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  • On SQL Developer and TNSNAMES.ORA

    - by thatjeffsmith
    Tnsnames.ora [DOCS] is a configuration file for SQL*Net that describes the network service names for the databases in your organization. Basically, it tells Oracle applications how to find your databases. This post is just a quick overview on how to get SQL Developer to ‘see’ this file and define a connection. There’s only a single prerequisite for having SQL Devleoper setup such that it can use TNSNAMES to connect: You have somewhere a tnsnames.ora file You don’t need a client, instant or otherwise, on your machine. You just need the file. Now, if you DO you have a client or HOME on your machine, SQL Developer will look for those and find the tnsnames file for you. IF we can’t find it at the usual places, you can simply tell us where it is via this preference: On the Database – Advanced page Once you’ve done this, assuming you have a file (or 10) in that directory, we’ll read it, parse it, and list the entries in the connection dialog. The File(s) That’s right, files. Just like SQL*Plus, we’ll read any file that starts with ‘tnsnames’ – that includes files you’ve renamed to .bak or .old. Kris talks about that more here. I have just the one, which is all I need anyway. There we go! Defining the Connection Just set the connection type to TNS. This is a lot easier to do than manually defining the connections – esp as they’re likely to frequently change in ‘the real world.’ No Client or Home Required That’s right. You don’t need an Oracle Client or $ORACLE_HOME to have SQL Developer see and read a TNS file. Just so you know I’m not cheating… SQL Dev doesn’t know which client to use and won’t use it even if it DID know… I’m able to define a new connection AND connect with these preferences ON|OFF.

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  • How to Quickly Cut a Clip From a Video File with Avidemux

    - by Trevor Bekolay
    Whether you’re cutting out the boring parts of your vacation video or getting a hilarious scene for an animated GIF, Avidemux provides a quick and easy way to cut clips from any video file. It’s overkill to use a full-featured video editing program if you just want to cut a few clips from a video file. Even programs that are designed to be small can have confusing interfaces when dealing with video. We’ve found that a great free program, Avidemux, makes the job of cutting clips extremely simple. Note: While the screenshots in this guide are taken from the Windows version, Avidemux runs on all of the major platforms – Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (GTK). Image by Keith Williamson. Cutting Clips from a Video File Open up Avidemux, and load the video file that you want to work with. If you get a prompt like this one: we recommend clicking Yes to use the safer mode. Find the portion of the video that you’d like to isolate. Get as close as you can to the start of the clip you want to cut. Once you find the start of your clip, look at the “Frame Type” of the current frame. You want it to read I; if it isn’t frame type I, then use the single left and right arrow buttons to go forward or backward one frame until you find an appropriate I frame. Once you’ve found the right starting frame, click the button with the A over a red bar. This will set the start of the clip. Advance to where you want your clip to end. Click on the button with a B when you’ve found the appropriate frame. This frame can be of any type. You can now save the clip, either by going to File –> Save –> Save Video… or by pressing Ctrl+S. Give the file a name, and Avidemux will prepare your clip. And that’s it! You should now have a movie file that contains only the portion of the original file that you want. Download Avidemux free for all platforms Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Colorize Black and White Vintage Photographs in Photoshop How To Get SSH Command-Line Access to Windows 7 Using Cygwin The How-To Geek Video Guide to Using Windows 7 Speech Recognition How To Create Your Own Custom ASCII Art from Any Image How To Process Camera Raw Without Paying for Adobe Photoshop How Do You Block Annoying Text Message (SMS) Spam? Battlestar Galactica – Caprica Map of the 12 Colonies (Wallpaper Also Available) View Enlarged Versions of Thumbnail Images with Thumbnail Zoom for Firefox IntoNow Identifies Any TV Show by Sound Walk Score Calculates a Neighborhood’s Pedestrian Friendliness Factor Fantasy World at Twilight Wallpaper Hack a Wireless Doorbell into a Snail Mail Indicator

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  • Predicting Likelihood of Click with Multiple Presentations

    - by Michel Adar
    When using predictive models to predict the likelihood of an ad or a banner to be clicked on it is common to ignore the fact that the same content may have been presented in the past to the same visitor. While the error may be small if the visitors do not often see repeated content, it may be very significant for sites where visitors come repeatedly. This is a well recognized problem that usually gets handled with presentation thresholds – do not present the same content more than 6 times. Observations and measurements of visitor behavior provide evidence that something better is needed. Observations For a specific visitor, during a single session, for a banner in a not too prominent space, the second presentation of the same content is more likely to be clicked on than the first presentation. The difference can be 30% to 100% higher likelihood for the second presentation when compared to the first. That is, for example, if the first presentation has an average click rate of 1%, the second presentation may have an average CTR of between 1.3% and 2%. After the second presentation the CTR stays more or less the same for a few more presentations. The number of presentations in this plateau seems to vary by the location of the content in the page and by the visual attraction of the content. After these few presentations the CTR starts decaying with a curve that is very well approximated by an exponential decay. For example, the 13th presentation may have 90% the likelihood of the 12th, and the 14th has 90% the likelihood of the 13th. The decay constant seems also to depend on the visibility of the content. Modeling Options Now that we know the empirical data, we can propose modeling techniques that will correctly predict the likelihood of a click. Use presentation number as an input to the predictive model Probably the most straight forward approach is to add the presentation number as an input to the predictive model. While this is certainly a simple solution, it carries with it several problems, among them: If the model learns on each case, repeated non-clicks for the same content will reinforce the belief of the model on the non-clicker disproportionately. That is, the weight of a person that does not click for 200 presentations of an offer may be the same as 100 other people that on average click on the second presentation. The effect of the presentation number is not a customer characteristic or a piece of contextual data about the interaction with the customer, but it is contextual data about the content presented. Models tend to underestimate the effect of the presentation number. For these reasons it is not advisable to use this approach when the average number of presentations of the same content to the same person is above 3, or when there are cases of having the presentation number be very large, in the tens or hundreds. Use presentation number as a partitioning attribute to the predictive model In this approach we essentially build a separate predictive model for each presentation number. This approach overcomes all of the problems in the previous approach, nevertheless, it can be applied only when the volume of data is large enough to have these very specific sub-models converge.

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  • Preview of MSDN Library Changes

    - by ScottGu
    The MSDN team has been working some potential changes to the online MSDN Library designed to help streamline the navigation experience and make it easier to find the .NET Framework information you need. To solicit feedback on the proposed changes while they are still in development, they’ve posted a preview version of some proposed changes to a new MSDN Library Preview site which you can check out.  They’ve also created a survey that leads you through the ideas and asks for your opinions on some of the changes.  We’d very much like to have as many people as possible people take the survey and give us feedback. Quick Preview of Some of the Changes Below are some examples of a few of the changes being proposed: Streamlined .NET Namespaces Navigation The current MSDN Class Library lists all .NET namespaces in a flat-namespace (sorted alphabetically): Two downsides of the above approach are: Some of the least-used namespaces are listed first (like Microsoft.Aspnet.Snapin and Microsoft.Build.BuildEngine) All sub-namespaces are listed, which makes the list a little overwhelming, and page-load times to be slow The new MSDN Library Preview Site now lists “System” namespaces first (since those are the most used), and the home-page lists just top-level namespace groups – which makes it easier to find things, and enables the page to load faster:   Class overview and members pages merged into a single topic about each class Previously you had to navigate to several different pages to find member information about types: Links to these are still available in the MSDN Library Preview Site TOC – but the members are also now listed on the overview page, which makes it easy to quickly find everything in one place: Commonly used things are nearer the top of the page One of the other usability improvements with the new MSDN Library Preview Site is that common elements like “Code Examples” and “Inheritance Hierarchy” (for classes) are now listed near the top of the help page – making them easy to quickly find: Give Us Feedback with a Survey Above are just a few of the changes made with the new MSDN preview site – there are many other changes also rolled into it.  The MSDN team is doing usability studies on the new layout and navigation right now, and would very much like feedback on it. If you have 15 minutes and want to help vote on which of these ideas makes it into the production MSDN site, please visit this survey before June 30, play with the changes a bit, and let the MSDN team know what you think. Important Note: the MSDN preview site is not a fully functional version of MSDN – it’s really only there to preview the new ideas themselves, so please don’t expect it to be integrated with the rest of MSDN, with search, etc.  Once the MSDN team gets feedback on some of the changes being proposed they will roll them into the live site for everyone to use. Hope this helps, Scott

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  • The embarrassingly obvious about SQL Server CE

    - by Edward Boyle
    I have been working with SQL servers in one form or another for almost two decades now. But I am new to SQL Server Compact Edition. In the past weeks I have been working with SQL Serve CE a lot. The SQL, not a problem, but the engine itself is very new to me. One of the issues I ran into was a simple SQL statement taking excusive amounts of time; by excessive, I mean over one second. I wrote a little code to time the method. Sometimes it took under one second, other times as long as three seconds. –But it was a simple update statement! As embarrassing as it is, why it was slow eluded me. I posted my issue to MSDN and I got a reply from ErikEJ (MS MVP) who runs the blog “Everything SQL Server Compact” . I know little to nothing about SQL Server Compact. This guy is completely obsessed very well versed in CE. If you spend any time in MSDN forums, it seems that this guy single handedly has the answer for every CE question that comes up. Anyway, he said: “Opening a connection to a SQL Server Compact database file is a costly operation, keep one connection open per thread (incl. your UI thread) in your app, the one on the UI thread should live for the duration of your app.” It hit me, all databases have some connection overhead and SQL Server CE is not a database engine running as a service drinking Jolt Cola waiting for someone to talk to him so he can spring into action and show off his quarter-mile sprint capabilities. Imagine if you had to start the SQL Server process every time you needed to make a database connection. Principally, that is what you are doing with SQL Server CE. For someone who has worked with Enterprise Level SQL Servers a lot, I had to come to the mental image that my Open connection to SQL Server CE is basically starting a service, my own private service, and by closing the connection, I am shutting down my little private service. After making the changes in my code, I lost any reservations I had with using CE. At present, my Data Access Layer class has a constructor; in that constructor I open my connection, I also have OpenConnection and CloseConnection methods, I also implemented IDisposable and clean up any connections in Dispose(). I am still finalizing how this assembly will function. – That’s beside the point. All I’m trying to say is: “Opening a connection to a SQL Server Compact database file is a costly operation”

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  • Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff

