger (seen by larger and larger stripes). Most of the time, this is fantastic behavior, and most likely will out perform any custom written partitioning.  However, if your routine is not scaling well, it may be due to a failure in the default partitioning to handle your specific case.  With prior knowledge about your work, it may be possible to partition data more meaningfully than the default Partitioner. There is the option to use an overload of Parallel.ForEach which takes a Partitioner<T> instance.  The Partitioner<T> class is an abstract class which allows for both static and dynamic partitioning.  By overriding Partitioner<T>.SupportsDynamicPartitions, you can specify whether a dynamic approach is available.  If not, your custom Partitioner<T> subclass would override GetPartitions(int), which returns a list of IEnumerator<T> instances.  These are then used by the Parallel class to split work up amongst processors.  When dynamic partitioning is available, GetDynamicPartitions() is used, which returns an IEnumerable<T> for each partition.  If you do decide to implement your own Partitioner<T>, keep in mind the goals and tradeoffs of different partitioning strategies, and design appropriately. The Samples for Parallel Programming project includes a ChunkPartitioner class in the ParallelExtensionsExtras project.  This provides example code for implementing your own, custom allocation strategies, including a static allocator of a given chunk size.  Although implementing your own Partitioner<T> is possible, as I mentioned above, this is rarely required or useful in practice.  The default behavior of the TPL is very good, often better than any hand written partitioning strategy.

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• Compiling examples for consuming the REST Endpoints for WCF Service using Agatha

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I recently made two contributions to the Agatha Project by Davy Brion over on Google Code, and one of the things I wanted to follow up with was a post showing examples and some, seemingly required tid bits.  The contributions which I made where: To support StructureMap To include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract The examples which I have made, I want to format them so they fit in with the current format of examples over on Agatha and hopefully create and submit a third patch which will include these examples to help others who wish to use these additions. Whilst building these examples for both XML and JSON I have learnt a couple of things which I feel are not really well documented, but are extremely good practice and once known make perfect sense.  I have chosen a real basic e-commerce context for my example Requests and Responses, and have also made use of the excellent tool AutoMapper, again on Google Code. Setting the scene I have followed the Pipes and Filters Pattern with the IQueryable interface on my Repository and exposed the following methods to query Products: IQueryable<Product> GetProducts(); IQueryable<Product> ByCategoryName(this IQueryable<Product> products, string categoryName) Product ByProductCode(this IQueryable<Product> products, String productCode) I have an interface for the IProductRepository but for the concrete implementation I have simply created a protected getter which populates a private List<Product> with 100 test products with random data.  Another good reason for following an interface based approach is that it will demonstrate usage of my first contribution which is the StructureMap support.  Finally the two Domain Objects I have made are Product and Category as shown below: public class Product { public String ProductCode { get; set; } public String Name { get; set; } public Decimal Price { get; set; } public Decimal Rrp { get; set; } public Category Category { get; set; } }   public class Category { public String Name { get; set; } }   Requirements for the REST Support One of the things which you will notice with Agatha is that you do not have to decorate your Request and Response objects with the WCF Service Model Attributes like DataContract, DataMember etc… Unfortunately from what I have seen, these are required if you want the same types to work with your REST endpoint.  I have not tried but I assume the same result can be achieved by simply decorating the same classes with the Serializable Attribute.  Without this the operation will fail. Another surprising thing I have found is that it did not work until I used the following Attribute parameters: Name Namespace e.g. [DataContract(Name = "GetProductsRequest", Namespace = "AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests")] public class GetProductsRequest : Request { }   Although I was surprised by this, things kind of explained themselves when I got round to figuring out the exact construct required for both the XML and the REST.  One of the things which you already know and are then reminded of is that each of your Requests and Responses ultimately inherit from an abstract base class respectively. This information needs to be represented in a way native to the format being used.  I have seen this in XML but I have not seen the format which is required for the JSON. JSON Consumer Example I have used JQuery to create the example and I simply want to make two requests to the server which as you will know with Agatha are transmitted inside an array to reduce the service calls.  I have also used a tool called json2 which is again over at Google Code simply to convert my JSON expression into its string format for transmission.  You will notice that I specify the type of Request I am using and the relevant Namespace it belongs to.  Also notice that the second request has a parameter so each of these two object are representing an abstract Request and the parameters of the object describe it. <script type="text/javascript"> var bodyContent = $.ajax({ url: "http://localhost:50348/service.svc/json/processjsonrequests", global: false, contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", type: "POST", processData: true, data: JSON.stringify([ { __type: "GetProductsRequest:AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests" }, { __type: "GetProductsByCategoryRequest:AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests", CategoryName: "Category1" } ]), dataType: "json", success: function(msg) { alert(msg); } }).responseText; </script>   XML Consumer Example For the XML Consumer example I have chosen to use a simple Console Application and make a WebRequest to the service using the XML as a request.  I have made a crude static method which simply reads from an XML File, replaces some value with a parameter and returns the formatted XML.  I say crude but it simply shows how XML Templates for each type of Request could be made and then have a wrapper utility in whatever language you use to combine the requests which are required.  The following XML is the same Request array as shown above but simply in the XML Format. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <ArrayOfRequest xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/Agatha.Common" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <Request i:type="a:GetProductsRequest" xmlns:a="AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests"/> <Request i:type="a:GetProductsByCategoryRequest" xmlns:a="AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests"> <a:CategoryName>{CategoryName}</a:CategoryName> </Request> </ArrayOfRequest>   It is funny because I remember submitting a question to StackOverflow asking whether there was a REST Client Generation tool similar to what Microsoft used for their RestStarterKit but which could be applied to existing services which have REST endpoints attached.  I could not find any but this is now definitely something which I am going to build, as I think it is extremely useful to have but also it should not be too difficult based on the information I now know about the above.  Finally I thought that the Strategy Pattern would lend itself really well to this type of thing so it can accommodate for different languages. I think that is about it, I have included the code for the example Console app which I made below incase anyone wants to have a mooch at the code.  As I said above I want to reformat these to fit in with the current examples over on the Agatha project, but also now thinking about it, make a Documentation Web method…{brain ticking} :-) Cheers for now and here is the final bit of code: static void Main(string[] args) { var request = WebRequest.Create("http://localhost:50348/service.svc/xml/processxmlrequests"); request.Method = "POST"; request.ContentType = "text/xml"; using(var writer = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream())) { writer.WriteLine(GetExampleRequestsString("Category1")); } var response = request.GetResponse(); using(var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream())) { Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd()); } Console.ReadLine(); } static string GetExampleRequestsString(string categoryName) { var data = File.ReadAllText(Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location), "ExampleRequests.xml")); data = data.Replace("{CategoryName}", categoryName); return data; } }

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• Complete Guide to Symbolic Links (symlinks) on Windows or Linux

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to easily access folders and files from different folders without maintaining duplicate copies?  Here’s how you can use Symbolic Links to link anything in Windows 7, Vista, XP, and Ubuntu. So What Are Symbolic Links Anyway? Symbolic links, otherwise known as symlinks, are basically advanced shortcuts. You can create symbolic links to individual files or folders, and then these will appear like they are stored in the folder with the symbolic link even though the symbolic link only points to their real location. There are two types of symbolic links: hard and soft. Soft symbolic links work essentially the same as a standard shortcut.  When you open a soft link, you will be redirected to the folder where the files are stored.  However, a hard link makes it appear as though the file or folder actually exists at the location of the symbolic link, and your applications won’t know any different. Thus, hard links are of the most interest in this article. Why should I use Symbolic Links? There are many things we use symbolic links for, so here’s some of the top uses we can think of: Sync any folder with Dropbox – say, sync your Pidgin Profile Across Computers Move the settings folder for any program from its original location Store your Music/Pictures/Videos on a second hard drive, but make them show up in your standard Music/Pictures/Videos folders so they’ll be detected my your media programs (Windows 7 Libraries can also be good for this) Keep important files accessible from multiple locations And more! If you want to move files to a different drive or folder and then symbolically link them, follow these steps: Close any programs that may be accessing that file or folder Move the file or folder to the new desired location Follow the correct instructions below for your operating system to create the symbolic link. Caution: Make sure to never create a symbolic link inside of a symbolic link. For instance, don’t create a symbolic link to a file that’s contained in a symbolic linked folder. This can create a loop, which can cause millions of problems you don’t want to deal with. Seriously. Create Symlinks in Any Edition of Windows in Explorer Creating symlinks is usually difficult, but thanks to the free Link Shell Extension, you can create symbolic links in all modern version of Windows pain-free.  You need to download both Visual Studio 2005 redistributable, which contains the necessary prerequisites, and Link Shell Extension itself (links below).  Download the correct version (32 bit or 64 bit) for your computer. Run and install the Visual Studio 2005 Redistributable installer first. Then install the Link Shell Extension on your computer. Your taskbar will temporally disappear during the install, but will quickly come back. Now you’re ready to start creating symbolic links.  Browse to the folder or file you want to create a symbolic link from.  Right-click the folder or file and select Pick Link Source. To create your symlink, right-click in the folder you wish to save the symbolic link, select “Drop as…”, and then choose the type of link you want.  You can choose from several different options here; we chose the Hardlink Clone.  This will create a hard link to the file or folder we selected.  The Symbolic link option creates a soft link, while the smart copy will fully copy a folder containing symbolic links without breaking them.  These options can be useful as well.   Here’s our hard-linked folder on our desktop.  Notice that the folder looks like its contents are stored in Desktop\Downloads, when they are actually stored in C:\Users\Matthew\Desktop\Downloads.  Also, when links are created with the Link Shell Extension, they have a red arrow on them so you can still differentiate them. And, this works the same way in XP as well. Symlinks via Command Prompt Or, for geeks who prefer working via command line, here’s how you can create symlinks in Command Prompt in Windows 7/Vista and XP. In Windows 7/Vista In Windows Vista and 7, we’ll use the mklink command to create symbolic links.  To use it, we have to open an administrator Command Prompt.  Enter “command” in your start menu search, right-click on Command Prompt, and select “Run as administrator”. To create a symbolic link, we need to enter the following in command prompt: mklink /prefix link_path file/folder_path First, choose the correct prefix.  Mklink can create several types of links, including the following: /D – creates a soft symbolic link, which is similar to a standard folder or file shortcut in Windows.  This is the default option, and mklink will use it if you do not enter a prefix. /H – creates a hard link to a file /J – creates a hard link to a directory or folder So, once you’ve chosen the correct prefix, you need to enter the path you want for the symbolic link, and the path to the original file or folder.  For example, if I wanted a folder in my Dropbox folder to appear like it was also stored in my desktop, I would enter the following: mklink /J C:\Users\Matthew\Desktop\Dropbox C:\Users\Matthew\Documents\Dropbox Note that the first path was to the symbolic folder I wanted to create, while the second path was to the real folder. Here, in this command prompt screenshot, you can see that I created a symbolic link of my Music folder to my desktop.   And here’s how it looks in Explorer.  Note that all of my music is “really” stored in C:\Users\Matthew\Music, but here it looks like it is stored in C:\Users\Matthew\Desktop\Music. If your path has any spaces in it, you need to place quotes around it.  Note also that the link can have a different name than the file it links to.  For example, here I’m going to create a symbolic link to a document on my desktop: mklink /H “C:\Users\Matthew\Desktop\ebook.pdf”  “C:\Users\Matthew\Downloads\Before You Call Tech Support.pdf” Don’t forget the syntax: mklink /prefix link_path Target_file/folder_path In Windows XP Windows XP doesn’t include built-in command prompt support for symbolic links, but we can use the free Junction tool instead.  Download Junction (link below), and unzip the folder.  Now open Command Prompt (click Start, select All Programs, then Accessories, and select Command Prompt), and enter cd followed by the path of the folder where you saved Junction. Junction only creates hard symbolic links, since you can use shortcuts for soft ones.  To create a hard symlink, we need to enter the following in command prompt: junction –s link_path file/folder_path As with mklink in Windows 7 or Vista, if your file/folder path has spaces in it make sure to put quotes around your paths.  Also, as usual, your symlink can have a different name that the file/folder it points to. Here, we’re going to create a symbolic link to our My Music folder on the desktop.  We entered: junction -s “C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\Music” “C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Music” And here’s the contents of our symlink.  Note that the path looks like these files are stored in a Music folder directly on the Desktop, when they are actually stored in My Documents\My Music.  Once again, this works with both folders and individual files. Please Note: Junction would work the same in Windows 7 or Vista, but since they include a built-in symbolic link tool we found it better to use it on those versions of Windows. Symlinks in Ubuntu Unix-based operating systems have supported symbolic links since their inception, so it is straightforward to create symbolic links in Linux distros such as Ubuntu.  There’s no graphical way to create them like the Link Shell Extension for Windows, so we’ll just do it in Terminal. Open terminal (open the Applications menu, select Accessories, and then click Terminal), and enter the following: ln –s file/folder_path link_path Note that this is opposite of the Windows commands; you put the source for the link first, and then the path second. For example, let’s create a symbolic link of our Pictures folder in our Desktop.  To do this, we entered: ln -s /home/maguay/Pictures /home/maguay/Desktop   Once again, here is the contents of our symlink folder.  The pictures look as if they’re stored directly in a Pictures folder on the Desktop, but they are actually stored in maguay\Pictures. Delete Symlinks Removing symbolic links is very simple – just delete the link!  Most of the command line utilities offer a way to delete a symbolic link via command prompt, but you don’t need to go to the trouble.   Conclusion Symbolic links can be very handy, and we use them constantly to help us stay organized and keep our hard drives from overflowing.  Let us know how you use symbolic links on your computers! Download Link Shell Extension for Windows 7, Vista, and XP Download Junction for XP Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Symlinks in Windows VistaHow To Figure Out Your PC’s Host Name From the Command PromptInstall IceWM on Ubuntu LinuxAdd Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideSync Your Pidgin Profile Across Multiple PCs with Dropbox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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• Integrating WIF with WCF Data Services

  - by cibrax

  A time ago I discussed how a custom REST Starter kit interceptor could be used to parse a SAML token in the Http Authorization header and wrap that into a ClaimsPrincipal that the WCF services could use. The thing is that code was initially created for Geneva framework, so it got deprecated quickly. I recently needed that piece of code for one of projects where I am currently working on so I decided to update it for WIF. As this interceptor can be injected in any host for WCF REST services, also represents an excellent solution for integrating claim-based security into WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.NET Data Services). The interceptor basically expects a SAML token in the Authorization header. If a token is found, it is parsed and a new ClaimsPrincipal is initialized and injected in the WCF authorization context. public class SamlAuthenticationInterceptor : RequestInterceptor {   SecurityTokenHandlerCollection handlers;   public SamlAuthenticationInterceptor()     : base(false)   {     this.handlers = FederatedAuthentication.ServiceConfiguration.SecurityTokenHandlers;   }   public override void ProcessRequest(ref RequestContext requestContext)   {     SecurityToken token = ExtractCredentials(requestContext.RequestMessage);     if (token != null)     {       ClaimsIdentityCollection claims = handlers.ValidateToken(token);       var principal = new ClaimsPrincipal(claims);       InitializeSecurityContext(requestContext.RequestMessage, principal);     }     else     {       DenyAccess(ref requestContext);     }   }   private void DenyAccess(ref RequestContext requestContext)   {     Message reply = Message.CreateMessage(MessageVersion.None, null);     HttpResponseMessageProperty responseProperty = new HttpResponseMessageProperty() { StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized };     responseProperty.Headers.Add("WWW-Authenticate",           String.Format("Basic realm=\"{0}\"", ""));     reply.Properties[HttpResponseMessageProperty.Name] = responseProperty;     requestContext.Reply(reply);     requestContext = null;   }   private SecurityToken ExtractCredentials(Message requestMessage)   {     HttpRequestMessageProperty request = (HttpRequestMessageProperty)  requestMessage.Properties[HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name];     string authHeader = request.Headers["Authorization"];     if (authHeader != null && authHeader.Contains("<saml"))     {       XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(new StringReader(authHeader));       var col = SecurityTokenHandlerCollection.CreateDefaultSecurityTokenHandlerCollection();       SecurityToken token = col.ReadToken(xmlReader);                                        return token;     }     return null;   }   private void InitializeSecurityContext(Message request, IPrincipal principal)   {     List<IAuthorizationPolicy> policies = new List<IAuthorizationPolicy>();     policies.Add(new PrincipalAuthorizationPolicy(principal));     ServiceSecurityContext securityContext = new ServiceSecurityContext(policies.AsReadOnly());     if (request.Properties.Security != null)     {       request.Properties.Security.ServiceSecurityContext = securityContext;     }     else     {       request.Properties.Security = new SecurityMessageProperty() { ServiceSecurityContext = securityContext };      }    }    class PrincipalAuthorizationPolicy : IAuthorizationPolicy    {      string id = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();      IPrincipal user;      public PrincipalAuthorizationPolicy(IPrincipal user)      {        this.user = user;      }      public ClaimSet Issuer      {        get { return ClaimSet.System; }      }      public string Id      {        get { return this.id; }      }      public bool Evaluate(EvaluationContext evaluationContext, ref object state)      {        evaluationContext.AddClaimSet(this, new DefaultClaimSet(System.IdentityModel.Claims.Claim.CreateNameClaim(user.Identity.Name)));        evaluationContext.Properties["Identities"] = new List<IIdentity>(new IIdentity[] { user.Identity });        evaluationContext.Properties["Principal"] = user;        return true;      }    } A WCF Data Service, as any other WCF Service, contains a service host where this interceptor can be injected. The following code illustrates how that can be done in the “svc” file. <%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="ContactsDataService"                 Factory="AppServiceHostFactory" %> using System; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using Microsoft.ServiceModel.Web; class AppServiceHostFactory : ServiceHostFactory {    protected override ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses)   {     WebServiceHost2 result = new WebServiceHost2(serviceType, true, baseAddresses);     result.Interceptors.Add(new SamlAuthenticationInterceptor());                 return result;   } } WCF Data Services includes an specific WCF host of out the box (DataServiceHost). However, the service is not affected at all if you replace it with a custom one as I am doing in the code above (WebServiceHost2 is part of the REST Starter kit). Finally, the client application needs to pass the SAML token somehow to the data service. In case you are using any Http client library for consuming the data service, that’s easy to do, you only need to include the SAML token as part of the “Authorization” header. If you are using the auto-generated data service proxy, a little piece of code is needed to inject a SAML token into the DataServiceContext instance. That class provides an event “SendingRequest” that any client application can leverage to include custom code that modified the Http request before it is sent to the service. So, you can easily create an extension method for the DataServiceContext that negotiates the SAML token with an existing STS, and adds that token as part of the “Authorization” header. public static class DataServiceContextExtensions {        public static void ConfigureFederatedCredentials(this DataServiceContext context, string baseStsAddress, string realm)   {     string address = string.Format(STSAddressFormat, baseStsAddress, realm);                  string token = NegotiateSecurityToken(address);     context.SendingRequest += (source, args) =>     {       args.RequestHeaders.Add("Authorization", token);     };   } private string NegotiateSecurityToken(string address) { } } I left the NegociateSecurityToken method empty for this extension as it depends pretty much on how you are negotiating tokens from an existing STS. In case you want to end-to-end REST solution that involves an Http endpoint for the STS, you should definitely take a look at the Thinktecture starter STS project in codeplex.

