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• How To Activate Your Free Office 2007 to 2010 Tech Guarantee Upgrade

  - by Matthew Guay

  Have you purchased Office 2007 since March 5th, 2010?  If so, here’s how you can activate and download your free upgrade to Office 2010! Microsoft Office 2010 has just been released, and today you can purchase upgrades from most retail stores or directly from Microsoft via download.  But if you’ve purchased a new copy of Office 2007 or a new computer that came with Office 2007 since March 5th, 2010, then you’re entitled to an absolutely free upgrade to Office 2010.  You’ll need enter information about your Office 2007 and then download the upgrade, so we’ll step you through the process. Getting Started First, if you’ve recently purchased Office 2007 but haven’t installed it, you’ll need to go ahead and install it before you can get your free Office 2010 upgrade.  Install it as normal.   Once Office 2007 is installed, run any of the Office programs.  You’ll be prompted to activate Office.  Make sure you’re connected to the internet, and then click Next to activate. Get your Free Upgrade to Office 2010 Now you’re ready to download your upgrade to Office 2010.  Head to the Office Tech Guarantee site (link below), and click Upgrade now. You’ll need to enter some information about your Office 2007.  Check that you purchased your copy of Office 2007 after March 5th, select your computer manufacturer, and check that you agree to the terms. Now you’re going to need the Product ID number from Office 2007.  To find this, open Word or any other Office 2007 application.  Click the Office Orb, and select Options on the bottom. Select the Resources button on the left, and then click About. Near the bottom of this dialog, you’ll see your Product ID.  This should be a number like: 12345-123-1234567-12345   Go back to the Office Tech Guarantee signup page in your browser, and enter this Product ID.  Select the language of your edition of Office 2007, enter the verification code, and then click Submit. It may take a few moments to validate your Product ID. When it is finished, you’ll be taken to an order page that shows the edition of Office 2010 you’re eligible to receive.  The upgrade download is free, but if you’d like to purchase a backup DVD of Office 2010, you can add it to your order for $13.99.  Otherwise, simply click Continue to accept. Do note that the edition of Office 2010 you receive may be different that the edition of Office 2007 you purchased, as the number of editions has been streamlined in the Office 2010 release.  Here’s a chart you can check to see what edition you’ll receive.  Note that you’ll still be allowed to install Office on the same number of computers; for example, Office 2007 Home and Student allows you to install it on up to 3 computers in the same house, and your Office 2010 upgrade will allow the same. Office 2007 Edition Office 2010 Upgrade You’ll Receive Office 2007 Home and Student Office Home and Student 2010 Office Basic 2007Office Standard 2007 Office Home and Business 2010 Office Small Business 2007Office Professional 2007Office Ultimate 2007 Office Professional 2010 Office Professional 2007 AcademicOffice Ultimate 2007 Academic Office Professional Academic 2010 Sign in with your Windows Live ID, or create a new one if you don’t already have one. Enter your name, select your country, and click Create My Account.  Note that Office will send Office 2010 tips to your email address; if you don’t wish to receive them, you can unsubscribe from the emails later.   Finally, you’re ready to download Office 2010!  Click the Download Now link to start downloading Office 2010.  Your Product Key will appear directly above the Download link, so you can copy it and then paste it in the installer when your download is finished.  You will additionally receive an email with the download links and product key, so if your download fails you can always restart it from that link. If your edition of Office 2007 included the Office Business Contact Manager, you will be able to download it from the second Download link.  And, of course, even if you didn’t order a backup DVD, you can always burn the installers to a DVD for a backup.   Install Office 2010 Once you’re finished downloading Office 2010, run the installer to get it installed on your computer.  Enter your Product Key from the Tech Guarantee website as above, and click Continue. Accept the license agreement, and then click Upgrade to upgrade to the latest version of Office.   The installer will remove all of your Office 2007 applications, and then install their 2010 counterparts.  If you wish to keep some of your Office 2007 applications instead, click Customize and then select to either keep all previous versions or simply keep specific applications. By default, Office 2010 will try to activate online automatically.  If it doesn’t activate during the install, you’ll need to activate it when you first run any of the Office 2010 apps.   Conclusion The Tech Guarantee makes it easy to get the latest version of Office if you recently purchased Office 2007.  The Tech Guarantee program is open through the end of September, so make sure to grab your upgrade during this time.  Actually, if you find a great deal on Office 2007 from a major retailer between now and then, you could also take advantage of this program to get Office 2010 cheaper. And if you need help getting started with Office 2010, check out our articles that can help you get situated in your new version of Office! Link Activate and Download Your free Office 2010 Tech Guarantee Upgrade Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Remove Office 2010 Beta and Reinstall Office 2007Upgrade Office 2003 to 2010 on XP or Run them Side by SideCenter Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010Change the Default Color Scheme in Office 2010Show Two Time Zones in Your Outlook 2007 Calendar TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer XPS file format & XPS Viewer Explained Microsoft Office Web Apps Guide

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• Consume WCF Service InProcess using Agatha and WCF

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I have been looking into this lately for a specific reason.  Some integration tests I want to write I want to control the types of instances which are used inside the service layer but I want that control from the test class instance.  One of the problems with just referencing the service is that a lot of the time this will by default be done inside a different process.  I am using StructureMap as my DI of choice and one of the tools which I am using inline with RhinoMocks is StructureMap.AutoMocking.  With StructureMap the main entry point is the ObjectFactory.  This will be process specific so if I decide that the I want a certain instance of a type to be used inside the ServiceLayer I cannot configure the ObjectFactory from my test class as that will only apply to the process which it belongs to. This is were I started thinking about two things: Running a WCF in process Being able to share mocked instances across processes A colleague in work pointed me to a project which is for the latter but I thought that it would be a better solution if I could run the WCF Service in process.  One of the projects which I use when I think about WCF Services is AGATHA, and the one which I have to used to try and get my head around doing this. Another asset I have is a book called Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy and if you have not heard of it or read it I would definately recommend it.  One of the many topics that is inside this book is the type of configuration you need to communicate with a service in the same process, and it turns out to be quite simple from a config point of view. <system.serviceModel> <services> <service name="Agatha.ServiceLayer.WCF.WcfRequestProcessor"> <endpoint address ="net.pipe://localhost/MyPipe" binding="netNamedPipeBinding" contract="Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor"/> </service> </services> <client> <endpoint name="MyEndpoint" address="net.pipe://localhost/MyPipe" binding="netNamedPipeBinding" contract="Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor"/> </client> </system.serviceModel>   You can see here that I am referencing the Agatha object and contract here, but also that my binding and the address is something called Named Pipes.  THis is sort of the “Magic” which makes it happen in the same process. Next I need to open the service prior to calling the methods on a proxy which I also need.  My initial attempt at the proxy did not use any Agatha specific coding and one of the pains I found was that you obviously need to give your proxy the known types which the serializer can be aware of.  So we need to add to the known types of the proxy programmatically.  I came across the following blog post which showed me how easy it was http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/vagif/archive/2009/05/18/how-to-programmatically-define-known-types-in-wcf.aspx. First Pass So with this in mind, and inside a console app this was my first pass at consuming a service in process.  First here is the proxy which I made making use of the Agatha IWcfRequestProcessor contract. public class InProcProxy : ClientBase<Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor>, Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor { public InProcProxy() { } public InProcProxy(string configurationName) : base(configurationName) { } public Agatha.Common.Response[] Process(params Agatha.Common.Request[] requests) { return Channel.Process(requests); } public void ProcessOneWayRequests(params Agatha.Common.OneWayRequest[] requests) { Channel.ProcessOneWayRequests(requests); } } So with the proxy in place I could then use this after opening the service so here is the code which I use inside the console app make the request. static void Main(string[] args) { ComponentRegistration.Register(); ServiceHost serviceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(Agatha.ServiceLayer.WCF.WcfRequestProcessor)); serviceHost.Open(); Console.WriteLine("Service is running...."); using (var proxy = new InProcProxy()) { foreach (var operation in proxy.Endpoint.Contract.Operations) { foreach (var t in KnownTypeProvider.GetKnownTypes(null)) { operation.KnownTypes.Add(t); } } var request = new GetProductsRequest(); var responses = proxy.Process(new[] { request }); var response = (GetProductsResponse)responses[0]; Console.WriteLine("{0} Products have been retrieved", response.Products.Count); } serviceHost.Close(); Console.WriteLine("Finished"); Console.ReadLine(); } So what I used here is the KnownTypeProvider of Agatha to easily get all the types I need for the service/proxy and add them to the proxy.  My Request handler for this was just a test one which always returned 2 products. public class GetProductsHandler : RequestHandler<GetProductsRequest,GetProductsResponse> { public override Agatha.Common.Response Handle(GetProductsRequest request) { return new GetProductsResponse { Products = new List<ProductDto> { new ProductDto{}, new ProductDto{} } }; } } Second Pass Now after I did this I started reading up some more on some resources including more by Davy Brion and others on Agatha.  Now it turns out that the work I did above to create a derived class of the ClientBase implementing Agatha.Common.WCF.IWcfRequestProcessor was not necessary due to a nice class which is present inside the Agatha code base, RequestProcessorProxy which takes care of this for you! :-) So disregarding that class I made for the proxy and changing my code to use it I am now left with the following: static void Main(string[] args) { ComponentRegistration.Register(); ServiceHost serviceHost = new ServiceHost(typeof(Agatha.ServiceLayer.WCF.WcfRequestProcessor)); serviceHost.Open(); Console.WriteLine("Service is running...."); using (var proxy = new RequestProcessorProxy()) { var request = new GetProductsRequest(); var responses = proxy.Process(new[] { request }); var response = (GetProductsResponse)responses[0]; Console.WriteLine("{0} Products have been retrieved", response.Products.Count); } serviceHost.Close(); Console.WriteLine("Finished"); Console.ReadLine(); }   Cheers for now, Andy References Agatha WCF InProcess Without WCF StructureMap.AutoMocking Cross Process Mocking Agatha Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy

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• Processing Email in Outlook

  - by Daniel Moth

  A. Why Goal 1 = Help others: Have at most a 24-hour response turnaround to internal (from colleague) emails, typically achieving same day response. Goal 2 = Help projects: Not to implicitly pass/miss an opportunity to have impact on electronic discussions around any project on the radar. Not achieving goals 1 & 2 = Colleagues stop relying on you, drop you off conversations, don't see you as a contributing resource or someone that cares, you are perceived as someone with no peripheral vision. Note this is perfect if all you are doing is cruising at your job, trying to fly under the radar, with no ambitions of having impact beyond your absolute minimum 'day job'. B. DON'T: Leave unread email lurking around Don't: Receive or process all incoming emails in a single folder ('inbox' or 'unread mail'). This is actually possible if you receive a small number of emails (e.g. new to the job, not working at a company like Microsoft). Even so, with (your future) success at any level (company, community) comes large incoming email, so learn to deal with it. With large volumes, it is best to let the system help you by doing some categorization and filtering on your behalf (instead of trying to do that in your head as you process the single folder). See later section on how to achieve this. Don't: Leave emails as 'unread' (or worse: read them, then mark them as unread). Often done by individuals who think they possess super powers ("I can mentally cache and distinguish between the emails I chose not to read, the ones that are actually new, and the ones I decided to revisit in the future; the fact that they all show up the same (bold = unread) does not confuse me"). Interactions with this super-powered individuals typically end up with them saying stuff like "I must have missed that email you are talking about (from 2 weeks ago)" or "I am a bit behind, so I haven't read your email, can you remind me". TIP: The only place where you are "allowed" unread email is in your Deleted Items folder. Don't: Interpret a read email as an email that has been processed. Doing that, means you will always end up with fake unread email (that you have actually read, but haven't dealt with completely so you then marked it as unread) lurking between actual unread email. Another side effect is reading the email and making a 'mental' note to action it, then leaving the email as read, so the only thing left to remind you to carry out the action is… you. You are not super human, you will forget. This is a key distinction. Reading (or even scanning) a new email, means you now know what needs to be done with it, in order for it to be truly considered processed. Truly processing an email is to, for example, write an email of your own (e.g. to reply or forward), or take a non-email related action (e.g. create calendar entry, do something on some website), or read it carefully to gain some knowledge (e.g. it had a spec as an attachment), or keep it around as reference etc. 'Reading' means that you know what to do, not that you have done it. An email that is read is an email that is triaged, not an email that is resolved. Sometimes the thing that needs to be done based on receiving the email, you can (and want) to do immediately after reading the email. That is fine, you read the email and you processed it (typically when it takes no longer than X minutes, where X is your personal tolerance – mine is roughly 2 minutes). Other times, you decide that you don't want to spend X minutes at that moment, so after reading the email you need a quick system for "marking" the email as to be processed later (and you still leave it as 'read' in outlook). See later section for how. C. DO: Use Outlook rules and have multiple folders where incoming email is automatically moved to Outlook email rules are very powerful and easy to configure. Use them to automatically file email into folders. Here are mine (note that if a rule catches an email message then no further rules get processed): "personal" Email is either personal or business related. Almost all personal email goes to my gmail account. The personal emails that end up on my work email account, go to a dedicated folder – that is achieved via a rule that looks at the email's 'From' field. For those that slip through, I use the new Outlook 2010  quick step of "Conversation To Folder" feature to let the slippage only occur once per conversation, and then update my rules. "External" and "ViaBlog" The remaining external emails either come from my blog (rule on the subject line) or are unsolicited (rule on the domain name not being microsoft) and they are filed accordingly. "invites" I may do a separate blog post on calendar management, but suffice to say it should be kept up to date. All invite requests end up in this folder, so that even if mail gets out of control, the calendar can stay under control (only 1 folder to check). I.e. so I can let the organizer know why I won't be attending their meeting (or that I will be). Note: This folder is the only one that shows the total number of items in it, instead of the total unread. "Inbox" The only email that ends up here is email sent TO me and me only. Note that this is also the only email that shows up above the systray icon in the notification toast – all other emails cannot interrupt. "ToMe++" Email where I am on the TO line, but there are other recipients as well (on the TO or CC line). "CC" Email where I am on the CC line. I need to read these, but nobody is expecting a response or action from me so they are not as urgent (and if they are and follow up with me, they'll receive a link to this). "@ XYZ" Emails to aliases that are about projects that I directly work on (and I wasn't on the TO or CC line, of course). Test: these projects are in my commitments that I get measured on at the end of the year. "Z Mass" and subfolders under it per distribution list (DL) Emails to aliases that are about topics that I am interested in, but not that I formally own/contribute to. Test: if I unsubscribed from these aliases, nobody could rightfully complain. "Admin" folder, which resides under "Z Mass" folder Emails to aliases that I was added typically by an admin, e.g. broad emails to the floor/group/org/building/division/company that I am a member of. "BCC" folder, which resides under "Z Mass" Emails where I was not on the TO or the CC line explicitly and the alias it was sent to is not one I explicitly subscribed to (or I have been added to the BCC line, which I briefly touched on in another post). When there are only a few quick minutes to catch up on email, read as much as possible from these folders, in this order: Invites, Inbox, ToMe++. Only when these folders are all read (remember that doesn't mean that each email in them has been fully dealt with), we can move on to the @XYZ and then the CC folders. Only when those are read we can go on to the remaining folders. Note that the typical flow in the "Z Mass" subfolders is to scan subject lines and use the new Ctrl+Delete Outlook 2010 feature to ignore conversations. D. DO: Use Outlook Search folders in combination with categories As you process each folder, when you open a new email (i.e. click on it and read it in the preview pane) the email becomes read and stays read and you have to decide whether: It can take 2 minutes to deal with for good, right now, or It will take longer than 2 minutes, so it needs to be postponed with a clear next step, which is one of ToReply – there may be intermediate action steps, but ultimately someone else needs to receive email about this Action – no email is required, but I need to do something ReadLater – no email is required from the quick scan, but this is too long to fully read now, so it needs to be read it later WaitingFor – the email is informing of an intermediate status and 'promising' a future email update. Need to track. SomedayMaybe – interesting but not important, non-urgent, non-time-bound information. I may want to spend part of one of my weekends reading it. For all these 'next steps' use Outlook categories (right click on the email and assign category, or use shortcut key). Note that I also use category 'WaitingFor' for email that I send where I am expecting a response and need to track it. Create a new search folder for each category (I dragged the search folders into my favorites at the top left of Outlook, above my inboxes). So after the activity of reading/triaging email in the normal folders (where the email arrived) is done, the result is a bunch of emails appearing in the search folders (configure them to show the total items, not the total unread items). To actually process email (that takes more than 2 minutes to deal with) process the search folders, starting with ToReply and Action. E. DO: Get into a Routine Now you have a system in place, get into a routine of using it. Here is how I personally use mine, but this part I keep tweaking: Spend short bursts of time (between meetings, during boring but mandatory meetings and, in general, 2-4 times a day) aiming to have no unread emails (and in the process deal with some emails that take less than 2 minutes). Spend around 30 minutes at the end of each day processing most urgent items in search folders. Spend as long as it takes each Friday (or even the weekend) ensuring there is no unnecessary email baggage carried forward to the following week. F. Other resources Official Outlook help on: Create custom actions rules, Manage e-mail messages with rules, creating a search folder. Video on ignoring conversations (Ctrl+Del). Official blog post on Quick Steps and in particular the Move Conversation to folder. If you've read "Getting Things Done" it is very obvious that my approach to email management is driven by GTD. A very similar approach was described previously by ScottHa (also influenced by GTD), worth reading here. He also described how he sets up 2 outlook rules ('invites' and 'external') which I also use – worth reading that too. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released