    - by The Geek
    Yesterday Microsoft announced the release candidate of Internet Explorer 9, which is very close to the final product. Here’s a screenshot tour of the most interesting new stuff, as well as answers to your questions. The most important question is should you install this version? And the answer is absolutely yes. Even if you don’t use IE, it’s better to have a newer, more secure version on your PC. What’s New Under the Hood in Release Candidate vs Beta? If you want to see the full list of changes with all the original marketing detail, you can read Microsoft’s Beauty of the Web page, but here’s the highlights that you might be interested in. Improved Performance – they’ve made a lot of changes, and it really feels faster, especially when using more intensive web apps like Gmail. Power Consumption Settings – since the JavaScript engine in any browser uses a lot of CPU power, they’ve now integrated it into the power settings, so if you’re on battery it will use less CPU, and save battery life. This is really a great change. UI Changes – The tab bar can now be moved below the address bar (see below for more), they’ve shaved some pixels off the design to save space, and now you can toggle the Menu bar to be always on. Pinned Sites – now you can pin multiple pages to a single taskbar button. Very useful if you always use a couple web apps together. You can also pin a site in InPrivate mode. FlashBlock and AdBlock are Integrated (sorta) – there’s a new ActiveX filtering that lets you enable plug-ins only for sites you trust. There’s also a tracking protection list that can block certain content (which can obviously be used to block ads). Geolocation – while a lot of privacy conscious people might complain about this, if you use your laptop while traveling, it’s really useful to have geo-located features when using Google Maps, etc. Don’t worry, it won’t leak your privacy by default. WebM Video – Yeah, Google recently removed H.264 from Chrome, but Microsoft has added Google’s WebM video format to Internet Explorer. Keep reading for more about using the new features Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines The 50 Faces of Mario Death [Infographic] Clean Up Google Calendar’s Interface in Chrome and Iron The Rise and Fall of Kramerica? [Seinfeld Video] GNOME Shell 3 Live CDs for OpenSUSE and Fedora Available for Testing Picplz Offers Special FX, Sharing, and Backup of Your Smartphone Pics BUILD! An Epic LEGO Stop Motion Film [VIDEO]

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  • Fed Authentication Methods in OIF / IdP

    - by Damien Carru
    This article is a continuation of my previous entry where I explained how OIF/IdP leverages OAM to authenticate users at runtime: OIF/IdP internally forwards the user to OAM and indicates which Authentication Scheme should be used to challenge the user if needed OAM determine if the user should be challenged (user already authenticated, session timed out or not, session authentication level equal or higher than the level of the authentication scheme specified by OIF/IdP…) After identifying the user, OAM internally forwards the user back to OIF/IdP OIF/IdP can resume its operation In this article, I will discuss how OIF/IdP can be configured to map Federation Authentication Methods to OAM Authentication Schemes: When processing an Authn Request, where the SP requests a specific Federation Authentication Method with which the user should be challenged When sending an Assertion, where OIF/IdP sets the Federation Authentication Method in the Assertion Enjoy the reading! Overview The various Federation protocols support mechanisms allowing the partners to exchange information on: How the user should be challenged, when the SP/RP makes a request How the user was challenged, when the IdP/OP issues an SSO response When a remote SP partner redirects the user to OIF/IdP for Federation SSO, the message might contain data requesting how the user should be challenged by the IdP: this is treated as the Requested Federation Authentication Method. OIF/IdP will need to map that Requested Federation Authentication Method to a local Authentication Scheme, and then invoke OAM for user authentication/challenge with the mapped Authentication Scheme. OAM would authenticate the user if necessary with the scheme specified by OIF/IdP. Similarly, when an IdP issues an SSO response, most of the time it will need to include an identifier representing how the user was challenged: this is treated as the Federation Authentication Method. When OIF/IdP issues an Assertion, it will evaluate the Authentication Scheme with which OAM identified the user: If the Authentication Scheme can be mapped to a Federation Authentication Method, then OIF/IdP will use the result of that mapping in the outgoing SSO response: AuthenticationStatement in the SAML Assertion OpenID Response, if PAPE is enabled If the Authentication Scheme cannot be mapped, then OIF/IdP will set the Federation Authentication Method as the Authentication Scheme name in the outgoing SSO response: AuthenticationStatement in the SAML Assertion OpenID Response, if PAPE is enabled Mappings In OIF/IdP, the mapping between Federation Authentication Methods and Authentication Schemes has the following rules: One Federation Authentication Method can be mapped to several Authentication Schemes In a Federation Authentication Method <-> Authentication Schemes mapping, a single Authentication Scheme is marked as the default scheme that will be used to authenticate a user, if the SP/RP partner requests the user to be authenticated via a specific Federation Authentication Method An Authentication Scheme can be mapped to a single Federation Authentication Method Let’s examine the following example and the various use cases, based on the SAML 2.0 protocol: Mappings defined as: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport mapped to LDAPScheme, marked as the default scheme used for authentication BasicScheme urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:X509 mapped to X509Scheme, marked as the default scheme used for authentication Use cases: SP sends an AuthnRequest specifying urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:X509 as the RequestedAuthnContext: OIF/IdP will authenticate the use with X509Scheme since it is the default scheme mapped for that method. SP sends an AuthnRequest specifying urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport as the RequestedAuthnContext: OIF/IdP will authenticate the use with LDAPScheme since it is the default scheme mapped for that method, not the BasicScheme SP did not request any specific methods, and user was authenticated with BasisScheme: OIF/IdP will issue an Assertion with urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport as the FederationAuthenticationMethod SP did not request any specific methods, and user was authenticated with LDAPScheme: OIF/IdP will issue an Assertion with urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport as the FederationAuthenticationMethod SP did not request any specific methods, and user was authenticated with BasisSessionlessScheme: OIF/IdP will issue an Assertion with BasisSessionlessScheme as the FederationAuthenticationMethod, since that scheme could not be mapped to any Federation Authentication Method (in this case, the administrator would need to correct that and create a mapping) Configuration Mapping Federation Authentication Methods to OAM Authentication Schemes is protocol dependent, since the methods are defined in the various protocols (SAML 2.0, SAML 1.1, OpenID 2.0). As such, the WLST commands to set those mappings will involve: Either the SP Partner Profile and affect all Partners referencing that profile, which do not override the Federation Authentication Method to OAM Authentication Scheme mappings Or the SP Partner entry, which will only affect the SP Partner It is important to note that if an SP Partner is configured to define one or more Federation Authentication Method to OAM Authentication Scheme mappings, then all the mappings defined in the SP Partner Profile will be ignored. Authentication Schemes As discussed in the previous article, during Federation SSO, OIF/IdP will internally forward the user to OAM for authentication/verification and specify which Authentication Scheme to use. OAM will determine if a user needs to be challenged: If the user is not authenticated yet If the user is authenticated but the session timed out If the user is authenticated, but the authentication scheme level of the original authentication is lower than the level of the authentication scheme requested by OIF/IdP So even though an SP requests a specific Federation Authentication Method to be used to challenge the user, if that method is mapped to an Authentication Scheme and that at runtime OAM deems that the user does not need to be challenged with that scheme (because the user is already authenticated, session did not time out, and the session authn level is equal or higher than the one for the specified Authentication Scheme), the flow won’t result in a challenge operation. Protocols SAML 2.0 The SAML 2.0 specifications define the following Federation Authentication Methods for SAML 2.0 flows: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:unspecified urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:InternetProtocol urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:Telephony urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:MobileOneFactorUnregistered urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PersonalTelephony urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PreviousSession urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:MobileOneFactorContract urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:Smartcard urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:Password urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:InternetProtocolPassword urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:X509 urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:TLSClient urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PGP urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:SPKI urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:XMLDSig urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:SoftwarePKI urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:Kerberos urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:SecureRemotePassword urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:NomadTelephony urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:AuthenticatedTelephony urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:MobileTwoFactorUnregistered urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:MobileTwoFactorContract urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:SmartcardPKI urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:TimeSyncToken Out of the box, OIF/IdP has the following mappings for the SAML 2.0 protocol: Only urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport is defined This Federation Authentication Method is mapped to: LDAPScheme, marked as the default scheme used for authentication FAAuthScheme BasicScheme BasicFAScheme This mapping is defined in the saml20-sp-partner-profile SP Partner Profile which is the default OOTB SP Partner Profile for SAML 2.0 An example of an AuthnRequest message sent by an SP to an IdP with the SP requesting a specific Federation Authentication Method to be used to challenge the user would be: <samlp:AuthnRequest xmlns:samlp="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:protocol" Destination="https://idp.com/oamfed/idp/samlv20" ID="id-8bWn-A9o4aoMl3Nhx1DuPOOjawc-" IssueInstant="2014-03-21T20:51:11Z" Version="2.0">  <saml:Issuer ...>https://acme.com/sp</saml:Issuer>  <samlp:NameIDPolicy AllowCreate="false" Format="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:unspecified"/>  <samlp:RequestedAuthnContext Comparison="minimum">    <saml:AuthnContextClassRef xmlns:saml="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:assertion">      urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport </saml:AuthnContextClassRef>  </samlp:RequestedAuthnContext></samlp:AuthnRequest> An example of an Assertion issued by an IdP would be: <samlp:Response ...>    <saml:Issuer ...>https://idp.com/oam/fed</saml:Issuer>    <samlp:Status>        <samlp:StatusCode Value="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:status:Success"/>    </samlp:Status>    <saml:Assertion ...>        <saml:Issuer ...>https://idp.com/oam/fed</saml:Issuer>        <dsig:Signature>            ...        </dsig:Signature>        <saml:Subject>            <saml:NameID ...>[email protected]</saml:NameID>            <saml:SubjectConfirmation Method="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:cm:bearer">                <saml:SubjectConfirmationData .../>            </saml:SubjectConfirmation>        </saml:Subject>        <saml:Conditions ...>            <saml:AudienceRestriction>                <saml:Audience>https://acme.com/sp</saml:Audience>            </saml:AudienceRestriction>        </saml:Conditions>        <saml:AuthnStatement AuthnInstant="2014-03-21T20:53:55Z" SessionIndex="id-6i-Dm0yB-HekG6cejktwcKIFMzYE8Yrmqwfd0azz" SessionNotOnOrAfter="2014-03-21T21:53:55Z">            <saml:AuthnContext>                <saml:AuthnContextClassRef>                    urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:ac:classes:PasswordProtectedTransport                </saml:AuthnContextClassRef>            </saml:AuthnContext>        </saml:AuthnStatement>    </saml:Assertion></samlp:Response> An administrator would be able to specify a mapping between a SAML 2.0 Federation Authentication Method and one or more OAM Authentication Schemes SAML 1.1 The SAML 1.1 specifications define the following Federation Authentication Methods for SAML 1.1 flows: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:unspecified urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:HardwareToken urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:password urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:X509-PKI urn:ietf:rfc:2246 urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:PGP urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:SPKI urn:ietf:rfc:3075 urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:XKMS urn:ietf:rfc:1510 urn:ietf:rfc:2945 Out of the box, OIF/IdP has the following mappings for the SAML 1.1 protocol: Only urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:password is defined This Federation Authentication Method is mapped to: LDAPScheme, marked as the default scheme used for authentication FAAuthScheme BasicScheme BasicFAScheme This mapping is defined in the saml11-sp-partner-profile SP Partner Profile which is the default OOTB SP Partner Profile for SAML 1.1 An example of an Assertion issued by an IdP would be: <samlp:Response ...>    <samlp:Status>        <samlp:StatusCode Value="samlp:Success"/>    </samlp:Status>    <saml:Assertion Issuer="https://idp.com/oam/fed" ...>        <saml:Conditions ...>            <saml:AudienceRestriction>                <saml:Audience>https://acme.com/sp/ssov11</saml:Audience>            </saml:AudienceRestriction>        </saml:Conditions>        <saml:AuthnStatement AuthenticationInstant="2014-03-21T20:53:55Z" AuthenticationMethod="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:am:password">            <saml:Subject>                <saml:NameID ...>[email protected]</saml:NameID>                <saml:SubjectConfirmation>                   <saml:ConfirmationMethod>                       urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.0:cm:bearer                   </saml:ConfirmationMethod>                </saml:SubjectConfirmation>            </saml:Subject>        </saml:AuthnStatement>        <dsig:Signature>            ...        </dsig:Signature>    </saml:Assertion></samlp:Response> Note: SAML 1.1 does not define an AuthnRequest message. An administrator would be able to specify a mapping between a SAML 1.1 Federation Authentication Method and one or more OAM Authentication Schemes OpenID 2.0 The OpenID 2.0 PAPE specifications define the following Federation Authentication Methods for OpenID 2.0 flows: http://schemas.openid.net/pape/policies/2007/06/phishing-resistant http://schemas.openid.net/pape/policies/2007/06/multi-factor http://schemas.openid.net/pape/policies/2007/06/multi-factor-physical Out of the box, OIF/IdP does not define any mappings for the OpenID 2.0 Federation Authentication Methods. For OpenID 2.0, the configuration will involve mapping a list of OpenID 2.0 policies to a list of Authentication Schemes. An example of an OpenID 2.0 Request message sent by an SP/RP to an IdP/OP would be: https://idp.com/openid?openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&openid.mode=checkid_setup&openid.claimed_id=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&openid.identity=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&openid.assoc_handle=id-6a5S6zhAKaRwQNUnjTKROREdAGSjWodG1el4xyz3&openid.return_to=https%3A%2F%2Facme.com%2Fopenid%3Frefid%3Did-9PKVXZmRxAeDYcgLqPm36ClzOMA-&openid.realm=https%3A%2F%2Facme.com%2Fopenid&openid.ns.ax=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fsrv%2Fax%2F1.0&openid.ax.mode=fetch_request&openid.ax.type.attr0=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2Fcontact%2Femail&openid.ax.if_available=attr0&openid.ns.pape=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fextensions%2Fpape%2F1.0&openid.pape.max_auth_age=0 An example of an Open ID 2.0 SSO Response issued by an IdP/OP would be: https://acme.com/openid?refid=id-9PKVXZmRxAeDYcgLqPm36ClzOMA-&openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&openid.mode=id_res&openid.op_endpoint=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.com%2Fopenid&openid.claimed_id=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.com%2Fopenid%3Fid%3Did-38iCmmlAVEXPsFjnFVKArfn5RIiF75D5doorhEgqqPM%3D&openid.identity=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.com%2Fopenid%3Fid%3Did-38iCmmlAVEXPsFjnFVKArfn5RIiF75D5doorhEgqqPM%3D&openid.return_to=https%3A%2F%2Facme.com%2Fopenid%3Frefid%3Did-9PKVXZmRxAeDYcgLqPm36ClzOMA-&openid.response_nonce=2014-03-24T19%3A20%3A06Zid-YPa2kTNNFftZkgBb460jxJGblk2g--iNwPpDI7M1&openid.assoc_handle=id-6a5S6zhAKaRwQNUnjTKROREdAGSjWodG1el4xyz3&openid.ns.ax=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fsrv%2Fax%2F1.0&openid.ax.mode=fetch_response&openid.ax.type.attr0=http%3A%2F%2Fsession%2Fcount&openid.ax.value.attr0=1&openid.ax.type.attr1=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fschema%2FnamePerson%2Ffriendly&openid.ax.value.attr1=My+name+is+Bobby+Smith&openid.ax.type.attr2=http%3A%2F%2Fschemas.openid.net%2Fax%2Fapi%2Fuser_id&openid.ax.value.attr2=bob&openid.ax.type.attr3=http%3A%2F%2Faxschema.org%2Fcontact%2Femail&openid.ax.value.attr3=bob%40oracle.com&openid.ax.type.attr4=http%3A%2F%2Fsession%2Fipaddress&openid.ax.value.attr4=10.145.120.253&openid.ns.pape=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fextensions%2Fpape%2F1.0&openid.pape.auth_time=2014-03-24T19%3A20%3A05Z&openid.pape.auth_policies=http%3A%2F%2Fschemas.openid.net%2Fpape%2Fpolicies%2F2007%2F06%2Fphishing-resistant&openid.signed=op_endpoint%2Cclaimed_id%2Cidentity%2Creturn_to%2Cresponse_nonce%2Cassoc_handle%2Cns.ax%2Cax.mode%2Cax.type.attr0%2Cax.value.attr0%2Cax.type.attr1%2Cax.value.attr1%2Cax.type.attr2%2Cax.value.attr2%2Cax.type.attr3%2Cax.value.attr3%2Cax.type.attr4%2Cax.value.attr4%2Cns.pape%2Cpape.auth_time%2Cpape.auth_policies&openid.sig=mYMgbGYSs22l8e%2FDom9NRPw15u8%3D In the next article, I will provide examples on how to configure OIF/IdP for the various protocols, to map OAM Authentication Schemes to Federation Authentication Methods.Cheers,Damien Carru