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• Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 4 – Calling the base method

  - by SeanMcAlinden

  Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 1 – Creating the Assembly builder, Module builder and caching mechanism Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 2 – Interceptor Design Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 3 – Creating the constructors   The plan for calling the base methods from the proxy is to create a private method for each overridden proxy method, this will allow the proxy to use a delegate to simply invoke the private method when required. Quite a few helper classes have been created to make this possible so as usual I would suggest download or viewing the code at http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/. In this post I’m just going to cover the main points for when creating methods. Getting the methods to override The first two notable methods are for getting the methods. private static MethodInfo[] GetMethodsToOverride<TBase>() where TBase : class {     return typeof(TBase).GetMethods().Where(x =>         !methodsToIgnore.Contains(x.Name) &&                              (x.Attributes & MethodAttributes.Final) == 0)         .ToArray(); } private static StringCollection GetMethodsToIgnore() {     return new StringCollection()     {         "ToString",         "GetHashCode",         "Equals",         "GetType"     }; } The GetMethodsToIgnore method string collection contains an array of methods that I don’t want to override. In the GetMethodsToOverride method, you’ll notice a binary AND which is basically saying not to include any methods marked final i.e. not virtual. Creating the MethodInfo for calling the base method This method should hopefully be fairly easy to follow, it’s only function is to create a MethodInfo which points to the correct base method, and with the correct parameters. private static MethodInfo CreateCallBaseMethodInfo<TBase>(MethodInfo method) where TBase : class {     Type[] baseMethodParameterTypes = ParameterHelper.GetParameterTypes(method, method.GetParameters());       return typeof(TBase).GetMethod(        method.Name,        BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic,        null,        baseMethodParameterTypes,        null     ); }   /// <summary> /// Get the parameter types. /// </summary> /// <param name="method">The method.</param> /// <param name="parameters">The parameters.</param> public static Type[] GetParameterTypes(MethodInfo method, ParameterInfo[] parameters) {     Type[] parameterTypesList = Type.EmptyTypes;       if (parameters.Length > 0)     {         parameterTypesList = CreateParametersList(parameters);     }     return parameterTypesList; }   Creating the new private methods for calling the base method The following method outline how I’ve created the private methods for calling the base class method. private static MethodBuilder CreateCallBaseMethodBuilder(TypeBuilder typeBuilder, MethodInfo method) {     string callBaseSuffix = "GetBaseMethod";       if (method.IsGenericMethod || method.IsGenericMethodDefinition)     {                         return MethodHelper.SetUpGenericMethod             (                 typeBuilder,                 method,                 method.Name + callBaseSuffix,                 MethodAttributes.Private | MethodAttributes.HideBySig             );     }     else     {         return MethodHelper.SetupNonGenericMethod             (                 typeBuilder,                 method,                 method.Name + callBaseSuffix,                 MethodAttributes.Private | MethodAttributes.HideBySig             );     } } The CreateCallBaseMethodBuilder is the entry point method for creating the call base method. I’ve added a suffix to the base classes method name to keep it unique. Non Generic Methods Creating a non generic method is fairly simple public static MethodBuilder SetupNonGenericMethod(     TypeBuilder typeBuilder,     MethodInfo method,     string methodName,     MethodAttributes methodAttributes) {     ParameterInfo[] parameters = method.GetParameters();       Type[] parameterTypes = ParameterHelper.GetParameterTypes(method, parameters);       Type returnType = method.ReturnType;       MethodBuilder methodBuilder = CreateMethodBuilder         (             typeBuilder,             method,             methodName,             methodAttributes,             parameterTypes,             returnType         );       ParameterHelper.SetUpParameters(parameterTypes, parameters, methodBuilder);       return methodBuilder; }   private static MethodBuilder CreateMethodBuilder (     TypeBuilder typeBuilder,     MethodInfo method,     string methodName,     MethodAttributes methodAttributes,     Type[] parameterTypes,     Type returnType ) { MethodBuilder methodBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineMethod(methodName, methodAttributes, returnType, parameterTypes); return methodBuilder; } As you can see, you simply have to declare a method builder, get the parameter types, and set the method attributes you want.   Generic Methods Creating generic methods takes a little bit more work. /// <summary> /// Sets up generic method. /// </summary> /// <param name="typeBuilder">The type builder.</param> /// <param name="method">The method.</param> /// <param name="methodName">Name of the method.</param> /// <param name="methodAttributes">The method attributes.</param> public static MethodBuilder SetUpGenericMethod     (         TypeBuilder typeBuilder,         MethodInfo method,         string methodName,         MethodAttributes methodAttributes     ) {     ParameterInfo[] parameters = method.GetParameters();       Type[] parameterTypes = ParameterHelper.GetParameterTypes(method, parameters);       MethodBuilder methodBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineMethod(methodName,         methodAttributes);       Type[] genericArguments = method.GetGenericArguments();       GenericTypeParameterBuilder[] genericTypeParameters =         GetGenericTypeParameters(methodBuilder, genericArguments);       ParameterHelper.SetUpParameterConstraints(parameterTypes, genericTypeParameters);       SetUpReturnType(method, methodBuilder, genericTypeParameters);       if (method.IsGenericMethod)     {         methodBuilder.MakeGenericMethod(genericArguments);     }       ParameterHelper.SetUpParameters(parameterTypes, parameters, methodBuilder);       return methodBuilder; }   private static GenericTypeParameterBuilder[] GetGenericTypeParameters     (         MethodBuilder methodBuilder,         Type[] genericArguments     ) {     return methodBuilder.DefineGenericParameters(GenericsHelper.GetArgumentNames(genericArguments)); }   private static void SetUpReturnType(MethodInfo method, MethodBuilder methodBuilder, GenericTypeParameterBuilder[] genericTypeParameters) {     if (method.IsGenericMethodDefinition)     {         SetUpGenericDefinitionReturnType(method, methodBuilder, genericTypeParameters);     }     else     {         methodBuilder.SetReturnType(method.ReturnType);     } }   private static void SetUpGenericDefinitionReturnType(MethodInfo method, MethodBuilder methodBuilder, GenericTypeParameterBuilder[] genericTypeParameters) {     if (method.ReturnType == null)     {         methodBuilder.SetReturnType(typeof(void));     }     else if (method.ReturnType.IsGenericType)     {         methodBuilder.SetReturnType(genericTypeParameters.Where             (x => x.Name == method.ReturnType.Name).First());     }     else     {         methodBuilder.SetReturnType(method.ReturnType);     }             } Ok, there are a few helper methods missing, basically there is way to much code to put in this post, take a look at the code at http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/ to follow it through completely. Basically though, when dealing with generics there is extra work to do in terms of getting the generic argument types setting up any generic parameter constraints setting up the return type setting up the method as a generic All of the information is easy to get via reflection from the MethodInfo.   Emitting the new private method Emitting the new private method is relatively simple as it’s only function is calling the base method and returning a result if the return type is not void. ILGenerator il = privateMethodBuilder.GetILGenerator();   EmitCallBaseMethod(method, callBaseMethod, il);   private static void EmitCallBaseMethod(MethodInfo method, MethodInfo callBaseMethod, ILGenerator il) {     int privateParameterCount = method.GetParameters().Length;       il.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0);       if (privateParameterCount > 0)     {         for (int arg = 0; arg < privateParameterCount; arg++)         {             il.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_S, arg + 1);         }     }       il.Emit(OpCodes.Call, callBaseMethod);       il.Emit(OpCodes.Ret); } So in the main method building method, an ILGenerator is created from the method builder. The ILGenerator performs the following actions: Load the class (this) onto the stack using the hidden argument Ldarg_0. Create an argument on the stack for each of the method parameters (starting at 1 because 0 is the hidden argument) Call the base method using the Opcodes.Call code and the MethodInfo we created earlier. Call return on the method   Conclusion Now we have the private methods prepared for calling the base method, we have reached the last of the relatively easy part of the proxy building. Hopefully, it hasn’t been too hard to follow so far, there is a lot of code so I haven’t been able to post it all so please check it out at http://rapidioc.codeplex.com/. The next section should be up fairly soon, it’s going to cover creating the delegates for calling the private methods created in this post.   Kind Regards, Sean.

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• AutoMapper MappingFunction from Source Type of NameValueCollection

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I have had a situation arise today where I need to construct a complex type from a source of a NameValueCollection.  A little while back I submitted a patch for the Agatha Project to include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract.  I realized today that as useful as it is, it did not actually support true REST conformance, as REST should support GET so that you can use JSONP from JavaScript directly meaning you can query cross domain services.  My original implementation for POX and JSON used the POST method and this immediately rules out JSONP as from reading, JSONP only works with GET Requests. This then raised another issue.  The current operation contract of Agatha and one of its main benefits is that you can supply an array of Request objects in a single request, limiting the about of server requests you need to make.  Now, at the present time I am thinking that this will not be the case for the REST imlementation but will yield the benefits of the fact that : The same Request objects can be used for SOAP and RST (POX, JSON) The construct of the JavaScript functions will be simpler and more readable It will enable the use of JSONP for cross domain REST Services The current contract for the Agatha WcfRequestProcessor is at time of writing the following: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessRequests")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] Response[] Process(params Request[] requests); [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessOneWayRequests", IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] void ProcessOneWayRequests(params OneWayRequest[] requests); }   My current proposed solution, and at the very early stages of my concept is as follows: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRestJsonRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name="process")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Response[] Process(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); [OperationContract(Name="processoneway",IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process-one-way/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] void ProcessOneWayRequests(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); }   Now this part I have not yet implemented, it is the preliminart step which I have developed which will allow me to take the name of the Request Type and the NameValueCollection and construct the complex type which is that of the Request which I can then supply to a nested instance of the original IWcfRequestProcessor  and work as it should normally.  To give an example of some of the urls which you I envisage with this method are: http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getweather/?location=london http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getproductsbycategory/?categoryid=1 http://www.url.om/service.svc/json/process/sayhello/?name=andy Another reason why my direction has gone to a single request for the REST implementation is because of restrictions which are imposed by browsers on the length of the url.  From what I have read this is on average 2000 characters.  I think that this is a very acceptable usage limit in the context of using 1 request, but I do not think this is acceptable for accommodating multiple requests chained together.  I would love to be corrected on that one, I really would but unfortunately from what I have read I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The mapping function So, as I say this is just the first pass I have made at this, and I am not overly happy with the try catch for detecting types without default constructors.  I know there is a better way but for the minute, it escapes me.  I would also like to know the correct way for adding mapping functions and not using the anonymous way that I have used.  To achieve this I have used recursion which I am sure is what other mapping function use. As you do have to go as deep as the complex type is. public static object RecurseType(NameValueCollection collection, Type type, string prefix) { try { var returnObject = Activator.CreateInstance(type); foreach (var property in type.GetProperties()) { foreach (var key in collection.AllKeys) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) || key.Length > prefix.Length) { var propertyNameToMatch = String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) ? key : key.Substring(property.Name.IndexOf(prefix) + prefix.Length + 1); if (property.Name == propertyNameToMatch) { property.SetValue(returnObject, Convert.ChangeType(collection.Get(key), property.PropertyType), null); } else if(property.GetValue(returnObject,null) == null) { property.SetValue(returnObject, RecurseType(collection, property.PropertyType, String.Concat(prefix, property.PropertyType.Name)), null); } } } } return returnObject; } catch (MissingMethodException) { //Quite a blunt way of dealing with Types without default constructor return null; } }   Another thing is performance, I have not measured this in anyway, it is as I say the first pass, so I hope this can be the start of a more perfected implementation.  I tested this out with a complex type of three levels, there is no intended logical meaning to the properties, they are simply for the purposes of example.  You could call this a spiking session, as from here on in, now I know what I am building I would take a more TDD approach.  OK, purists, why did I not do this from the start, well I didn’t, this was a brain dump and now I know what I am building I can. The console test and how I used with AutoMapper is as follows: static void Main(string[] args) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); collection.Add("Name", "Andrew Rea"); collection.Add("Number", "1"); collection.Add("AddressLine1", "123 Street"); collection.Add("AddressNumber", "2"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeCountry", "United Kingdom"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeNumber", "3"); AutoMapper.Mapper.CreateMap<NameValueCollection, Person>() .ConvertUsing(x => { return(Person) RecurseType(x, typeof(Person), null); }); var person = AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<NameValueCollection, Person>(collection); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); Console.WriteLine(person.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Line1); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Country); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Number); Console.ReadLine(); }   Notice the convention that I am using and that this method requires you do use.  Each property is prefixed with the constructed name of its parents combined.  This is the convention used by AutoMapper and it makes sense. I can also think of other uses for this including using with ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders for creating a complex type from the QueryString which is itself is a NameValueCollection. Hope this is of some help to people and I would welcome any code reviews you could give me. References: Agatha : http://code.google.com/p/agatha-rrsl/ AutoMapper : http://automapper.codeplex.com/   Cheers for now, Andrew   P.S. I will have the proposed solution for a more complete REST implementation for AGATHA very soon. 