  - by ScottGu

  The final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services is now available for download.  Download and Install If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express), then you can install both the Silverlight 4 Tooling Support as well as WCF RIA Services support by downloading and running this setup package (note: please make sure to uninstall the preview release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 if you have previously installed that).  The Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 package extends the Silverlight support built into Visual Studio 2010 and enables support for Silverlight 4 applications as well.  It also installs WCF RIA Services application templates and libraries: Today’s release includes the English edition of the Silverlight 4 Tooling – localized versions will be available next month for other Visual Studio languages as well. Silverlight Tooling Support Visual Studio 2010 includes rich tooling support for building Silverlight and WPF applications. It includes a WYSIWYG designer surface that enables you to easily use controls to construct UI – including the ability to take advantage of layout containers, and apply styles and resources: The VS 2010 designer enables you to leverage the rich data binding support within Silverlight and WPF, and easily wire-up bindings on controls.  The Data Sources window within Silverlight projects can be used to reference POCO objects (plain old CLR objects), WCF Services, WCF RIA Services client proxies or SharePoint Lists.  For example, let’s assume we add a “Person” class like below to our project: We could then add it to the Data Source window which will cause it to show up like below in the IDE: We can optionally customize the default UI control types that are associated for each property on the object.  For example, below we’ll default the BirthDate property to be represented by a “DatePicker” control: And then when we drag/drop the Person type from the Data Sources onto the design-surface it will automatically create UI controls that are bound to the properties of our Person class: VS 2010 allows you to optionally customize each UI binding further by selecting a control, and then right-click on any of its properties within the property-grid and pull up the “Apply Bindings” dialog: This will bring up a floating data-binding dialog that enables you to easily configure things like the binding path on the data source object, specify a format convertor, specify string-format settings, specify how validation errors should be handled, etc: In addition to providing WYSIWYG designer support for WPF and Silverlight applications, VS 2010 also provides rich XAML intellisense and code editing support – enabling a rich source editing environment. Silverlight 4 Tool Enhancements Today’s Silverlight 4 Tooling Release for VS 2010 includes a bunch of nice new features.  These include: Support for Silverlight Out of Browser Applications and Elevated Trust Applications You can open up a Silverlight application’s project properties window and click the “Enable Running Application Out of Browser” checkbox to enable you to install an offline, out of browser, version of your Silverlight 4 application.  You can then customize a number of “out of browser” settings of your application within Visual Studio: Notice above how you can now indicate that you want to run with elevated trust, with hardware graphics acceleration, as well as customize things like the Window style of the application (allowing you to build a nice polished window style for consumer applications). Support for Implicit Styles and “Go to Value Definition” Support: Silverlight 4 now allows you to define “implicit styles” for your applications.  This allows you to style controls by type (for example: have a default look for all buttons) and avoid you having to explicitly reference styles from each control.  In addition to honoring implicit styles on the designer-surface, VS 2010 also now allows you to right click on any control (or on one of it properties) and choose the “Go to Value Definition…” context menu to jump to the XAML where the style is defined, and from there you can easily navigate onward to any referenced resources.  This makes it much easier to figure out questions like “why is my button red?”: Style Intellisense VS 2010 enables you to easily modify styles you already have in XAML, and now you get intellisense for properties and their values within a style based on the TargetType of the specified control.  For example, below we have a style being set for controls of type “Button” (this is indicated by the “TargetType” property).  Notice how intellisense now automatically shows us properties for the Button control (even within the <Setter> element): Great Video - Watch the Silverlight Designer Features in Action You can see all of the above Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 features (and some more cool ones I haven’t mentioned) demonstrated in action within this 20 minute Silverlight.TV video on Channel 9: WCF RIA Services Today we also shipped the V1 release of WCF RIA Services.  It is included and automatically installed as part of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 setup. WCF RIA Services makes it much easier to build business applications with Silverlight.  It simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms using the power of WCF for communication.  WCF RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and authorization based on roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier. Put simply – it makes it much easier to query data stored on a server from a client machine, optionally manipulate/modify the data on the client, and then save it back to the server.  It supports a validation architecture that helps ensure that your data is kept secure and business rules are applied consistently on both the client and middle-tiers. WCF RIA Services uses WCF for communication between the client and the server  It supports both an optimized .NET to .NET binary serialization format, as well as a set of open extensions to the ATOM format known as ODATA and an optional JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format that can be used by any client. You can hear Nikhil and Dinesh talk a little about WCF RIA Services in this 13 minutes Channel 9 video. Putting it all Together – the Silverlight 4 Training Kit Check out the Silverlight 4 Training Kit to learn more about how to build business applications with Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands-on labs that explain Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services concepts and walks you through building an end-to-end application with them.    The training kit is available for free and is a great way to get started. Summary I’m really excited about today’s release – as they really complete the Silverlight development story and deliver a great end to end runtime + tooling story for building applications.  All of the above features are available for use both in VS 2010 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition – making it really easy to get started building great solutions. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Upgrading Team Foundation Server 2008 to 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  I am sure you will have seen my posts on upgrading our internal Team Foundation Server from TFS2008 to TFS2010 Beta 2, RC and RTM, but what about a fresh upgrade of TFS2008 to TFS2010 using the RTM version of TFS. One of our clients is taking the plunge with TFS2010, so I have the job of doing the upgrade. It is sometimes very useful to have a team member that starts work when most of the Sydney workers are heading home as I can do the upgrade without impacting them. The down side is that if you have any blockers then you can be pretty sure that everyone that can deal with your problem is asleep I am starting with an existing blank installation of TFS 2010, but Adam Cogan let slip that he was the one that did the install so I thought it prudent to make sure that it was OK. Verifying Team Foundation Server 2010 We need to check that TFS 2010 has been installed correctly. First, check the Admin console and have a root about for any errors. Figure: Even the SQL Setup looks good. I don’t know how Adam did it! Backing up the Team Foundation Server 2008 Databases As we are moving from one server to another (recommended method) we will be taking a backup of our TFS2008 databases and resorting them to the SQL Server for the new TFS2010 Server. Do not just detach and reattach. This will cause problems with the version of the database. If you are running a test migration you just need to create a backup of the TFS 2008 databases, but if you are doing the live migration then you should stop IIS on the TFS 2008 server before you backup the databases. This will stop any inadvertent check-ins or changes to TFS 2008. Figure: Stop IIS before you take a backup to prevent any TFS 2008 changes being written to the database. It is good to leave a little time between taking the TFS 2008 server offline and commencing the upgrade as there is always one developer who has not finished and starts screaming. This time it was John Liu that needed 10 more minutes to make his changes and check-in, so I always give it 30 minutes and see if anyone screams. John Liu [SSW] said:   are you doing something to TFS :-O MrHinsh [SSW UK][VS ALM MVP] said:   I have stopped TFS 2008 as per my emails John Liu [SSW] said:   haven't finish check in @_@   can we have it for 10mins? :) MrHinsh [SSW UK][VS ALM MVP] said:   TFS 2008 has been started John Liu [SSW] said:   I love you! -IM conversation at TFS Upgrade +25 minutes After John confirmed that he had everything done I turned IIS off again and made a cup of tea. There were no more screams so the upgrade can continue. Figure: Backup all of the databases for TFS and include the Reporting Services, just in case.   Figure: Check that all the backups have been taken Once you have your backups, you need to copy them to your new TFS2010 server and restore them. This is a good way to proceed as if we have any problems, or just plain run out of time, then you just turn the TFS 2008 server back on and all you have lost is one upgrade day, and not 10 developer days. As per the rules, you should record the number of files and the total number of areas and iterations before the upgrade so you have something to compare to: TFS2008 File count: Type Count 1 1845 2 15770 Areas & Iterations: 139 You can use this to verify that the upgrade was successful. it should however be noted that the numbers in TFS 2010 will be bigger. This is due to some of the sorting out that TFS does during the upgrade process. Restore Team Foundation Server 2008 Databases Restoring the databases is much more time consuming than just attaching them as you need to do them one at a time. But you may be taking a backup of an operational database and need to restore all your databases to a particular point in time instead of to the latest. I am doing latest unless I encounter any problems. Figure: Restore each of the databases to either a latest or specific point in time.     Figure: Restore all of the required databases Now that all of your databases are restored you now need to upgrade them to Team Foundation Server 2010. Upgrade Team Foundation Server 2008 Databases This is probably the easiest part of the process. You need to call a fire and forget command that will go off to the database specified, find the TFS 2008 databases and upgrade them to 2010. During this process all of the 6 main TFS 2008 databases are merged into the TfsVersionControl database, upgraded and then the database is renamed to TFS_[CollectionName]. The rename is only the database and not the physical files, so it is worth going back and renaming the physical file as well. This keeps everything neat and tidy. If you plan to keep the old TFS 2008 server around, for example if you are doing a test migration first, then you will need to change the TFS GUID. This GUID is unique to each TFS instance and is preserved when you upgrade. This GUID is used by the clients and they can get a little confused if there are two servers with the same one. To kick of the upgrade you need to open a command prompt and change the path to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools” and run the “import” command in  “tfsconfig”. TfsConfig import /sqlinstance:<Previous TFS Data Tier>                  /collectionName:<Collection Name>                  /confirmed Imports a TFS 2005 or 2008 data tier as a new project collection. Important: This command should only be executed after adequate backups have been performed. After you import, you will need to configure portal and reporting settings via the administration console. EXAMPLES -------- TfsConfig import /sqlinstance:tfs2008sql /collectionName:imported /confirmed TfsConfig import /sqlinstance:tfs2008sql\Instance /collectionName:imported /confirmed OPTIONS: -------- sqlinstance         The sql instance of the TFS 2005 or 2008 data tier. The TFS databases at that location will be modified directly and will no longer be usable as previous version databases.  Ensure you have back-ups. collectionName      The name of the new Team Project Collection. confirmed           Confirm that you have backed-up databases before importing. This command will automatically look for the TfsIntegration database and verify that all the other required databases exist. In this case it took around 5 minutes to complete the upgrade as the total database size was under 700MB. This was unlike the upgrade of SSW’s production database with over 17GB of data which took a few hours. At the end of the process you should get no errors and no warnings. The Upgrade operation on the ApplicationTier feature has completed. There were 0 errors and 0 warnings. As this is a new server and not a pure upgrade there should not be a problem with the GUID. If you think at any point you will be doing this more than once, for example doing a test migration, or merging many TFS 2008 instances into a single one, then you should go back and rename the physical TfsVersionControl.mdf file to the same as the new collection. This will avoid confusion later down the line. To do this, detach the new collection from the server and rename the physical files. Then reattach and change the physical file locations to match the new name. You can follow http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1122 for a more detailed explanation of how to do this. Figure: Stop the collection so TFS does not take a wobbly when we detach the database. When you try to start the new collection again you will get a conflict with project names and will require to remove the Test Upgrade collection. This is fine and it just needs detached. Figure: Detaching the test upgrade from the new Team Foundation Server 2010 so we can start the new Collection again. You will now be able to start the new upgraded collection and you are ready for testing. Do you remember the stats we took off the TFS 2008 server? TFS2008 File count: Type Count 1 1845 2 15770 Areas & Iterations: 139 Well, now we need to compare them to the TFS 2010 stats, remembering that there will probably be more files under source control. TFS2010 File count: Type Count 1 19288 Areas & Iterations: 139 Lovely, the number of iterations are the same, and the number of files is bigger. Just what we were looking for. Testing the upgraded Team Foundation Server 2010 Project Collection Can we connect to the new collection and project? Figure: We can connect to the new collection and project.   Figure: make sure you can connect to The upgraded projects and that you can see all of the files. Figure: Team Web Access is there and working. Note that for Team Web Access you now use the same port and URL as for TFS 2010. So in this case as I am running on the local box you need to use http://localhost:8080/tfs which will redirect you to http://localhost:8080/tfs/web for the web access. If you need to connect with a Visual Studio 2008 client you will need to use the full path of the new collection, http://[servername]/tfs/[collectionname] and this will work with all of your collections. With Visual Studio 2005 you will only be able to connect to the Default collection and in both VS2008 and VS2005 you will need to install the forward compatibility updates. Visual Studio Team System 2005 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 To make sure that you have everything up to date, make sure that you run SSW Diagnostics and get all green ticks. Upgrade Done! At this point you can send out a notice to everyone that the upgrade is complete and and give them the connection details. You need to remember that at this stage we have 2008 project upgraded to run under TFS 2010 but it is still running under that same process template that it was running before. You can only “enable” 2010 features in a process template you can’t upgrade. So what to do? Well, you need to create a new project and migrate things you want to keep across. Souse code is easy, you can move or Branch, but Work Items are more difficult as you can’t move them between projects. This instance is complicated more as the old project uses the Conchango/EMC Scrum for Team System template and I will need to write a script/application to get the work items across with their attachments in tact. That is my next task! Technorati Tags: TFS 2010,TFS 2008,VS ALM

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• Ajax Control Toolkit Now Supports jQuery