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  • UPK Customer Success Story: The City and County of San Francisco

    - by karen.rihs(at)oracle.com
    The value of UPK during an upgrade is a hot topic and was a primary focus during our latest customer roundtable featuring The City and County of San Francisco: Leveraging UPK to Accelerate Your PeopleSoft Upgrade. As the Change Management Analyst for their PeopleSoft 9.0 HCM project (Project eMerge), Jan Crosbie-Taylor provided a unique perspective on how they're utilizing UPK and UPK pre-built content early on to successfully manage change for thousands of city and county employees and retirees as they move to this new release. With the first phase of the project going live next September, it's important to the City and County of San Francisco to 1) ensure that the various constituents are brought along with the project team, and 2) focus on the end user aspects of the implementation, including training. Here are some highlights on how UPK and UPK pre-built content are helping them accomplish this: As a former documentation manager, Jan really appreciates the power of UPK as a single source content creation tool. It saves them time by streamlining the documentation creation process, enabling them to record content once, then repurpose it multiple times. With regard to change management, UPK has enabled them to educate the project team and gain critical buy in and support by familiarizing users with the application early on through User Experience Workshops and by promoting UPK at meetings whenever possible. UPK has helped create awareness for the project, making the project real to users. They are taking advantage of UPK pre-built content to: Educate the project team and subject matter experts on how PeopleSoft 9.0 works as delivered Create a guide/storyboard for their own recording Save time/effort and create consistency by enhancing their recorded content with text and conceptual information from the pre-built content Create PeopleSoft Help for their development databases by publishing and integrating the UPK pre-built content into the application help menu Look ahead to the next release of PeopleTools, comparing the differences to help the team evaluate which version to use with their implemtentation When it comes time for training, they will be utilizing UPK in the classroom, eliminating the time and cost of maintaining training databases. Instructors will be able to carry all training content on a thumb drive, allowing them to easily provide consistent training at their many locations, regardless of the environment. Post go-live, they will deploy the same UPK content to provide just-in-time, in-application support for the entire system via the PeopleSoft Help menu and their PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal. Users will already be comfortable with UPK as a source of help, having been exposed to it during classroom training. They are also using UPK for a non-Oracle application called JobAps, an online job application solution used by many government organizations. Jan found UPK's object recognition to be excellent, yet it's been incredibly easy for her to change text or a field name if needed. Please take time to listen to this recording. The City and County of San Francisco's UPK story is very exciting, and Jan shared so many great examples of how they're taking advantage of UPK and UPK pre-built content early on in their project. We hope others will be able to incorporate these into their projects. Many thanks to Jan for taking the time to share her experiences and creative uses of UPK with us! - Karen Rihs, Oracle UPK Outbound Product Management

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  • Nginx and PHP Fundamentals

    - by Elton Stoneman
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/08/01/nginx-and-php-fundamentals.aspxHot on the heels of my .NET caching course, I’ve had my first “fundamentals” course released on Pluralsight: Nginx and PHP Fundamentals. It’s a practical look at two of the biggest technologies on the web – Nginx, which is the fastest growing HTTP server around (currently hosting 100+ million sites), and PHP, which powers more websites than any other server-side framework (currently 240+ million sites). The two technologies work well together, both are open-source and cross-platform and both are lightweight and easy to get started with - you just need to download and unzip the runtimes, and with a text editor you can create and host dynamic websites. I’ve used PHP as a second (sometimes third) language since 2005 when I was brought cold into an established codebase to help improve performance, and Nginx to host tier 2 apps for the last couple of years. As with any training course, you learn new things as you produce it, and it was good to focus on a different stack from my commercial .NET world. In the course I start with a website in two parts – one which is just static content, and one which processes a user registration form using ASP.NET MVC, both running in IIS. Over four modules I migrate the app to Nginx and PHP: Hosting Static Content in Nginx – how to deploy and configure Nginx for a basic website; PHP Part 1: Basic Web Forms – installing PHP and an IDE, and building a simple form with server-side validation; PHP Part 2: Packages and Integration – using PECL and Composer for packages to connect to Azure, AWS, Mongo and reCAPTCHA; Hosting PHP in Nginx – configuring Nginx to host our PHP site. Along the way I run some performance stats with JMeter, and the headlines are that Nginx running on Linux outperforms IIS on Windows for static content,by 800 requests per second over 1000 concurrent requests; and Linux+Ngnix+PHP outperforms Windows+IIS+ASP.NET MVC by 700 request per second with the same load. Of course, the headline stats don’t tell the whole story, and when you add OpCode caching for PHP and the ASP.NET Output Cache, the results are very different. As Web architecture moves away from heavy server-side processing, to Single Page Apps with client-side frameworks like AngularJS and Knockout, I think there’s an increasing need for high-performance, low-cost server technologies, and the combination of Nginx and PHP makes a compelling case.

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  • Limiting DOPs &ndash; Who rules over whom?