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite Now Available

  - by chung.wu

  Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite is now available. The management suite combines features that were available in the standalone Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle's market leading real user monitoring and configuration management capabilities to provide the most complete solution for managing E-Business Suite applications. The features that were available in the standalone management packs are now packaged into Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in 4.0, which is now fully certified with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control. This latest plug-in extends Grid Control with E-Business Suite specific management capabilities and features enhanced change management support. In addition, this latest release of Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite also includes numerous real user monitoring improvements. General Enhancements This new release of Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite offers the following key capabilities: Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Support: All components of the management suite are certified with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control. Built-in Diagnostic Ability: This release has numerous major enhancements that provide the necessary intelligence to determine if the product has been installed and configured correctly. There are diagnostics for Discovery, Cloning, and User Monitoring that will validate if the appropriate patches, privileges, setups, and profile options have been configured. This feature improves the setup and configuration time to be up and operational. Lifecycle Automation Enhancements Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite provides a centralized view to monitor and orchestrate changes (both functional and technical) across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite systems. In this latest release, it provides even more control and flexibility in managing Oracle E-Business Suite changes.Change Management: Built-in Diagnostic Ability: This latest release has numerous major enhancements that provide the necessary intelligence to determine if the product has been installed and configured correctly. There are diagnostics for Customization Manager, Patch Manager, and Setup Manager that will validate if the appropriate patches, privileges, setups, and profile options have been configured. Enhancing the setup time and configuration time to be up and operational. Customization Manager: Multi-Node Custom Application Registration: This feature automates the process of registering and validating custom products/applications on every node in a multi-node EBS system. Public/Private File Source Mappings and E-Business Suite Mappings: File Source Mappings & E-Business Suite Mappings can be created and marked as public or private. Only the creator/owner can define/edit his/her own mappings. Users can use public mappings, but cannot edit or change settings. Test Checkout Command for Versions: This feature allows you to test/verify checkout commands at the version level within the File Source Mapping page. Prerequisite Patch Validation: You can specify prerequisite patches for Customization packages and for Release 12 Oracle E-Business Suite packages. Destination Path Population: You can now automatically populate the Destination Path for common file types during package construction. OAF File Type Support: Ability to package Oracle Application Framework (OAF) customizations and deploy them across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Extended PLL Support: Ability to distinguish between different types of PLLs (that is, Report and Forms PLL files). Providing better granularity when managing PLL objects. Enhanced Standard Checker: Provides greater and more comprehensive list of coding standards that are verified during the package build process (for example, File Driver exceptions, Java checks, XML checks, SQL checks, etc.) HTML Package Readme: The package Readme is in HTML format and includes the file listing. Advanced Package Search Capabilities: The ability to utilize more criteria within the advanced search package (that is, Public, Last Updated by, Files Source Mapping, and E-Business Suite Mapping). Enhanced Package Build Notifications: More detailed information on the results of a package build process. Better, more detailed troubleshooting guidance in the event of build failures. Patch Manager:Staged Patches: Ability to run Patch Manager with no external internet access. Customer can download Oracle E-Business Suite patches into a shared location for Patch Manager to access and apply. Supports highly secured production environments that prohibit external internet connections. Support for Superseded Patches: Automatic check for superseded patches. Allows users to easily add superseded patches into the Patch Run. More comprehensive and correct Patch Runs. Removes many manual and laborious tasks, frees up Apps DBAs for higher value-added tasks. Automatic Primary Node Identification: Users can now specify which is the "primary node" (that is, which node hosts the Shared APPL_TOP) during the Patch Run interview process, available for Release 12 only. Setup Manager:Preview Extract Results: Ability to execute an extract in "proof mode", and examine the query results, to determine accuracy. Used in conjunction with the "where" clause in Advanced Filtering. This feature can provide better and more accurate fine tuning of extracts. Use Uploaded Extracts in New Projects: Ability to incorporate uploaded extracts in new projects via new LOV fields in package construction. Leverages the Setup Manager repository to access extracts that have been uploaded. Allows customer to reuse uploaded extracts to provision new instances. Re-use Existing (that is, historical) Extracts in New Projects: Ability to incorporate existing extracts in new projects via new LOV fields in package construction. Leverages the Setup Manager repository to access point-in-time extracts (snapshots) of configuration data. Allows customer to reuse existing extracts to provision new instances. Allows comparative historical reporting of identical APIs, executed at different times. Support for BR100 formats: Setup Manager can now automatically produce reports in the BR100 format. Native support for industry standard formats. Concurrent Manager API Support: General Foundation now provides an API for management of "Concurrent Manager" configuration data. Ability to migrate Concurrent Managers from one instance to another. Complete the setup once and never again; no need to redefine the Concurrent Managers. User Experience Management Enhancements Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite includes comprehensive capabilities for user experience management, supporting both real user and synthetic transaction based user monitoring techniques. This latest release of the management suite include numerous improvements in real user monitoring support. KPI Reporting: Configurable decimal precision for reporting of KPI and SLA values. By default, this is two decimal places. KPI numerator and denominator information. It is now possible to view KPI numerator and denominator information, and to have it available for export. Content Messages Processing: The application content message facility has been extended to distinguish between notifications and errors. In addition, it is now possible to specify matching rules that can be used to refine a selected content message specification. Note this is only available for XPath-based (not literal) message contents. Data Export: The Enriched data export facility has been significantly enhanced to provide improved performance and accessibility. Data is no longer stored within XML-based files, but is now stored within the Reporter database. However, it is possible to configure an alternative database for its storage. Access to the export data is through SQL. With this enhancement, it is now more easy than ever to use tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to analyze correlated data collected from real user monitoring and business data sources. SNMP Traps for System Events: Previously, the SNMP notification facility was only available for KPI alerting. It has now been extended to support the generation of SNMP traps for system events, to provide external health monitoring of the RUEI system processes. Performance Improvements: Enhanced dashboard performance. The dashboard facility has been enhanced to support the parallel loading of items. In the case of dashboards containing large numbers of items, this can result in a significant performance improvement. Initial period selection within Data Browser and reports. The User Preferences facility has been extended to allow you to specify the initial period selection when first entering the Data Browser or reports facility. The default is the last hour. Performance improvement when querying the all sessions group. Technical Prerequisites, Download and Installation Instructions The Linux version of the plug-in is available for immediate download from Oracle Technology Network or Oracle eDelivery. For specific information regarding technical prerequisites, product download and installation, please refer to My Oracle Support note 1224313.1. The following certifications are in progress: * Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit) (9, 10) * HP-UX Itanium (11.23, 11.31) * HP-UX PA-RISC (64-bit) (11.23, 11.31) * IBM AIX on Power Systems (64-bit) (5.3, 6.1)

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 2, Simple Imperative Data Parallelism

  - by Reed

  In my discussion of Decomposition of the problem space, I mentioned that Data Decomposition is often the simplest abstraction to use when trying to parallelize a routine.  If a problem can be decomposed based off the data, we will often want to use what MSDN refers to as Data Parallelism as our strategy for implementing our routine.  The Task Parallel Library in .NET 4 makes implementing Data Parallelism, for most cases, very simple. Data Parallelism is the main technique we use to parallelize a routine which can be decomposed based off data.  Data Parallelism refers to taking a single collection of data, and having a single operation be performed concurrently on elements in the collection.  One side note here: Data Parallelism is also sometimes referred to as the Loop Parallelism Pattern or Loop-level Parallelism.  In general, for this series, I will try to use the terminology used in the MSDN Documentation for the Task Parallel Library.  This should make it easier to investigate these topics in more detail. Once we’ve determined we have a problem that, potentially, can be decomposed based on data, implementation using Data Parallelism in the TPL is quite simple.  Let’s take our example from the Data Decomposition discussion – a simple contrast stretching filter.  Here, we have a collection of data (pixels), and we need to run a simple operation on each element of the pixel.  Once we know the minimum and maximum values, we most likely would have some simple code like the following: for (int row=0; row < pixelData.GetUpperBound(0); ++row) { for (int col=0; col < pixelData.GetUpperBound(1); ++col) { pixelData[row, col] = AdjustContrast(pixelData[row, col], minPixel, maxPixel); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This simple routine loops through a two dimensional array of pixelData, and calls the AdjustContrast routine on each pixel. As I mentioned, when you’re decomposing a problem space, most iteration statements are potentially candidates for data decomposition.  Here, we’re using two for loops – one looping through rows in the image, and a second nested loop iterating through the columns.  We then perform one, independent operation on each element based on those loop positions. This is a prime candidate – we have no shared data, no dependencies on anything but the pixel which we want to change.  Since we’re using a for loop, we can easily parallelize this using the Parallel.For method in the TPL: Parallel.For(0, pixelData.GetUpperBound(0), row => { for (int col=0; col < pixelData.GetUpperBound(1); ++col) { pixelData[row, col] = AdjustContrast(pixelData[row, col], minPixel, maxPixel); } }); Here, by simply changing our first for loop to a call to Parallel.For, we can parallelize this portion of our routine.  Parallel.For works, as do many methods in the TPL, by creating a delegate and using it as an argument to a method.  In this case, our for loop iteration block becomes a delegate creating via a lambda expression.  This lets you write code that, superficially, looks similar to the familiar for loop, but functions quite differently at runtime. We could easily do this to our second for loop as well, but that may not be a good idea.  There is a balance to be struck when writing parallel code.  We want to have enough work items to keep all of our processors busy, but the more we partition our data, the more overhead we introduce.  In this case, we have an image of data – most likely hundreds of pixels in both dimensions.  By just parallelizing our first loop, each row of pixels can be run as a single task.  With hundreds of rows of data, we are providing fine enough granularity to keep all of our processors busy. If we parallelize both loops, we’re potentially creating millions of independent tasks.  This introduces extra overhead with no extra gain, and will actually reduce our overall performance.  This leads to my first guideline when writing parallel code: Partition your problem into enough tasks to keep each processor busy throughout the operation, but not more than necessary to keep each processor busy. Also note that I parallelized the outer loop.  I could have just as easily partitioned the inner loop.  However, partitioning the inner loop would have led to many more discrete work items, each with a smaller amount of work (operate on one pixel instead of one row of pixels).  My second guideline when writing parallel code reflects this: Partition your problem in a way to place the most work possible into each task. This typically means, in practice, that you will want to parallelize the routine at the “highest” point possible in the routine, typically the outermost loop.  If you’re looking at parallelizing methods which call other methods, you’ll want to try to partition your work high up in the stack – as you get into lower level methods, the performance impact of parallelizing your routines may not overcome the overhead introduced. Parallel.For works great for situations where we know the number of elements we’re going to process in advance.  If we’re iterating through an IList<T> or an array, this is a typical approach.  However, there are other iteration statements common in C#.  In many situations, we’ll use foreach instead of a for loop.  This can be more understandable and easier to read, but also has the advantage of working with collections which only implement IEnumerable<T>, where we do not know the number of elements involved in advance. As an example, lets take the following situation.  Say we have a collection of Customers, and we want to iterate through each customer, check some information about the customer, and if a certain case is met, send an email to the customer and update our instance to reflect this change.  Normally, this might look something like: foreach(var customer in customers) { // Run some process that takes some time... DateTime lastContact = theStore.GetLastContact(customer); TimeSpan timeSinceContact = DateTime.Now - lastContact; // If it's been more than two weeks, send an email, and update... if (timeSinceContact.Days > 14) { theStore.EmailCustomer(customer); customer.LastEmailContact = DateTime.Now; } } Here, we’re doing a fair amount of work for each customer in our collection, but we don’t know how many customers exist.  If we assume that theStore.GetLastContact(customer) and theStore.EmailCustomer(customer) are both side-effect free, thread safe operations, we could parallelize this using Parallel.ForEach: Parallel.ForEach(customers, customer => { // Run some process that takes some time... DateTime lastContact = theStore.GetLastContact(customer); TimeSpan timeSinceContact = DateTime.Now - lastContact; // If it's been more than two weeks, send an email, and update... if (timeSinceContact.Days > 14) { theStore.EmailCustomer(customer); customer.LastEmailContact = DateTime.Now; } }); Just like Parallel.For, we rework our loop into a method call accepting a delegate created via a lambda expression.  This keeps our new code very similar to our original iteration statement, however, this will now execute in parallel.  The same guidelines apply with Parallel.ForEach as with Parallel.For. The other iteration statements, do and while, do not have direct equivalents in the Task Parallel Library.  These, however, are very easy to implement using Parallel.ForEach and the yield keyword. Most applications can benefit from implementing some form of Data Parallelism.  Iterating through collections and performing “work” is a very common pattern in nearly every application.  When the problem can be decomposed by data, we often can parallelize the workload by merely changing foreach statements to Parallel.ForEach method calls, and for loops to Parallel.For method calls.  Any time your program operates on a collection, and does a set of work on each item in the collection where that work is not dependent on other information, you very likely have an opportunity to parallelize your routine.

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• Security Trimmed Cross Site Collection Navigation

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). This article will serve as documentation of a fully functional codeplex project that I just created. This project will give you a WebPart that will give you security trimmed navigation across site collections. The first question is, why create such a project? In every single SharePoint project you will do, one question you will always be faced with is, what should the boundaries of sites be, and what should the boundaries of site collections be? There is no good or bad answer to this, because it really really depends on your needs. There are some factors in play here. Site Collections will allow you to scale, as a Site collection is the smallest entity you can put inside a content database Site collections will allow you to offer different levels of SLAs, because you put a site collection on a separate content database, and put that database on a separate server. Site collections are a security boundary – and they can be moved around at will without affecting other site collections. Site collections are also a branding boundary. They are also a feature deployment boundary, so you can have two site collections on the same web application with completely different nature of services. But site collections break navigation, i.e. a site collection at “/”, and a site collection at “/sites/mySiteCollection”, are completely independent of each other. If you have access to both, the navigation of / won’t show you a link to /sites/mySiteCollection. Some people refer to this as a huge issue in SharePoint. Luckily, some workarounds exist. A long time ago, I had blogged about “Implementing Consistent Navigation across Site Collections”. That approach was a no-code solution, it worked – it gave you a consistent navigation across site collections. But, it didn’t work in a security trimmed fashion! i.e., if I don’t have access to Site Collection ‘X’, it would still show me a link to ‘X’. Well this project gets around that issue. Simply deploy this project, and it’ll give you a WebPart. You can use that WebPart as either a webpart or as a server control dropped via SharePoint designer, and it will give you Security Trimmed Cross Site Collection Navigation. The code has been written for SP2010, but it will work in SP2007 with the help of http://spwcfsupport.codeplex.com . What do I need to do to make it work? I’m glad you asked! Simple! Deploy the .wsp (which you can download here). This will give you a site collection feature called “Winsmarts Cross Site Collection Navigation” as shown below. Go ahead and activate it, and this will give you a WebPart called “Winsmarts Navigation Web Part” as shown below: Just drop this WebPart on your page, and it will show you all site collections that the currently logged in user has access to. Really it’s that easy! This is shown as below - In the above example, I have two site collections that I created at /sites/SiteCollection1 and /sites/SiteCollection2. The navigation shows the titles. You see some extraneous crap as well, you might want to clean that – I’ll talk about that in a minute. What? You’re running into problems? If the problem you’re running into is that you are prompted to login three times, and then it shows a blank webpart that says “Loading your applications ..” and then craps out!, then most probably you’re using a different authentication scheme. Behind the scenes I use a custom WCF service to perform this job. OOTB, I’ve set it to work with NTLM, but if you need to make it work alternate authentications such as forms based auth, or client side certs, you will need to edit the %14%\ISAPI\Winsmarts.CrossSCNav\web.config file, specifically, this section - 1: <bindings> 2: <webHttpBinding> 3: <binding name="customWebHttpBinding"> 4: <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly"> 5: <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm"/> 6: </security> 7: </binding> 8: </webHttpBinding> 9: </bindings> For Kerberos, change the “clientCredentialType” to “Windows” For Forms auth, remove that transport line For client certs – well that’s a bit more involved, but it’s just web.config changes – hit a good book on WCF or hire me for a billion trillion $. But fair warning, I might be too busy to help immediately. If you’re running into a different problem, please leave a comment below, but the code is pretty rock solid, so .. hmm .. check what you’re doing! BTW, I don’t  make any guarantee/warranty on this – if this code makes you sterile, unpopular, bad hairstyle, anything else, that is your problem! But, there are some known issues - I wrote this as a concept – you can easily extend it to be more flexible. Example, hierarchical nav, or, horizontal nav, jazzy effects with jquery or silverlight– all those are possible very very easily. This webpart is not smart enough to co-exist with another instance of itself on the same page. I can easily extend it to do so, which I will do in my spare(!?) time! Okay good! But that’s not all! As you can see, just dropping the WebPart may show you many extraneous site collections, or maybe you want to restrict which site collections are shown, or exclude a certain site collection to be shown from the navigation. To support that, I created a property on the WebPart called “UrlMatchPattern”, which is a regex expression you specify to trim the results :). So, just edit the WebPart, and specify a string property of “http://sp2010/sites/” as shown below. Note that you can put in whatever regex expression you want! So go crazy, I don’t care! And this gives you a cleaner look.   w00t! Enjoy! Comment on the article ....