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I’m excited to announce the September 2013 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, which now supports building new Ajax Control Toolkit controls with jQuery. You can download the latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit from http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com or you can install the Ajax Control Toolkit directly within Visual Studio by executing the following NuGet command: The New jQuery Extender Base Class This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit introduces a new jQueryExtender base class. This new base class enables you to create Ajax Control Toolkit controls with jQuery instead of the Microsoft Ajax Library. Currently, only one control in the Ajax Control Toolkit has been rewritten to use the new jQueryExtender base class (only one control has been jQueryized). The ToggleButton control is the first of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls to undergo this dramatic transformation. All of the other controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit are written using the Microsoft Ajax Library. We hope to gradually rewrite these controls as jQuery controls over time. You can view the new jQuery ToggleButton live at the Ajax Control Toolkit sample site: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/ToggleButton/ToggleButton.aspx Why are we rewriting Ajax Control Toolkits with jQuery? There are very few developers actively working with the Microsoft Ajax Library while there are thousands of developers actively working with jQuery. Because we want talented developers in the community to continue to contribute to the Ajax Control Toolkit, and because almost all JavaScript developers are familiar with jQuery, it makes sense to support jQuery with the Ajax Control Toolkit. Also, we believe that the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great framework for Web Forms developers who want to build new ASP.NET controls that use JavaScript. The Ajax Control Toolkit has great features such as automatic bundling, minification, caching, and compression. We want to make it easy for ASP.NET developers to build new controls that take advantage of these features. Instantiating Controls with data-* Attributes We took advantage of the new JQueryExtender base class to change the way that Ajax Control Toolkit controls are instantiated. In the past, adding an Ajax Control Toolkit to a page resulted in inline JavaScript being injected into the page. For example, adding the ToggleButton control to a page injected the following HTML and script: <input id="ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1" name="ctl00$SampleContent$CheckBox1" type="checkbox" checked="checked" /> <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ Sys.Application.add_init(function() { $create(Sys.Extended.UI.ToggleButtonBehavior, {"CheckedImageAlternateText":"Check", "CheckedImageUrl":"ToggleButton_Checked.gif", "ImageHeight":19, "ImageWidth":19, "UncheckedImageAlternateText":"UnCheck", "UncheckedImageUrl":"ToggleButton_Unchecked.gif", "id":"ctl00_SampleContent_ToggleButtonExtender1"}, null, null, $get("ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1")); }); //]]> </script> Notice the call to the JavaScript $create() method at the bottom of the page. When using the Microsoft Ajax Library, this call to the $create() method is necessary to create the Ajax Control Toolkit control. This inline script looks pretty ugly to a modern JavaScript developer. Inline script! Horrible! The jQuery version of the ToggleButton injects the following HTML and script into the page: <input id="ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1" name="ctl00$SampleContent$CheckBox1" type="checkbox" checked="checked" data-act-togglebuttonextender="imageWidth:19, imageHeight:19, uncheckedImageUrl:'ToggleButton_Unchecked.gif', checkedImageUrl:'ToggleButton_Checked.gif', uncheckedImageAlternateText:'I don&#39;t understand why you don&#39;t like ASP.NET', checkedImageAlternateText:'It&#39;s really nice to hear from you that you like ASP.NET'" /> Notice that there is no script! There is no call to the $create() method. In fact, there is no inline JavaScript at all. The jQuery version of the ToggleButton uses an HTML5 data-* attribute instead of an inline script. The ToggleButton control is instantiated with a data-act-togglebuttonextender attribute. Using data-* attributes results in much cleaner markup (You don’t need to feel embarrassed when selecting View Source in your browser). Ajax Control Toolkit versus jQuery So in a jQuery world why is the Ajax Control Toolkit needed at all? Why not just use jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit? For example, there are lots of jQuery ToggleButton plugins floating around the Internet. Why not just use one of these jQuery plugins instead of using the Ajax Control Toolkit ToggleButton control? There are three main reasons why the Ajax Control Toolkit continues to be valuable in a jQuery world: Ajax Control Toolkit controls run on both the server and client jQuery plugins are client only. A jQuery plugin does not include any server-side code. If you need to perform any work on the server – think of the AjaxFileUpload control – then you can’t use a pure jQuery solution. Ajax Control Toolkit controls provide a better Visual Studio experience You don’t get any design time experience when you use jQuery plugins within Visual Studio. Ajax Control Toolkit controls, on the other hand, are designed to work with Visual Studio. For example, you can use the Visual Studio Properties window to set Ajax Control Toolkit control properties. Ajax Control Toolkit controls shield you from working with JavaScript I like writing code in JavaScript. However, not all developers like JavaScript and some developers want to completely avoid writing any JavaScript code at all. The Ajax Control Toolkit enables you to take advantage of JavaScript (and the latest features of HTML5) in your ASP.NET Web Forms websites without writing a single line of JavaScript. Better ToolkitScriptManager Documentation With this release, we have added more detailed documentation for using the ToolkitScriptManager. In particular, we added documentation that describes how to take advantage of the new bundling, minification, compression, and caching features of the Ajax Control Toolkit. The ToolkitScriptManager documentation is part of the Ajax Control Toolkit sample site and it can be read here: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/ToolkitScriptManager/ToolkitScriptManager.aspx Other Fixes This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit includes several important bug fixes. For example, the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control was completely rewritten with this release. Twitter is in the process of retiring the first version of their API. You can read about their plans here: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/planning-for-api-v1-retirement We completely rewrote the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control to use the new Twitter API. To take advantage of the new Twitter API, you must get a key and access token from Twitter and add the key and token to your web.config file. Detailed instructions for using the new version of the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control can be found here: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/Twitter/Twitter.aspx   Summary We’ve made some really great changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit over the last two releases to modernize the toolkit. In the previous release, we updated the Ajax Control Toolkit to use a better bundling, minification, compression, and caching system. With this release, we updated the Ajax Control Toolkit to support jQuery. We also continue to update the Ajax Control Toolkit with important bug fixes. I hope you like these changes and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

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• Mulit-tenant ASP.NET MVC – Controllers

  - by zowens

  Part I – Introduction Part II – Foundation   The time has come to talk about controllers in a multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC architecture. This is actually the most critical design decision you will make when dealing with multi-tenancy with MVC. In my design, I took into account the design goals I mentioned in the introduction about inversion of control and what a tenant is to my design. Be aware that this is only one way to achieve multi-tenant controllers.   The Premise MvcEx (which is a sample written by Rob Ashton) utilizes dynamic controllers. Essentially a controller is “dynamic” in that multiple action results can be placed in different “controllers” with the same name. This approach is a bit too complicated for my design. I wanted to stick with plain old inheritance when dealing with controllers. The basic premise of my controller design is that my main host defines a set of universal controllers. It is the responsibility of the tenant to decide if the tenant would like to utilize these core controllers. This can be done either by straight usage of the controller or inheritance for extension of the functionality defined by the controller. The controller is resolved by a StructureMap container that is attached to the tenant, as discussed in Part II.   Controller Resolution I have been thinking about two different ways to resolve controllers with StructureMap. One way is to use named instances. This is a really easy way to simply pull the controller right out of the container without a lot of fuss. I ultimately chose not to use this approach. The reason for this decision is to ensure that the controllers are named properly. If a controller has a different named instance that the controller type, then the resolution has a significant disconnect and there are no guarantees. The final approach, the one utilized by the sample, is to simply pull all controller types and correlate the type with a controller name. This has a bit of a application start performance disadvantage, but is significantly more approachable for maintainability. For example, if I wanted to go back and add a “ControllerName” attribute, I would just have to change the ControllerFactory to suit my needs.   The Code The container factory that I have built is actually pretty simple. That’s really all we need. The most significant method is the GetControllersFor method. This method makes the model from the Container and determines all the concrete types for IController.  The thing you might notice is that this doesn’t depend on tenants, but rather containers. You could easily use this controller factory for an application that doesn’t utilize multi-tenancy. public class ContainerControllerFactory : IControllerFactory { private readonly ThreadSafeDictionary<IContainer, IDictionary<string, Type>> typeCache; public ContainerControllerFactory(IContainerResolver resolver) { Ensure.Argument.NotNull(resolver, "resolver"); this.ContainerResolver = resolver; this.typeCache = new ThreadSafeDictionary<IContainer, IDictionary<string, Type>>(); } public IContainerResolver ContainerResolver { get; private set; } public virtual IController CreateController(RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName) { var controllerType = this.GetControllerType(requestContext, controllerName); if (controllerType == null) return null; var controller = this.ContainerResolver.Resolve(requestContext).GetInstance(controllerType) as IController; // ensure the action invoker is a ContainerControllerActionInvoker if (controller != null && controller is Controller && !((controller as Controller).ActionInvoker is ContainerControllerActionInvoker)) (controller as Controller).ActionInvoker = new ContainerControllerActionInvoker(this.ContainerResolver); return controller; } public void ReleaseController(IController controller) { if (controller != null && controller is IDisposable) ((IDisposable)controller).Dispose(); } internal static IEnumerable<Type> GetControllersFor(IContainer container) { Ensure.Argument.NotNull(container); return container.Model.InstancesOf<IController>().Select(x => x.ConcreteType).Distinct(); } protected virtual Type GetControllerType(RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName) { Ensure.Argument.NotNull(requestContext, "requestContext"); Ensure.Argument.NotNullOrEmpty(controllerName, "controllerName"); var container = this.ContainerResolver.Resolve(requestContext); var typeDictionary = this.typeCache.GetOrAdd(container, () => GetControllersFor(container).ToDictionary(x => ControllerFriendlyName(x.Name))); Type found = null; if (typeDictionary.TryGetValue(ControllerFriendlyName(controllerName), out found)) return found; return null; } private static string ControllerFriendlyName(string value) { return (value ?? string.Empty).ToLowerInvariant().Without("controller"); } } One thing to note about my implementation is that we do not use namespaces that can be utilized in the default ASP.NET MVC controller factory. This is something that I don’t use and have no desire to implement and test. The reason I am not using namespaces in this situation is because each tenant has its own namespaces and the routing would not make sense in this case.   Because we are using IoC, dependencies are automatically injected into the constructor. For example, a tenant container could implement it’s own IRepository and a controller could be defined in the “main” project. The IRepository from the tenant would be injected into the main project’s controller. This is quite a useful feature.   Again, the source code is on GitHub here.   Up Next Up next is the view resolution. This is a complicated issue, so be prepared. I hope that you have found this series useful. If you have any questions about my implementation so far, send me an email or DM me on Twitter. I have had a lot of great conversations about multi-tenancy so far and I greatly appreciate the feedback!

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• LINQ to SQL and missing Many to Many EntityRefs

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ran into an odd behavior today with a many to many mapping of one of my tables in LINQ to SQL. Many to many mappings aren’t transparent in LINQ to SQL and it maps the link table the same way the SQL schema has it when creating one. In other words LINQ to SQL isn’t smart about many to many mappings and just treats it like the 3 underlying tables that make up the many to many relationship. Iain Galloway has a nice blog entry about Many to Many relationships in LINQ to SQL. I can live with that – it’s not really difficult to deal with this arrangement once mapped, especially when reading data back. Writing is a little more difficult as you do have to insert into two entities for new records, but nothing that can’t be handled in a small business object method with a few lines of code. When I created a database I’ve been using to experiment around with various different OR/Ms recently I found that for some reason LINQ to SQL was completely failing to map even to the linking table. As it turns out there’s a good reason why it fails, can you spot it below? (read on :-}) Here is the original database layout: There’s an items table, a category table and a link table that holds only the foreign keys to the Items and Category tables for a typical M->M relationship. When these three tables are imported into the model the *look* correct – I do get the relationships added (after modifying the entity names to strip the prefix): The relationship looks perfectly fine, both in the designer as well as in the XML document: <Table Name="dbo.wws_Item_Categories" Member="ItemCategories"> <Type Name="ItemCategory"> <Column Name="ItemId" Type="System.Guid" DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL" CanBeNull="false" /> <Column Name="CategoryId" Type="System.Guid" DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL" CanBeNull="false" /> <Association Name="ItemCategory_Category" Member="Categories" ThisKey="CategoryId" OtherKey="Id" Type="Category" /> <Association Name="Item_ItemCategory" Member="Item" ThisKey="ItemId" OtherKey="Id" Type="Item" IsForeignKey="true" /> </Type> </Table> <Table Name="dbo.wws_Categories" Member="Categories"> <Type Name="Category"> <Column Name="Id" Type="System.Guid" DbType="UniqueIdentifier NOT NULL" IsPrimaryKey="true" IsDbGenerated="true" CanBeNull="false" /> <Column Name="ParentId" Type="System.Guid" DbType="UniqueIdentifier" CanBeNull="true" /> <Column Name="CategoryName" Type="System.String" DbType="NVarChar(150)" CanBeNull="true" /> <Column Name="CategoryDescription" Type="System.String" DbType="NVarChar(MAX)" CanBeNull="true" /> <Column Name="tstamp" AccessModifier="Internal" Type="System.Data.Linq.Binary" DbType="rowversion" CanBeNull="true" IsVersion="true" /> <Association Name="ItemCategory_Category" Member="ItemCategory" ThisKey="Id" OtherKey="CategoryId" Type="ItemCategory" IsForeignKey="true" /> </Type> </Table> However when looking at the code generated these navigation properties (also on Item) are completely missing: [global::System.Data.Linq.Mapping.TableAttribute(Name="dbo.wws_Item_Categories")] [global::System.Runtime.Serialization.DataContractAttribute()] public partial class ItemCategory : Westwind.BusinessFramework.EntityBase { private System.Guid _ItemId; private System.Guid _CategoryId; public ItemCategory() { } [global::System.Data.Linq.Mapping.ColumnAttribute(Storage="_ItemId", DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL")] [global::System.Runtime.Serialization.DataMemberAttribute(Order=1)] public System.Guid ItemId { get { return this._ItemId; } set { if ((this._ItemId != value)) { this._ItemId = value; } } } [global::System.Data.Linq.Mapping.ColumnAttribute(Storage="_CategoryId", DbType="uniqueidentifier NOT NULL")] [global::System.Runtime.Serialization.DataMemberAttribute(Order=2)] public System.Guid CategoryId { get { return this._CategoryId; } set { if ((this._CategoryId != value)) { this._CategoryId = value; } } } } Notice that the Item and Category association properties which should be EntityRef properties are completely missing. They’re there in the model, but the generated code – not so much. So what’s the problem here? The problem – it appears – is that LINQ to SQL requires primary keys on all entities it tracks. In order to support tracking – even of the link table entity – the link table requires a primary key. Real obvious ain’t it, especially since the designer happily lets you import the table and even shows the relationship and implicitly the related properties. Adding an Id field as a Pk to the database and then importing results in this model layout: which properly generates the Item and Category properties into the link entity. It’s ironic that LINQ to SQL *requires* the PK in the middle – the Entity Framework requires that a link table have *only* the two foreign key fields in a table in order to recognize a many to many relation. EF actually handles the M->M relation directly without the intermediate link entity unlike LINQ to SQL. [updated from comments – 12/24/2009] Another approach is to set up both ItemId and CategoryId in the database which shows up in LINQ to SQL like this: This also work in creating the Category and Item fields in the ItemCategory entity. Ultimately this is probably the best approach as it also guarantees uniqueness of the keys and so helps in database integrity. It took me a while to figure out WTF was going on here – lulled by the designer to think that the properties should be when they were not. It’s actually a well documented feature of L2S that each entity in the model requires a Pk but of course that’s easy to miss when the model viewer shows it to you and even the underlying XML model shows the Associations properly. This is one of the issue with L2S of course – you have to play by its rules and once you hit one of those rules there’s no way around them – you’re stuck with what it requires which in this case meant changing the database.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ADO.NET  LINQ  