    - by jean-pierre.dijcks
    I've gotten a couple of questions from Dan Morgan and figured I start to answer them in this way. While Dan is running on a big system he is running with Database Resource Manager and he is trying to make sure the system doesn't go crazy (remember end user are never, ever crazy!) on very high DOPs. Q: How do I control statements with very high DOPs driven from user hints in queries? A: The best way to do this is to work with DBRM and impose limits on consumer groups. The Max DOP setting you can set in DBRM allows you to overwrite the hint. Now let's go into some more detail here. Assume my object (and for simplicity we assume there is a single object - and do remember that we always pick the highest DOP when in doubt and when conflicting DOPs are available in a query) has PARALLEL 64 as its setting. Assume that the query that selects something cool from that table lives in a consumer group with a max DOP of 32. Assume no goofy things (like running out of parallel_max_servers) are happening. A query selecting from this table will run at DOP 32 because DBRM caps the DOP. As of 11.2.0.1 we also use the DBRM cap to create the original plan (at compile time) and not just enforce the cap at runtime. Now, my user is smart and writes a query with a parallel hint requesting DOP 128. This query is still capped by DBRM and DBRM overrules the hint in the statement. The statement, despite the hint, runs at DOP 32. Note that in the hinted scenario we do compile the statement with DOP 128 (the optimizer obeys the hint). This is another reason to use table decoration rather than hints. Q: What happens if I set parallel_max_servers higher than processes (e.g. the max number of processes allowed to run on my machine)? A: Processes rules. It is important to understand that processes are fixed at startup time. If you increase parallel_max_servers above the number of processes in the processes parameter you should get a warning in the alert log stating it can not take effect. As a follow up, a hinted query requesting more parallel processes than either parallel_max_servers or processes will not be able to acquire the requested number. Parallel_max_processes will prevent this. And since parallel_max_servers should be lower than max processes you can never go over either...

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  • UV texture mapping with perspective correct interpolation

    - by Twodordan
    I am working on a software rasterizer for educational purposes and I am having issues with the texturing. The problem is, only one face of the cube gets correctly textured. The rest are stretched edges: You can see the running program online here. I have used cartesian coordinates, and all I do is interpolate the uv values along the scanlines. The general formula I use for interpolating the uv coordinates is pretty much the one I use for the z-buffering interpolation and looks like this (in this case for horizontal scanlines): u_Slope = (right.u - left.u) / (triangleRight_x - triangleLeft_x); v_Slope = (right.v - left.v) / (triangleRight_x - triangleLeft_x); //[...] new_u = left.u + ((currentX_onScanLine - triangleLeft_x) * u_Slope); new_v = left.v + ((currentX_onScanLine - triangleLeft_x) * v_Slope); Then, when I add each point to the pixel buffer, I restore z and uv: z = (1/z); uv.u = Math.round(uv.u * z *100);//*100 because my texture is 100x100px uv.v = Math.round(uv.v * z *100); Then I turn the u v indexes into one index in order to fetch the correct pixel from the image data (which is a 1 dimensional px array): var index = texture.width * uv.u + uv.v; //and the rest is unimportant imagedata[index].RGBA bla bla The interpolation formula is correct considering the consistency of the texture (including the straight stripes). However, I seem to get quite a lot of 0 values for either u or v. Which is probably why I only get one face right. Furthermore, why is the texture flipped horizontally? (the "1" is flipped) I must get some sleep now, but before I get into further dissecting of every single value to see what goes wrong, Can someone more experienced guess why might this be happening, just by looking at the cube? "I have no idea what I'm doing" (it's my first time implementing a rasterizer). Did I miss an important stage? Thanks for any insight. PS: My UV values are as follows: { u:0, v:0 }, { u:0, v:0.5 }, { u:0.5, v:0.5 }, { u:0.5, v:0 }, { u:0, v:0 }, { u:0, v:0.5 }, { u:0.5, v:0.5 }, { u:0.5, v:0 }

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  • LLBLGen Pro feature highlights: model views

    - by FransBouma
    (This post is part of a series of posts about features of the LLBLGen Pro system) To be able to work with large(r) models, it's key you can view subsets of these models so you can have a better, more focused look at them. For example because you want to display how a subset of entities relate to one another in a different way than the list of entities. LLBLGen Pro offers this in the form of Model Views. Model Views are views on parts of the entity model of a project, and the subsets are displayed in a graphical way. Additionally, one can add documentation to a Model View. As Model Views are displaying parts of the model in a graphical way, they're easier to explain to people who aren't familiar with entity models, e.g. the stakeholders you're interviewing for your project. The documentation can then be used to communicate specifics of the elements on the model view to the developers who have to write the actual code. Below I've included an example. It's a model view on a subset of the entities of AdventureWorks. It displays several entities, their relationships (both relational and inheritance relationships) and also some specifics gathered from the interview with the stakeholder. As the information is inside the actual project the developer will work with, the information doesn't have to be converted back/from e.g .word documents or other intermediate formats, it's the same project. This makes sure there are less errors / misunderstandings. (of course you can hide the docked documentation pane or dock it to another corner). The Model View can contain entities which are placed in different groups. This makes it ideal to group entities together for close examination even though they're stored in different groups. The Model View is a first-class citizen of the code-generator. This means you can write templates which consume Model Views and generate code accordingly. E.g. you can write a template which generates a service per Model View and exposes the entities in the Model View as a single entity graph, fetched through a method. (This template isn't included in the LLBLGen Pro package, but it's easy to write it up yourself with the built-in template editor). Viewing an entity model in different ways is key to fully understand the entity model and Model Views help with that.

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  • .NET Reflector Pro Coming…

    The very best software is almost always originally the creation of a single person. Readers of our 'Geek of the Week' will know of a few of them.  Even behemoths such as MS Word or Excel started out with one programmer.  There comes a time with any software that it starts to grow up, and has to move from this form of close parenting to being developed by a team.  This has happened several times within Red-Gate: SQL Refactor, SQL Compare, and SQL Dependency Tracker, not to mention SQL Backup, were all originally the work of a lone coder, who subsequently handed over the development to a structured team of programmers, test engineers and usability designers. Because we loved .NET Reflector when Lutz Roeder wrote and nurtured it, and, like many other .NET developers, used it as a development tool ourselves, .NET Reflector's progress from being the apple of Lutz's eye to being a Red-Gate team-based development  seemed natural.  Lutz, after all, eventually felt he couldn't afford the time to develop it to the extent it deserved. Why, then, did we want to take on .NET Reflector?  Different people may give you different answers, but for us in the .NET team, it just seemed a natural progression. We're always very surprised when anyone suggests that we want to change the nature of the tool since it seems right just as it is. .NET Reflector will stay very much the tool we all use and appreciate, although the new version will support .NET 4, and will have many improvements in the accuracy of its decompiling. Whilst we've made a lot of improvements to Reflector, the radical addition, which we hope you'll want to try out as well, is '.NET Reflector Pro'. This is an extension to .NET Reflector that allows the debugging of decompiled code using the Visual Studio debugger. It is an add-in, but we'll be charging for it, mainly because we prefer to live indoors with a warm meal, rather than outside in tents, particularly when the winter's been as cold as this one has. We're hoping (we're even pretty confident!) that you'll share our excitement about .NET Reflector Pro. .NET Reflector Pro integrates .NET Reflector into Visual Studio, allowing you to seamlessly debug into third-party code and assemblies, even if you don't have the source code for them. You can now treat decompiled assemblies much like your own code: you can step through them and use all the debugging techniques that you would use on your own code. Try the beta now. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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  • ASP.NET Frameworks and Raw Throughput Performance