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• Apache Tomcat Server failure

  - by Kenneth Ordona

  I'm trying to set up Apache Tomcat 6 with SSL and once I edited the server.xml file to include the following definitions the server started to fail as soon as I hit startup.bat: <-- Define a SSL Coyote HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8443 -- < Connector protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol" port="8445" maxThreads="200" scheme="https" secure="true" SSLEnabled="true" keystoreFile="${user.home}/.tomcat" keystorePass="pnnlpw" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS"/ The logs that I have are as follows: Jul 05, 2012 1:52:15 PM org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener init INFO: The APR based Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.path: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_05\bin;C:\WINDOWS\Sun\Java\bin;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;. Jul 05, 2012 1:52:15 PM org.apache.tomcat.util.digester.Digester fatalError SEVERE: Parse Fatal Error at line 91 column 2: The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup. org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; systemId: file://C/tomcat6/conf/server.xml; lineNumber: 91; columnNumber: 2; The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup. at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.createSAXParseException(ErrorHandlerWrapper.java:198) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.fatalError(ErrorHandlerWrapper.java:177) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(XMLErrorReporter.java:441) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(XMLErrorReporter.java:368) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLScanner.reportFatalError(XMLScanner.java:1388) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDriver.startOfMarkup(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:2565) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDriver.next(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:2663) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentScannerImpl.next(XMLDocumentScannerImpl.java:607) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:488) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:835) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:764) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:123) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1210) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser.parse(SAXParserImpl.java:568) at org.apache.tomcat.util.digester.Digester.parse(Digester.java:1642) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load(Catalina.java:524) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load(Catalina.java:562) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:601) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.load(Bootstrap.java:261) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:413) Jul 05, 2012 1:52:15 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina load WARNING: Catalina.start using conf/server.xml: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; systemId: file://C/tomcat6/conf/server.xml; lineNumber: 91; columnNumber: 2; The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup. at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1236) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser.parse(SAXParserImpl.java:568) at org.apache.tomcat.util.digester.Digester.parse(Digester.java:1642) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load(Catalina.java:524) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load(Catalina.java:562) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:601) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.load(Bootstrap.java:261) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:413) Jul 05, 2012 1:52:15 PM org.apache.tomcat.util.digester.Digester fatalError SEVERE: Parse Fatal Error at line 91 column 2: The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup. org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; systemId: file://C/tomcat6/conf/server.xml; lineNumber: 91; columnNumber: 2; The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup. at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.createSAXParseException(ErrorHandlerWrapper.java:198) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.fatalError(ErrorHandlerWrapper.java:177) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(XMLErrorReporter.java:441) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLErrorReporter.reportError(XMLErrorReporter.java:368) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLScanner.reportFatalError(XMLScanner.java:1388) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDriver.startOfMarkup(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:2565) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDriver.next(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:2663) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentScannerImpl.next(XMLDocumentScannerImpl.java:607) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:488) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:835) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:764) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:123) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1210) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser.parse(SAXParserImpl.java:568) at org.apache.tomcat.util.digester.Digester.parse(Digester.java:1642) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load(Catalina.java:524) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:582) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:601) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:289) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:414) Jul 05, 2012 1:52:15 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina load WARNING: Catalina.start using conf/server.xml: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; systemId: file://C/tomcat6/conf/server.xml; lineNumber: 91; columnNumber: 2; The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup. at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1236) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser.parse(SAXParserImpl.java:568) at org.apache.tomcat.util.digester.Digester.parse(Digester.java:1642) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load(Catalina.java:524) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:582) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:601) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:289) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:414) Jul 05, 2012 1:52:15 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start SEVERE: Cannot start server. Server instance is not configured. Does anyone have an idea why this is happening? I believe it has to do with the configuration of my connector. I'm pretty new to this so any help would be much appreciated.

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• Top Tweets SOA Partner Community – March 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity SOA Community ?SOA Community Newsletter February 2012 wp.me/p10C8u-o0 Marc ?Reading through the #OFM 11.1.1.6 , patchset 5 documentation. What is the best way to upgrade your whole dev…prd street. SOA Community Thanks for the successful and super interesting #sbidays ! Wonderful discussions around the Integration, case management and security tracks Torsten Winterberg Schon den neuen Opitz Technology-Blog gebookmarked? The Cattle Crew bit.ly/yLPwBD wird ab sofort regelmäßig Erkenntnisse posten. OTNArchBeat ? Unit Testing Asynchronous BPEL Processes Using soapUI | @DanielAmadei bit.ly/x9NsS9 Rolando Carrasco ?Video de Human Task en BPM 11g. Por @edwardo040. bit.ly/wki9CA cc @OracleBPM @OracleSOA @soacommunity View video Marcel Mertin SOA Security Hands-On by Dirk Krafzig and Mamoon Yunus at #sbidays is also great! SOA Community Workshop day #sbidays #BPMN2.0 by Volker Stiehl from #SAP great training – now I can model & execute in #bpmsuite #soacommunity Simone Geib ?Just updated our advanced #soasuite #otn page with a number of very interesting @orclateamsoa blog posts: bit.ly/advancedsoasui… OTNArchBeat ? Start Small, Grow Fast: SOA Best Practices article by @biemond, @rluttikhuizen, @demed bit.ly/yem9Zv Steffen Miller ? Nice new features in SOA Suite Business Rules #PS5 Testing rules with scenarios and output validation bit.ly/zj64Q3 @SOACOMMUNITY OTNArchBeat ? Reply SOA Blackbelt training by David Shaffer, April 30th–May 4th 2012 bit.ly/xGdC24 OTNArchBeat ? What have BPM, big data, social tools, and business models got in common? | Andy Mulholland bit.ly/xUkOGf SOA Community ? Live hacking at #sbidays – cheaper shopping, bias cracking, payment systems, secure your SOA! pic.twitter.com/y7YaIdug SOA Community Future #BPM & #ACM solutions can make use of ontology’s, based on #sqarql #sbidays pic.twitter.com/xLb1Z5zs Simone Geib ? @soacommunity: SOA Blackbelt training by David Shaffer, April 30th–May 4th 2012 wp.me/p10C8u-nX Biemond Changing your ADF Connections in Enterprise Manager with PS5: With Patch Set 5 of Fusion Middleware you can fina… bit.ly/zF7Rb1 Marc ? HUGE (!) CPU and Heap improvement on Oracle Fusion Middleware tinyurl.com/762drzp @wlscommunity @soacommunity #OSB #SOA #WLS SOA Community ?Networking @ SOA & BPM Partner Community blogs.oracle.com/soacommunity/e… #soacommunity #otn #opn #oracle SOA Community ?Published the SOA Partner Community newsletter February edition – READ it. Not yet a member? oracle.com/goto/emea/soa #soacommunity #otn #opn AMIS, Oracle & Java Blog by Lucas Jellema: "Book Review: Do More with SOA Integration: Best of Packt (december 2011, various authors)" bit.ly/wq633E Jon petter hjulstad @SOASimone Excellent summary! Lots of new features! Simone Geib ?Do you want to know what’s new in #soasuite #PS5? Go to bit.ly/xBX06f and let me know what you think SOA Community ? Unit Testing Asynchronous BPEL Processes Using soapUI oracle.com/technetwork/ar… #soacommunity #soa #otn #oracle #bpel Retweeted by SOA Community View media Retweeted by SOA Community Eric Elzinga ? Oracle Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum Malage, The Overview, bit.ly/AA9BKd #ofmforum SOA&Cloud Symposium ? The February issue of the Service Technology Magazine is now published. servicetechmag.com SOA Community ? Oracle SOA Suite 11g Database Growth Management – must read! oracle.com/technetwork/da… #soacommunity #soa #purging demed ? Have you exposed internal processes to mobile devices using #oraclesoa? Interested in an article? DM me! #osb #rest #multichannel #mobile orclateamsoa ? A-Team SOA Blog: Enhanced version of Thread Dump Analyzer (TDA A-Team) ow.ly/1hpk7l SOA Community Reply BPM Suite #PS5 (11.1.1.6) available for download soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/soa… Send us your feedback! #soacommunity #bpmsuite #opn SOA Community ? SOA Suite #PS5 (11.1.1.6) available for download soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/soa… Send us your feedback! #soacommunity #soasuite SOA Community BPM Suite #PS5 1(1.1.1.6) available for download. List of new BPM features blogs.oracle.com/soacommunity/e… #soacommunity #bpm #bpmsuite #opn OracleBlogs BPM in Utilties Industry ow.ly/1hC3fp Retweeted by SOA Community OTNArchBeat ? Demystifying Oracle Enterprise Gateway | Naresh Persaud bit.ly/xtDNe2 OTNArchBeat ? Architect’s Guide to Big Data; Test BPEL Processes Using SoapUI; Development Debate bit.ly/xbDYSo Frank Nimphius ? Finished my book review of "Do More with SOA Integration: Best of Packt ". Here are my review comments: bit.ly/x2k9OZ Lucas Jellema ? That is my one stop-and-go download center for #PS5 : edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/g… Lucas Jellema ? Interesting piece of documentation: Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide – docs.oracle.com/cd/E15586_01/f… source for design time @ run time inspira Lucas Jellema ? Strongly improved support for testing Business Rules at Design Time in #PS5 see docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/u… Lucas Jellema ? SOA Suite 11gR1 PS5: new BPEL Component testing – docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… Lucas Jellema ? PS5 available for CEP (Complex Event Processing) – a personal favorite of mine : oracle.com/technetwork/mi… Lucas Jellema ?What’s New in Fusion Developer’s Guide 11gR1 PS5: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/w… Lucas Jellema ? BPMN Correlation (FMW 11gR1 PS5): docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… Lucas Jellema ? Modifying running BPM Process instances (FMW 11gR1 PS5): docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… Lucas Jellema ? SOA Suite 11gR1 PS5 – new aggregation pattern: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… routing multiple messages to same instance Melvin van der Kuijl ? Automating Testing of SOA Composite Applications in PS5. docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/d… Cato Aune ? SOA suite PS5 Enterprise Deployment Guide is available in ePub docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/c… . Much better than pdf on Galaxy Note SOA Community ?JDeveloper 11.1.1.6 is available for download bit.ly/wGYrwE #soacommunity SOA Community ? Your first experience #PS5 – let us know @soacommunity – send us your tweets and blog posts! #soacommunity Jon petter hjulstad ? WLS 10.3.6 New features, ex better logging of jdbc use: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/w… Heidi Buelow ? Get it now! RT @soacommunity: BPM Suite PS5 11.1.1.6 available for download bit.ly/AgagT5 #bpm #soacommunity Jon petter hjulstad ?SOA Suite PS5 EDG contains OSB! docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/c… Jon petter hjulstad ? Testing Oracle Rules from JDeveloper is easier in PS5: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/u… Biemond® ? What’s New in Oracle Service Bus 11.1.1.6.0 oracle.com/technetwork/mi… Jon petter hjulstad ? Adminguide New and Changed Features for PS5, ex GridLink data sources: docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/c… Retweeted by SOA Community Andreas Koop ? Unbelievable! #OFM Doc Lib growth from 11gPS4->11gPS5 by 1.2G! View media SOA Community ?ODI PS5 is available oracle.com/technetwork/mi… #odi #soacommunity 22 Feb View media SOA Community Service Bus 11g Development Cookbook soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/ser… #osb #soacommunity #ace #opn View media For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: soacommunity,twitter,Oracle,SOA Community,Jürgen Kress,OPN,SOA,BPM

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 4, Imperative Data Parallelism: Aggregation

  - by Reed

  In the article on simple data parallelism, I described how to perform an operation on an entire collection of elements in parallel.  Often, this is not adequate, as the parallel operation is going to be performing some form of aggregation. Simple examples of this might include taking the sum of the results of processing a function on each element in the collection, or finding the minimum of the collection given some criteria.  This can be done using the techniques described in simple data parallelism, however, special care needs to be taken into account to synchronize the shared data appropriately.  The Task Parallel Library has tools to assist in this synchronization. The main issue with aggregation when parallelizing a routine is that you need to handle synchronization of data.  Since multiple threads will need to write to a shared portion of data.  Suppose, for example, that we wanted to parallelize a simple loop that looked for the minimum value within a dataset: double min = double.MaxValue; foreach(var item in collection) { double value = item.PerformComputation(); min = System.Math.Min(min, value); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This seems like a good candidate for parallelization, but there is a problem here.  If we just wrap this into a call to Parallel.ForEach, we’ll introduce a critical race condition, and get the wrong answer.  Let’s look at what happens here: // Buggy code! Do not use! double min = double.MaxValue; Parallel.ForEach(collection, item => { double value = item.PerformComputation(); min = System.Math.Min(min, value); }); This code has a fatal flaw: min will be checked, then set, by multiple threads simultaneously.  Two threads may perform the check at the same time, and set the wrong value for min.  Say we get a value of 1 in thread 1, and a value of 2 in thread 2, and these two elements are the first two to run.  If both hit the min check line at the same time, both will determine that min should change, to 1 and 2 respectively.  If element 1 happens to set the variable first, then element 2 sets the min variable, we’ll detect a min value of 2 instead of 1.  This can lead to wrong answers. Unfortunately, fixing this, with the Parallel.ForEach call we’re using, would require adding locking.  We would need to rewrite this like: // Safe, but slow double min = double.MaxValue; // Make a "lock" object object syncObject = new object(); Parallel.ForEach(collection, item => { double value = item.PerformComputation(); lock(syncObject) min = System.Math.Min(min, value); }); This will potentially add a huge amount of overhead to our calculation.  Since we can potentially block while waiting on the lock for every single iteration, we will most likely slow this down to where it is actually quite a bit slower than our serial implementation.  The problem is the lock statement – any time you use lock(object), you’re almost assuring reduced performance in a parallel situation.  This leads to two observations I’ll make: When parallelizing a routine, try to avoid locks. That being said: Always add any and all required synchronization to avoid race conditions. These two observations tend to be opposing forces – we often need to synchronize our algorithms, but we also want to avoid the synchronization when possible.  Looking at our routine, there is no way to directly avoid this lock, since each element is potentially being run on a separate thread, and this lock is necessary in order for our routine to function correctly every time. However, this isn’t the only way to design this routine to implement this algorithm.  Realize that, although our collection may have thousands or even millions of elements, we have a limited number of Processing Elements (PE).  Processing Element is the standard term for a hardware element which can process and execute instructions.  This typically is a core in your processor, but many modern systems have multiple hardware execution threads per core.  The Task Parallel Library will not execute the work for each item in the collection as a separate work item. Instead, when Parallel.ForEach executes, it will partition the collection into larger “chunks” which get processed on different threads via the ThreadPool.  This helps reduce the threading overhead, and help the overall speed.  In general, the Parallel class will only use one thread per PE in the system. Given the fact that there are typically fewer threads than work items, we can rethink our algorithm design.  We can parallelize our algorithm more effectively by approaching it differently.  Because the basic aggregation we are doing here (Min) is communitive, we do not need to perform this in a given order.  We knew this to be true already – otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to parallelize this routine in the first place.  With this in mind, we can treat each thread’s work independently, allowing each thread to serially process many elements with no locking, then, after all the threads are complete, “merge” together the results. This can be accomplished via a different set of overloads in the Parallel class: Parallel.ForEach<TSource,TLocal>.  The idea behind these overloads is to allow each thread to begin by initializing some local state (TLocal).  The thread will then process an entire set of items in the source collection, providing that state to the delegate which processes an individual item.  Finally, at the end, a separate delegate is run which allows you to handle merging that local state into your final results. To rewriting our routine using Parallel.ForEach<TSource,TLocal>, we need to provide three delegates instead of one.  The most basic version of this function is declared as: public static ParallelLoopResult ForEach<TSource, TLocal>( IEnumerable<TSource> source, Func<TLocal> localInit, Func<TSource, ParallelLoopState, TLocal, TLocal> body, Action<TLocal> localFinally ) The first delegate (the localInit argument) is defined as Func<TLocal>.  This delegate initializes our local state.  It should return some object we can use to track the results of a single thread’s operations. The second delegate (the body argument) is where our main processing occurs, although now, instead of being an Action<T>, we actually provide a Func<TSource, ParallelLoopState, TLocal, TLocal> delegate.  This delegate will receive three arguments: our original element from the collection (TSource), a ParallelLoopState which we can use for early termination, and the instance of our local state we created (TLocal).  It should do whatever processing you wish to occur per element, then return the value of the local state after processing is completed. The third delegate (the localFinally argument) is defined as Action<TLocal>.  This delegate is passed our local state after it’s been processed by all of the elements this thread will handle.  This is where you can merge your final results together.  This may require synchronization, but now, instead of synchronizing once per element (potentially millions of times), you’ll only have to synchronize once per thread, which is an ideal situation. Now that I’ve explained how this works, lets look at the code: // Safe, and fast! double min = double.MaxValue; // Make a "lock" object object syncObject = new object(); Parallel.ForEach( collection, // First, we provide a local state initialization delegate. () => double.MaxValue, // Next, we supply the body, which takes the original item, loop state, // and local state, and returns a new local state (item, loopState, localState) => { double value = item.PerformComputation(); return System.Math.Min(localState, value); }, // Finally, we provide an Action<TLocal>, to "merge" results together localState => { // This requires locking, but it's only once per used thread lock(syncObj) min = System.Math.Min(min, localState); } ); Although this is a bit more complicated than the previous version, it is now both thread-safe, and has minimal locking.  This same approach can be used by Parallel.For, although now, it’s Parallel.For<TLocal>.  When working with Parallel.For<TLocal>, you use the same triplet of delegates, with the same purpose and results. Also, many times, you can completely avoid locking by using a method of the Interlocked class to perform the final aggregation in an atomic operation.  The MSDN example demonstrating this same technique using Parallel.For uses the Interlocked class instead of a lock, since they are doing a sum operation on a long variable, which is possible via Interlocked.Add. By taking advantage of local state, we can use the Parallel class methods to parallelize algorithms such as aggregation, which, at first, may seem like poor candidates for parallelization.  Doing so requires careful consideration, and often requires a slight redesign of the algorithm, but the performance gains can be significant if handled in a way to avoid excessive synchronization.