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• July 2013 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I’m super excited to announce the July 2013 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. You can download the new version of the Ajax Control Toolkit from CodePlex (http://ajaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com) or install the Ajax Control Toolkit from NuGet: With this release, we have completely rewritten the way the Ajax Control Toolkit combines, minifies, gzips, and caches JavaScript files. The goal of this release was to improve the performance of the Ajax Control Toolkit and make it easier to create custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. Improving Ajax Control Toolkit Performance Previous releases of the Ajax Control Toolkit optimized performance for a single page but not multiple pages. When you visited each page in an app, the Ajax Control Toolkit would combine all of the JavaScript files required by the controls in the page into a new JavaScript file. So, even if every page in your app used the exact same controls, visitors would need to download a new combined Ajax Control Toolkit JavaScript file for each page visited. Downloading new scripts for each page that you visit does not lead to good performance. In general, you want to make as few requests for JavaScript files as possible and take maximum advantage of caching. For most apps, you would get much better performance if you could specify all of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls that you need for your entire app and create a single JavaScript file which could be used across your entire app. What a great idea! Introducing Control Bundles With this release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, we introduce the concept of Control Bundles. You define a Control Bundle to indicate the set of Ajax Control Toolkit controls that you want to use in your app. You define Control Bundles in a file located in the root of your application named AjaxControlToolkit.config. For example, the following AjaxControlToolkit.config file defines two Control Bundles: <ajaxControlToolkit> <controlBundles> <controlBundle> <control name="CalendarExtender" /> <control name="ComboBox" /> </controlBundle> <controlBundle name="CalendarBundle"> <control name="CalendarExtender"></control> </controlBundle> </controlBundles> </ajaxControlToolkit> The first Control Bundle in the file above does not have a name. When a Control Bundle does not have a name then it becomes the default Control Bundle for your entire application. The default Control Bundle is used by the ToolkitScriptManager by default. For example, the default Control Bundle is used when you declare the ToolkitScriptManager like this:  <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager runat=”server” /> The default Control Bundle defined in the file above includes all of the scripts required for the CalendarExtender and ComboBox controls. All of the scripts required for both of these controls are combined, minified, gzipped, and cached automatically. The AjaxControlToolkit.config file above also defines a second Control Bundle with the name CalendarBundle. Here’s how you would use the CalendarBundle with the ToolkitScriptManager: <ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager runat="server"> <ControlBundles> <ajaxToolkit:ControlBundle Name="CalendarBundle" /> </ControlBundles> </ajaxToolkit:ToolkitScriptManager> In this case, only the JavaScript files required by the CalendarExtender control, and not the ComboBox, would be downloaded because the CalendarBundle lists only the CalendarExtender control. You can use multiple named control bundles with the ToolkitScriptManager and you will get all of the scripts from both bundles. Support for ControlBundles is a new feature of the ToolkitScriptManager that we introduced with this release. We extended the ToolkitScriptManager to support the Control Bundles that you can define in the AjaxControlToolkit.config file. Let me be explicit about the rules for Control Bundles: 1. If you do not create an AjaxControlToolkit.config file then the ToolkitScriptManager will download all of the JavaScript files required for all of the controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. This is the easy but low performance option. 2. If you create an AjaxControlToolkit.config file and create a ControlBundle without a name then the ToolkitScriptManager uses that Control Bundle by default. For example, if you plan to use only the CalendarExtender and ComboBox controls in your application then you should create a default bundle that lists only these two controls. 3. If you create an AjaxControlToolkit.config file and create one or more named Control Bundles then you can use these named Control Bundles with the ToolkitScriptManager. For example, you might want to use different subsets of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls in different sections of your app. I should also mention that you can use the AjaxControlToolkit.config file with custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls – new controls that you write. For example, here is how you would register a set of custom controls from an assembly named MyAssembly: <ajaxControlToolkit> <controlBundles> <controlBundle name="CustomBundle"> <control name="MyAssembly.MyControl1" assembly="MyAssembly" /> <control name="MyAssembly.MyControl2" assembly="MyAssembly" /> </controlBundle> </ajaxControlToolkit> What about ASP.NET Bundling and Minification? The idea of Control Bundles is similar to the idea of Script Bundles used in ASP.NET Bundling and Minification. You might be wondering why we didn’t simply use Script Bundles with the Ajax Control Toolkit. There were several reasons. First, ASP.NET Bundling does not work with scripts embedded in an assembly. Because all of the scripts used by the Ajax Control Toolkit are embedded in the AjaxControlToolkit.dll assembly, ASP.NET Bundling was not an option. Second, Web Forms developers typically think at the level of controls and not at the level of individual scripts. We believe that it makes more sense for a Web Forms developer to specify the controls that they need in an app (CalendarExtender, ToggleButton) instead of the individual scripts that they need in an app (the 15 or so scripts required by the CalenderExtender). Finally, ASP.NET Bundling does not work with older versions of ASP.NET. The Ajax Control Toolkit needs to support ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET 4.0, and ASP.NET 4.5. Therefore, using ASP.NET Bundling was not an option. There is nothing wrong with using Control Bundles and Script Bundles side-by-side. The ASP.NET 4.0 and 4.5 ToolkitScriptManager supports both approaches to bundling scripts. Using the AjaxControlToolkit.CombineScriptsHandler Browsers cache JavaScript files by URL. For example, if you request the exact same JavaScript file from two different URLs then the exact same JavaScript file must be downloaded twice. However, if you request the same JavaScript file from the same URL more than once then it only needs to be downloaded once. With this release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, we have introduced a new HTTP Handler named the AjaxControlToolkit.CombineScriptsHandler. If you register this handler in your web.config file then the Ajax Control Toolkit can cache your JavaScript files for up to one year in the future automatically. You should register the handler in two places in your web.config file: in the <httpHandlers> section and the <system.webServer> section (don’t forget to register the handler for the AjaxFileUpload while you are there!). <httpHandlers> <add verb="*" path="AjaxFileUploadHandler.axd" type="AjaxControlToolkit.AjaxFileUploadHandler, AjaxControlToolkit" /> <add verb="*" path="CombineScriptsHandler.axd" type="AjaxControlToolkit.CombineScriptsHandler, AjaxControlToolkit" /> </httpHandlers> <system.webServer> <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" /> <handlers> <add name="AjaxFileUploadHandler" verb="*" path="AjaxFileUploadHandler.axd" type="AjaxControlToolkit.AjaxFileUploadHandler, AjaxControlToolkit" /> <add name="CombineScriptsHandler" verb="*" path="CombineScriptsHandler.axd" type="AjaxControlToolkit.CombineScriptsHandler, AjaxControlToolkit" /> </handlers> <system.webServer> The handler is only used in release mode and not in debug mode. You can enable release mode in your web.config file like this: <compilation debug=”false”> You also can override the web.config setting with the ToolkitScriptManager like this: <act:ToolkitScriptManager ScriptMode=”Release” runat=”server”/> In release mode, scripts are combined, minified, gzipped, and cached with a far future cache header automatically. When the handler is not registered, scripts are requested from the page that contains the ToolkitScriptManager: When the handler is registered in the web.config file, scripts are requested from the handler: If you want the best performance, always register the handler. That way, the Ajax Control Toolkit can cache the bundled scripts across page requests with a far future cache header. If you don’t register the handler then a new JavaScript file must be downloaded whenever you travel to a new page. Dynamic Bundling and Minification Previous releases of the Ajax Control Toolkit used a Visual Studio build task to minify the JavaScript files used by the Ajax Control Toolkit controls. The disadvantage of this approach to minification is that it made it difficult to create custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. Starting with this release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, we support dynamic minification. The JavaScript files in the Ajax Control Toolkit are minified at runtime instead of at build time. Scripts are minified only when in release mode. You can specify release mode with the web.config file or with the ToolkitScriptManager ScriptMode property. Because of this change, the Ajax Control Toolkit now depends on the Ajax Minifier. You must include a reference to AjaxMin.dll in your Visual Studio project or you cannot take advantage of runtime minification. If you install the Ajax Control Toolkit from NuGet then AjaxMin.dll is added to your project as a NuGet dependency automatically. If you download the Ajax Control Toolkit from CodePlex then the AjaxMin.dll is included in the download. This change means that you no longer need to do anything special to create a custom Ajax Control Toolkit. As an open source project, we hope more people will contribute to the Ajax Control Toolkit (Yes, I am looking at you.) We have been working hard on making it much easier to create new custom controls. More on this subject with the next release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. A Single Visual Studio Solution We also made substantial changes to the Visual Studio solution and projects used by the Ajax Control Toolkit with this release. This change will matter to you only if you need to work directly with the Ajax Control Toolkit source code. In previous releases of the Ajax Control Toolkit, we maintained separate solution and project files for ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET 4.0, and ASP.NET 4.5. Starting with this release, we now support a single Visual Studio 2012 solution that takes advantage of multi-targeting to build ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET 4.0, and ASP.NET 4.5 versions of the toolkit. This change means that you need Visual Studio 2012 to open the Ajax Control Toolkit project downloaded from CodePlex. For details on how we setup multi-targeting, please see Budi Adiono’s blog post: http://www.budiadiono.com/2013/07/25/visual-studio-2012-multi-targeting-framework-project/ Summary You can take advantage of this release of the Ajax Control Toolkit to significantly improve the performance of your website. You need to do two things: 1) You need to create an AjaxControlToolkit.config file which lists the controls used in your app and 2) You need to register the AjaxControlToolkit.CombineScriptsHandler in the web.config file. We made substantial changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit with this release. We think these changes will result in much better performance for multipage apps and make the process of building custom controls much easier. As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 25, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 25, 2010New ProjectsAptusSoftware.Threading: AptusSoftware.Threading is a class library designed primarily to assist in the development of multi-threaded WinForm applications, although there i...AxiomGameDesigner: It is going to be a universal scene editor for Axiom 3D game engine. It is in pure C# and will be kept portable to MONO for compatibility with linu...Badger - Unity Productivity Extensions: A set of Microsoft Unity Extensions. Why Badger? Because I love badgers.Business & System Analysis Templates and Best Practices for Russian: http://saway.codeplex.com/Conectayas: Conectayas is an open source "Connect Four" alike game but transformable to "Tic-Tac-Toe" and to a lot of similar games that uses mouse. Written in...FastCode: .NET 3.5 Extensions set to increase coding speed.Hundiyas: Hundiyas is an open source "Battleship" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses mouse. This cross-platform and cro...Icelandic Online Banking: Icelandic Online Banking is project defining a web service interface for online banking.IE8 AddOns XML Creator: Application that helps on creating the xml files for IE8 Accelerators, Search Providers and the markup for Web Slices.iKnowledge: a asp.net mvc demoLearn ASP.NET MVC: Learn ASP.NET MVC is a project for the members of the Peer Learning group in Silicon Valley. It contains the SportsStore solution from the Pro ASP...Live at Education Meta Web-Service: Live at Education Meta Web-Service is intended to abstract from several technologies that are included in Live@edu set of services. This web-ser...Low level wave sound output for VB.NET: Low level sound output class for VB.NET using platform invocation services to call winmm.dllMailQ: MailQ makes it easier for developers to send mail messages from an application. The system sends mails based on a database queue system (store, se...Managed DXGI: Managed DXGI library is Fully managed wrapper writen on C# for DXGI 1.0 and 1.1 technology. It makes easier to support DXGI in managed application....Multivalue AutoComplete WinForms TextBox in C#: This project is a sample application that demonstrates how to create a multivalue WinForms textbox in C# using .NET Framework 3.5.Nifty CSharp Tools: Nifty CSharp Tools, will contain various tools and snippets. IRCBot, splashscreens, linq, world of warcraft log parsing, screenshot uploaders, twi...PHP MPQ: A port of StormLib to PHP for handling Blizzard MPQ files.RedDevils strategy - Project Hoshimi Programming Battle: Source Code of RedDevils strategy. Imagine Cup 2008 - Project Hoshimi Programming Battle.RNUNIT: rNunit is a distributed Nunit project. Many application these days are client-server application, distributed application and regular unit testing ...Samar Solution: Samar Solutions is a business system for office automation.Silverlight OOMRPG Game Engine: Silverlight OOMRPG Game EngineSimulator: GPSSimulatorSLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit: SLARToolkit is a flexible Augmented Reality library for Silverlight with the aim to make real time Augmented Reality applications with Silverlight ...Spiral Architecture Driven Development (SADD) for Russian: Это русская версия сайта sadd.codeplex.comSQLSnapshotManager: Easily manage SQL Server database snapshots in a easy to use visual interface.Twilio with VB.NET MVC: Twilio with VB.NET MVC is a sample application for developing with Twilio's REST based telephony API. It includes an XML Schema of the TwiML respon...Ultra Speed Dial: UltraSpeedDial.com - Online Speed Dial Page.Visual HTML Editor justHTML: justHTML - is simle windows-application WYSIWYG editor that allow everyone - without any knowledge of HTML - to create and edit web-pages. It supp...WinMTR.NET: .NET Clone of the popular Windows clone of the popular Linux Matt's TracerouteWPF Dialogs: "WPF Dialogs" is a library for different Dialogs in WPF (e.g. FolderBrowseDialog, SaveFileDialog, OpenFileDialog etc.). These Dialogs are written i...WPFLogin: A small Login window in WPF and C#XNA PerformanceTimers: CPU Timers for Windows and Xbox360. Can track multiple threads, and presents output as a log on-screen.New ReleasesAptusSoftware.Threading: 2.0.0: First public release. This release is in production as part of several commercial applications and is stable. The source code download includes a...BizTalk Software Factory: BizTalk Software Factory v2.1: This is a service release for the BizTalk Software Factory for BizTalk Server 2009, containing so far: Fix for x64: the SN.EXE tool is now locate...Business & System Analysis Templates and Best Practices for Russian: R00 The Place reserver: Just to reserve the place Will be filled out soonChronos WPF: Chronos v1.0 Beta 2: Added a new SplashScreen Added a new Login View and implemented Log Off Added a new PasswordBoxHelper (http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/371...dotNetTips: dotNetTips.Utility 3.5 R2: This is a new release (version 3.5.0.3) compatible with .NET 3.5. Lots of new classes/features!! Requires SP1 if using the Entity Framework extensi...fleXdoc: template-based server-side document generator (docx): fleXdoc 1.0 beta 3: The third and final beta of fleXdoc. fleXdoc consists of a webservice and a (test)client for the service. Make sure you also download the testclien...FluentPS: FluentPS v1.0: - FluentPS is moved from ASMX to WCF interface of the Project Server Interface (PSI) - Impersonation changes to work in compliance with WCF interfa...FolderSize: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.4.0: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.3.0 A simple utility intended to be used to scan harddrives for the folders that take most place and display this to the user...iTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.1.3707 Beta 3: As promised, the iTuner Automated Librarian is now available. This automatically cleans an entire album of dead tracks and duplicates as tracks ar...Live at Education Meta Web-Service: LAEMWS v 1.0 beta: Release Candidate for LAEMWS.Macaw Reusable Code Library: LanguageConfigurationSolution: This Solution helps developing a multi language publishing web siteManaged DXGI: Initial Release.: Base declaration of interfaces, most of them untested yet.Math.NET Numerics: 2010.2.24.667 Build: Latest alpha buildMiniTwitter: 1.08.1: MiniTwitter 1.08.1 更新内容 変更 インクリメンタル検索時には大文字小文字の区別をしないように変更 クライアント名の表示を本家にあわせて from から via に変更 修正 公式 RT 時にステータスが上に表示されたり二重に表示されるバグを修正 自分が自分へ返信...Multivalue AutoComplete WinForms TextBox in C#: 1.0 First public release: Multivalue autocomplete textbox control and host application in this release are released in a single Visual Studio 2008 projects. See my related b...NMock3: NMock3 - Beta3, .NET 3.5: This release has some exciting new features. Please start providing feedback on the tutorials. The first several are complete and the rest are no...nxAjax - an asp.net ajax library using jQuery: nxAjax v3 codeplex 7: nxAjax v3 codeplex 7 binary and test website. Bug Fixed: ajax:Form control Add: Drag and drop Rewritten: DragnDropManager DragPanel DropPan...Office Apps: 0.8.7: whats new? Document.Editor and Document.Viewer now supports FlowDocument (.xaml) files bug fix'sPDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.3: Application PrerequisitesMicrosoft Windows Operating Systems (XP (tested) - Vista - 7) Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime A PDF rendering sof...ShellLight: ShellLight 0.1.0.1 Src: Codeplex project released. This is only a preview of the product. Until the first final release there will be many improvements.Silverlight OOMRPG Game Engine: SilverlightGameTutorialSolution v1.01: Please visit my blog for Silverlight OOMROG Game Tutorial: http://www.cnblogs.com/Jax/archive/2010/02/24/1673053.html.Simple Savant: Simple Savant v0.4: Added support for full-text indexing (See Full-Text Indexing) Added support for attribute spanning and compression for property values larger tha...Spiral Architecture Driven Development (SADD) for Russian: R00: R00 to reserve site nameTeamReview - TFS Code Review: Release 1.1.3: Release Features New expanded product positioning for capturing any targeted coding work as a trackable, assignable, reportable Work Item for any r...Text Designer Outline Text Library: 10th minor release: Version 0.3.1 (10th minor release)Fixed the gradient brush being too big for the text, resulting in not much gradient shown in the text. Gradient...TFS Workflow Control: TeamExplorer and TSWA control 1.0 for TFS 2010 RC: This is a special version for TFS 2010 RC. Use the RC version of the power tools to modify the layout of your work items (http://visualstudiogaller...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.7) - VS2010 RC Support: This update adds support for Visual Studio 2010 RC in addition to Visual Studio 2008. Please note that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is NOT supported a...Tumblen3: tumblen3 Version 25Feb2010: ready for Twitter's xAuthUMD文本编辑器: UMDEditor文本编辑器V2.1.0: 2.1.0 (2010-02-24) 增加查找章节内指定文本内容的功能 2.0.4 (2010-02-06) 章节内容框增加右键菜单，包含编辑文本的基本操作 ------------------------------------------------------- 执行 reg.bat ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30224.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual HTML Editor justHTML: Latest binary: Latest buid here. Executable and mshtml.dll included in this archive. Ready to use ;)Visual HTML Editor justHTML: Source code for version 2.5: Visual studio 2008 project with full source code.VOB2MKV: vob2mkv-1.0.2: The release vob2mkv-1.0.2 is a feature update of the VOB2MKV project. It now includes a DirectShow source filter, MKVSOURCE. A source filter allo...WinMTR.NET: V 1.0: V 1.0WPF Dialogs: Version 0.1.0: Version 0.1.0 FolderBrowseDialog is implementet for more information look here Version 0.1.0 (german: Version 0.1.0 - Deutsch).WPF Dialogs: Version 0.1.1: Version 0.1.1 Features FolderBrowseDialog was extended / FolderBrowseDialog - Deutsch wurde erweitertXNA PerformanceTimers: XNA PerformanceTimers 0.1: Initial release.Zeta Resource Editor: Release 2010-02-24: Added HTTP proxy server support.Most Popular ProjectsASP.NET Ajax LibraryManaged Extensibility FrameworkWindows 7 USB/DVD Download ToolDotNetZip LibraryMDownloaderVirtual Router - Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2MFCMAPIDroid ExplorerUseful Sharepoint Designer Custom Workflow ActivitiesOxiteMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netBlogEngine.NETRawrInfoServiceSLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality ToolkitNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLRjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesRapid Entity Framework. (ORM). CTP 2Common Context Adapters