    - by Rick Strahl
    A few days ago I had a curious thought: With all these different technologies that the ASP.NET stack has to offer, what's the most efficient technology overall to return data for a server request? When I started this it was mere curiosity rather than a real practical need or result. Different tools are used for different problems and so performance differences are to be expected. But still I was curious to see how the various technologies performed relative to each just for raw throughput of the request getting to the endpoint and back out to the client with as little processing in the actual endpoint logic as possible (aka Hello World!). I want to clarify that this is merely an informal test for my own curiosity and I'm sharing the results and process here because I thought it was interesting. It's been a long while since I've done any sort of perf testing on ASP.NET, mainly because I've not had extremely heavy load requirements and because overall ASP.NET performs very well even for fairly high loads so that often it's not that critical to test load performance. This post is not meant to make a point  or even come to a conclusion which tech is better, but just to act as a reference to help understand some of the differences in perf and give a starting point to play around with this yourself. I've included the code for this simple project, so you can play with it and maybe add a few additional tests for different things if you like. Source Code on GitHub I looked at this data for these technologies: ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET MVC WebForms ASP.NET WebPages ASMX AJAX Services  (couldn't get AJAX/JSON to run on IIS8 ) WCF Rest Raw ASP.NET HttpHandlers It's quite a mixed bag, of course and the technologies target different types of development. What started out as mere curiosity turned into a bit of a head scratcher as the results were sometimes surprising. What I describe here is more to satisfy my curiosity more than anything and I thought it interesting enough to discuss on the blog :-) First test: Raw Throughput The first thing I did is test raw throughput for the various technologies. This is the least practical test of course since you're unlikely to ever create the equivalent of a 'Hello World' request in a real life application. The idea here is to measure how much time a 'NOP' request takes to return data to the client. So for this request I create the simplest Hello World request that I could come up for each tech. Http Handler The first is the lowest level approach which is an HTTP handler. public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } WebForms Next I added a couple of ASPX pages - one using CodeBehind and one using only a markup page. The CodeBehind page simple does this in CodeBehind without any markup in the ASPX page: public partial class HelloWorld_CodeBehind : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() ); Response.End(); } } while the Markup page only contains some static output via an expression:<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="HelloWorld_Markup.aspx.cs" Inherits="AspNetFrameworksPerformance.HelloWorld_Markup" %> Hello World. Time is <%= DateTime.Now %> ASP.NET WebPages WebPages is the freestanding Razor implementation of ASP.NET. Here's the simple HelloWorld.cshtml page:Hello World @DateTime.Now WCF REST WCF REST was the token REST implementation for ASP.NET before WebAPI and the inbetween step from ASP.NET AJAX. I'd like to forget that this technology was ever considered for production use, but I'll include it here. Here's an OperationContract class: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } } WCF REST can return arbitrary results by returning a Stream object and a content type. The code above turns the string result into a stream and returns that back to the client. ASP.NET AJAX (ASMX Services) I also wanted to test ASP.NET AJAX services because prior to WebAPI this is probably still the most widely used AJAX technology for the ASP.NET stack today. Unfortunately I was completely unable to get this running on my Windows 8 machine. Visual Studio 2012  removed adding of ASP.NET AJAX services, and when I tried to manually add the service and configure the script handler references it simply did not work - I always got a SOAP response for GET and POST operations. No matter what I tried I always ended up getting XML results even when explicitly adding the ScriptHandler. So, I didn't test this (but the code is there - you might be able to test this on a Windows 7 box). ASP.NET MVC Next up is probably the most popular ASP.NET technology at the moment: MVC. Here's the small controller: public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } } ASP.NET WebAPI Next up is WebAPI which looks kind of similar to MVC. Except here I have to use a StringContent result to return the response: public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } } Testing Take a minute to think about each of the technologies… and take a guess which you think is most efficient in raw throughput. The fastest should be pretty obvious, but the others - maybe not so much. The testing I did is pretty informal since it was mainly to satisfy my curiosity - here's how I did this: I used Apache Bench (ab.exe) from a full Apache HTTP installation to run and log the test results of hitting the server. ab.exe is a small executable that lets you hit a URL repeatedly and provides counter information about the number of requests, requests per second etc. ab.exe and the batch file are located in the \LoadTests folder of the project. An ab.exe command line  looks like this: ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld which hits the specified URL 100,000 times with a load factor of 20 concurrent requests. This results in output like this:   It's a great way to get a quick and dirty performance summary. Run it a few times to make sure there's not a large amount of varience. You might also want to do an IISRESET to clear the Web Server. Just make sure you do a short test run to warm up the server first - otherwise your first run is likely to be skewed downwards. ab.exe also allows you to specify headers and provide POST data and many other things if you want to get a little more fancy. Here all tests are GET requests to keep it simple. I ran each test: 100,000 iterations Load factor of 20 concurrent connections IISReset before starting A short warm up run for API and MVC to make sure startup cost is mitigated Here is the batch file I used for the test: IISRESET REM make sure you add REM C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin REM to your path so ab.exe can be found REM Warm up ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJsonab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/handler.ashx > handler.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_CodeBehind.aspx > AspxCodeBehind.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_Markup.aspx > AspxMarkup.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld > Wcf.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldCode > Mvc.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld > WebApi.txt I ran each of these tests 3 times and took the average score for Requests/second, with the machine otherwise idle. I did see a bit of variance when running many tests but the values used here are the medians. Part of this has to do with the fact I ran the tests on my local machine - result would probably more consistent running the load test on a separate machine hitting across the network. I ran these tests locally on my laptop which is a Dell XPS with quad core Sandibridge I7-2720QM @ 2.20ghz and a fast SSD drive on Windows 8. CPU load during tests ran to about 70% max across all 4 cores (IOW, it wasn't overloading the machine). Ideally you can try running these tests on a separate machine hitting the local machine. If I remember correctly IIS 7 and 8 on client OSs don't throttle so the performance here should be Results Ok, let's cut straight to the chase. Below are the results from the tests… It's not surprising that the handler was fastest. But it was a bit surprising to me that the next fastest was WebForms and especially Web Forms with markup over a CodeBehind page. WebPages also fared fairly well. MVC and WebAPI are a little slower and the slowest by far is WCF REST (which again I find surprising). As mentioned at the start the raw throughput tests are not overly practical as they don't test scripting performance for the HTML generation engines or serialization performances of the data engines. All it really does is give you an idea of the raw throughput for the technology from time of request to reaching the endpoint and returning minimal text data back to the client which indicates full round trip performance. But it's still interesting to see that Web Forms performs better in throughput than either MVC, WebAPI or WebPages. It'd be interesting to try this with a few pages that actually have some parsing logic on it, but that's beyond the scope of this throughput test. But what's also amazing about this test is the sheer amount of traffic that a laptop computer is handling. Even the slowest tech managed 5700 requests a second, which is one hell of a lot of requests if you extrapolate that out over a 24 hour period. Remember these are not static pages, but dynamic requests that are being served. Another test - JSON Data Service Results The second test I used a JSON result from several of the technologies. I didn't bother running WebForms and WebPages through this test since that doesn't make a ton of sense to return data from the them (OTOH, returning text from the APIs didn't make a ton of sense either :-) In these tests I have a small Person class that gets serialized and then returned to the client. The Person class looks like this: public class Person { public Person() { Id = 10; Name = "Rick"; Entered = DateTime.Now; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public DateTime Entered { get; set; } } Here are the updated handler classes that use Person: Handler public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { var action = context.Request.QueryString["action"]; if (action == "json") JsonRequest(context); else TextRequest(context); } public void TextRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public void JsonRequest(HttpContext context) { var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new Person(), Formatting.None); context.Response.ContentType = "application/json"; context.Response.Write(json); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } This code adds a little logic to check for a action query string and route the request to an optional JSON result method. To generate JSON, I'm using the same JSON.NET serializer (JsonConvert.SerializeObject) used in Web API to create the JSON response. WCF REST   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } [OperationContract] [WebGet(ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json,BodyStyle=WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest)] public Person HelloWorldJson() { // Add your operation implementation here return new Person(); } } For WCF REST all I have to do is add a method with the Person result type.   ASP.NET MVC public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { // // GET: /MvcPerformance/ public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } public JsonResult HelloWorldJson() { return Json(new Person(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } } For MVC all I have to do for a JSON response is return a JSON result. ASP.NET internally uses JavaScriptSerializer. ASP.NET WebAPI public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } [HttpGet] public Person HelloWorldJson() { return new Person(); } [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldJson2() { var response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); response.Content = new ObjectContent<Person>(new Person(), GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter); return response; } } Testing and Results To run these data requests I used the following ab.exe commands:REM JSON RESPONSES ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/Handler.ashx?action=json > HandlerJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJson > MvcJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson > WebApiJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorldJson > WcfJson.txt The results from this test run are a bit interesting in that the WebAPI test improved performance significantly over returning plain string content. Here are the results:   The performance for each technology drops a little bit except for WebAPI which is up quite a bit! From this test it appears that WebAPI is actually significantly better performing returning a JSON response, rather than a plain string response. Snag with Apache Benchmark and 'Length Failures' I ran into a little snag with Apache Benchmark, which was reporting failures for my Web API requests when serializing. As the graph shows performance improved significantly from with JSON results from 5580 to 6530 or so which is a 15% improvement (while all others slowed down by 3-8%). However, I was skeptical at first because the WebAPI test reports showed a bunch of errors on about 10% of the requests. Check out this report: Notice the Failed Request count. What the hey? Is WebAPI failing on roughly 10% of requests when sending JSON? Turns out: No it's not! But it took some sleuthing to figure out why it reports these failures. At first I thought that Web API was failing, and so to make sure I re-ran the test with Fiddler attached and runiisning the ab.exe test by using the -X switch: ab.exe -n100 -c10 -X localhost:8888 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson which showed that indeed all requests where returning proper HTTP 200 results with full content. However ab.exe was reporting the errors. After some closer inspection it turned out that the dates varying in size altered the response length in dynamic output. For example: these two results: {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.841926-10:00"} {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.8519262-10:00"} are different in length for the number which results in 68 and 69 bytes respectively. The same URL produces different result lengths which is what ab.exe reports. I didn't notice at first bit the same is happening when running the ASHX handler with JSON.NET result since it uses the same serializer that varies the milliseconds. Moral: You can typically ignore Length failures in Apache Benchmark and when in doubt check the actual output with Fiddler. Note that the other failure values are accurate though. Another interesting Side Note: Perf drops over Time As I was running these tests repeatedly I was finding that performance steadily dropped from a startup peak to a 10-15% lower stable level. IOW, with Web API I'd start out with around 6500 req/sec and in subsequent runs it keeps dropping until it would stabalize somewhere around 5900 req/sec occasionally jumping lower. For these tests this is why I did the IIS RESET and warm up for individual tests. This is a little puzzling. Looking at Process Monitor while the test are running memory very quickly levels out as do handles and threads, on the first test run. Subsequent runs everything stays stable, but the performance starts going downwards. This applies to all the technologies - Handlers, Web Forms, MVC, Web API - curious to see if others test this and see similar results. Doing an IISRESET then resets everything and performance starts off at peak again… Summary As I stated at the outset, these were informal to satiate my curiosity not to prove that any technology is better or even faster than another. While there clearly are differences in performance the differences (other than WCF REST which was by far the slowest and the raw handler which was by far the highest) are relatively minor, so there is no need to feel that any one technology is a runaway standout in raw performance. Choosing a technology is about more than pure performance but also about the adequateness for the job and the easy of implementation. The strengths of each technology will make for any minor performance difference we see in these tests. However, to me it's important to get an occasional reality check and compare where new technologies are heading. Often times old stuff that's been optimized and designed for a time of less horse power can utterly blow the doors off newer tech and simple checks like this let you compare. Luckily we're seeing that much of the new stuff performs well even in V1.0 which is great. To me it was very interesting to see Web API perform relatively badly with plain string content, which originally led me to think that Web API might not be properly optimized just yet. For those that caught my Tweets late last week regarding WebAPI's slow responses was with String content which is in fact considerably slower. Luckily where it counts with serialized JSON and XML WebAPI actually performs better. But I do wonder what would make generic string content slower than serialized code? This stresses another point: Don't take a single test as the final gospel and don't extrapolate out from a single set of tests. Certainly Twitter can make you feel like a fool when you post something immediate that hasn't been fleshed out a little more <blush>. Egg on my face. As a result I ended up screwing around with this for a few hours today to compare different scenarios. Well worth the time… I hope you found this useful, if not for the results, maybe for the process of quickly testing a few requests for performance and charting out a comparison. Now onwards with more serious stuff… Resources Source Code on GitHub Apache HTTP Server Project (ab.exe is part of the binary distribution)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  Web Api   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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  • Announcing Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g

    - by [email protected]
    Today Oracle announced Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g. This is a major release for us, and reinforces our three key themes at Oracle: Complete New in this release - Oracle ECM Suite 11g is built on a single, unified repository. Every piece of content - documents, HTML pages, digital assets, scanned images - is stored and accessbile directly from the repository, whether you are working on websites, creating brand logos, processing accounts payable invoices, or running records and retention functions. It makes complete, end-to-end management of content possible, from the point it enters the organization, through its entire lifecycle. Also new in this release, the installation, access, monitoring and administration of Oracle ECM Suite 11g is centralized. As a complete system, organizations can lower the costs of training and usage by having a centralized source of information that is easily administered. As part of this new unified repository release, Oracle has released a benchmarking white paper that shows the extreme performance and scalability of Oracle ECM Suite. When tested on a two node UCM Server running on Sun Oracle DB Machine Half Rack Hardware with an Exadata storage server, Oracle ECM Suite 11g is able to ingest over 178 million documents per day. Open Oracle ECM Suite 11g is built on a service-oriented architecture. All functions are available through standards-based services calls in Web Services or Java. In this release Oracle unveils Open Web Content Management. Open Web Content Management is a revolutionary approach to web content management that decouples the content management process from the process of creating web applications. One piece of this approach is our one-click web content management. With one click, a web application builder can drag content services into their application, enabling their users to also edit content with just one click. Open Web Content Management is also open because it enables Web developers to add Web content management to new and existing JavaServer Pages (JSP), JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces applications Open content distribution - Oracle ECM Suite 11g offers flexible deployment options with a built-in smart cache so organizations can deliver Web sites or Web applications without requiring Oracle ECM Suite as part of the delivery system Integrated Oracle ECM Suite 11g also offers a series of next generation desktop integrations, providing integrations such as: New MS Office integration with menus to access managed content, insert managed links, and compare managed documents using standard MS Office reviewing tools Automatic identity tagging of documents on download - to help users understand which versions they are viewing and prevent duplicate content items in the content repository. New "smart productivity folders" to show a users workflow inbox, saved searches and checked out content directly from Windows Explorer Drag and drop metadata pop-ups Check in and check out for all file formats with any standard WebDAV server As part of Oracle's Enterprise Application Documents initiative, Oracle Content Management 11g also provides certified application integrations with solution templates You can read the press release here. You can see more assets at the launch center here. You can sign up for the announcement webinar and hear more about the new features here. You can read the benchmarking study here.