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• DropDownList and SelectListItem Array Item Updates in MVC

  - by Rick Strahl

  So I ran into an interesting behavior today as I deployed my first MVC 4 app tonight. I have a list form that has a filter drop down that allows selection of categories. This list is static and rarely changes so rather than loading these items from the database each time I load the items once and then cache the actual SelectListItem[] array in a static property. However, when we put the site online tonight we immediately noticed that the drop down list was coming up with pre-set values that randomly changed. Didn't take me long to trace this back to the cached list of SelectListItem[]. Clearly the list was getting updated - apparently through the model binding process in the selection postback. To clarify the scenario here's the drop down list definition in the Razor View:@Html.DropDownListFor(mod => mod.QueryParameters.Category, Model.CategoryList, "All Categories") where Model.CategoryList gets set with:[HttpPost] [CompressContent] public ActionResult List(MessageListViewModel model) { InitializeViewModel(model); busEntry entryBus = new busEntry(); var entries = entryBus.GetEntryList(model.QueryParameters); model.Entries = entries; model.DisplayMode = ApplicationDisplayModes.Standard; model.CategoryList = AppUtils.GetCachedCategoryList(); return View(model); } The AppUtils.GetCachedCategoryList() method gets the cached list or loads the list on the first access. The code to load up the list is housed in a Web utility class. The method looks like this:/// <summary> /// Returns a static category list that is cached /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static SelectListItem[] GetCachedCategoryList() { if (_CategoryList != null) return _CategoryList; lock (_SyncLock) { if (_CategoryList != null) return _CategoryList; var catBus = new busCategory(); var categories = catBus.GetCategories().ToList(); // Turn list into a SelectItem list var catList= categories .Select(cat => new SelectListItem() { Text = cat.Name, Value = cat.Id.ToString() }) .ToList(); catList.Insert(0, new SelectListItem() { Value = ((int)SpecialCategories.AllCategoriesButRealEstate).ToString(), Text = "All Categories except Real Estate" }); catList.Insert(1, new SelectListItem() { Value = "-1", Text = "--------------------------------" }); _CategoryList = catList.ToArray(); } return _CategoryList; } private static SelectListItem[] _CategoryList ; This seemed normal enough to me - I've been doing stuff like this forever caching smallish lists in memory to avoid an extra trip to the database. This list is used in various places throughout the application - for the list display and also when adding new items and setting up for notifications etc.. Watch that ModelBinder! However, it turns out that this code is clearly causing a problem. It appears that the model binder on the [HttpPost] method is actually updating the list that's bound to and changing the actual entry item in the list and setting its selected value. If you look at the code above I'm not setting the SelectListItem.Selected value anywhere - the only place this value can get set is through ModelBinding. Sure enough when stepping through the code I see that when an item is selected the actual model - model.CategoryList[x].Selected - reflects that. This is bad on several levels: First it's obviously affecting the application behavior - nobody wants to see their drop down list values jump all over the place randomly. But it's also a problem because the array is getting updated by multiple ASP.NET threads which likely would lead to odd crashes from time to time. Not good! In retrospect the modelbinding behavior makes perfect sense. The actual items and the Selected property is the ModelBinder's way of keeping track of one or more selected values. So while I assumed the list to be read-only, the ModelBinder is actually updating it on a post back producing the rather surprising results. Totally missed this during testing and is another one of those little - "Did you know?" moments. So, is there a way around this? Yes but it's maybe not quite obvious. I can't change the behavior of the ModelBinder, but I can certainly change the way that the list is generated. Rather than returning the cached list, I can return a brand new cloned list from the cached items like this:/// <summary> /// Returns a static category list that is cached /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static SelectListItem[] GetCachedCategoryList() { if (_CategoryList != null) { // Have to create new instances via projection // to avoid ModelBinding updates to affect this // globally return _CategoryList .Select(cat => new SelectListItem() { Value = cat.Value, Text = cat.Text }) .ToArray(); } …}  The key is that newly created instances of SelectListItems are returned not just filtered instances of the original list. The key here is 'new instances' so that the ModelBinding updates do not update the actual static instance. The code above uses LINQ and a projection into new SelectListItem instances to create this array of fresh instances. And this code works correctly - no more cross-talk between users. Unfortunately this code is also less efficient - it has to reselect the items and uses extra memory for the new array. Knowing what I know now I probably would have not cached the list and just take the hit to read from the database. If there is even a possibility of thread clashes I'm very wary of creating code like this. But since the method already exists and handles this load in one place this fix was easy enough to put in. Live and learn. It's little things like this that can cause some interesting head scratchers sometimes…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Entity Association Mapping with Code First Part 1 : Mapping Complex Types

  - by mortezam

  Last week the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code First has been released by data team at Microsoft. Entity Framework Code-First provides a pretty powerful code-centric way to work with the databases. When it comes to associations, it brings ultimate flexibility. I’m a big fan of the EF Code First approach and am planning to explain association mapping with code first in a series of blog posts and this one is dedicated to Complex Types. If you are new to Code First approach, you can find a great walkthrough here. In order to build a solid foundation for our discussion, we will start by learning about some of the core concepts around the relationship mapping.   What is Mapping?Mapping is the act of determining how objects and their relationships are persisted in permanent data storage, in our case, relational databases. What is Relationship mapping?A mapping that describes how to persist a relationship (association, aggregation, or composition) between two or more objects. Types of RelationshipsThere are two categories of object relationships that we need to be concerned with when mapping associations. The first category is based on multiplicity and it includes three types: One-to-one relationships: This is a relationship where the maximums of each of its multiplicities is one. One-to-many relationships: Also known as a many-to-one relationship, this occurs when the maximum of one multiplicity is one and the other is greater than one. Many-to-many relationships: This is a relationship where the maximum of both multiplicities is greater than one. The second category is based on directionality and it contains two types: Uni-directional relationships: when an object knows about the object(s) it is related to but the other object(s) do not know of the original object. To put this in EF terminology, when a navigation property exists only on one of the association ends and not on the both. Bi-directional relationships: When the objects on both end of the relationship know of each other (i.e. a navigation property defined on both ends). How Object Relationships Are Implemented in POCO domain models?When the multiplicity is one (e.g. 0..1 or 1) the relationship is implemented by defining a navigation property that reference the other object (e.g. an Address property on User class). When the multiplicity is many (e.g. 0..*, 1..*) the relationship is implemented via an ICollection of the type of other object. How Relational Database Relationships Are Implemented? Relationships in relational databases are maintained through the use of Foreign Keys. A foreign key is a data attribute(s) that appears in one table and must be the primary key or other candidate key in another table. With a one-to-one relationship the foreign key needs to be implemented by one of the tables. To implement a one-to-many relationship we implement a foreign key from the “one table” to the “many table”. We could also choose to implement a one-to-many relationship via an associative table (aka Join table), effectively making it a many-to-many relationship. Introducing the ModelNow, let's review the model that we are going to use in order to implement Complex Type with Code First. It's a simple object model which consist of two classes: User and Address. Each user could have one billing address. The Address information of a User is modeled as a separate class as you can see in the UML model below: In object-modeling terms, this association is a kind of aggregation—a part-of relationship. Aggregation is a strong form of association; it has some additional semantics with regard to the lifecycle of objects. In this case, we have an even stronger form, composition, where the lifecycle of the part is fully dependent upon the lifecycle of the whole. Fine-grained domain models The motivation behind this design was to achieve Fine-grained domain models. In crude terms, fine-grained means “more classes than tables”. For example, a user may have both a billing address and a home address. In the database, you may have a single User table with the columns BillingStreet, BillingCity, and BillingPostalCode along with HomeStreet, HomeCity, and HomePostalCode. There are good reasons to use this somewhat denormalized relational model (performance, for one). In our object model, we can use the same approach, representing the two addresses as six string-valued properties of the User class. But it’s much better to model this using an Address class, where User has the BillingAddress and HomeAddress properties. This object model achieves improved cohesion and greater code reuse and is more understandable. Complex Types: Splitting a Table Across Multiple Types Back to our model, there is no difference between this composition and other weaker styles of association when it comes to the actual C# implementation. But in the context of ORM, there is a big difference: A composed class is often a candidate Complex Type. But C# has no concept of composition—a class or property can’t be marked as a composition. The only difference is the object identifier: a complex type has no individual identity (i.e. no AddressId defined on Address class) which make sense because when it comes to the database everything is going to be saved into one single table. How to implement a Complex Types with Code First Code First has a concept of Complex Type Discovery that works based on a set of Conventions. The convention is that if Code First discovers a class where a primary key cannot be inferred, and no primary key is registered through Data Annotations or the fluent API, then the type will be automatically registered as a complex type. Complex type detection also requires that the type does not have properties that reference entity types (i.e. all the properties must be scalar types) and is not referenced from a collection property on another type. Here is the implementation: public class User{    public int UserId { get; set; }    public string FirstName { get; set; }    public string LastName { get; set; }    public string Username { get; set; }    public Address Address { get; set; }} public class Address {     public string Street { get; set; }     public string City { get; set; }            public string PostalCode { get; set; }        }public class EntityMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; }        } With code first, this is all of the code we need to write to create a complex type, we do not need to configure any additional database schema mapping information through Data Annotations or the fluent API. Database SchemaThe mapping result for this object model is as follows: Limitations of this mappingThere are two important limitations to classes mapped as Complex Types: Shared references is not possible: The Address Complex Type doesn’t have its own database identity (primary key) and so can’t be referred to by any object other than the containing instance of User (e.g. a Shipping class that also needs to reference the same User Address). No elegant way to represent a null reference There is no elegant way to represent a null reference to an Address. When reading from database, EF Code First always initialize Address object even if values in all mapped columns of the complex type are null. This means that if you store a complex type object with all null property values, EF Code First returns a initialized complex type when the owning entity object is retrieved from the database. SummaryIn this post we learned about fine-grained domain models which complex type is just one example of it. Fine-grained is fully supported by EF Code First and is known as the most important requirement for a rich domain model. Complex type is usually the simplest way to represent one-to-one relationships and because the lifecycle is almost always dependent in such a case, it’s either an aggregation or a composition in UML. In the next posts we will revisit the same domain model and will learn about other ways to map a one-to-one association that does not have the limitations of the complex types. References ADO.NET team blog Mapping Objects to Relational Databases Java Persistence with Hibernate

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• SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Part 2

  - by SQLOS Team

  Part 1 of this series was an introduction and overview of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory. This part looks at SQL Server memory management and how the SQL engine responds to changing OS memory conditions.   Part 2: SQL Server Memory Management As with any Windows process, sqlserver.exe has a virtual address space (VAS) of 4GB on 32-bit and 8TB in 64-bit editions. Pages in its VAS are mapped to pages in physical memory when the memory is committed and referenced for the first time. The collection of VAS pages that have been recently referenced is known as the Working Set. How and when SQL Server allocates virtual memory and grows its working set depends on the memory model it uses. SQL Server supports three basic memory models:   1. Conventional Memory Model   The Conventional model is the default SQL Server memory model and has the following properties: - Dynamic - can grow or shrink its working set in response to load and external (operating system) memory conditions. - OS uses 4K pages – (not to be confused with SQL Server “pages” which are 8K regions of committed memory).- Pageable - Can be paged out to disk by the operating system.   2. Locked Page Model The locked page memory model is set when SQL Server is started with "Lock Pages in Memory" privilege*. It has the following characteristics: - Dynamic - can grow or shrink its working set in the same way as the Conventional model.- OS uses 4K pages - Non-Pageable – When memory is committed it is locked in memory, meaning that it will remain backed by physical memory and will not be paged out by the operating system. A common misconception is to interpret "locked" as non-dynamic. A SQL Server instance using the locked page memory model will grow and shrink (allocate memory and release memory) in response to changing workload and OS memory conditions in the same way as it does with the conventional model.   This is an important consideration when we look at Hyper-V Dynamic Memory – “locked” memory works perfectly well with “dynamic” memory.   * Note in “Denali” (Standard Edition and above), and in SQL 2008 R2 64-bit (Enterprise and above editions) the Lock Pages in Memory privilege is all that is required to set this model. In 2008 R2 64-Bit standard edition it also requires trace flag 845 to be set, in 2008 R2 32-bit editions it requires sp_configure 'awe enabled' 1.   3. Large Page Model The Large page model is set using trace flag 834 and potentially offers a small performance boost for systems that are configured with large pages. It is characterized by: - Static - memory is allocated at startup and does not change. - OS uses large (>2MB) pages - Non-Pageable The large page model is supported with Hyper-V Dynamic Memory (and Hyper-V also supports large pages), but you get no benefit from using Dynamic Memory with this model since SQL Server memory does not grow or shrink. The rest of this article will focus on the locked and conventional SQL Server memory models.   When does SQL Server grow? For “dynamic” configurations (Conventional and Locked memory models), the sqlservr.exe process grows – allocates and commits memory from the OS – in response to a workload. As much memory is allocated as is required to optimally run the query and buffer data for future queries, subject to limitations imposed by:   - SQL Server max server memory setting. If this configuration option is set, the buffer pool is not allowed to grow to more than this value. In SQL Server 2008 this value represents single page allocations, and in “Denali” it represents any size page allocations and also managed CLR procedure allocations.   - Memory signals from OS. The operating system sets a signal on memory resource notification objects to indicate whether it has memory available or whether it is low on available memory. If there is only 32MB free for every 4GB of memory a low memory signal is set, which continues until 64MB/4GB is free. If there is 96MB/4GB free the operating system sets a high memory signal. SQL Server only allocates memory when the high memory signal is set.   To summarize, for SQL Server to grow you need three conditions: a workload, max server memory setting higher than the current allocation, high memory signals from the OS.    When does SQL Server shrink caches? SQL Server as a rule does not like to return memory to the OS, but it will shrink its caches in response to memory pressure. Memory pressure can be divided into “internal” and “external”.   - External memory pressure occurs when the operating system is running low on memory and low memory signals are set. The SQL Server Resource Monitor checks for low memory signals approximately every 5 seconds and it will attempt to free memory until the signals stop.   To free memory SQL Server does the following: ·         Frees unused memory. ·         Notifies Memory Manager Clients to release memory o   Caches – Free unreferenced cache objects. o   Buffer pool - Based on oldest access times.   The freed memory is released back to the operating system. This process continues until the low memory resource notifications stop.    - Internal memory pressure occurs when the size of different caches and allocations increase but the SQL Server process needs to keep its total memory within a target value. For example if max server memory is set and certain caches are growing large, it will cause SQL to free memory for re-use internally, but not to release memory back to the OS. If you lower the value of max server memory you will generate internal memory pressure that will cause SQL to release memory back to the OS.    Memory pressure handling has not changed much since SQL 2005 and it was described in detail in a blog post by Slava Oks.   Note that SQL Server Express is an exception to the above behavior. Unlike other editions it does not assume it is the most important process running on the system but tries to be more “desktop” friendly. It will empty its working set after a period of inactivity.   How does SQL Server respond to changing OS memory?    In SQL Server 2005 support for Hot-Add memory was introduced. This feature, available in Enterprise and above editions, allows the server to make use of any extra physical memory that was added after SQL Server started. Being able to add physical memory when the system is running is limited to specialized hardware, but with the Hyper-V Dynamic Memory feature, when new memory is allocated to a guest virtual machine, it looks like hot-add physical memory to the guest. What this means is that thanks to the hot-add memory feature, SQL Server 2005 and higher can dynamically grow if more “physical” memory is granted to a guest VM by Hyper-V dynamic memory.   SQL Server checks OS memory every second and dynamically adjusts its “target” (based on available OS memory and max server memory) accordingly.   In “Denali” Standard Edition will also have sqlserver.exe support for hot-add memory when running virtualized (i.e. detecting and acting on Hyper-V Dynamic Memory allocations).   How does a SQL Server workload in a guest VM impact Hyper-V dynamic memory scheduling?   When a SQL workload causes the sqlserver.exe process to grow its working set, the Hyper-V memory scheduler will detect memory pressure in the guest VM and add memory to it. SQL Server will then detect the extra memory and grow according to workload demand. In our tests we have seen this feedback process cause a guest VM to grow quickly in response to SQL workload - we are still working on characterizing this ramp-up.    How does SQL Server respond when Hyper-V removes memory from a guest VM through ballooning?   If pressure from other VM's cause Hyper-V Dynamic Memory to take memory away from a VM through ballooning (allocating memory with a virtual device driver and returning it to the host OS), Windows Memory Manager will page out unlocked portions of memory and signal low resource notification events. When SQL Server detects these events it will shrink memory until the low memory notifications stop (see cache shrinking description above).    This raises another question. Can we make SQL Server release memory more readily and hence behave more "dynamically" without compromising performance? In certain circumstances where the application workload is predictable it may be possible to have a job which varies "max server memory" according to need, lowering it when the engine is inactive and raising it before a period of activity. This would have limited applicaability but it is something we're looking into.   What Memory Management changes are there in SQL Server “Denali”?   In SQL Server “Denali” (aka SQL11) the Memory Manager has been re-written to be more efficient. The main changes are summarized in this post. An important change with respect to Hyper-V Dynamic Memory support is that now the max server memory setting includes any size page allocations and managed CLR procedure allocations it now represents a closer approximation to total sqlserver.exe memory usage. This makes it easier to calculate a value for max server memory, which becomes important when configuring virtual machines to work well with Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Startup and Maximum RAM settings.   Another important change is no more AWE or hot-add support for 32-bit edition. This means if you're running a 32-bit edition of Denali you're limited to a 4GB address space and will not be able to take advantage of dynamically added OS memory that wasn't present when SQL Server started (though Hyper-V Dynamic Memory is still a supported configuration).   In part 3 we’ll develop some best practices for configuring and using SQL Server with Dynamic Memory. Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