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• Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

  - by Stephen Walther

  Microsoft has asked my company, Superexpert Consulting, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the Ajax Control Toolkit moving forward. In this blog entry, I discuss our strategy for improving the Ajax Control Toolkit. Why the Ajax Control Toolkit? The Ajax Control Toolkit is one of the most popular projects on CodePlex. In fact, some have argued that it is among the most successful open-source projects of all time. It consistently receives over 3,500 downloads a day (not weekends -- workdays). A mind-boggling number of developers use the Ajax Control Toolkit in their ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Why does the Ajax Control Toolkit continue to be such a popular project? The Ajax Control Toolkit fills a strong need in the ASP.NET Web Forms world. The Toolkit enables Web Forms developers to build richly interactive JavaScript applications without writing any JavaScript. For example, by taking advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit, a Web Forms developer can add modal dialogs, popup calendars, and client tabs to a web application simply by dragging web controls onto a page. The Ajax Control Toolkit is not for everyone. If you are comfortable writing JavaScript then I recommend that you investigate using jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit. However, if you are a Web Forms developer and you don’t want to get your hands dirty writing JavaScript, then the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great solution. The Ajax Control Toolkit is Vast The Ajax Control Toolkit consists of 40 controls. That’s a lot of controls (For the sake of comparison, jQuery UI consists of only 8 controls – those slackers J). Furthermore, developers expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on browsers both old and new. For example, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 9 and every version of Internet Explorer in between. People also expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. And, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with different operating systems. Yikes, that is a lot of combinations. The biggest challenge which my company faces in supporting the Ajax Control Toolkit is ensuring that the Ajax Control Toolkit works across all of these different browsers and operating systems. Testing, Testing, Testing Because we wanted to ensure that we could easily test the Ajax Control Toolkit with different browsers, the very first thing that we did was to set up a dedicated testing server. The dedicated server -- named Schizo -- hosts 4 virtual machines so that we can run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 at the same time (We also use the virtual machines to host the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari). The five developers on our team (plus me) can each publish to a separate FTP website on the testing server. That way, we can quickly test how changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit affect different browsers. QUnit Tests for the Ajax Control Toolkit Introducing regressions – introducing new bugs when trying to fix existing bugs – is the concern which prevents me from sleeping well at night. There are so many people using the Ajax Control Toolkit in so many unique scenarios, that it is difficult to make improvements to the Ajax Control Toolkit without introducing regressions. In order to avoid regressions, we decided early on that it was extremely important to build good test coverage for the 40 controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We’ve been focusing a lot of energy on building automated JavaScript unit tests which we can use to help us discover regressions. We decided to write the unit tests with the QUnit test framework. We picked QUnit because it is quickly becoming the standard unit testing framework in the JavaScript world. For example, it is the unit testing framework used by the jQuery team, the jQuery UI team, and many jQuery UI plugin developers. We had to make several enhancements to the QUnit framework in order to test the Ajax Control Toolkit. For example, QUnit does not support tests which include postbacks. We modified the QUnit framework so that it works with IFrames so we could perform postbacks in our automated tests. At this point, we have written hundreds of QUnit tests. For example, we have written 135 QUnit tests for the Accordion control. The QUnit tests are included with the Ajax Control Toolkit source code in a project named AjaxControlToolkit.Tests. You can run all of the QUnit tests contained in the project by opening the Default.aspx page. Automating the QUnit Tests across Multiple Browsers Automated tests are useless if no one ever runs them. In order for the QUnit tests to be useful, we needed an easy way to run the tests automatically against a matrix of browsers. We wanted to run the unit tests against Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari automatically. Expecting a developer to run QUnit tests against every browser after every check-in is just too much to expect. It takes 20 seconds to run the Accordion QUnit tests. We are testing against 8 browsers. That would require the developer to open 8 browsers and wait for the results after each change in code. Too much work. Therefore, we built a JavaScript Test Server. Our JavaScript Test Server project was inspired by John Resig’s TestSwarm project. The JavaScript Test Server runs our QUnit tests in a swarm of browsers (running on different operating systems) automatically. Here’s how the JavaScript Test Server works: 1. We created an ASP.NET page named RunTest.aspx that constantly polls the JavaScript Test Server for a new set of QUnit tests to run. After the RunTest.aspx page runs the QUnit tests, the RunTest.aspx records the test results back to the JavaScript Test Server. 2. We opened the RunTest.aspx page on instances of Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Google, and Safari. Now that we have the JavaScript Test Server setup, we can run all of our QUnit tests against all of the browsers which we need to support with a single click of a button. A New Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit Each Month The Ajax Control Toolkit Issue Tracker contains over one thousand five hundred open issues and feature requests. So we have plenty of work on our plates J At CodePlex, anyone can vote for an issue to be fixed. Originally, we planned to fix issues in order of their votes. However, we quickly discovered that this approach was inefficient. Constantly switching back and forth between different controls was too time-consuming. It takes time to re-familiarize yourself with a control. Instead, we decided to focus on two or three controls each month and really focus on fixing the issues with those controls. This way, we can fix sets of related issues and avoid the randomization caused by context switching. Our team works in monthly sprints. We plan to do another release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each and every month. So far, we have competed one release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which was released on April 1, 2011. We plan to release a new version in early May. Conclusion Fortunately, I work with a team of smart developers. We currently have 5 developers working on the Ajax Control Toolkit (not full-time, they are also building two very cool ASP.NET MVC applications). All the developers who work on our team are required to have strong JavaScript, jQuery, and ASP.NET MVC skills. In the interest of being as transparent as possible about our work on the Ajax Control Toolkit, I plan to blog frequently about our team’s ongoing work. In my next blog entry, I plan to write about the two Ajax Control Toolkit controls which are the focus of our work for next release.

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• Behind ASP.NET MVC Mock Objects

  - by imran_ku07

     Introduction:           I think this sentence now become very familiar to ASP.NET MVC developers that "ASP.NET MVC is designed with testability in mind". But what ASP.NET MVC team did for making applications build with ASP.NET MVC become easily testable? Understanding this is also very important because it gives you some help when designing custom classes. So in this article i will discuss some abstract classes provided by ASP.NET MVC team for the various ASP.NET intrinsic objects, including HttpContext, HttpRequest, and HttpResponse for making these objects as testable. I will also discuss that why it is hard and difficult to test ASP.NET Web Forms.      Description:           Starting from Classic ASP to ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Intrinsic objects is extensively used in all form of web application. They provide information about Request, Response, Server, Application and so on. But ASP.NET MVC uses these intrinsic objects in some abstract manner. The reason for this abstraction is to make your application testable. So let see the abstraction.           As we know that ASP.NET MVC uses the same runtime engine as ASP.NET Web Form uses, therefore the first receiver of the request after IIS and aspnet_filter.dll is aspnet_isapi.dll. This will start the application domain. With the application domain up and running, ASP.NET does some initialization and after some initialization it will call Application_Start if it is defined. Then the normal HTTP pipeline event handlers will be executed including both HTTP Modules and global.asax event handlers. One of the HTTP Module is registered by ASP.NET MVC is UrlRoutingModule. The purpose of this module is to match a route defined in global.asax. Every matched route must have IRouteHandler. In default case this is MvcRouteHandler which is responsible for determining the HTTP Handler which returns MvcHandler (which is derived from IHttpHandler). In simple words, Route has MvcRouteHandler which returns MvcHandler which is the IHttpHandler of current request. In between HTTP pipeline events the handler of ASP.NET MVC, MvcHandler.ProcessRequest will be executed and shown as given below,          void IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)          {                    this.ProcessRequest(context);          }          protected virtual void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)          {                    // HttpContextWrapper inherits from HttpContextBase                    HttpContextBase ctxBase = new HttpContextWrapper(context);                    this.ProcessRequest(ctxBase);          }          protected internal virtual void ProcessRequest(HttpContextBase ctxBase)          {                    . . .          }             HttpContextBase is the base class. HttpContextWrapper inherits from HttpContextBase, which is the parent class that include information about a single HTTP request. This is what ASP.NET MVC team did, just wrap old instrinsic HttpContext into HttpContextWrapper object and provide opportunity for other framework to provide their own implementation of HttpContextBase. For example           public class MockHttpContext : HttpContextBase          {                    . . .          }                     As you can see, it is very easy to create your own HttpContext. That's what did the third party mock frameworks like TypeMock, Moq, RhinoMocks, or NMock2 to provide their own implementation of ASP.NET instrinsic objects classes.           The key point to note here is the types of ASP.NET instrinsic objects. In ASP.NET Web Form and ASP.NET MVC. For example in ASP.NET Web Form the type of Request object is HttpRequest (which is sealed) and in ASP.NET MVC the type of Request object is HttpRequestBase. This is one of the reason that makes test in ASP.NET WebForm is difficult. because their is no base class and the HttpRequest class is sealed, therefore it cannot act as a base class to others. On the other side ASP.NET MVC always uses a base class to give a chance to third parties and unit test frameworks to create thier own implementation ASP.NET instrinsic object.           Therefore we can say that in ASP.NET MVC, instrinsic objects are of type base classes (for example HttpContextBase) .Actually these base classes had it's own implementation of same interface as the intrinsic objects it abstracts. It includes only virtual members which simply throws an exception. ASP.NET MVC also provides the corresponding wrapper classes (for example, HttpRequestWrapper) which provides a concrete implementation of the base classes in the form of ASP.NET intrinsic object. Other wrapper classes may be defined by third parties in the form of a mock object for testing purpose.           So we can say that a Request object in ASP.NET MVC may be HttpRequestWrapper or may be MockRequestWrapper(assuming that MockRequestWrapper class is used for testing purpose). Here is list of ASP.NET instrinsic and their implementation in ASP.NET MVC in the form of base and wrapper classes. Base Class Wrapper Class ASP.NET Intrinsic Object Description HttpApplicationStateBase HttpApplicationStateWrapper Application HttpApplicationStateBase abstracts the intrinsic Application object HttpBrowserCapabilitiesBase HttpBrowserCapabilitiesWrapper HttpBrowserCapabilities HttpBrowserCapabilitiesBase abstracts the HttpBrowserCapabilities class HttpCachePolicyBase HttpCachePolicyWrapper HttpCachePolicy HttpCachePolicyBase abstracts the HttpCachePolicy class HttpContextBase HttpContextWrapper HttpContext HttpContextBase abstracts the intrinsic HttpContext object HttpFileCollectionBase HttpFileCollectionWrapper HttpFileCollection HttpFileCollectionBase abstracts the HttpFileCollection class HttpPostedFileBase HttpPostedFileWrapper HttpPostedFile HttpPostedFileBase abstracts the HttpPostedFile class HttpRequestBase HttpRequestWrapper Request HttpRequestBase abstracts the intrinsic Request object HttpResponseBase HttpResponseWrapper Response HttpResponseBase abstracts the intrinsic Response object HttpServerUtilityBase HttpServerUtilityWrapper Server HttpServerUtilityBase abstracts the intrinsic Server object HttpSessionStateBase HttpSessionStateWrapper Session HttpSessionStateBase abstracts the intrinsic Session object HttpStaticObjectsCollectionBase HttpStaticObjectsCollectionWrapper HttpStaticObjectsCollection HttpStaticObjectsCollectionBase abstracts the HttpStaticObjectsCollection class      Summary:           ASP.NET MVC provides a set of abstract classes for ASP.NET instrinsic objects in the form of base classes, allowing someone to create their own implementation. In addition, ASP.NET MVC also provide set of concrete classes in the form of wrapper classes. This design really makes application easier to test and even application may replace concrete implementation with thier own implementation, which makes ASP.NET MVC very flexable.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 14, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 14, 2010New ProjectsBeerMath.net: BeerMath.net lets brewers calculate expected values for their recipes. Written entirely in C#, it can be used in any .Net language.Bible Study: Данный проект предусматривает создание программного обеспечения, предоставляющего пользователю гибкие и мощные инструменты для чтения и изучения Пи...E-Messenger: Description détaillé du sujet : Développement d'une application (client lourd) de messagerie instantané et de partage de fichier interne à ESPRIT....Facebook Azure Toolkit: The Facebook Azure Toolit provides a flexible and scalable hosting platform for the smallest and largest of Facebook applications. This toolkit hel...Gherkin editor: A simple text editor to write specifications using Gherkin. The editor supports code completion, syntax highlighting, spell checker and more.Mydra Center: Mydra Center is a Media center with the particularity to be very flexible, allowing developers to extend it and add new features. The philosophy be...MyTwits - A rich Twitter client for Windows powered by WPF: MyTwits is a free Twitter client for Windows XP/Vista/7 powered by WPF which gives you freedom to twit right from your desktop. You can do almost a...na laborke: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaasssssssssssssssddddddddddddddddddddfffffffffffffNMTools: The "Network Management Tools" (NMTools) complete OpenSLIM CMDB capa­bil­i­ties with Network Discovery, Automa­tion and Con­fig­u­ra­tion Man­age­m...orionSRO: This project aims to make a fully functional server.Project Naduvar: Project Naduvar, is a centralized Locking Service in distribute systems. You can use this service in any of your existing distributed application. ...Silverlight Input Keyboard: Silverlight Input Keyboard and Behaviorsuh: uh.py is a command line tool that helps developers porting native projects from a case-insensitive filesystem to a case-sensitive filesystem by sea...New ReleasesAmiBroker Plug-ins with C#. A non official AmiBroker Plug-in SDK: AmiBroker Plug-in SDK v0.0.3: Small changesAmiBroker Plug-ins with C#. A non official AmiBroker Plug-in SDK: AmiBroker Plug-in SDK v0.0.4: Small updatesAStyle AddIn for SharpDevelop (Alex): 2.0 Production: #D 3.* add in with updated GUI elements.Coding Cockerel code samples: Validation with ASP .NET MVC and jQuery: Code sample related to the following blog post, http://codingcockerel.co.uk/consistent-validation-with-asp-net-mvc-and-jquery/.CoreSystem Library: Release - 1.0.3725.10575: This release contains a new class Crypto which makes encryption and descryption of string easy, it uses TripleDESCrystal Mapper: Release - 2.0.3725.11614: This is preview if release 2.0* that I promised, it contains following new features Tracking dirty entities and provide Save function to save all ...Digital Media Processing Project 1: Image Processor: Image Processor Alpha: First Release Features Include: Curve Adjustment Tool Region Growing Segmetation Threshold Segmentation Guassian/Butterworth High/Low pass filter...Exepack.NET: Exepack.NET version 0.03 beta: Exepack.NET is executable file compressor for .NET Framework. It allows to package your .NET application consisting of an executable file and sever...Export code as Code Snippet - Addin for Visual Studio 2008/2010 RC: VS 2010 Release Candidate: This release targets Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. It includes full Visual Basic 2010 source code. Fixes already available in previous ve...Facebook Azure Toolkit: 0.9 Beta: This is the initial beta releaseFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.0.5.0: Version 1.0.5.0 Change the way Census & Individual reports columns are sized so that user can resize later. Add filter to exclude individuals over...Home Access Plus+: v3.1.2.1: Version 3.1.2.1 Release Change Log: Added SSL SMTP Added SSL Authentication File Changes: ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdb ~/we...Home Access Plus+: v3.1.3.1: Version 3.1.3.1 Release Change Log: Fixed Help Desk File Changes: ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdb ~/helpdesk/*.htmIceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 Full Install: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 - Full Installer, installs IceChat 2009, and the Emoticons, and will also download .Net Framework 2.0 if needed.IceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 Simple Binaries: This simply the IceChat2009.exe and the IPluginIceChat.dll needed to run IceChat 2009. Is not an installer, does not include emoticons.IceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 Source Code: IceChat 2009 Alpha 11.6 Source CodeLunar Phase Silverlight Gadget: Lunar Phase RC: Stable release. 6 languages Auto refresh. Name / Light problem fixedMiracle OS: Miracle OS Alpha 0.001: Our first release is the Alpha 0.001. Miracle OS doens't work at all, but we work on it. You to? Please help us.MyTwits - A rich Twitter client for Windows powered by WPF: MyTwits BETA 1: I'm happy to release first BETA version of MyTwits. Just download the zip file attached and run setup.exe and you are done! If you've any problem...MyTwits - A rich Twitter client for Windows powered by WPF: MyTwits Source BETA 1: I'm providing you just a project file, I'll upload complete source code once I fine tuned the code.NMock3: NMock3 - Beta 5, .NET 3.5: Hilights of this releaseTutorials have been updated and are in a much better place now. (they compile) Public API is getting locked down. Void me...Project Naduvar: com.declum.naduvar.locking: First ReleaseQueryToGrid Module for DotNetNuke®: QueryToGrid Module version 01.00.01: This module is a proof of concept for both using AJAX in a DotNetNuke® module, and for using SQL in a module. »»» IMPORTANT NOTE ««« Using this mo...SCSI Interface for Multimedia and Block Devices: Release 10 - Almost like a commercial burner!!: I made many changes in the ISOBurn program in this version, making it much more user-friendly than before. You can now add, rename, and delete file...Silverlight Input Keyboard: Initial Release: For more information see http://www.orktane.com/Blog/post/2009/11/09/Virtual-Input-Keyboard-Behaviours-for-Silverlight.aspxThe Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: RC: The release candidate is now in place. Unfortunately, because there are aspects of it that I'm not yet ready to discuss, the code for the RC will...twNowplaying: twNowplaying 1.0.0.3: Press the Twitter icon to get started, don't forget to submit bugs to the issue tracker. What's new This release has some minor UI fixes.uh: 1.0: This is the first stable release. It isn't super full featured but it does the basics.UriTree: UriTree 2.0.0: This release is the WPF version of this application.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30313.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVr30 OS: Blackra1n: The software was made by blackra1n for jailbreak iphone and ipod touch. Is not the Vr30 OS Team ProjectVr30 OS: Vr30 Operating System Live Cd 1.0: The Operating system linux made by team. For more information go to http://vr30os.tuxfamily.orgWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.01.00: Whats New Decide between Tags generated from the Search words, or create your own Tag List Custom Tag list changes Small BugfixesZeta Resource Editor: Source code release 2010-03-13: New sources, some small fixes.ZipStorer - A Pure C# Class to Store Files in Zip: ZipStorer 2.35: Improved UTF-8 Support Correct writting of modification time for extracted filesMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NET Ajax LibraryASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrN2 CMSBlogEngine.NETpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibrarySharePoint Team-MailerFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APICaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesCalcium: A modular application toolset leveraging PrismFarseer Physics Engine