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  • Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework Review

    - by Ben Griswold
    Early in my career, when I wanted to learn a new technology, I’d sit in the bookstore aisle and I’d work my way through each of the available books on the given subject.  Put in enough time in a bookstore and you can learn just about anything. I used to really enjoy my time in the bookstore – but times have certainly changed.  Whereas books used to be the only place I could find solutions to my problems, now they may be the very last place I look.  I have been working with the ASP.NET MVC Framework for more than a year.  I have a few projects and a couple of major deployments under my belt and I was able to get up to speed with the framework without reading a single book*.  With so many resources at our fingertips (podcasts, screencasts, blogs, stackoverflow, open source projects, www.asp.net, you name it) why bother with a book? Well, I flipped through Steven Sanderson’s Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework a few months ago. And since it is prominently displayed in my co-worker’s office, I tend to pick it up as a reference from time to time.  Last week, I’m not sure why, I decided to read it cover to cover.  Man, did I eat this book up.  Granted, a lot of what I read was review, but it was only review because I had already learned lessons by piecing the puzzle together for myself via various sources. If I were starting with ASP.NET MVC (or ASP.NET Web Deployment in general) today, the first thing I would do is buy Steven Sanderson’s Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework and read it cover to cover. Steven Sanderson did such a great job with this book! As much as I appreciated the in-depth model, view, and controller talk, I was completely impressed with all the extra bits which were included.  There a was nice overview of BDD, view engine comparisons, a chapter dedicated to security and vulnerabilities, IoC, TDD and Mocking (of course), IIS deployment options and a nice overview of what the .NET platform and C# offers.  Heck, Sanderson even include bits about webforms! The book is fantastic and I highly recommend it – even if you think you’ve already got your head around ASP.NET MVC.  By the way, procrastinators may be in luck.  ASP.NET MVC V2 Framework can be pre-ordered.  You might want to jump right into the second edition and find out what Sanderson has to say about MVC 2. * Actually, I did read through the free bits of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0.  But it was just a chapter – albeit a really long chapter.

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  • Challenges in multi-player Android Game Server with RESTful Nature

    - by Kush
    I'm working on an Android Game based on Contract Bridge, as a part of my college Summer Internship project. The game will be multi-player such that 4 Android devices can play it, so there's no BOT or CPU player to be developed. At the time of getting project, I realized that most of the students had already worked on the project but none of their works is reusable now (for variety of reasons like, undocumented code and design architecture, different platform implementation). I have experience working on several open source projects and hence I emphasis to work out on this project such that components I make become reusable as much as possible. Now, as the game is multi-player and entire game progress will be handled on server, I'm currently working on Server's design, since I wanted to make game server reusable such that any client platform can use it, I was previously confused in selecting Socket or REST for Game Server's design, but later finalized to work on REST APIs for the server. Now, since I have to keep all players in-sync while they make movements in game, on server I've planned to use Database which will keep all players' progress, specific for each table (in Bridge, 4 players play on single table, and server will handle many such game tables). I don't know if its an appropriate decision to use database as shared medium to track progress of each game table (let me know if there's an appropriate or better option). Obviously, when game is completed for the table, data for that table on server's database is discarded. Now the problem is that, access to REST service is an HTTP call, so as long as client doesn't make any request, server will remain idle, and consider a situation where A player has played a card on his device and the device requests to apply this change on the server. Now, I need to let rest of the three devices know that the player has played a card, and also update view on their device. AFAIK, REST cannot provide a sort-of Push-notification system, since the connection to the server is not persistent. One solution that I thought was to make each device constantly poll the server for any change (like every 56 ms) and when changes are found, reflect it on the device. But I feel this is not an elegant way, as every HTTP request is expensive. (and I choose REST to make game play experience robust since, a mobile device tends to get disconnected from Internet, and if there's Socket-like persistent connection then entire game progress is subject to lost. Also, portability on client-end is important) Also, imagining a situation where 10 game tables are in progress and 40 players are playing, a server must be capable to handle flooded HTTP requests from all the devices which make it every 56 ms. So I wonder if the situation is assumed as DoS attack. So, explaining the situation, am I going on the right track for the server design? I wanted to be sure before I proceed much further with the code.

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  • SQL – Building a High Traffic, Profitable Blog – A Unique Gift on Author’s Birthday

    - by Pinal Dave
    Every July 30th, I like to do something new. It is my birthday and I like to give gifts to everyone this day. Last year, at this time I had written an article A Year Older and 3 SQL Server Books and 3 Video Courses – 33. I had written a total of 3 books by that time and had published total of  3 Pluralsight courses. When I look back the year, I feel that I gave my best to last year. Sine Last July 30th, I have written 6 more books and 5 more video courses. The total is now 9 books and 8 video courses. It seems that I have been producing one new book or course every month since last July. Building a High Traffic, Profitable Blog Out of my 8 courses my favorite course is my latest course at Pluralsight. This course is about how to build a high traffic blog and monetize it. I have been blogging for over 7 years and there have been many hurdles and roadblocks but I have never stopped blogging any single day. There have been many instances when I felt I should just hit delete and remove my entire blog from the web but fortunately I had courage to stand by on my decisions. Well at the end, I kept on fighting through the difficult time and kept on blogging. Every day there was a lesson to learn and every day there was an issue to resolve. I never gave up and kept on building new content. Today after 7 years, when I look back there are many stories to tell. It was impossible to write down the stories so I decided to build a course based on my experience. In this course, I share all the best tricks to build a high traffic, profitable blog. When we talk about profit, people often talk about money but the reality is that profit is much bigger word than money. There are many different ways one can profit from their own blog. In this course, I discuss about all different ways about how you can be profitable by building a high traffic blog. I believe this course is for everybody who aspire to build a website or blog which gives them a profit.  Here are the major topics based out of this course. Introduction Techniques to Engage Blog Readers Social Media – Social Sharing and Social Networking Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Monetizing a Blog Frequently Asked Questions Checklists Personally I believe this is the best gift I can give to all of you my friends. Build a successful high traffic blog and monetize it. Here is the list of the all of my video courses and here is the list of all of the books. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Blogging

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  • Syncing Data with a Server using Silverlight and HTTP Polling Duplex