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• Fix Problems Upgrading Office 2010 Beta to RTM (Final) Release

  - by Mysticgeek

  There are several scenarios where you may run into trouble uninstalling the 2010 Beta and trying to install the RTM (final) release. Today we’ll cover the problems we ran into, and how to fix them. You would think upgrading from the Office 2010 Beta to the final release would be an easy process. Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple. In fact, we ran into three different scenarios where the install wasn’t smooth whatsoever. If you currently have the 2010 Beta installed, you have to remove it before you can install the RTM.  Here we’ll take a look at three different troublesome install scenarios we ran into, and how we fixed each one. Important Note: Before proceeding with any of these steps, make sure and backup your Outlook .pst files! Scenario 1 – Uninstall Office 2010 Beta & Fix Install Errors In this first scenario we have Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta 32-bit installed on a Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit system. First try to uninstall the Office 2010 Beta by going into Control Panel and selecting Programs and Features. Scroll down to Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, right-click it and select Uninstall. Click Yes when the confirmation dialog box comes up. Wait while Office 2010 Beta uninstalls…the amount of time it takes will vary from system to system. To complete the uninstall process, a reboot is required. Fixing Setup Errors The problem is when you start the installation of the 2010 RTM… You get the following setup error even though you uninstalled the 2010 Beta. The problem is there are leftover Office apps or stand alone Office products. So, we need a utility that will clean them up for us.   Windows Installer Clean Up Utility Download and install the Clean Up Utility (link Below) following the defaults. After it’s installed you’ll find it in Start \ All Programs \ Windows Install Clean Up …go ahead and launch the utility. Now go through and remove all Office Programs or addins that you find in the list. Make sure you are just deleting Office apps and not something you need like Java for example. If you’re not sure what something is, doing a quick Google search should help you out. For instance we had the Office labs Ribbon Hero installed… just highlight and click Remove. Remove anything that has something to do with Office…then reboot your machine. Now, you should be able to begin the installation of Office 2010 RTM (Final) Release without any errors. If you do get an error during the install process, like this one telling us we have old version of Groove Server… Navigate to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft (where username is the computer name) and delete any existing MS Office folders. Then try the install again, this solved the problem in our first scenario. Scenario 2 – Not Being Able to Uninstall 2010 Beta from Programs and Features In this next scenario we have Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta 32-bit installed on a Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit system. Another problem we ran into is not being able to uninstall the 2010 Beta from Programs and Features. When you go in to uninstall it, nothing happens. If you run into this problem, we again need to download and install the Windows Installer Clean Up Utility (link below) and manually uninstall the Beta. When you launch it, scroll down to Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 (Beta), highlight it and click Remove.   Click OK to the Warning Dialog box… If you see any other Office 2010, 2007, or 2003 entries you can hold the “Shift” key and highlight them all…then click Remove and click OK to the warning dialog. Now we need to delete some Registry settings. Click on Start and type regedit into the Search box and hit Enter. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office and delete the folder. Then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office and delete those keys as well. Now go into C:\Program Files and find any of these three folders…Microsoft Office, OfficeUpdate, or OfficeUpdate14…you might find one, two or all three. Either way just rename the folders with “_OLD” (without quotes) at the end. Then go into C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft and delete any existing MS Office folders. Where in this example we have office, Office Labs, One Note…etc. Now we want to delete the contents of the Temp folder. Click on Start and type %temp% into the Search box and hit Enter. Use the key combination “Ctrl+A” to select all the files in this folder, then right-click and click Delete, or simply hit the Delete key. If you have some files that won’t delete, just skip them as they shouldn’t affect the Office install. Then empty the Recycle Bin and restart your machine. When you get back from the restart launch the Office 2010 RTM installer and you should be good to go with installation. Because we uninstalled the Office 2010 Beta manually, you may have some lingering blank icons that you’ll need to clean up. Scenario –3 Uninstall 2007 and Install 2010 32-Bit on x64 Windows 7 For this final scenario we are uninstalling Office Professional 2007 and installing Office Professional Plus 2010 32-Bit edition on a Windows Ultimate 64-bit computer. This machine actually had Office 2010 Beta 64-bit installed at one point also, it’s since been removed, and 2007 was reinstalled.  Go into Programs and Settings and uninstall Microsoft Office Professional 2007. Click Yes to the dialog box asking if you’re sure you want to uninstall it… Then wait while Office 2007 is uninstalled. The amount of time it takes will vary between systems. A restart is required to complete the process… Again we need to call upon the Windows Installer Clean Up Utility. Go through and delete any left over Office 2007 and 2010 entries. Click OK to the warning dialog that comes up. After that’s complete, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office and delete the folder. Then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office and delete those keys as well. We still need to go into C:\Users\ username\AppData\ Local\ Microsoft (where username is the computer name) and delete any Office folders. In this example we have Outlook Connector, Office, and Outlook to delete. Now let’s delete the contents of the Temp folder by typing %temp% into the Search box in the Start Menu. Then delete all of the files and folders in the Temp directory. If you have some files that won’t delete, just skip them as they shouldn’t affect the Office install. Then empty the Recycle Bin and restart your machine. If you try to install the 2010 RTM at this point you might be able to begin the install, but may get the following Error 1402 message. To solve this issue, we opened the command prompt and ran the following: secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose After the command completes, kick off the Office 2010 (Final) RTM 32-bit edition. This solved the issue and Office 2010 installed successfully.   Conclusion Except for the final scenario, we found using the Windows Installer Clean Up Utility to come in very handy. Using that along with deleting a couple folders and registry settings did the trick. In the last one, we had to get a bit more geeky and use some command line magic, but it got the job done. After some extensive testing in our labs, the only time the upgrade to the RTM went smoothly was when we had a clean Vista or Windows 7 system with a fresh install of the 2010 beta only. However, chances are you went from 2003 or 2007 to the free 2010 Beta. You might also have addins or other Office products installed, so there are going to be a lot of different office files scattered throughout your PC. If that’s the case, you may run into the issues we covered here. These are a few scenarios where we got errors and were not able to install Office 2010 after removing the beta. There could be other problems, and if any of you have experienced different issues or have more good suggestions, leave a comment and let us know! Link Download Windows Installer Clean Up Utility Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Remove Office 2010 Beta and Reinstall Office 2007How to Upgrade the Windows 7 RC to RTM (Final Release)Upgrading Ubuntu from Dapper to Edgy with Update ManagerDisable Office 2010 Beta Send-a-Smile from StartupAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 Suite TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle ! Find That Elusive Icon with FindIcons

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• Implementing a generic repository for WCF data services

  - by cibrax

  The repository implementation I am going to discuss here is not exactly what someone would call repository in terms of DDD, but it is an abstraction layer that becomes handy at the moment of unit testing the code around this repository. In other words, you can easily create a mock to replace the real repository implementation. The WCF Data Services update for .NET 3.5 introduced a nice feature to support two way data bindings, which is very helpful for developing WPF or Silverlight based application but also for implementing the repository I am going to talk about. As part of this feature, the WCF Data Services Client library introduced a new collection DataServiceCollection<T> that implements INotifyPropertyChanged to notify the data context (DataServiceContext) about any change in the association links. This means that it is not longer necessary to manually set or remove the links in the data context when an item is added or removed from a collection. Before having this new collection, you basically used the following code to add a new item to a collection. Order order = new Order {   Name = "Foo" }; OrderItem item = new OrderItem {   Name = "bar",   UnitPrice = 10,   Qty = 1 }; var context = new OrderContext(); context.AddToOrders(order); context.AddToOrderItems(item); context.SetLink(item, "Order", order); context.SaveChanges(); Now, thanks to this new collection, everything is much simpler and similar to what you have in other ORMs like Entity Framework or L2S. Order order = new Order {   Name = "Foo" }; OrderItem item = new OrderItem {   Name = "bar",   UnitPrice = 10,   Qty = 1 }; order.Items.Add(item); var context = new OrderContext(); context.AddToOrders(order); context.SaveChanges(); In order to use this new feature, you first need to enable V2 in the data service, and then use some specific arguments in the datasvcutil tool (You can find more information about this new feature and how to use it in this post). DataSvcUtil /uri:"http://localhost:3655/MyDataService.svc/" /out:Reference.cs /dataservicecollection /version:2.0 Once you use those two arguments, the generated proxy classes will use DataServiceCollection<T> rather than a simple ObjectCollection<T>, which was the default collection in V1. There are some aspects that you need to know to use this feature correctly. 1. All the entities retrieved directly from the data context with a query track the changes and report those to the data context automatically. 2. A entity created with “new” does not track any change in the properties or associations. In order to enable change tracking in this entity, you need to do the following trick. public Order CreateOrder() {   var collection = new DataServiceCollection<Order>(this.context);   var order = new Order();   collection.Add(order);   return order; } You basically need to create a collection, and add the entity to that collection with the “Add” method to enable change tracking on that entity. 3. If you need to attach an existing entity (For example, if you created the entity with the “new” operator rather than retrieving it from the data context with a query) to a data context for tracking changes, you can use the “Load” method in the DataServiceCollection. var order = new Order {   Id = 1 }; var collection = new DataServiceCollection<Order>(this.context); collection.Load(order); In this case, the order with Id = 1 must exist on the data source exposed by the Data service. Otherwise, you will get an error because the entity did not exist. These cool extensions methods discussed by Stuart Leeks in this post to replace all the magic strings in the “Expand” operation with Expression Trees represent another feature I am going to use to implement this generic repository. Thanks to these extension methods, you could replace the following query with magic strings by a piece of code that only uses expressions. Magic strings, var customers = dataContext.Customers .Expand("Orders")         .Expand("Orders/Items") Expressions, var customers = dataContext.Customers .Expand(c => c.Orders.SubExpand(o => o.Items)) That query basically returns all the customers with their orders and order items. Ok, now that we have the automatic change tracking support and the expression support for explicitly loading entity associations, we are ready to create the repository. The interface for this repository looks like this,public interface IRepository { T Create<T>() where T : new(); void Update<T>(T entity); void Delete<T>(T entity); IQueryable<T> RetrieveAll<T>(params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] eagerProperties); IQueryable<T> Retrieve<T>(Expression<Func<T, bool>> predicate, params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] eagerProperties); void Attach<T>(T entity); void SaveChanges(); } The Retrieve and RetrieveAll methods are used to execute queries against the data service context. While both methods receive an array of expressions to load associations explicitly, only the Retrieve method receives a predicate representing the “where” clause. The following code represents the final implementation of this repository.public class DataServiceRepository: IRepository { ResourceRepositoryContext context; public DataServiceRepository() : this (new DataServiceContext()) { } public DataServiceRepository(DataServiceContext context) { this.context = context; } private static string ResolveEntitySet(Type type) { var entitySetAttribute = (EntitySetAttribute)type.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(EntitySetAttribute), true).FirstOrDefault(); if (entitySetAttribute != null) return entitySetAttribute.EntitySet; return null; } public T Create<T>() where T : new() { var collection = new DataServiceCollection<T>(this.context); var entity = new T(); collection.Add(entity); return entity; } public void Update<T>(T entity) { this.context.UpdateObject(entity); } public void Delete<T>(T entity) { this.context.DeleteObject(entity); } public void Attach<T>(T entity) { var collection = new DataServiceCollection<T>(this.context); collection.Load(entity); } public IQueryable<T> Retrieve<T>(Expression<Func<T, bool>> predicate, params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] eagerProperties) { var entitySet = ResolveEntitySet(typeof(T)); var query = context.CreateQuery<T>(entitySet); foreach (var e in eagerProperties) { query = query.Expand(e); } return query.Where(predicate); } public IQueryable<T> RetrieveAll<T>(params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] eagerProperties) { var entitySet = ResolveEntitySet(typeof(T)); var query = context.CreateQuery<T>(entitySet); foreach (var e in eagerProperties) { query = query.Expand(e); } return query; } public void SaveChanges() { this.context.SaveChanges(SaveChangesOptions.Batch); } } For instance, you can use the following code to retrieve customers with First name equal to “John”, and all their orders in a single call. repository.Retrieve<Customer>(    c => c.FirstName == “John”, //Where    c => c.Orders.SubExpand(o => o.Items)); In case, you want to have some pre-defined queries that you are going to use across several places, you can put them in an specific class. public static class CustomerQueries {   public static Expression<Func<Customer, bool>> LastNameEqualsTo(string lastName)   {     return c => c.LastName == lastName;   } } And then, use it with the repository. repository.Retrieve<Customer>(    CustomerQueries.LastNameEqualsTo("foo"),    c => c.Orders.SubExpand(o => o.Items));

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• ASP.NET MVC ‘Extendable-hooks’ – ControllerActionInvoker class