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• Integrating WIF with WCF Data Services

  - by cibrax

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

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• Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community

  There we go! I finally managed to push myself forward and pick up an old, actually too old, idea since I ever arrived here in Mauritius more than six years ago. I'm talking about a community for all kind of ICT connected people. In the past (back in Germany), I used to be involved in various community activities. For example, I was part of the Microsoft Community Leader/Influencer Program (CLIP) in Germany due to an FAQ on Visual FoxPro, actually Active FoxPro Pages (AFP) to be more precise. Then in 2003/2004 I addressed the responsible person of the dFPUG user group in Speyer in order to assist him in organising monthly user group meetings. Well, he handed over management completely, and attended our meetings regularly. Why did it take you so long? Well, I don't want to bother you with the details but short version is that I was too busy on either job (building up new companies) or private life (got married and we have two lovely children, eh 'monsters') or even both. But now is the time where I was starting to look for new fields given the fact that I gained some spare time. My businesses are up and running, the kids are in school, and I am finally in a position where I can commit myself again to community activities. And I love to do that! Why a new user group? Good question... And 'easy' to answer. Since back in 2007 I did my usual research, eh Google searches, to see whether there existing user groups in Mauritius and in which field of interest. And yes, there are! If I recall this correctly, then there are communities for PHP, Drupal, Python (just recently), Oracle, and Linux (which used to be even two). But... either they do not exist anymore, they are dormant, or there is only a low heart-beat, frankly speaking. And yes, I went to meetings of the Linux User Group Meta (Mauritius) back in 2010/2011 and just recently. I really like the setup and the way the LUGM is organised. It's just that I have a slightly different point of view on how a user group or community should organise itself and how to approach future members. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing others doing a very good job, I'm only saying that I'd like to do it differently. The last meeting of the LUGM was awesome; read my feedback about it. Ok, so what's up with 'Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community' or short: MSCC? As I've already written in my article on 'Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion' I think it is essential in a world of IT to stay 'connected' with a good number of other people in the same field. There is so much dynamic and every day's news that it is almost impossible to keep on track with all of them. The MSCC is going to provide a common platform to exchange experience and share knowledge between each other. You might be a newbie and want to know what to expect working as a software developer, or as a database administrator, or maybe as an IT systems administrator, or you're an experienced geek that loves to share your ideas or solutions that you implemented to solve a specific problem, or you're the business (or HR) guy that is looking for 'fresh' blood to enforce your existing team. Or... you're just interested and you'd like to communicate with like-minded people. Meetup of 26.06.2013 @ L'arabica: Of course there are laptops around. Free WiFi, power outlet, coffee, code and Linux in one go. The MSCC is technology-agnostic and spans an umbrella over any kind of technology. Simply because you can't ignore other technologies anymore in a connected IT world as we have. A front-end developer for iOS applications should have the chance to connect with a Python back-end coder and eventually with a DBA for MySQL or PostgreSQL and exchange their experience. Furthermore, I'm a huge fan of cross-platform development, and it is very pleasant to have pure Web developers - with all that HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and JS libraries stuff - and passionate C# or Java coders at the same table. This diversity of knowledge can assist and boost your personal situation. And last but not least, there are projects and open positions 'flying' around... People might like to hear others opinion about an employer or get new impulses on how to tackle down an issue at their workspace, etc. This is about community. And that's how I see the MSCC in general - free of any limitations be it by programming language or technology. Having the chance to exchange experience and to discuss certain aspects of technology saves you time and money, and it's a pleasure to enjoy. Compared to dusty books and remote online resources. It's human! Organising meetups (meetings, get-together, gatherings - you name it!) As of writing this article, the MSCC is currently meeting every Wednesday for the weekly 'Code & Coffee' session at various locations (suggestions are welcome!) in Mauritius. This might change in the future eventually but especially at the beginning I think it is very important to create awareness in the Mauritian IT world. Yes, we are here! Come and join us! ;-) The MSCC's main online presence is located at Meetup.com because it allows me to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments very easily, and any member can have a look who else is involved so that an exchange of contacts is given at any time. In combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there is a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Trello is also available as free smartphone app. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians! Recent updates The MSCC is now officially participating in the O'Reilly UK User Group programm and we are allowed to request review or recension copies of recent titles. Additionally, we have a discount code for any books or ebooks that you might like to order on shop.oreilly.com. More applications for user group sponsorship programms are pending and I'm looking forward to a couple of announcement very soon. And... we need some kind of 'corporate identity' - Over at the MSCC website there is a call for action (or better said a contest with prizes) to create a unique design for the MSCC. This would include a decent colour palette, a logo, graphical banners for Meetup, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and of course badges for our craftsmen to add to their personal blogs and websites. Please spread the word and contribute. Thanks!

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• jQuery Templates and Data Linking (and Microsoft contributing to jQuery)

  - by ScottGu

  The jQuery library has a passionate community of developers, and it is now the most widely used JavaScript library on the web today. Two years ago I announced that Microsoft would begin offering product support for jQuery, and that we’d be including it in new versions of Visual Studio going forward. By default, when you create new ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects with VS 2010 you’ll find jQuery automatically added to your project. A few weeks ago during my second keynote at the MIX 2010 conference I announced that Microsoft would also begin contributing to the jQuery project.  During the talk, John Resig -- the creator of the jQuery library and leader of the jQuery developer team – talked a little about our participation and discussed an early prototype of a new client templating API for jQuery. In this blog post, I’m going to talk a little about how my team is starting to contribute to the jQuery project, and discuss some of the specific features that we are working on such as client-side templating and data linking (data-binding). Contributing to jQuery jQuery has a fantastic developer community, and a very open way to propose suggestions and make contributions.  Microsoft is following the same process to contribute to jQuery as any other member of the community. As an example, when working with the jQuery community to improve support for templating to jQuery my team followed the following steps: We created a proposal for templating and posted the proposal to the jQuery developer forum (http://forum.jquery.com/topic/jquery-templates-proposal and http://forum.jquery.com/topic/templating-syntax ). After receiving feedback on the forums, the jQuery team created a prototype for templating and posted the prototype at the Github code repository (http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl ). We iterated on the prototype, creating a new fork on Github of the templating prototype, to suggest design improvements. Several other members of the community also provided design feedback by forking the templating code. There has been an amazing amount of participation by the jQuery community in response to the original templating proposal (over 100 posts in the jQuery forum), and the design of the templating proposal has evolved significantly based on community feedback. The jQuery team is the ultimate determiner on what happens with the templating proposal – they might include it in jQuery core, or make it an official plugin, or reject it entirely.  My team is excited to be able to participate in the open source process, and make suggestions and contributions the same way as any other member of the community. jQuery Template Support Client-side templates enable jQuery developers to easily generate and render HTML UI on the client.  Templates support a simple syntax that enables either developers or designers to declaratively specify the HTML they want to generate.  Developers can then programmatically invoke the templates on the client, and pass JavaScript objects to them to make the content rendered completely data driven.  These JavaScript objects can optionally be based on data retrieved from a server. Because the jQuery templating proposal is still evolving in response to community feedback, the final version might look very different than the version below. This blog post gives you a sense of how you can try out and use templating as it exists today (you can download the prototype by the jQuery core team at http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl or the latest submission from my team at http://github.com/nje/jquery-tmpl).  jQuery Client Templates You create client-side jQuery templates by embedding content within a <script type="text/html"> tag.  For example, the HTML below contains a <div> template container, as well as a client-side jQuery “contactTemplate” template (within the <script type="text/html"> element) that can be used to dynamically display a list of contacts: The {{= name }} and {{= phone }} expressions are used within the contact template above to display the names and phone numbers of “contact” objects passed to the template. We can use the template to display either an array of JavaScript objects or a single object. The JavaScript code below demonstrates how you can render a JavaScript array of “contact” object using the above template. The render() method renders the data into a string and appends the string to the “contactContainer” DIV element: When the page is loaded, the list of contacts is rendered by the template.  All of this template rendering is happening on the client-side within the browser:   Templating Commands and Conditional Display Logic The current templating proposal supports a small set of template commands - including if, else, and each statements. The number of template commands was deliberately kept small to encourage people to place more complicated logic outside of their templates. Even this small set of template commands is very useful though. Imagine, for example, that each contact can have zero or more phone numbers. The contacts could be represented by the JavaScript array below: The template below demonstrates how you can use the if and each template commands to conditionally display and loop the phone numbers for each contact: If a contact has one or more phone numbers then each of the phone numbers is displayed by iterating through the phone numbers with the each template command: The jQuery team designed the template commands so that they are extensible. If you have a need for a new template command then you can easily add new template commands to the default set of commands. Support for Client Data-Linking The ASP.NET team recently submitted another proposal and prototype to the jQuery forums (http://forum.jquery.com/topic/proposal-for-adding-data-linking-to-jquery). This proposal describes a new feature named data linking. Data Linking enables you to link a property of one object to a property of another object - so that when one property changes the other property changes.  Data linking enables you to easily keep your UI and data objects synchronized within a page. If you are familiar with the concept of data-binding then you will be familiar with data linking (in the proposal, we call the feature data linking because jQuery already includes a bind() method that has nothing to do with data-binding). Imagine, for example, that you have a page with the following HTML <input> elements: The following JavaScript code links the two INPUT elements above to the properties of a JavaScript “contact” object that has a “name” and “phone” property: When you execute this code, the value of the first INPUT element (#name) is set to the value of the contact name property, and the value of the second INPUT element (#phone) is set to the value of the contact phone property. The properties of the contact object and the properties of the INPUT elements are also linked – so that changes to one are also reflected in the other. Because the contact object is linked to the INPUT element, when you request the page, the values of the contact properties are displayed: More interesting, the values of the linked INPUT elements will change automatically whenever you update the properties of the contact object they are linked to. For example, we could programmatically modify the properties of the “contact” object using the jQuery attr() method like below: Because our two INPUT elements are linked to the “contact” object, the INPUT element values will be updated automatically (without us having to write any code to modify the UI elements): Note that we updated the contact object above using the jQuery attr() method. In order for data linking to work, you must use jQuery methods to modify the property values. Two Way Linking The linkBoth() method enables two-way data linking. The contact object and INPUT elements are linked in both directions. When you modify the value of the INPUT element, the contact object is also updated automatically. For example, the following code adds a client-side JavaScript click handler to an HTML button element. When you click the button, the property values of the contact object are displayed using an alert() dialog: The following demonstrates what happens when you change the value of the Name INPUT element and click the Save button. Notice that the name property of the “contact” object that the INPUT element was linked to was updated automatically: The above example is obviously trivially simple.  Instead of displaying the new values of the contact object with a JavaScript alert, you can imagine instead calling a web-service to save the object to a database. The benefit of data linking is that it enables you to focus on your data and frees you from the mechanics of keeping your UI and data in sync. Converters The current data linking proposal also supports a feature called converters. A converter enables you to easily convert the value of a property during data linking. For example, imagine that you want to represent phone numbers in a standard way with the “contact” object phone property. In particular, you don’t want to include special characters such as ()- in the phone number - instead you only want digits and nothing else. In that case, you can wire-up a converter to convert the value of an INPUT element into this format using the code below: Notice above how a converter function is being passed to the linkFrom() method used to link the phone property of the “contact” object with the value of the phone INPUT element. This convertor function strips any non-numeric characters from the INPUT element before updating the phone property.  Now, if you enter the phone number (206) 555-9999 into the phone input field then the value 2065559999 is assigned to the phone property of the contact object: You can also use a converter in the opposite direction also. For example, you can apply a standard phone format string when displaying a phone number from a phone property. Combining Templating and Data Linking Our goal in submitting these two proposals for templating and data linking is to make it easier to work with data when building websites and applications with jQuery. Templating makes it easier to display a list of database records retrieved from a database through an Ajax call. Data linking makes it easier to keep the data and user interface in sync for update scenarios. Currently, we are working on an extension of the data linking proposal to support declarative data linking. We want to make it easy to take advantage of data linking when using a template to display data. For example, imagine that you are using the following template to display an array of product objects: Notice the {{link name}} and {{link price}} expressions. These expressions enable declarative data linking between the SPAN elements and properties of the product objects. The current jQuery templating prototype supports extending its syntax with custom template commands. In this case, we are extending the default templating syntax with a custom template command named “link”. The benefit of using data linking with the above template is that the SPAN elements will be automatically updated whenever the underlying “product” data is updated.  Declarative data linking also makes it easier to create edit and insert forms. For example, you could create a form for editing a product by using declarative data linking like this: Whenever you change the value of the INPUT elements in a template that uses declarative data linking, the underlying JavaScript data object is automatically updated. Instead of needing to write code to scrape the HTML form to get updated values, you can instead work with the underlying data directly – making your client-side code much cleaner and simpler. Downloading Working Code Examples of the Above Scenarios You can download this .zip file to get with working code examples of the above scenarios.  The .zip file includes 4 static HTML page: Listing1_Templating.htm – Illustrates basic templating. Listing2_TemplatingConditionals.htm – Illustrates templating with the use of the if and each template commands. Listing3_DataLinking.htm – Illustrates data linking. Listing4_Converters.htm – Illustrates using a converter with data linking. You can un-zip the file to the file-system and then run each page to see the concepts in action. Summary We are excited to be able to begin participating within the open-source jQuery project.  We’ve received lots of encouraging feedback in response to our first two proposals, and we will continue to actively contribute going forward.  These features will hopefully make it easier for all developers (including ASP.NET developers) to build great Ajax applications. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

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• Visual Studio 2013 Static Code Analysis in depth: What? When and How?