    - by dwahlin
    Many applications have the need to stay in-sync with data provided by a service. Although web applications typically rely on standard polling techniques to check if data has changed, Silverlight provides several interesting options for keeping an application in-sync that rely on server “push” technologies. A few years back I wrote several blog posts covering different “push” technologies available in Silverlight that rely on sockets or HTTP Polling Duplex. We recently had a project that looked like it could benefit from pushing data from a server to one or more clients so I thought I’d revisit the subject and provide some updates to the original code posted. If you’ve worked with AJAX before in Web applications then you know that until browsers fully support web sockets or other duplex (bi-directional communication) technologies that it’s difficult to keep applications in-sync with a server without relying on polling. The problem with polling is that you have to check for changes on the server on a timed-basis which can often be wasteful and take up unnecessary resources. With server “push” technologies, data can be pushed from the server to the client as it changes. Once the data is received, the client can update the user interface as appropriate. Using “push” technologies allows the client to listen for changes from the data but stay 100% focused on client activities as opposed to worrying about polling and asking the server if anything has changed. Silverlight provides several options for pushing data from a server to a client including sockets, TCP bindings and HTTP Polling Duplex.  Each has its own strengths and weaknesses as far as performance and setup work with HTTP Polling Duplex arguably being the easiest to setup and get going.  In this article I’ll demonstrate how HTTP Polling Duplex can be used in Silverlight 4 applications to push data and show how you can create a WCF server that provides an HTTP Polling Duplex binding that a Silverlight client can consume.   What is HTTP Polling Duplex? Technologies that allow data to be pushed from a server to a client rely on duplex functionality. Duplex (or bi-directional) communication allows data to be passed in both directions.  A client can call a service and the server can call the client. HTTP Polling Duplex (as its name implies) allows a server to communicate with a client without forcing the client to constantly poll the server. It has the benefit of being able to run on port 80 making setup a breeze compared to the other options which require specific ports to be used and cross-domain policy files to be exposed on port 943 (as with sockets and TCP bindings). Having said that, if you’re looking for the best speed possible then sockets and TCP bindings are the way to go. But, they’re not the only game in town when it comes to duplex communication. The first time I heard about HTTP Polling Duplex (initially available in Silverlight 2) I wasn’t exactly sure how it was any better than standard polling used in AJAX applications. I read the Silverlight SDK, looked at various resources and generally found the following definition unhelpful as far as understanding the actual benefits that HTTP Polling Duplex provided: "The Silverlight client periodically polls the service on the network layer, and checks for any new messages that the service wants to send on the callback channel. The service queues all messages sent on the client callback channel and delivers them to the client when the client polls the service." Although the previous definition explained the overall process, it sounded as if standard polling was used. Fortunately, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie provided me with a more clear definition several years back that explains the benefits provided by HTTP Polling Duplex quite well (used with his permission): "The [HTTP Polling Duplex] duplex support does use polling in the background to implement notifications – although the way it does it is different than manual polling. It initiates a network request, and then the request is effectively “put to sleep” waiting for the server to respond (it doesn’t come back immediately). The server then keeps the connection open but not active until it has something to send back (or the connection times out after 90 seconds – at which point the duplex client will connect again and wait). This way you are avoiding hitting the server repeatedly – but still get an immediate response when there is data to send." After hearing Scott’s definition the light bulb went on and it all made sense. A client makes a request to a server to check for changes, but instead of the request returning immediately, it parks itself on the server and waits for data. It’s kind of like waiting to pick up a pizza at the store. Instead of calling the store over and over to check the status, you sit in the store and wait until the pizza (the request data) is ready. Once it’s ready you take it back home (to the client). This technique provides a lot of efficiency gains over standard polling techniques even though it does use some polling of its own as a request is initially made from a client to a server. So how do you implement HTTP Polling Duplex in your Silverlight applications? Let’s take a look at the process by starting with the server. Creating an HTTP Polling Duplex WCF Service Creating a WCF service that exposes an HTTP Polling Duplex binding is straightforward as far as coding goes. Add some one way operations into an interface, create a client callback interface and you’re ready to go. The most challenging part comes into play when configuring the service to properly support the necessary binding and that’s more of a cut and paste operation once you know the configuration code to use. To create an HTTP Polling Duplex service you’ll need to expose server-side and client-side interfaces and reference the System.ServiceModel.PollingDuplex assembly (located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Libraries\Server on my machine) in the server project. For the demo application I upgraded a basketball simulation service to support the latest polling duplex assemblies. The service simulates a simple basketball game using a Game class and pushes information about the game such as score, fouls, shots and more to the client as the game changes over time. Before jumping too far into the game push service, it’s important to discuss two interfaces used by the service to communicate in a bi-directional manner. The first is called IGameStreamService and defines the methods/operations that the client can call on the server (see Listing 1). The second is IGameStreamClient which defines the callback methods that a server can use to communicate with a client (see Listing 2).   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "Silverlight", CallbackContract = typeof(IGameStreamClient))] public interface IGameStreamService { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void GetTeamData(); } Listing 1. The IGameStreamService interface defines server operations that can be called on the server.   [ServiceContract] public interface IGameStreamClient { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void ReceiveTeamData(List<Team> teamData); [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, AsyncPattern=true)] IAsyncResult BeginReceiveGameData(GameData gameData, AsyncCallback callback, object state); void EndReceiveGameData(IAsyncResult result); } Listing 2. The IGameStreamClient interfaces defines client operations that a server can call.   The IGameStreamService interface is decorated with the standard ServiceContract attribute but also contains a value for the CallbackContract property.  This property is used to define the interface that the client will expose (IGameStreamClient in this example) and use to receive data pushed from the service. Notice that each OperationContract attribute in both interfaces sets the IsOneWay property to true. This means that the operation can be called and passed data as appropriate, however, no data will be passed back. Instead, data will be pushed back to the client as it’s available.  Looking through the IGameStreamService interface you can see that the client can request team data whereas the IGameStreamClient interface allows team and game data to be received by the client. One interesting point about the IGameStreamClient interface is the inclusion of the AsyncPattern property on the BeginReceiveGameData operation. I initially created this operation as a standard one way operation and it worked most of the time. However, as I disconnected clients and reconnected new ones game data wasn’t being passed properly. After researching the problem more I realized that because the service could take up to 7 seconds to return game data, things were getting hung up. By setting the AsyncPattern property to true on the BeginReceivedGameData operation and providing a corresponding EndReceiveGameData operation I was able to get around this problem and get everything running properly. I’ll provide more details on the implementation of these two methods later in this post. Once the interfaces were created I moved on to the game service class. The first order of business was to create a class that implemented the IGameStreamService interface. Since the service can be used by multiple clients wanting game data I added the ServiceBehavior attribute to the class definition so that I could set its InstanceContextMode to InstanceContextMode.Single (in effect creating a Singleton service object). Listing 3 shows the game service class as well as its fields and constructor.   [ServiceBehavior(ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple, InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)] public class GameStreamService : IGameStreamService { object _Key = new object(); Game _Game = null; Timer _Timer = null; Random _Random = null; Dictionary<string, IGameStreamClient> _ClientCallbacks = new Dictionary<string, IGameStreamClient>(); static AsyncCallback _ReceiveGameDataCompleted = new AsyncCallback(ReceiveGameDataCompleted); public GameStreamService() { _Game = new Game(); _Timer = new Timer { Enabled = false, Interval = 2000, AutoReset = true }; _Timer.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(_Timer_Elapsed); _Timer.Start(); _Random = new Random(); }} Listing 3. The GameStreamService implements the IGameStreamService interface which defines a callback contract that allows the service class to push data back to the client. By implementing the IGameStreamService interface, GameStreamService must supply a GetTeamData() method which is responsible for supplying information about the teams that are playing as well as individual players.  GetTeamData() also acts as a client subscription method that tracks clients wanting to receive game data.  Listing 4 shows the GetTeamData() method. public void GetTeamData() { //Get client callback channel var context = OperationContext.Current; var sessionID = context.SessionId; var currClient = context.GetCallbackChannel<IGameStreamClient>(); context.Channel.Faulted += Disconnect; context.Channel.Closed += Disconnect; IGameStreamClient client; if (!_ClientCallbacks.TryGetValue(sessionID, out client)) { lock (_Key) { _ClientCallbacks[sessionID] = currClient; } } currClient.ReceiveTeamData(_Game.GetTeamData()); //Start timer which when fired sends updated score information to client if (!_Timer.Enabled) { _Timer.Enabled = true; } } Listing 4. The GetTeamData() method subscribes a given client to the game service and returns. The key the line of code in the GetTeamData() method is the call to GetCallbackChannel<IGameStreamClient>().  This method is responsible for accessing the calling client’s callback channel. The callback channel is defined by the IGameStreamClient interface shown earlier in Listing 2 and used by the server to communicate with the client. Before passing team data back to the client, GetTeamData() grabs the client’s session ID and checks if it already exists in the _ClientCallbacks dictionary object used to track clients wanting callbacks from the server. If the client doesn’t exist it adds it into the collection. It then pushes team data from the Game class back to the client by calling ReceiveTeamData().  Since the service simulates a basketball game, a timer is then started if it’s not already enabled which is then used to randomly send data to the client. When the timer fires, game data is pushed down to the client. Listing 5 shows the _Timer_Elapsed() method that is called when the timer fires as well as the SendGameData() method used to send data to the client. void _Timer_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e) { int interval = _Random.Next(3000, 7000); lock (_Key) { _Timer.Interval = interval; _Timer.Enabled = false; } SendGameData(_Game.GetGameData()); } private void SendGameData(GameData gameData) { var cbs = _ClientCallbacks.Where(cb => ((IContextChannel)cb.Value).State == CommunicationState.Opened); for (int i = 0; i < cbs.Count(); i++) { var cb = cbs.ElementAt(i).Value; try { cb.BeginReceiveGameData(gameData, _ReceiveGameDataCompleted, cb); } catch (TimeoutException texp) { //Log timeout error } catch (CommunicationException cexp) { //Log communication error } } lock (_Key) _Timer.Enabled = true; } private static void ReceiveGameDataCompleted(IAsyncResult result) { try { ((IGameStreamClient)(result.AsyncState)).EndReceiveGameData(result); } catch (CommunicationException) { // empty } catch (TimeoutException) { // empty } } LIsting 5. _Timer_Elapsed is used to simulate time in a basketball game. When _Timer_Elapsed() fires the SendGameData() method is called which iterates through the clients wanting to be notified of changes. As each client is identified, their respective BeginReceiveGameData() method is called which ultimately pushes game data down to the client. Recall that this method was defined in the client callback interface named IGameStreamClient shown earlier in Listing 2. Notice that BeginReceiveGameData() accepts _ReceiveGameDataCompleted as its second parameter (an AsyncCallback delegate defined in the service class) and passes the client callback as the third parameter. The initial version of the sample application had a standard ReceiveGameData() method in the client callback interface. However, sometimes the client callbacks would work properly and sometimes they wouldn’t which was a little baffling at first glance. After some investigation I realized that I needed to implement an asynchronous pattern for client callbacks to work properly since 3 – 7 second delays are occurring as a result of the timer. Once I added the BeginReceiveGameData() and ReceiveGameDataCompleted() methods everything worked properly since each call was handled in an asynchronous manner. The final task that had to be completed to get the server working properly with HTTP Polling Duplex was adding configuration code into web.config. In the interest of brevity I won’t post all of the code here since the sample application includes everything you need. However, Listing 6 shows the key configuration code to handle creating a custom binding named pollingDuplexBinding and associate it with the service’s endpoint.   <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="pollingDuplexBinding"> <binaryMessageEncoding /> <pollingDuplex maxPendingSessions="2147483647" maxPendingMessagesPerSession="2147483647" inactivityTimeout="02:00:00" serverPollTimeout="00:05:00"/> <httpTransport /> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <services> <service name="GameService.GameStreamService" behaviorConfiguration="GameStreamServiceBehavior"> <endpoint address="" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="pollingDuplexBinding" contract="GameService.IGameStreamService"/> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> </service> </services>   Listing 6. Configuring an HTTP Polling Duplex binding in web.config and associating an endpoint with it. Calling the Service and Receiving “Pushed” Data Calling the service and handling data that is pushed from the server is a simple and straightforward process in Silverlight. Since the service is configured with a MEX endpoint and exposes a WSDL file, you can right-click on the Silverlight project and select the standard Add Service Reference item. After the web service proxy is created you may notice that the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file only contains an empty configuration element instead of the normal configuration elements created when creating a standard WCF proxy. You can certainly update the file if you want to read from it at runtime but for the sample application I fed the service URI directly to the service proxy as shown next: var address = new EndpointAddress("http://localhost.:5661/GameStreamService.svc"); var binding = new PollingDuplexHttpBinding(); _Proxy = new GameStreamServiceClient(binding, address); _Proxy.ReceiveTeamDataReceived += _Proxy_ReceiveTeamDataReceived; _Proxy.ReceiveGameDataReceived += _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived; _Proxy.GetTeamDataAsync(); This code creates the proxy and passes the endpoint address and binding to use to its constructor. It then wires the different receive events to callback methods and calls GetTeamDataAsync().  Calling GetTeamDataAsync() causes the server to store the client in the server-side dictionary collection mentioned earlier so that it can receive data that is pushed.  As the server-side timer fires and game data is pushed to the client, the user interface is updated as shown in Listing 7. Listing 8 shows the _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived() method responsible for handling the data and calling UpdateGameData() to process it.   Listing 7. The Silverlight interface. Game data is pushed from the server to the client using HTTP Polling Duplex. void _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived(object sender, ReceiveGameDataReceivedEventArgs e) { UpdateGameData(e.gameData); } private void UpdateGameData(GameData gameData) { //Update Score this.tbTeam1Score.Text = gameData.Team1Score.ToString(); this.tbTeam2Score.Text = gameData.Team2Score.ToString(); //Update ball visibility if (gameData.Action != ActionsEnum.Foul) { if (tbTeam1.Text == gameData.TeamOnOffense) { AnimateBall(this.BB1, this.BB2); } else //Team 2 { AnimateBall(this.BB2, this.BB1); } } if (this.lbActions.Items.Count > 9) this.lbActions.Items.Clear(); this.lbActions.Items.Add(gameData.LastAction); if (this.lbActions.Visibility == Visibility.Collapsed) this.lbActions.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; } private void AnimateBall(Image onBall, Image offBall) { this.FadeIn.Stop(); Storyboard.SetTarget(this.FadeInAnimation, onBall); Storyboard.SetTarget(this.FadeOutAnimation, offBall); this.FadeIn.Begin(); } Listing 8. As the server pushes game data, the client’s _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived() method is called to process the data. In a real-life application I’d go with a ViewModel class to handle retrieving team data, setup data bindings and handle data that is pushed from the server. However, for the sample application I wanted to focus on HTTP Polling Duplex and keep things as simple as possible.   Summary Silverlight supports three options when duplex communication is required in an application including TCP bindins, sockets and HTTP Polling Duplex. In this post you’ve seen how HTTP Polling Duplex interfaces can be created and implemented on the server as well as how they can be consumed by a Silverlight client. HTTP Polling Duplex provides a nice way to “push” data from a server while still allowing the data to flow over port 80 or another port of your choice.   Sample Application Download

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  • SnagIt Live Writer Plug-in updated