  - by nmarun

  There’s a class ControllerActionInvoker in ASP.NET MVC. This can be used as one of an hook-points to allow customization of your application. Watching Brad Wilsons’ Advanced MP3 from MVC Conf inspired me to write about this class. What MSDN says: “Represents a class that is responsible for invoking the action methods of a controller.” Well if MSDN says it, I think I can instill a fair amount of confidence into what the class does. But just to get to the details, I also looked into the source code for MVC. Seems like the base class Controller is where an IActionInvoker is initialized: 1: protected virtual IActionInvoker CreateActionInvoker() { 2: return new ControllerActionInvoker(); 3: } In the ControllerActionInvoker (the O-O-B behavior), there are different ‘versions’ of InvokeActionMethod() method that actually call the action method in question and return an instance of type ActionResult. 1: protected virtual ActionResult InvokeActionMethod(ControllerContext controllerContext, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor, IDictionary<string, object> parameters) { 2: object returnValue = actionDescriptor.Execute(controllerContext, parameters); 3: ActionResult result = CreateActionResult(controllerContext, actionDescriptor, returnValue); 4: return result; 5: } I guess that’s enough on the ‘behind-the-screens’ of this class. Let’s see how we can use this class to hook-up extensions. Say I have a requirement that the user should be able to get different renderings of the same output, like html, xml, json, csv and so on. The user will type-in the output format in the url and should the get result accordingly. For example: http://site.com/RenderAs/ – renders the default way (the razor view) http://site.com/RenderAs/xml http://site.com/RenderAs/csv … and so on where RenderAs is my controller. There are many ways of doing this and I’m using a custom ControllerActionInvoker class (even though this might not be the best way to accomplish this). For this, my one and only route in the Global.asax.cs is: 1: routes.MapRoute("RenderAsRoute", "RenderAs/{outputType}", 2: new {controller = "RenderAs", action = "Index", outputType = ""}); Here the controller name is ‘RenderAsController’ and the action that’ll get called (always) is the Index action. The outputType parameter will map to the type of output requested by the user (xml, csv…). I intend to display a list of food items for this example. 1: public class Item 2: { 3: public int Id { get; set; } 4: public string Name { get; set; } 5: public Cuisine Cuisine { get; set; } 6: } 7:  8: public class Cuisine 9: { 10: public int CuisineId { get; set; } 11: public string Name { get; set; } 12: } Coming to my ‘RenderAsController’ class. I generate an IList<Item> to represent my model. 1: private static IList<Item> GetItems() 2: { 3: Cuisine cuisine = new Cuisine { CuisineId = 1, Name = "Italian" }; 4: Item item = new Item { Id = 1, Name = "Lasagna", Cuisine = cuisine }; 5: IList<Item> items = new List<Item> { item }; 6: item = new Item {Id = 2, Name = "Pasta", Cuisine = cuisine}; 7: items.Add(item); 8: //... 9: return items; 10: } My action method looks like 1: public IList<Item> Index(string outputType) 2: { 3: return GetItems(); 4: } There are two things that stand out in this action method. The first and the most obvious one being that the return type is not of type ActionResult (or one of its derivatives). Instead I’m passing the type of the model itself (IList<Item> in this case). We’ll convert this to some type of an ActionResult in our custom controller action invoker class later. The second thing (a little subtle) is that I’m not doing anything with the outputType value that is passed on to this action method. This value will be in the RouteData dictionary and we’ll use this in our custom invoker class as well. It’s time to hook up our invoker class. First, I’ll override the Initialize() method of my RenderAsController class. 1: protected override void Initialize(RequestContext requestContext) 2: { 3: base.Initialize(requestContext); 4: string outputType = string.Empty; 5:  6: // read the outputType from the RouteData dictionary 7: if (requestContext.RouteData.Values["outputType"] != null) 8: { 9: outputType = requestContext.RouteData.Values["outputType"].ToString(); 10: } 11:  12: // my custom invoker class 13: ActionInvoker = new ContentRendererActionInvoker(outputType); 14: } Coming to the main part of the discussion – the ContentRendererActionInvoker class: 1: public class ContentRendererActionInvoker : ControllerActionInvoker 2: { 3: private readonly string _outputType; 4:  5: public ContentRendererActionInvoker(string outputType) 6: { 7: _outputType = outputType.ToLower(); 8: } 9: //... 10: } So the outputType value that was read from the RouteData, which was passed in from the url, is being set here in  a private field. Moving to the crux of this article, I now override the CreateActionResult method. 1: protected override ActionResult CreateActionResult(ControllerContext controllerContext, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor, object actionReturnValue) 2: { 3: if (actionReturnValue == null) 4: return new EmptyResult(); 5:  6: ActionResult result = actionReturnValue as ActionResult; 7: if (result != null) 8: return result; 9:  10: // This is where the magic happens 11: // Depending on the value in the _outputType field, 12: // return an appropriate ActionResult 13: switch (_outputType) 14: { 15: case "json": 16: { 17: JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer(); 18: string json = serializer.Serialize(actionReturnValue); 19: return new ContentResult { Content = json, ContentType = "application/json" }; 20: } 21: case "xml": 22: { 23: XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(actionReturnValue.GetType()); 24: using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter()) 25: { 26: serializer.Serialize(writer, actionReturnValue); 27: return new ContentResult { Content = writer.ToString(), ContentType = "text/xml" }; 28: } 29: } 30: case "csv": 31: controllerContext.HttpContext.Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=items.csv"); 32: return new ContentResult 33: { 34: Content = ToCsv(actionReturnValue as IList<Item>), 35: ContentType = "application/ms-excel" 36: }; 37: case "pdf": 38: string filePath = controllerContext.HttpContext.Server.MapPath("~/items.pdf"); 39: controllerContext.HttpContext.Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", 40: "attachment; filename=items.pdf"); 41: ToPdf(actionReturnValue as IList<Item>, filePath); 42: return new FileContentResult(StreamFile(filePath), "application/pdf"); 43:  44: default: 45: controllerContext.Controller.ViewData.Model = actionReturnValue; 46: return new ViewResult 47: { 48: TempData = controllerContext.Controller.TempData, 49: ViewData = controllerContext.Controller.ViewData 50: }; 51: } 52: } A big method there! The hook I was talking about kinda above actually is here. This is where different kinds / formats of output get returned based on the output type requested in the url. When the _outputType is not set (string.Empty as set in the Global.asax.cs file), the razor view gets rendered (lines 45-50). This is the default behavior in most MVC applications where-in a view (webform/razor) gets rendered on the browser. As you see here, this gets returned as a ViewResult. But then, for an outputType of json/xml/csv, a ContentResult gets returned, while for pdf, a FileContentResult is returned. Here are how the different kinds of output look like: This is how we can leverage this feature of ASP.NET MVC to developer a better application. I’ve used the iTextSharp library to convert to a pdf format. Mike gives quite a bit of detail regarding this library here. You can download the sample code here. (You’ll get an option to download once you open the link). Verdict: Hot chocolate: $3; Reebok shoes: $50; Your first car: $3000; Being able to extend a web application: Priceless.

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• Oracle Fusion Applications: Changing the Game

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Originally posted in the Oracle Profit Magazine, November 2010 Edition. When the order processing system red-flags a customer's credit status, the IT department doesn't get the customer's call. When a supplier misses a delivery date for a key automotive assembly, it's not the CIO who has to answer for the error. Knowledge workers (known in IT circles as "users") are on the front lines when an exception occurs in an established business process. They're also the ones who study sales trends to decide when to open a new store in an up-and-coming neighborhood, which products are most profitable, how employee skill sets are evolving, and which suppliers are most efficient. In short, knowledge workers are masters of business as unusual. Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other familiar enterprise applications excel at automating, managing, and executing standard business processes. These programs shine when everything goes as planned. Life gets even trickier when a traditional application needs to be extended with a new service or an extra step is added to a business process when new products are brought to market, divisions are merged, or companies are acquired. Monolithic applications often need the IT department to step in and make the necessary adjustments--incurring additional costs and delays. Until now. When Oracle unveiled the much-anticipated family of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2010, knowledge workers in particular had a lot to cheer about. Business users will soon have ready access to analytical information and collaboration tools in the context of what they are working on, so they can make better decisions when problems or opportunities arise. Additionally, the Oracle Fusion Applications platform will make it easy for business users to tweak processes, create new capabilities, and find information, often without the need for IT department assistance and while still following company guidelines. And IT leaders will be happy to hear about new deployment options, guided implementation and setup tools, and cost-saving management capabilities. Just as important, the underlying technologies in Oracle Fusion Applications will allow organizations to choose among their existing investments and next-generation enterprise applications so they can introduce innovations at a pace that makes the most business and financial sense. "Oracle Fusion Applications are architected so you don't have to do rip and replace," says Jim Hayes, managing director of the consulting firm Accenture. "That's very important for creating a business case that will get through the steering committee and be approved by the board. It shows you can drive value and make a difference in the near term." For these and other reasons, analysts and early adopters are calling Oracle Fusion Applications a game changer for enterprise customers. The differences become apparent in three key areas: the way we innovate, work, and adopt technology. Game Changer #1: New Standard for InnovationChange is a constant challenge for most businesses, whether the catalysts are market dynamics, new competition, or the ever-expanding regulatory environment. And, in an ongoing effort to differentiate, business leaders are constantly looking for new ways to do business, serve constituents, and bring new products and services to market. In addition, companies face significant costs to keep their applications up-to-date. For example, when a company adds new suppliers to a procurement system, the IT shop typically has to invest time, effort, and even consulting fees for custom integrations that allow various ERP systems to communicate with each other. Oracle Fusion Applications were built on Web services and a modular SOA foundation to ease customizations and integration activities among all applications--whether from Oracle or another vendor. Interfaces and updates written in ubiquitous Java, rather than a proprietary coding language, allow organizations to tap into existing in-house technical skills rather than seek expensive outside specialists. And with SOA, organizations can extend a feature set or integrate with other SOA environments by combining Web services such as "look up customer" into a new business process managed by the BPEL orchestration engine. Flexibility like this has long-term implications. "Because users capture these changes at a higher metadata layer, not in the application's code, changes and additions are protected even as new versions of Oracle Fusion Applications are released," says Steve Miranda, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. "This is a much more sustainable approach because you don't incur costly customizations that prevent upgrades and other innovations." And changes are easier to make: if one change is made in the metadata, that change is automatically reflected throughout the application interface, business intelligence, business process, and business logic. Game Changer #2: New Standard for WorkBoosting productivity comes down to doing the basics right: running business processes more efficiently and managing exceptions more effectively, so users can accomplish more in the course of a day or spend more quality time with the most profitable customers. The fastest way to improve process efficiency is to reduce the number of steps it takes to execute common tasks, such as ordering office equipment from an internal procurement system. Oracle Fusion Applications will deliver a complete role-based user experience with business intelligence and collaboration capabilities provided in the context of the work at hand. "We created every Oracle Fusion Applications screen by asking 'What does the user need to know?' 'What does he or she need to do?' and 'Who do they need to work with to get the job done?'" Miranda explains. So when the sales department heads need new laptops, the self-service procurement screen will not only display a list of approved vendors and configurations, but also a running list of reviews by coworkers who recently purchased the various models. Embedded intelligence may also display prevailing delivery lead times based on actual order histories, not the generic shipping dates vendors may quote. The pervasive business intelligence serves many other business activities across all areas of the enterprise. For example, a manager considering whether to promote a direct report can see the person's employee profile, with a salary history, appraisal summaries, and a rundown of skills and training. This approach to business intelligence also has implications for supply chain management. "One of the challenges at Ingersoll Rand is lack of visibility in our supply chain," says Mike Macrie, global director of enterprise applications for global industrial firm Ingersoll Rand. "Oracle Fusion Applications are going to provide the embedded intelligence to give us that visibility and give us the ability to analyze those orders at any point in our supply chain." Oracle Fusion Applications will also create a "role-based user experience" that displays a work list of events that need attention, based on user job function. Role awareness guides users with daily lists of action items and exceptions. So a credit manager may see seven invoices with discounts that are about to expire or 12 suppliers that have been put on hold because credit memos are awaiting approval. Individualization extends to the search capabilities of Oracle Fusion Applications. The platform uses Web-style search screens powered by an Oracle enterprise search engine, with a security framework that filters search results so individuals will only see the internal information they're authorized to access. A further aid to productivity is Oracle Fusion Applications' integration with Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking resources for business environments. Hover-over text will reveal relevant contact information whenever the name of a person appears in an Oracle Fusion Application. Users can connect via an online chat, phone call, or instant message without leaving the main application, reducing the time required for an accounts payable staffer to resolve a mismatch between an invoiced charge and the service record, for example. Addresses of suppliers, customers, or partners will also initiate hover-over text to show contact details and Web-based maps. Finally, Oracle Fusion Applications will promote a new way of working with purpose-driven communities that can bring new efficiencies to everything from cultivating sales leads to managing new projects. As soon as a lead or project materializes, the applications will automatically gather relevant participants into an online community that shares member contact information, schedules, discussion forums, and Wiki pages. "Oracle Fusion Applications will allow us to take it to the next level with embedded Web 2.0 tools and the embedded analytics," says Steve Printz, CIO and vice president, supply chain management, at window-and-door manufacturer Pella. "[This] allows those employees today who are processing transactions to really contribute to the success of the company and become decision-makers." Game Changer #3: New Standard for Technology AdoptionAs IT becomes a dominant component of how businesses run and compete, organizations need to lower the cost of implementing applications and introducing new application features. In the past, rolling out new code often required creating a test bed system, moving beta code to a separate system for user feedback, and--once all the revisions were made--moving version one of the software onto production systems, where business users could finally get the needed new features. Oracle Fusion Applications will use a dedicated setup manager application to streamline this process. First, the setup manager will help scope out the project, querying users about their requirements. "From those questions and answers we determine the steps and the order of those steps that will enable that task," Miranda says. Next, system utilities will assign tasks to owners, track completion status, and monitor the overall status of a programming effort. Oracle Fusion Applications can then recommend Web services that allow users to migrate setup choices and steps across all the various deployments of the application. Those setup capabilities automate the migration from test systems to production systems, as well as between different business units that may be using the same application. "The self-service ability of the setup manager helps business users change setups with very little intervention from the IT team," says Ravi Kumar, vice president at IT services company Infosys. "That to me is a big difference from how we've viewed enterprise applications before." For additional flexibility, organizations will be able to adopt Oracle Fusion Applications modules in either of two modes: a single-instance alternative uses one database for all Oracle Fusion Applications, while a "pillar mode" creates separate databases to underpin each application. This means IT departments running any one of Oracle's applications or even third-party applications can plug Oracle Fusion Applications modules into their environment and see additional business value created on top of their existing systems. And Oracle Fusion Applications offer a hybrid approach to deployment. The applications are all software-as-a-service-ready, so customers can choose on-premises, public or private cloud, or a combination of these to suit their business needs. It's that combination of flexibility and a roadmap for the future that may be the biggest game changer of all. "The Oracle Fusion Applications architecture allows us to migrate our company at a pace that's consistent with our business strategy, whereas before we might have had to do it with a massive upgrade," says Macrie of Ingersoll Rand. "We're looking forward to that architecture to really give us more flexibility in how we migrate over time." For More InformationUser Input Key to the Success of Oracle Fusion ApplicationsTransforming Coexistence into Strategic ValueUnder the HoodOracle Fusion ApplicationsOracle Service-Oriented Architecture  

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• Make your CHM Help Files show HTML5 and CSS3 content

  - by Rick Strahl

  The HTML Help 1.0 specification aka CHM files, is pretty old. In fact, it's practically ancient as it was introduced in 1997 when Internet Explorer 4 was introduced. Html Help 1.0 is basically a completely HTML based Help system that uses a Help Viewer that internally uses Internet Explorer to render the HTML Help content. Because of its use of the Internet Explorer shell for rendering there were many security issues in the past, which resulted in locking down of the Web Browser control in Windows and also the Help Engine which caused some unfortunate side effects. Even so, CHM continues to be a popular help format because it is very easy to produce content for it, using plain HTML and because it works with many Windows application platforms out of the box. While there have been various attempts to replace CHM help files CHM files still seem to be a popular choice for many applications to display their help systems. The biggest alternative these days is no system based help at all, but links to online documentation. For Windows apps though it's still very common to see CHM help files and there are still a ton of CHM help out there and lots of tools (including our own West Wind Html Help Builder) that produce output for CHM files as well as Web output. Image is Everything and you ain't got it! One problem with the CHM engine is that it's stuck with an ancient Internet Explorer version for rendering. For example if you have help content that uses HTML5 or CSS3 content you might have an HTML Help topic like the following shown here in a full Web Browser instance of Internet Explorer: The page clearly uses some CSS3 features like rounded corners and box shadows that are rendered using plain CSS 3 features. Note that I used Internet Explorer on purpose here to demonstrate that IE9 on Windows 7 can properly render this content using some of the new features of CSS, but the same is true for all other recent versions of the major browsers (FireFox 3.1+, Safari 4.5+, WebKit 9+ etc.). Unfortunately if you take this nice and simple CSS3 content and run it through the HTML Help compiler to produce a CHM file the resulting output on the same machine looks a bit less flashy: All the CSS3 styling is gone and although the page display and functionality still works, but all the extra styling features are gone. This even though I am running this on a Windows 7 machine that has IE9 that should be able to render these CSS features. Bummer. Web Browser Control - perpetually stuck in IE 7 Mode The problem is the Web Browser/Shell Components in Windows. This component is and has been part of Windows for as long as Internet Explorer has been around, but the Web Browser control hasn't kept up with the latest versions of IE. In a nutshell the control is stuck in IE7 rendering mode for engine compatibility reasons by default. However, there is at least one way to fix this explicitly using Registry keys on a per application basis. The key point from that blog article is that you can override the IE rendering engine for a particular executable by setting one (or more) registry flags that tell the Windows Shell which version of the Internet Explorer rendering engine to load. An application that wishes to use a more recent version of Internet Explorer can then register itself during installation for the specific IE version desired and from then on the application will use that version of the Web Browser component. If the application is older than the specified version it falls back to the default version (IE 7 rendering). Forcing CHM files to display with IE9 (or later) Rendering Knowing that we can force the IE usage for a given process it's also possible to affect the CHM rendering by setting same keys on the executable that's hosting the CHM file. What that executable file is depends on the type of application as there are a number of ways that can launch the help engine. hh.exeThe standalone Windows CHM Help Viewer that launches when you launch a CHM from Windows Explorer. You can manually add hh.exe to the registry keys. YourApplication.exeIf you're using .NET or any tool that internally uses the hhControl ActiveX control to launch help content your application is your host. You should add your application's exe to the registry during application startup. foxhhelp9.exeIf you're building a FoxPro application that uses the built-in help features, foxhhelp9.exe is used to actually host the help controls. Make sure to add this executable to the registry. What to set You can configure the Internet Explorer version used for an application in the registry by specifying the executable file name and a value that specifies the IE version desired. There are two different sets of keys for 32 bit and 64 bit applications. 32 bit only or 64 bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: hh.exe 32 bit on 64 bit machine: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: hh.exe Note that it's best to always set both values ideally when you install your application so it works regardless of which platform you run on. The value specified is a DWORD value and the interesting values are decimal 9000 for IE9 rendering mode depending on !DOCTYPE settings or 9999 for IE 9 standards mode always. You can use the same logic for 8000 and 8888 for IE8 and the final value of 7000 for IE7 (one has to wonder what they're going todo for version 10 to perpetuate that pattern). I think 9000 is the value you'd most likely want to use. 9000 means that IE9 will be used for rendering but unless the right doctypes are used (XHTML and HTML5 specifically) IE will still fall back into quirks mode as needed. This should allow existing pages to continue to use the fallback engine while new pages that have the proper HTML doctype set can take advantage of the newest features. Here's an example of how I set the registry keys in my Tarma Installmate registry configuration: Note that I set all three values both under the Software and Wow6432Node keys so that this works regardless of where these EXEs are launched from. Even though all apps are 32 bit apps, the 64 bit (the default one shown selected) key is often used. So, now once I've set the registry key for hh.exe I can now launch my CHM help file from Explorer and see the following CSS3 IE9 rendered display: Summary It sucks that we have to go through all these hoops to get what should be natural behavior for an application to support the latest features available on a system. But it shouldn't be a surprise - the Windows Help team (if there even is such a thing) has not been known for forward looking technologies. It's a pretty big hassle that we have to resort to setting registry keys in order to get the Web Browser control and the internal CHM engine to render itself properly but at least it's possible to make it work after all. Using this technique it's possible to ship an application with a help file and allow your CHM help to display with richer CSS markup and correct rendering using the stricter and more consistent XHTML or HTML5 doctypes. If you provide both Web help and in-application help (and why not if you're building from a single source) you now can side step the issue of your customers asking: Why does my help file look so much shittier than the online help… No more!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML5  Help  Html Help Builder  Internet Explorer  Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Faceted search with Solr on Windows