  - by Hosam Kamel

  In this post I'll illustrate in details the following points What is static code analysis? When to use? Supported platforms Supported Visual Studio versions How to use Run Code Analysis Manually Run Code Analysis Automatically Run Code Analysis while check-in source code to TFS version control (TFSVC) Run Code Analysis as part of Team Build Understand the Code Analysis results & learn how to fix them Create your custom rule set Q & A References What is static Rule analysis? Static Code Analysis feature of Visual Studio performs static code analysis on code to help developers identify potential design, globalization, interoperability, performance, security, and a lot of other categories of potential problems according to Microsoft's rules that mainly targets best practices in writing code, and there is a large set of those rules included with Visual Studio grouped into different categorized targeting specific coding issues like security, design, Interoperability, globalizations and others. Static here means analyzing the source code without executing it and this type of analysis can be performed through automated tools (like Visual Studio 2013 Code Analysis Tool) or manually through Code Review which already supported in Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 (check Using Code Review to Improve Quality video on Channel9) There is also Dynamic analysis which performed on executing programs using software testing techniques such as Code Coverage for example. When to use? Running Code analysis tool at regular intervals during your development process can enhance the quality of your software, examines your code for a set of common defects and violations is always a good programming practice. Adding that Code analysis can also find defects in your code that are difficult to discover through testing allowing you to achieve first level quality gate for you application during development phase before you release it to the testing team. Supported platforms .NET Framework, native (C and C++) Database applications. Support Visual Studio versions All version of Visual Studio starting Visual Studio 2013 (except Visual Studio Test Professional) check Feature comparisons Create and modify a custom rule set required Visual Studio Premium or Ultimate. How to use? Code Analysis can be run manually at any time from within the Visual Studio IDE, or even setup to automatically run as part of a Team Build or check-in policy for Team Foundation Server. Run Code Analysis Manually To run code analysis manually on a project, on the Analyze menu, click Run Code Analysis on your project or simply right click on the project name on the Solution Explorer choose Run Code Analysis from the context menu Run Code Analysis Automatically To run code analysis each time that you build a project, you select Enable Code Analysis on Build on the project's Property Page Run Code Analysis while check-in source code to TFS version control (TFSVC) Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) provides a way for organizations to enforce practices that lead to better code and more efficient group development through Check-in policies which are rules that are set at the team project level and enforced on developer computers before code is allowed to be checked in. (This is available only if you're using Team Foundation Server) Require permissions on Team Foundation Server: you must have the Edit project-level information permission set to Allow typically your account must be part of Project Administrators, Project Collection Administrators, for more information about Team Foundation permissions check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252587(v=vs.120).aspx In Team Explorer, right-click the team project name, point to Team Project Settings, and then click Source Control. In the Source Control dialog box, select the Check-in Policy tab. Click Add to create a new check-in policy. Double-click the existing Code Analysis item in the Policy Type list to change the policy. Check or Uncheck the policy option based on the configurations you need to perform as illustrated below: Enforce check-in to only contain files that are part of current solution: code analysis can run only on files specified in solution and project configuration files. This policy guarantees that all code that is part of a solution is analyzed. Enforce C/C++ Code Analysis (/analyze): Requires that all C or C++ projects be built with the /analyze compiler option to run code analysis before they can be checked in. Enforce Code Analysis for Managed Code: Requires that all managed projects run code analysis and build before they can be checked in. Check Code analysis rule set reference on MSDN What is Rule Set? Rule Set is a group of code analysis rules like the example below where Microsoft.Design is the rule set name where "Do not declare static members on generic types" is the code analysis rule Once you configured the Analysis rule the policy will be enabled for all the team member in this project whenever a team member check-in any source code to the TFSVC the policy section will highlight the Code Analysis policy as below TFS is a very extensible platform so you can simply implement your own custom Code Analysis Check-in policy, check this link for more details http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd492668.aspx but you have to be aware also about compatibility between different TFS versions check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb907157.aspx Run Code Analysis as part of Team Build With Team Foundation Build (TFBuild), you can create and manage build processes that automatically compile and test your applications, and perform other important functions. Code Analysis can be enabled in the Build Definition file by selecting the correct value for the build process parameter "Perform Code Analysis" Once configure, Kick-off your build definition to queue a new build, Code Analysis will run as part of build workflow and you will be able to see code analysis warning as part of build report Understand the Code Analysis results & learn how to fix them Now after you went through Code Analysis configurations and the different ways of running it, we will go through the Code Analysis result how to understand them and how to resolve them. Code Analysis window in Visual Studio will show all the analysis results based on the rule sets you configured in the project file properties, let's dig deep into what each result item contains: 1 Check ID The unique identifier for the rule. CheckId and Category are used for in-source suppression of a warning.       2 Title The title of warning message       3 Description A description of the problem or suggested fix 4 File Name File name and the line of code number which violate the code analysis rule set 5 Category The code analysis category for this error 6 Warning /Error Depend on how you configure it in the rule set the default is Warning level 7 Action Copy: copy the warning information to the clipboard Create Work Item: If you're connected to Team Foundation Server you can create a work item most probably you may create a Task or Bug and assign it for a developer to fix certain code analysis warning Suppress Message: There are times when you might decide not to fix a code analysis warning. You might decide that resolving the warning requires too much recoding in relation to the probability that the issue will arise in any real-world implementation of your code. Or you might believe that the analysis that is used in the warning is inappropriate for the particular context. You can suppress individual warnings so that they no longer appear in the Code Analysis window. Two options available: In Source inserts a SuppressMessage attribute in the source file above the method that generated the warning. This makes the suppression more discoverable. In Suppression File adds a SuppressMessage attribute to the GlobalSuppressions.cs file of the project. This can make the management of suppressions easier. Note that the SuppressMessage attribute added to GlobalSuppression.cs also targets the method that generated the warning. It does not suppress the warning globally.       Visual Studio makes it very easy to fix Code analysis warning, all you have to do is clicking on the Check Id hyperlink if you are not aware how to fix the warring and you'll be directed to MSDN online or local copy based on the configuration you did while installing Visual Studio and you will find all the information about the warring including how to fix it. Create a Custom Code Analysis Rule Set The Microsoft standard rule sets provide groups of rules that are organized by function and depth. For example, the Microsoft Basic Design Guidelines Rules and the Microsoft Extended Design Guidelines Rules contain rules that focus on usability and maintainability issues, with added emphasis on naming rules in the Extended rule set, you can create and modify a custom rule set to meet specific project needs associated with code analysis. To create a custom rule set, you open one or more standard rule sets in the rule set editor. Create and modify a custom rule set required Visual Studio Premium or Ultimate. You can check How to: Create a Custom Rule Set on MSDN for more details http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264974.aspx Q & A Visual Studio static code analysis vs. FxCop vs. StyleCpp http://www.excella.com/blog/stylecop-vs-fxcop-difference-between-code-analysis-tools/ Code Analysis for SharePoint Apps and SPDisposeCheck? This post lists some of the rule set you can run specifically for SharePoint applications and how to integrate SPDisposeCheck as well. Code Analysis for SQL Server Database Projects? This post illustrate how to run static code analysis on T-SQL through SSDT ReSharper 8 vs. Visual Studio 2013? This document lists some of the features that are provided by ReSharper 8 but are missing or not as fully implemented in Visual Studio 2013. References A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lines-of-code-later/fulltext What is New in Code Analysis for Visual Studio 2013 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/07/03/what-is-new-in-code-analysis-for-visual-studio-2013.aspx Analyze the code quality of Windows Store apps using Visual Studio static code analysis http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh441471.aspx [Hands-on-lab] Using Code Analysis with Visual Studio 2012 to Improve Code Quality http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/9/2/A9253B14-5F23-4BC8-9C7E-F5199DB5F831/Using%20Code%20Analysis%20with%20Visual%20Studio%202012%20to%20Improve%20Code%20Quality.docx Originally posted at "Hosam Kamel| Developer & Platform Evangelist" http://blogs.msdn.com/hkamel

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

  - by chung.wu

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

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

  - by Reed

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

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• Security Trimmed Cross Site Collection Navigation

  - by Sahil Malik

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

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• GZip/Deflate Compression in ASP.NET MVC

  - by Rick Strahl

  A long while back I wrote about GZip compression in ASP.NET. In that article I describe two generic helper methods that I've used in all sorts of ASP.NET application from WebForms apps to HttpModules and HttpHandlers that require gzip or deflate compression. The same static methods also work in ASP.NET MVC. Here are the two routines:/// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } The first method checks whether the client sending the request includes the accept-encoding for either gzip or deflate, and if if it does it returns true. The second function uses IsGzipSupported() to decide whether it should encode content and uses an Response Filter to do its job. Basically response filters look at the Response output stream as it's written and convert the data flowing through it. Filters are a bit tricky to work with but the two .NET filter streams for GZip and Deflate Compression make this a snap to implement. In my old code and even now in MVC I can always do:public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); …} to encode my content. And that works just fine. The proper way: Create an ActionFilterAttribute However in MVC this sort of thing is typically better handled by an ActionFilter which can be applied with an attribute. So to be all prim and proper I created an CompressContentAttribute ActionFilter that incorporates those two helper methods and which looks like this:/// <summary> /// Attribute that can be added to controller methods to force content /// to be GZip encoded if the client supports it /// </summary> public class CompressContentAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute { /// <summary> /// Override to compress the content that is generated by /// an action method. /// </summary> /// <param name="filterContext"></param> public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { GZipEncodePage(); } /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } } It's basically the same code wrapped into an ActionFilter attribute, which intercepts requests MVC requests to Controller methods and lets you hook up logic before and after the methods have executed. Here I want to override OnActionExecuting() which fires before the Controller action is fired. With the CompressContentAttribute created, it can now be applied to either the controller as a whole:[CompressContent] public class ClassifiedsController : ClassifiedsBaseController { … } or to one of the Action methods:[CompressContent] public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { … } The former applies compression to every action method, while the latter is selective and only applies it to the individual action method. Is the attribute better than the static utility function? Not really, but it is the standard MVC way to hook up 'filter' content and that's where others are likely to expect to set options like this. In fact,  you have a bit more control with the utility function because you can conditionally apply it in code, but this is actually much less likely in MVC applications than old WebForms apps since controller methods tend to be more focused. Compression Caveats Http compression is very cool and pretty easy to implement in ASP.NET but you have to be careful with it - especially if your content might get transformed or redirected inside of ASP.NET. A good example, is if an error occurs and a compression filter is applied. ASP.NET errors don't clear the filter, but clear the Response headers which results in some nasty garbage because the compressed content now no longer matches the headers. Another issue is Caching, which has to account for all possible ways of compression and non-compression that the content is served. Basically compressed content and caching don't mix well. I wrote about several of these issues in an old blog post and I recommend you take a quick peek before diving into making every bit of output Gzip encoded. None of these are show stoppers, but you have to be aware of the issues. Related Posts GZip Compression with ASP.NET Content ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   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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• 500 Metro Style WP7 Icons

  - by Bil Simser

  I was inspired by The Noun Project, a project that offers up “Metro-style” icons in SVG format. The project is licensed under a public domain license and while it’s a great project, all of the content is in SVG format. Jon Galloway has a great post (from 2007) talking about the differences between SVG and XAML so I highly recommend that for some background. I thought it would be helpful to the WPF/Windows Phone 7/Silverlight community to provide the content in alternative formats for use in your applications. The Goods I’ve put together a package of the 500 icons (502 actually) in PNG, XAML and the original SVG format along with a couple of sample projects so you can see them in action. There’s a WPF desktop app: And a Windows Phone 7 app: Building It To get all the content first I wrote up a quick program to suck the original SVG files. Luckily they’re all in a common path just named 1.SVG, 2.SVG, and so on. Easy sleazy to grab the contents. Once I had 500 SVG files I used the latest copy of XamlTune, an open source CodePlex project that has a command line conversion tool to convert the directory of SVG files into XAML (the tool also created a PNG file of each SVG so that’s just icing on the cake). Conversions The conversion from SVG to XAML isn’t 100%. While you can just drop the content into a WPF app, it doesn’t work that way for WP7. There are just some small adjustments I made to each format so you’ll have to do the same. Follow the information below or refer to the sample applications. As a sample, here’s an icon we want to use: Here’s the original SVG file: <svg version="1.0" id="Layer_1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" x="0px" y="0px" width="100px" height="94.616px" viewBox="0 0 100 94.616" enable-background="new 0 0 100 94.616" xml:space="preserve"> <path d="M25.076,15.639c4.324,0.009,7.824-3.488,7.82-7.82C32.9,3.512,29.4,0.012,25.076,0c-4.313,0.012-7.814,3.512-7.821,7.819 C17.262,12.15,20.763,15.648,25.076,15.639L25.076,15.639z"/> <path d="M4.593,43.388h6.861l4.137-15.135h1.716L13.22,43.388h24.318l-4.389-15.135h1.817l2.32,7.415 c1.08,3.131,3.852,3.851,6.003,1.162l8.375-10.142c2.651-3.42-2.104-7.021-4.844-4.035l-4.993,5.952 c0.007,0.095-0.96-3.278-0.96-3.278c-1.135-3.978-4.918-7.903-10.595-7.922H19.576c-5.071,0.019-9.043,4.434-9.888,7.214 L4.593,43.388L4.593,43.388z"/> <polygon points="56.206,22.753 56.206,7.163 49.192,7.163 49.192,22.753 56.206,22.753 "/> <path d="M79.87,15.738c4.332-0.014,7.831-3.516,7.82-7.82c0.011-4.332-3.488-7.833-7.82-7.82c-4.306-0.013-7.806,3.488-7.821,7.82 C72.064,12.222,75.564,15.725,79.87,15.738L79.87,15.738z"/> <path d="M89.759,89.556v-43.19h5.751V22.804c0.007-3.079-2.757-5.448-6.71-5.449H70.436c-3.65,0.001-4.539,1.186-5.551,2.168 L49.597,37.889c-3.098,3.848,2.428,8.333,5.55,4.743L69.88,25.226v64.43c-0.019,6.475,9.06,6.686,9.081,0.201v-36.58h1.765v36.379 C80.748,96.109,89.772,96.13,89.759,89.556L89.759,89.556z"/> <polygon points="100,54.035 100,45.155 0,45.155 0,54.035 100,54.035 "/> </svg> Here’s the XAML that XamlTune created. It can be used in any WPF app without any changes: <Canvas Name="Layer_1" Width="100" Height="94.616" ClipToBounds="True" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"> <Path Fill="#FF000000"> <Path.Data> <PathGeometry FillRule="Nonzero" Figures="M25.076,15.639C29.4,15.648 32.9,12.151 32.896,7.819 32.9,3.512 29.4,0.012 25.076,0 20.763,0.012 17.262,3.512 17.255,7.819 17.262,12.15 20.763,15.648 25.076,15.639L25.076,15.639z" /> </Path.Data> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000"> <Path.Data> <PathGeometry FillRule="Nonzero" Figures="M4.593,43.388L11.454,43.388 15.591,28.253 17.307,28.253 13.22,43.388 37.538,43.388 33.149,28.253 34.966,28.253 37.286,35.668C38.366,38.799,41.138,39.519,43.289,36.83L51.664,26.688C54.315,23.268,49.56,19.667,46.82,22.653L41.827,28.605C41.834,28.7 40.867,25.327 40.867,25.327 39.732,21.349 35.949,17.424 30.272,17.405L19.576,17.405C14.505,17.424,10.533,21.839,9.688,24.619L4.593,43.388 4.593,43.388z" /> </Path.Data> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000"> <Path.Data> <PathGeometry FillRule="Nonzero" Figures="M56.206,22.753L56.206,7.163 49.192,7.163 49.192,22.753 56.206,22.753z" /> </Path.Data> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000"> <Path.Data> <PathGeometry FillRule="Nonzero" Figures="M79.87,15.738C84.202,15.724 87.701,12.222 87.69,7.918 87.701,3.586 84.202,0.0849999999999991 79.87,0.097999999999999 75.564,0.084999999999999 72.064,3.586 72.049,7.918 72.064,12.222 75.564,15.725 79.87,15.738L79.87,15.738z" /> </Path.Data> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000"> <Path.Data> <PathGeometry FillRule="Nonzero" Figures="M89.759,89.556L89.759,46.366 95.51,46.366 95.51,22.804C95.517,19.725,92.753,17.356,88.8,17.355L70.436,17.355C66.786,17.356,65.897,18.541,64.885,19.523L49.597,37.889C46.499,41.737,52.025,46.222,55.147,42.632L69.88,25.226 69.88,89.656C69.861,96.131,78.94,96.342,78.961,89.857L78.961,53.277 80.726,53.277 80.726,89.656C80.748,96.109,89.772,96.13,89.759,89.556L89.759,89.556z" /> </Path.Data> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000"> <Path.Data> <PathGeometry FillRule="Nonzero" Figures="M100,54.035L100,45.155 0,45.155 0,54.035 100,54.035z" /> </Path.Data> </Path> </Canvas> The XAML works AS-IS in a WPF application but there are some changes I did to get it to work in a WP7 app. Here’s the modified XAML in a WP7 application: <Canvas Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0" Name="Icon_1" Width="100" Height="94.616"> <Path Fill="#FF000000" Data="M25.076,15.639C29.4,15.648 32.9,12.151 32.896,7.819 32.9,3.512 29.4,0.012 25.076,0 20.763,0.012 17.262,3.512 17.255,7.819 17.262,12.15 20.763,15.648 25.076,15.639L25.076,15.639z"> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000" Data="M4.593,43.388L11.454,43.388 15.591,28.253 17.307,28.253 13.22,43.388 37.538,43.388 33.149,28.253 34.966,28.253 37.286,35.668C38.366,38.799,41.138,39.519,43.289,36.83L51.664,26.688C54.315,23.268,49.56,19.667,46.82,22.653L41.827,28.605C41.834,28.7 40.867,25.327 40.867,25.327 39.732,21.349 35.949,17.424 30.272,17.405L19.576,17.405C14.505,17.424,10.533,21.839,9.688,24.619L4.593,43.388 4.593,43.388z"> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000" Data="M56.206,22.753L56.206,7.163 49.192,7.163 49.192,22.753 56.206,22.753z"> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000" Data="M79.87,15.738C84.202,15.724 87.701,12.222 87.69,7.918 87.701,3.586 84.202,0.0849999999999991 79.87,0.097999999999999 75.564,0.084999999999999 72.064,3.586 72.049,7.918 72.064,12.222 75.564,15.725 79.87,15.738L79.87,15.738z"> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000" Data="M89.759,89.556L89.759,46.366 95.51,46.366 95.51,22.804C95.517,19.725,92.753,17.356,88.8,17.355L70.436,17.355C66.786,17.356,65.897,18.541,64.885,19.523L49.597,37.889C46.499,41.737,52.025,46.222,55.147,42.632L69.88,25.226 69.88,89.656C69.861,96.131,78.94,96.342,78.961,89.857L78.961,53.277 80.726,53.277 80.726,89.656C80.748,96.109,89.772,96.13,89.759,89.556L89.759,89.556z"> </Path> <Path Fill="#FF000000" Data="M100,54.035L100,45.155 0,45.155 0,54.035 100,54.035z"> </Path> </Canvas> All I did was take the data portion and put it directly into a Data attribute on the Path. Note that while it does show up in the app (on the emulator or device) it wouldn’t show up in Visual Studio for me. Maybe some XAML guru out there can tell me why. You can just as easily use the PNG files in WP7 but if you want the crispness of vector graphics, go for the XAML version. Of course with XamlTune being open source you could always modify the output of that program to cater it to your app. If you do make a change that’s worthy please consider submitting a patch to the project so everyone can benefit. Hope this helps and happy programming! Resources and Links Sample Project and Icons XamlTune an open source project to convert SVG to XAML The Noun Project source of the original files Jon Galloways post on SVG and XAML StackOverflow question on converting SVG to XAML