    - by Rick Strahl
    I've updated my free SnagIt Live Writer plug-in again as there have been a few issues with the new release of SnagIt 11. It appears that TechSmith has trimmed the COM object and removed a bunch of redundant functionality which has broken the older plug-in. I also updated the layout and added SnagIt's latest icons to the form. Finally I've moved the source code to Github for easier browsing and downloading for anybody interested and easier updating for me. This plug-in is not new - I created it a number of years back, but I use the hell out it both for my blogging and for a few internal apps that with MetaWebLogApi to update online content. The plug-in makes it super easy to add captured image content directly into a post and upload it to the server. What does it do? Once installed the plug-in shows up in the list of plug-ins. When you click it launches a SnagIt Capture Dialog: Typically you set the capture settings once, and then save your settings. After that a single click or ENTER press gets you off capturing. If you choose the Show in SnagIt preview window option, the image you capture is is displayed in the preview editor to mark up images, which is one of SnagIt's great strengths IMHO. The image editor has a bunch of really nice effects for framing and marking up and highlighting of images that is really sweet. Here's a capture from a previous image in the SnagIt editor where I applied the saw tooth cutout effect: Images are saved to disk and can optionally be deleted immediately, since Live Writer creates copies of original images in its own folders before uploading the files. No need to keep the originals around typically. The plug-in works with SnagIt Versions 7 and later. It's a simple thing of course - nothing magic here, but incredibly useful at least to me. If you're using Live Writer and you own a copy of SnagIt do yourself a favor and grab this and install it as a plug-in. Resources: SnagIt Windows Live Writer Plug-in Installer Source Code on GitHub Buy SnagIt© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012 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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  • Adding AjaxOnly Filter in ASP.NET Web API

    - by imran_ku07
            Introduction:                     Currently, ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Single Page Application are the hottest topics in ASP.NET community. Specifically, lot of developers loving the inclusion of ASP.NET Web API in ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET Web API makes it very simple to build HTTP RESTful services, which can be easily consumed from desktop/mobile browsers, silverlight/flash applications and many different types of clients. Client side Ajax may be a very important consumer for various service providers. Sometimes, some HTTP service providers may need some(or all) of thier services can only be accessed from Ajax. In this article, I will show you how to implement AjaxOnly filter in ASP.NET Web API application.         Description:                     First of all you need to create a new ASP.NET MVC 4(Web API) application. Then, create a new AjaxOnly.cs file and add the following lines in this file, public class AjaxOnlyAttribute : System.Web.Http.Filters.ActionFilterAttribute { public override void OnActionExecuting(System.Web.Http.Controllers.HttpActionContext actionContext) { var request = actionContext.Request; var headers = request.Headers; if (!headers.Contains("X-Requested-With") || headers.GetValues("X-Requested-With").FirstOrDefault() != "XMLHttpRequest") actionContext.Response = request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.NotFound); } }                     This is an action filter which simply checks X-Requested-With header in request with value XMLHttpRequest. If X-Requested-With header is not presant in request or this header value is not XMLHttpRequest then the filter will return 404(NotFound) response to the client.                      Now just register this filter, [AjaxOnly] public string GET(string input)                     You can also register this filter globally, if your Web API application is only targeted for Ajax consumer.         Summary:                       ASP.NET WEB API provide a framework for building RESTful services. Sometimes, you may need your certain API services can only be accessed from Ajax. In this article, I showed you how to add AjaxOnly action filter in ASP.NET Web API. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.

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  • SQL SERVER – DMV – sys.dm_exec_query_optimizer_info – Statistics of Optimizer

    - by pinaldave
    Incredibly, SQL Server has so much information to share with us. Every single day, I am amazed with this SQL Server technology. Sometimes I find several interesting information by just querying few of the DMV. And when I present this info in front of my client during performance tuning consultancy, they are surprised with my findings. Today, I am going to share one of the hidden gems of DMV with you, the one which I frequently use to understand what’s going on under the hood of SQL Server. SQL Server keeps the record of most of the operations of the Query Optimizer. We can learn many interesting details about the optimizer which can be utilized to improve the performance of server. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_exec_query_optimizer_info WHERE counter IN ('optimizations', 'elapsed time','final cost', 'insert stmt','delete stmt','update stmt', 'merge stmt','contains subquery','tables', 'hints','order hint','join hint', 'view reference','remote query','maximum DOP', 'maximum recursion level','indexed views loaded', 'indexed views matched','indexed views used', 'indexed views updated','dynamic cursor request', 'fast forward cursor request') All occurrence values are cumulative and are set to 0 at system restart. All values for value fields are set to NULL at system restart. I have removed a few of the internal counters from the script above, and kept only documented details. Let us check the result of the above query. As you can see, there is so much vital information that is revealed in above query. I can easily say so many things about how many times Optimizer was triggered and what the average time taken by it to optimize my queries was. Additionally, I can also determine how many times update, insert or delete statements were optimized. I was able to quickly figure out that my client was overusing the Query Hints using this dynamic management view. If you have been reading my blog, I am sure you are aware of my series related to SQL Server Views SQL SERVER – The Limitations of the Views – Eleven and more…. With this, I can take a quick look and figure out how many times Views were used in various solutions within the query. Moreover, you can easily know what fraction of the optimizations has been involved in tuning server. For example, the following query would tell me, in total optimizations, what the fraction of time View was “reference“. As this View also includes system Views and DMVs, the number is a bit higher on my machine. SELECT (SELECT CAST (occurrence AS FLOAT) FROM sys.dm_exec_query_optimizer_info WHERE counter = 'view reference') / (SELECT CAST (occurrence AS FLOAT) FROM sys.dm_exec_query_optimizer_info WHERE counter = 'optimizations') AS ViewReferencedFraction Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DMV, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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  • SQL SERVER – SQL in Sixty Seconds – Last Three Episodes – Need Your Opinion

    - by Pinal Dave
    I have been blogging for almost 7 years and building video content for around 2 years. After spending so much time on blogging and creating video, I have got the quite a good idea what people would like to read and what people like to watch. However, there is one thing, which I am constantly struggling after almost a year and I would like to get your opinion about it. Though, this may look very simple to you but it is very crucial to me and I would like to know your opinion about it. I have been building video almost every week for my SQL in Sixty Seconds series and it has been quite popular. So far on my YouTube Channel there are over 2600 subscribers and over 250K views. Here is my problem – there are about 50+ videos on SQL in Sixty Seconds Series but the not every video is popular. There are a few videos which are extremely popular and there are videos which are absolutely struggling to get even single view. I have yet not figured out what people would love to watch on this channel. I noticed lots of people watching various videos but hardly anyone leaving comments or suggestions. At the end of the blog posts associated with the SQL in Sixty Seconds, I always ask which video people would love to watch, but I get a very low response over there too. What I wonder is that why such a low engagement of viewers/readers on the video blog posts where as the channel is success and lots of people are watching the video? What do you think I should change in my video to increase the engagement? Here are my last three videos from SQL in Sixty Seconds channel and I would like to know your feedback. Remove Cached Login from SSMS Connect Dialog – SQL in Sixty Seconds #049 RESEED Identity Column in Database Table – SQL in Sixty Seconds #051 Puzzle SET ANSI_NULLS and Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #052  The feedback which I will like the most will for sure get a special surprise gift for me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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  • What was missing from the Content Strategy Forum?

    - by Roger Hart
    In April, Paris hosted the first ever Content Strategy Forum. The event's website proudly proclaims: 170 attendees, 18 nationalities, 17 speakers, 1 volcano... Content Strategy Forum 2010 rocked the world! The volcano was in Iceland, and the closest we came to rocking the world was a cursory mention in the Huffington Post, but I'll grant the event was awesome. One thing missing from that list, however, is "94 companies" (Plus a couple of universities and freelancers, and what have you). A glance through the attendees directory reveals a fairly wide organisational turnout - 24 students from two Parisian universities, countless design and marketing agencies, a series of tech firms, small and large. Two delegates from IBM, two from ARM, an appearance from RIM, Skype, and Facebook; twelve from the various bits of eBay. Oh, and, err, nobody from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, Play, Twitter, LinkedIn, Craigslist, the BBC, no banks I noticed, and I didn't spot a newspaper. You get the idea. Facebook notwithstanding, you have to scroll through a few pages to Alexa rankings to find company names from the attendee list. I find this interesting, and I'm not wholly sure what to make of it. Of the large, web-centric, content-rich organizations conspicuously absent, at least one of two things is true: They didn't know about the event They didn't care about the event Maybe these guys all have content strategy completely sorted, and it's an utterly naturalised part of their business process. Maybe nobody at say, Apple or Play.com ever publishes a single piece of content that isn't neatly tailored to their (clearly defined, of course) user and business goals. Wouldn't that be lovely? The thing is, in that rosy and beatific world, there's still a case for those folks to join the community. There are bound to be other perspectives, and things to learn. You see, the other thing achingly conspicuous by its absence was case studies. In her keynote address, Kristina Halvorson made the point that what content strategy really needs is some big, loud success stories. A point I'd firmly second as a content strategist working within an organisation. Sarah Cancilla's presentation on content strategy at Facebook included some very neat, specific examples, and was richer for it. It didn't hurt that the example was Facebook - you're getting impressively big numbers off base. What about the other big boys? Is there anybody out there with a perspective? Do we all just look very silly to you, fretting away over text and images and users and purposes? Is content validation and maintenance so accustomed a part of your business that calling attention to it is like sniffing the air and saying "Hmm, a lot of nitrogen about today."? And if it is, do you have any wisdom to share?

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  • First impressions of Scala

    - by Scott Weinstein
    I have an idea that it may be possible to predict build success/failure based on commit data. Why Scala? It’s a JVM language, has lots of powerful type features, and it has a linear algebra library which I’ll need later. Project definition and build Neither maven or the scala build tool (sbt) are completely satisfactory. This maven **archetype** (what .Net folks would call a VS project template) mvn archetype:generate `-DarchetypeGroupId=org.scala-tools.archetypes `-DarchetypeArtifactId=scala-archetype-simple `-DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases `-DgroupId=org.SW -DartifactId=BuildBreakPredictor gets you started right away with “hello world” code, unit tests demonstrating a number of different testing approaches, and even a ready made `.gitignore` file - nice! But the Scala version is behind at v2.8, and more seriously, compiling and testing was painfully slow. So much that a rapid edit – test – edit cycle was not practical. So Lab49 colleague Steve Levine tells me that I can either adjust my pom to use fsc – the fast scala compiler, or use sbt. Sbt has some nice features It’s fast – it uses fsc by default It has a continuous mode, so  `> ~test` will compile and run your unit test each time you save a file It’s can consume (and produce) Maven 2 dependencies the build definition file can be much shorter than the equivalent pom (about 1/5 the size, as repos and dependencies can be declared on a single line) And some real limitations Limited support for 3rd party integration – for instance out of the box, TeamCity doesn’t speak sbt, nor does IntelliJ IDEA Steeper learning curve for build steps outside the default Side note: If a language has a fast compiler, why keep the slow compiler around? Even worse, why make it the default? I choose sbt, for the faster development speed it offers. Syntax Scala APIs really like to use punctuation – sometimes this works well, as in the following map1 |+| map2 The `|+|` defines a merge operator which does addition on the `values` of the maps. It’s less useful here: http(baseUrl / url >- parseJson[BuildStatus] sure you can probably guess what `>-` does from the context, but how about `>~` or `>+`? Language features I’m still learning, so not much to say just yet. However case classes are quite usefull, implicits scare me, and type constructors have lots of power. Community A number of projects, such as https://github.com/scalala and https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz are split between github and google code – github for the src, and google code for the docs. Not sure I understand the motivation here.

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