  - by Dr.NETjes

  With over 10 million hits a day, funda.nl is probably the largest ASP.NET website which uses Solr on a Windows platform. While all our data (i.e. real estate properties) is stored in SQL Server, we're using Solr 1.4.1 to return the faceted search results as fast as we can.And yes, Solr is very fast. We did do some heavy stress testing on our Solr service, which allowed us to do over 1,000 req/sec on a single 64-bits Solr instance; and that's including converting search-url's to Solr http-queries and deserializing Solr's result-XML back to .NET objects! Let me tell you about faceted search and how to integrate Solr in a .NET/Windows environment. I'll bet it's easier than you think :-) What is faceted search? Faceted search is the clustering of search results into categories, allowing users to drill into search results. By showing the number of hits for each facet category, users can easily see how many results match that category. If you're still a bit confused, this example from CNET explains it all: The SQL solution for faceted search Our ("pre-Solr") solution for faceted search was done by adding a lot of redundant columns to our SQL tables and doing a COUNT(...) for each of those columns:   So if a user was searching for real estate properties in the city 'Amsterdam', our facet-query would be something like: SELECT COUNT(hasGarden), COUNT(has2Bathrooms), COUNT(has3Bathrooms), COUNT(etc...) FROM Houses WHERE city = 'Amsterdam' While this solution worked fine for a couple of years, it wasn't very easy for developers to add new facets. And also, performing COUNT's on all matched rows only performs well if you have a limited amount of rows in a table (i.e. less than a million). Enter Solr "Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface." (quoted from Wikipedia's page on Solr) Solr isn't a database, it's more like a big index. Every time you upload data to Solr, it will analyze the data and create an inverted index from it (like the index-pages of a book). This way Solr can lookup data very quickly. To explain the inner workings of Solr is beyond the scope of this post, but if you want to learn more, please visit the Solr Wiki pages. Getting faceted search results from Solr is very easy; first let me show you how to send a http-query to Solr:    http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=city:Amsterdam This will return an XML document containing the search results (in this example only three houses in the city of Amsterdam):    <response>     <result name="response" numFound="3" start="0">         <doc>            <long name="id">3203</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Keizersgracht</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>        </doc>         <doc>             <long name="id">3205</long>             <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>             <str name="steet">Vondelstraat</str>             <int name="numberOfBathrooms">3</int>          </doc>          <doc>             <long name="id">4293</long>             <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>             <str name="steet">Wibautstraat</str>             <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>          </doc>       </result>   </response> By adding a facet-querypart for the field "numberOfBathrooms", Solr will return the facets for this particular field. We will see that there's one house in Amsterdam with three bathrooms and two houses with two bathrooms.    http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=city:Amsterdam&facet=true&facet.field=numberOfBathrooms The complete XML response from Solr now looks like:    <response>      <result name="response" numFound="3" start="0">         <doc>            <long name="id">3203</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Keizersgracht</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>         </doc>         <doc>            <long name="id">3205</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Vondelstraat</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">3</int>         </doc>         <doc>            <long name="id">4293</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Wibautstraat</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>         </doc>      </result>      <lst name="facet_fields">         <lst name="numberOfBathrooms">            <int name="2">2</int>            <int name="3">1</int>         </lst>      </lst>   </response> Trying Solr for yourself To run Solr on your local machine and experiment with it, you should read the Solr tutorial. This tutorial really only takes 1 hour, in which you install Solr, upload sample data and get some query results. And yes, it works on Windows without a problem. Note that in the Solr tutorial, you're using Jetty as a Java Servlet Container (that's why you must start it using "java -jar start.jar"). In our environment we prefer to use Apache Tomcat to host Solr, which installs like a Windows service and works more like .NET developers expect. See the SolrTomcat page.Some best practices for running Solr on Windows: Use the 64-bits version of Tomcat. In our tests, this doubled the req/sec we were able to handle!Use a .NET XmlReader to convert Solr's XML output-stream to .NET objects. Don't use XPath; it won't scale well.Use filter queries ("fq" parameter) instead of the normal "q" parameter where possible. Filter queries are cached by Solr and will speed up Solr's response time (see FilterQueryGuidance)In my next post I’ll talk about how to keep Solr's indexed data in sync with the data in your SQL tables. Timestamps / rowversions will help you out here!

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• Day 2 - Game Design Documentation

  - by dapostolov

  So yesterday I didn't cut any code for my game but I was able to do a tiny bit of research on the XNA Game Development Technology and the communities out there and do you know what? I feel I'm a bit closer to my goal. The bad news is today I didn't cut code either. However, not all is lost because I wanted to get my ideas on paper and today I just did that.  Today, I began to jot down notes about the game and how I felt the visual elements would interact with each other. Unlike my workplace, my personal level of documentation is nothing more than a task list or a mind map of my ideas; it helps me streamline my solutions quiet effectively and circumvent the long process of articulating each thought to the n-th degree. I truly dislike documentation (because I have an extremely hard time articulating my thought and solutions); however, because I tend to do a really good job with documentation I tend to get stuck writing the buggers. But as a generalist remark: 'No Developer likes documentation.' For now let's stick with my basic notes and call this post a living document. Here are my notes, fresh, from after watching the new first episode of Merlin second season! Actually, a quick recommendation to anyone who is reading this (if anyone is): I truly recommend you envelope yourself in the medium or task you're trying to tackle. Be one with moment and feel it! For instance: Are you writing a fantasy script / game? What would the music of the genre sound like? For me the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is frackin awesome. There are many other good CD's out there, which I listen to (some who even use medival instruments, but Conan I keep returning to. It's a creative trigger for me. Ask yourself what would the imagery look like? Time to surf google for artist renditions of fantasy! What would the game feel like? Start playing some of your favorite games that inspire you, be wary though, have some self control and don't let it absorb your time. Anyhow, onto the documentation... Screens, Scenes, and Sprites. Oh My! (groan...) The first thing that came to mind were the screens, I thought the following would suffice: Menu Screen Character Customisation Screen Loading Screen? Battle Ground The Menu Screen Ok. So, the thought here is when the game loads a huge title is displayed: Wizard Wars. The player is prompted with 3 menu items: 1 Player Game, 2 Player Game, and Exit. Since I'm targetting the PC platform, as a non-networked game to start, I picture myself running my mouse over each menu option and the visual element of the menu item changes, along with a sound to indicate that I am over a curent menu item. And as I move my mouse away, it changes back, and possibly an exit mouse sound. Maybe on the screen somewhere is a brazier alit with a magical tome open right beside it, OR, maybe the tome is the menu! I hear the menu music as mellow, not obtrusive or piercing. On a menu item select, a confirmation sound bellows to indicate the players selection. The Esc key will always return me to the previous screens or desktop. The menu screen must feel...dark, like a really important ritual is about to happen and thus the music should build up. 1 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) 2 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) Exit - > Back to Windows Notes: So the first thing I pick up here are a couple things: First and foremost, my artistic abilities suck crap, so I may have to hire an artist (now that i've said that, lets get techy) graphical objects will be positioned within a scene on each screen / window. Menu items will be represented grapically, possibly animated, and have sound / animation effects triggered by user input or a time line. I have an animated scene involving a brazier or fire on a stick IF I was to move this game to the xbox, I'd have to track which menu item is currently selected (unless I do a mouse pointer type thing.) WindowObject has a scene A Scene has many GameObjects GameObject has a position graphic or animation MenuObject is a GameObject which has a mouse in, mouse out, and click event which either does something graphically (animation), does something with sound, or moves to another screen.  Character Customisation Screen With either the 1 or 2 player option selected, both selections will come to this screen; a wizard requires a name, powers, and vestements of course! Player one will configure his character first and then player two. I considered a split screen for PC but to have two people fighting over a keyboard would probably suck. For XBox, a split screen could work; maybe when I get into the networking portion (phase 2 blog?) of this game I will remove the 2 player option for PC and provide only multiplayer and I will leave 2 player for xbox...hmm... Anyhow...I picture the creation process as follows: Name: (textbox / keyboard entry) - for xbox, this would have to be different. Robe Color: (color box, or something) Stats: Speed, Oomph, and Health. (as sliders) 1 as minimum and 10 as maximum. Ok, Back, and Cancel buttons / options. Each stat has a benefit which are listed below. The idea is the player decides if he wants his wizard to run fast, be a tank and ... hit with a purse.Regardless, the player will have a pool of 12 points to use. Ideally, A balanced wizard will have 5 in each attribute. Spells? The only spell of choice is a ball of fire which comes without question. The music and screen should still feel like a ritual. The Character Speed Basically, how fast your character moves and casts. Oomph (Best Monster Truck Voice): PURE POWAH!!! The damage output of your fireball. Health How much damage you can take. Notes: I realise the game dynamics may sound uninteresting at the moment; but I think after a couple releases, we could have some other grand ideas such as: saved profiles, gold to upgrade arsenal of spells, talents, etc...but for now...a vanilla fireball thrower mage will suffice for this experiment. OK. So... a MenuObject  may need to be loosely coupled to allow future items such as networking? may be a button? a CharacterObject has a name speed oomph health and a funky robe color. cap on the three stats (1-10) an arsenal of 1 spell (possibly could expand this) The Loading Screen As is. The Battleground Screen For now, I'm keeping the screen as max resolution for the PC. The screen isn't going to move or even be a split screen. I'm not aiming high here because I want to see what level of change is involved when new features / concepts are added to game content. I'm interested to find out if we could apply techniques such as MVC or MVVM to this type of development or is it too tightly coupled? This reminds me when when my best friend and I were brainstorming our game idea (this is going back a while...1994, 6?) and he cringed at the thought of bringing business technology into games, especially when I suggested a database to store character information and COM / DCOM as the medium, but it seems I wasn't far off (reflecting); just like his implementation of a xml "config file" for dynamic direct-x menus back before .net in 1999...anyhow...i digress... The Battle One screen, two characters lobing balls of fire at each other...It doesn't get better than that. Every so often a scroll appears...and the fireballs bounce off walls, or the wizard has rapid fire, or even scrolls of healing! The scroll options are endless. Two bars at the top, each the color of the wizard (with their name beside the bar) indicate how much health they have. Possibly the appearance of the scrolls means the battle is taking too long? I'm thinking 1 player controls: up, down, left, right and space to fire the button. Or even possibly, mouse click and shift - mouse button to fire a spell in the direction they are facing. Two player controls: a, s, d, f and space AND arrows (up, down, left, right) and Del key or Crtl. The game ends when a player has 0 health and a dialog box appears asking for a rematch / reconfigure / exit. Health goes down when a fireball (friendly or not), connects with a wizard. When a wizard connects with a scroll, a countdown clock / icon appears near the health bar and the wizard begins to glow. For the most part, a wizard can have only scroll 1 effect on him at a time. Notes: Ok, there's alot to cover here. a CharacterObject is a GameObject it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has sounds (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, whistling, other?) it has animations (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, idle, other?) it has a lifespan (determined by health) it is alive or dead it has a position a ScrollObject is a GameObject it carries a transferance of points "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it carries a transferance of "other" it is stationary it has a sound on impact it has a stationary animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by game) it is alive or dead it has a position a WallObject is a GameObject it has a sound on fireball impact? it is a still image / stationary it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it is dead it has a position A FireBall is a GameObject it carries a transferance of poinst "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has a sound it has a travel animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by caster) it is alive or dead it has a position As I look at this, I can see some common attributes in each object that I can carry up to the GameObject. I think I'm going to end the documentation here, it's taken me a bit of time to type this all out, tomorrow. I'll load up my IDE and my paint studio to get some good old fashioned cowboy hacking going!   D.

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• Customize your icons in Windows 7 and Vista

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to change out the icons on your desktop and more?  Personalizing your icons is a great way to make your PC uniquely yours,, and today we show you how to grab unique icons, and default Winnows. to be your own. Change the icon for Computer, Recycle Bin, Network, and your User folder Right-click on the desktop, and select Personalize. Now, click the “Change desktop icons” link on the left sidebar in the Personalization window. The window looks slightly different in Windows Vista, but the link is the same. Select the icon you wish to change, and click the Change Icon button.  In Windows 7, you will also notice a box to choose whether or not to allow themes to change icons, and you can uncheck it if you don’t want themes to change your icon settings. You can select one of the other included icons, or click browse to find the icon you want.  Click Ok when you are finished. Change Folder icons You can easily change the icon on most folders in Windows Vista and 7.  Simply right-click on the folder and select properties. Click the Customize tab, and then click the Change Icon button.  This will open the standard dialog to change your icon, so proceed as normal. This basically just creates a hidden desktop.ini file in the folder containing the following or similar data: [.ShellClassInfo]IconFile=%SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dllIconIndex=20 You could manually create or edit the file if you choose, instead of using the dialogs. Simply create a new text file named desktop.ini with this same information, or edit the existing one.  Change the IconFile line to the location of your icon. If you are pointing to a .ico file you should change the IconIndex line to 0 instead. Note that this isn’t available for all folders, for instance you can’t use this to change the icon for the Windows folder.   In Windows 7, please note that you cannot change the icon of folder inside a library.  So if you are browsing your Documents library and would like to change an icon in that folder, right-click on it and select Open folder location.  Now you can change the icon as above. And if you would like to change a Library’s icon itself, then check out this tutorial: Change Your Windows 7 Library Icons the Easy Way Change the icon of any file type Want to make you files easier to tell apart?  Check out our tutorial on how to simply do this: Change a File Type’s Icon in Windows 7 Change the icon of any Application Shortcut To change the icon of a shortcut on your desktop, start menu, or in Explorer, simply right-click on the icon and select Properties. In the Shortcut tab, click the Change Icon button. Now choose one of the other available icons or click browse to find the icon you want. Change Icons of Running Programs in the Windows 7 taskbar If your computer is running Windows 7, you can customize the icon of any program running in the taskbar!  This only works on applications that are running but not pinned to the taskbar, so if you want to customize a pinned icon you may want to unpin it before customizing it.  But the interesting thing about this trick is that it can customize any icon anything running in the taskbar, including things like Control Panel! Right-click or click and push up to open the jumplist on the icon, and then right-click on the program’s name and select Properties.  Here we are customizing Control Panel, but you can do this on any application icon. Now, click Change Icon as usual. Select an icon you want (We switched the Control Panel icon to the Security Shield), or click Browse to find another icon.  Click Ok when finished, and then close the application window. The next time you open the program (or Control Panel in our example), you will notice your new icon on its taskbar icon. Please note that this only works on applications that are currently running and are not pinned to the taskbar.  Strangely, if the application is pinned to the taskbar, you can still click Properties and change the icon, but the change will not show up. Change the icon on any Drive on your Computer You can easily change the icon on your internal hard drives and portable drives with the free Drive Icon Changer application.  Simply download and unzip the file (link below), and then run the application as administrator by right-clicking on the icon and selecting “Run as administrator”. Now, select the drive that you want to change the icon of, and select your desired icon file. Click Save, and Drive Icon Changer will let you know that the icon has been changed successfully. You will then need to reboot your computer to complete the changes.  Simply click Yes to reboot. Now, our Drive icon is changed from this default image: to a Laptop icon we chose! You can do this to any drive in your computer, or to removable drives such as USB flash drives.  When you change these drives icons, the new icon will appear on any computer you insert the drive into.  Also, if you wish to remove the icon change, simply run the Drive Icon Changer again and remove the icon path. Download Drive Icon Changer This application actually simply creates or edits a hidden Autorun.inf file on the top of your drive.  You can edit or create the file yourself by hand if you’d like; simply include the following information in the file, and save it in the top directory of your drive: [autorun]ICON=[path of your icon] Remove Arrow from shortcut icons Many people don’t like the arrow on the shortcut icon, and there are two easy ways to do this. If you’re running the 32 bit version of Windows Vista or 7, simply use the Vista Shortcut Overlay Remover. If your computer is running the 64 bit version of Windows Vista or 7, use the Ultimate Windows Tweaker instead.  Simply select the Additional Tweaks section, and check the “Remove arrows from Shortcut Icons.” For more info and download links check out this article: Disable Shortcut Icon Arrow Overlay in Windows 7 or Vista Closing: This gives you a lot of ways to customize almost any icon on your computer, so you can make it look just like you want it to.  Stay tuned for more great desktop customization articles from How-to Geek! 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