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• DropDownList and SelectListItem Array Item Updates in MVC

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 11, Divide and Conquer via Parallel.Invoke

  - by Reed

  Many algorithms are easily written to work via recursion.  For example, most data-oriented tasks where a tree of data must be processed are much more easily handled by starting at the root, and recursively “walking” the tree.  Some algorithms work this way on flat data structures, such as arrays, as well.  This is a form of divide and conquer: an algorithm design which is based around breaking up a set of work recursively, “dividing” the total work in each recursive step, and “conquering” the work when the remaining work is small enough to be solved easily. Recursive algorithms, especially ones based on a form of divide and conquer, are often a very good candidate for parallelization. This is apparent from a common sense standpoint.  Since we’re dividing up the total work in the algorithm, we have an obvious, built-in partitioning scheme.  Once partitioned, the data can be worked upon independently, so there is good, clean isolation of data. Implementing this type of algorithm is fairly simple.  The Parallel class in .NET 4 includes a method suited for this type of operation: Parallel.Invoke.  This method works by taking any number of delegates defined as an Action, and operating them all in parallel.  The method returns when every delegate has completed: Parallel.Invoke( () => { Console.WriteLine("Action 1 executing in thread {0}", Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId); }, () => { Console.WriteLine("Action 2 executing in thread {0}", Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId); }, () => { Console.WriteLine("Action 3 executing in thread {0}", Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId); } ); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Running this simple example demonstrates the ease of using this method.  For example, on my system, I get three separate thread IDs when running the above code.  By allowing any number of delegates to be executed directly, concurrently, the Parallel.Invoke method provides us an easy way to parallelize any algorithm based on divide and conquer.  We can divide our work in each step, and execute each task in parallel, recursively. For example, suppose we wanted to implement our own quicksort routine.  The quicksort algorithm can be designed based on divide and conquer.  In each iteration, we pick a pivot point, and use that to partition the total array.  We swap the elements around the pivot, then recursively sort the lists on each side of the pivot.  For example, let’s look at this simple, sequential implementation of quicksort: public static void QuickSort<T>(T[] array) where T : IComparable<T> { QuickSortInternal(array, 0, array.Length - 1); } private static void QuickSortInternal<T>(T[] array, int left, int right) where T : IComparable<T> { if (left >= right) { return; } SwapElements(array, left, (left + right) / 2); int last = left; for (int current = left + 1; current <= right; ++current) { if (array[current].CompareTo(array[left]) < 0) { ++last; SwapElements(array, last, current); } } SwapElements(array, left, last); QuickSortInternal(array, left, last - 1); QuickSortInternal(array, last + 1, right); } static void SwapElements<T>(T[] array, int i, int j) { T temp = array[i]; array[i] = array[j]; array[j] = temp; } Here, we implement the quicksort algorithm in a very common, divide and conquer approach.  Running this against the built-in Array.Sort routine shows that we get the exact same answers (although the framework’s sort routine is slightly faster).  On my system, for example, I can use framework’s sort to sort ten million random doubles in about 7.3s, and this implementation takes about 9.3s on average. Looking at this routine, though, there is a clear opportunity to parallelize.  At the end of QuickSortInternal, we recursively call into QuickSortInternal with each partition of the array after the pivot is chosen.  This can be rewritten to use Parallel.Invoke by simply changing it to: // Code above is unchanged... SwapElements(array, left, last); Parallel.Invoke( () => QuickSortInternal(array, left, last - 1), () => QuickSortInternal(array, last + 1, right) ); } This routine will now run in parallel.  When executing, we now see the CPU usage across all cores spike while it executes.  However, there is a significant problem here – by parallelizing this routine, we took it from an execution time of 9.3s to an execution time of approximately 14 seconds!  We’re using more resources as seen in the CPU usage, but the overall result is a dramatic slowdown in overall processing time. This occurs because parallelization adds overhead.  Each time we split this array, we spawn two new tasks to parallelize this algorithm!  This is far, far too many tasks for our cores to operate upon at a single time.  In effect, we’re “over-parallelizing” this routine.  This is a common problem when working with divide and conquer algorithms, and leads to an important observation: When parallelizing a recursive routine, take special care not to add more tasks than necessary to fully utilize your system. This can be done with a few different approaches, in this case.  Typically, the way to handle this is to stop parallelizing the routine at a certain point, and revert back to the serial approach.  Since the first few recursions will all still be parallelized, our “deeper” recursive tasks will be running in parallel, and can take full advantage of the machine.  This also dramatically reduces the overhead added by parallelizing, since we’re only adding overhead for the first few recursive calls.  There are two basic approaches we can take here.  The first approach would be to look at the total work size, and if it’s smaller than a specific threshold, revert to our serial implementation.  In this case, we could just check right-left, and if it’s under a threshold, call the methods directly instead of using Parallel.Invoke. The second approach is to track how “deep” in the “tree” we are currently at, and if we are below some number of levels, stop parallelizing.  This approach is a more general-purpose approach, since it works on routines which parse trees as well as routines working off of a single array, but may not work as well if a poor partitioning strategy is chosen or the tree is not balanced evenly. This can be written very easily.  If we pass a maxDepth parameter into our internal routine, we can restrict the amount of times we parallelize by changing the recursive call to: // Code above is unchanged... SwapElements(array, left, last); if (maxDepth < 1) { QuickSortInternal(array, left, last - 1, maxDepth); QuickSortInternal(array, last + 1, right, maxDepth); } else { --maxDepth; Parallel.Invoke( () => QuickSortInternal(array, left, last - 1, maxDepth), () => QuickSortInternal(array, last + 1, right, maxDepth)); } We no longer allow this to parallelize indefinitely – only to a specific depth, at which time we revert to a serial implementation.  By starting the routine with a maxDepth equal to Environment.ProcessorCount, we can restrict the total amount of parallel operations significantly, but still provide adequate work for each processing core. With this final change, my timings are much better.  On average, I get the following timings: Framework via Array.Sort: 7.3 seconds Serial Quicksort Implementation: 9.3 seconds Naive Parallel Implementation: 14 seconds Parallel Implementation Restricting Depth: 4.7 seconds Finally, we are now faster than the framework’s Array.Sort implementation.

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• Issue 15: Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ Oracle OpenWorld

  - by rituchhibber

       ORACLE FOCUS Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange@ ORACLE OpenWorld Sylvie MichouSenior DirectorPartner Marketing & Communications and Strategic Programs RESOURCES -- Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld Registration Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange SpecializationTest Fest Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder Oracle OpenWorld Promotional Toolkit for Partners Oracle Partner Events Oracle Partner Webcasts Oracle EMEA Partner News SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES If you are attending our forthcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference in San Francisco from 30 September to 4 October, you will discover a new dedicated programme of keynotes and sessions tailored especially for you, our valued partners. Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld has been created to enhance the opportunities for you to learn from and network with Oracle executives and experts. The programme also provides more informal opportunities than ever throughout the week to meet up with the people who are most important to your business: customers, prospects, colleagues and the Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels management team. Oracle remains fully focused on building the industry's most admired partner ecosystem—which today spans over 25,000 partners. This new OPN Exchange programme offers an exciting change of pace for partners throughout the conference. Now it will be possible to enjoy a fully-integrated, partner-dedicated session schedule throughout the week, as well as key social events such as the Sunday night Welcome Reception, networking lunches from Monday to Thursday at the Howard Street Tent, and a fantastic closing event on the last Thursday afternoon. In addition to the regular Oracle OpenWorld conference schedule, if you have registered for the Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld programme, you will be invited to attend a much anticipated global partner keynote presentation, plus more than 40 conference sessions aimed squarely at what's most important to you, as partners. Prominent topics for discussion will include: Oracle technologies and roadmaps and how they fit with partners' business plans; business development; regional distinctions in business practices; and much more. Each session will provide plenty of food for thought ahead of the numerous networking opportunities throughout the week, encouraging the knowledge exchange with Oracle executives, customers, prospects, and colleagues that will make this conference of even greater value for you. At Oracle we always work closely with our partners to deliver solution offerings that improve business value, simplify the IT experience and drive innovation and efficiencies for joint customers. The most important element of our new OPN Exchange is content that helps you get more from technology investments, more from your peer-to-peer connections, and more from your interactions with customers. To this end we've created some partner-specific tools which can be used by OPN members ahead of the conference itself. Crucially, a comprehensive Content Catalog already lists and organises details of every OPN Exchange session, speaker, exhibitor, demonstration and related materials. This Content Catalog can be used by all our partners to identify interesting content that you can add to your own personalised Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder, allowing more effective planning and pre-enrolment for vital sessions. There are numerous highlights that you will definitely want to include in those personal schedules. On Sunday morning, 30 September we will start the week with partner dedicated OPN Exchange sessions, following our Global Partner Keynote at 13:00 with Judson Althoff, SVP, Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales and senior executives, giving insight into Oracle's partner vision, strategy, and resources—all designed to help build and strengthen market opportunities for you. This will be followed by a number of OPN Exchange general sessions, the Oracle OpenWorld Opening Keynote with Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle and concluded with the OPN Exchange AfterDark Welcome Reception, starting at 19:30 at the Metreon. From Monday 1 to Thursday 4 October, you can attend the OPN Exchange sessions that are most relevant to your business today and over the coming year. Oracle's top product and sales leaders will be on hand to discuss Oracle's strategic direction in 40+ targeted and in-depth sessions focussing on critical success factors to develop your business. Oracle's dedication to innovation, specialization, enablement and engineering provides Oracle partners with a huge opportunity to create new services and solutions, differentiate themselves and deliver extreme value to joint customers across the globe. Oracle will even be helping over 1000 partners to earn OPN Specialization certification during the Oracle OpenWorld OPN Exchange Test Fest, which will be providing all the study materials and exams required to drive Specialization for free at the conference. You simply need to check the list of current certification tracks available, and make sure you pre-register to reserve a seat in one of the ten sessions being offered free to OPN Exchange registered attendees. And finally, let's not forget those all-important networking opportunities, which can so often provide partners with valuable long-term alliances as well as exciting new business leads. The Oracle PartnerNetwork Lounge, located at Moscone South, exhibition hall, room 100 is the place where partners can meet formally or informally with colleagues, customers, prospects, and other industry professionals. OPN Specialized partners with OPN Exchange passes can also visit the OPN Video Blogging room to record and share ideas, and at the OPN Information Station you will find consultants available to answer your questions. "For the first time ever we will have a full partner conference within OpenWorld. OPN Exchange @ OpenWorld will kick-off on the first Sunday and run the entire week. We'll have over 40 sessions throughout that time and partners will hear from our top development executives, with special sessions dedicated to partnering throughout. It's going to be a phenomenal event, and we look forward to seeing our partners there." Judson Althoff, SVP, Oracle Worldwide Alliances & Channels and Embedded Sales So if you haven't done so already, please register for Oracle PartnerNetwork Exchange @ OpenWorld today or add OPN Exchange to your existing registration for just $100 through My Account. And if you have any further questions regarding partner activities at Oracle OpenWorld, please don't hesitate to contact the Oracle PartnerNetwork team at [email protected] will be on hand to share the very latest information about: Oracle's SPARC Superclusters: the latest Engineered Systems from Oracle, delivering radically improved performance, faster deployment and greatly reduced operational costs for mixed database and enterprise application consolidation Oracle's SPARC T4 servers: with the newly developed T4 processor and Oracle Solaris providing up to five times the single threaded performance and better overall system throughput for expanded application versatility Oracle Database Appliance: a new way to take advantage of the world's most popular database, Oracle Database 11g, in a single, easy-to-deploy and manage system. It's a complete package engineered to deliver simple, reliable and affordable database services to small and medium size businesses and departmental systems. All hardware and software components are supported together and offer customers unique pay-as-you-grow software licensing to quickly scale from two to 24 processor cores without incurring the costs and downtime usually associated with hardware upgrades Oracle Exalogic: the world's only integrated cloud machine, featuring server hardware and middleware software engineered together for maximum performance with minimum set-up and operational cost Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto grids or private clouds. It is a complete package of servers, storage, networking and software that is massively scalable, secure and redundant Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliances: providing enterprise-class NAS performance, price-performance, manageability and TCO by combining third-generation software with high-performance controllers, flash-based caches and disks Oracle Pillar Axiom Quality-of-Service: confidently consolidate storage for multiple applications into a single datacentre storage solution Oracle Solaris 11: delivering secure enterprise cloud deployments with the ability to run hundreds of virtual application with no overhead and co-engineered with other Oracle software products to provide the highest levels of security, manageability and performance Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Oracle's integrated enterprise IT management product, providing the industry's only complete, integrated and business-driven enterprise cloud management solution Oracle VM 3.0: the latest release of Oracle's server virtualisation and management solution, helping to move datacentres beyond server consolidation to improve application deployment and management. Register today and ensure your place at the Extreme Performance Tour! Extreme Performance Tour events are free to attend, but places are limited. To make sure that you don't miss out, please visit Oracle's Extreme Performance Tour website, select the city that you'd be interest in attending an event in, and then click on the 'Register Now' button for that city to secure your interest. Each individual city page also contains more in-depth information about your local event, including logistics, agenda and maybe even a preview of VIP guest speakers. -- Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Whether you attended Oracle OpenWorld 2009 or not, don't forget to save the date now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010. The event will be held a little earlier next year, from 19th-23rd September, so please don't miss out. With thousands of sessions and hundreds of exhibits and demos already lined up, there's no better place to learn how to optimise your existing systems, get an inside line on upcoming technology breakthroughs, and meet with your partner peers, Oracle strategists and even the developers responsible for the products and services that help you get better results for your end customers. Register Now for Oracle OpenWorld 2010! Perhaps you are interested in learning more about Oracle OpenWorld 2010, but don't wish to register at this time? Great! Please just enter your contact information here and we will contact you at a later date. How to Exhibit at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Sponsorship Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Advertising Opportunities at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 -- Back to the welcome page

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