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• Recursively created linked lists with a class, C++

  - by Jon Brant

  I'm using C++ to recursively make a hexagonal grid (using a multiply linked list style). I've got it set up to create neighboring tiles easily, but because I'm doing it recursively, I can only really create all 6 neighbors for a given tile. Obviously, this is causing duplicate tiles to be created and I'm trying to get rid of them in some way. Because I'm using a class, checking for null pointers doesn't seem to work. It's either failing to convert from my Tile class to and int, or somehow converting it but not doing it properly. I'm explicitly setting all pointers to NULL upon creation, and when I check to see if it still is, it says it's not even though I never touched it since initialization. Is there a specific way I'm supposed to do this? I can't even traverse the grid without NULLs of some kind Here's some of my relevant code. Yes, I know it's embarassing. Tile class header: class Tile { public: Tile(void); Tile(char *Filename); ~Tile(void); void show(void); bool LoadGLTextures(); void makeDisplayList(); void BindTexture(); void setFilename(char *newName); char Filename[100]; GLuint texture[2]; GLuint displayList; Tile *neighbor[6]; float xPos, yPos,zPos; };` Tile Initialization: Tile::Tile(void) { xPos=0.0f; yPos=0.0f; zPos=0.0f; glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); strcpy(Filename, strcpy(Filename, "Data/BlueTile.bmp")); if(!BuildTexture(Filename, texture[0]))MessageBox(NULL,"Texture failed to load!","Crap!",MB_OK|MB_ICONASTERISK); for(int x=0;x<6;x++) { neighbor[x]=NULL; } } Creation of neighboring tiles: void MakeNeighbors(Tile *InputTile, int stacks) { for(int x=0;x<6;x++) { InputTile->neighbor[x]=new Tile();InputTile->neighbor[x]->xPos=0.0f;InputTile->neighbor[x]->yPos=0.0f;InputTile->zPos=float(stacks); } if(stacks) { for(int x=0;x<6;x++)MakeNeighbors(InputTile->neighbor[x],stacks-1); } } And finally, traversing the grid: void TraverseGrid(Tile *inputTile) { Tile *temp; for(int x=0;x<6;x++) if(inputTile->neighbor[x]) { temp=inputTile->neighbor[x]; temp->xPos=0.0f; TraverseGrid(temp); //MessageBox(NULL,"Not Null!","SHUTDOWN ERROR",MB_OK | MB_ICONINFORMATION); } } The key line is "if(inputTile-neighbor[x])" and whether I make it "if(inputTile-neighbor[x]==NULL)" or whatever I do, it just isn't handling it properly. Oh and I'm also aware that I haven't set up the list fully. It's only one direction now.

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• Accessing Layout Items from inside Widget AppWidgetProvider

  - by cam4mav

  I am starting to go insane trying to figure this out. It seems like it should be very easy, I'm starting to wonder if it's possible. What I am trying to do is create a home screen widget, that only contains an ImageButton. When it is pressed, the idea is to change some setting (like the wi-fi toggle) and then change the Buttons image. I have the ImageButton declared like this in my main.xml <ImageButton android:id="@+id/buttonOne" android:src="@drawable/button_normal_ringer" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center" /> my AppWidgetProvider class, named ButtonWidget * note that the RemoteViews class is a locally stored variable. this allowed me to get access to the RViews layout elements... or so I thought. @Override public void onUpdate(Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager, int[] appWidgetIds) { remoteViews = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(), R.layout.main); Intent active = new Intent(context, ButtonWidget.class); active.setAction(VIBRATE_UPDATE); active.putExtra("msg","TESTING"); PendingIntent actionPendingIntent = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(context, 0, active, 0); remoteViews.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.buttonOne, actionPendingIntent); appWidgetManager.updateAppWidget(appWidgetIds, remoteViews); } @Override public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) { // v1.5 fix that doesn't call onDelete Action final String action = intent.getAction(); Log.d("onReceive",action); if (AppWidgetManager.ACTION_APPWIDGET_DELETED.equals(action)) { final int appWidgetId = intent.getExtras().getInt( AppWidgetManager.EXTRA_APPWIDGET_ID, AppWidgetManager.INVALID_APPWIDGET_ID); if (appWidgetId != AppWidgetManager.INVALID_APPWIDGET_ID) { this.onDeleted(context, new int[] { appWidgetId }); } } else { // check, if our Action was called if (intent.getAction().equals(VIBRATE_UPDATE)) { String msg = "null"; try { msg = intent.getStringExtra("msg"); } catch (NullPointerException e) { Log.e("Error", "msg = null"); } Log.d("onReceive",msg); if(remoteViews != null){ Log.d("onReceive",""+remoteViews.getLayoutId()); remoteViews.setImageViewResource(R.id.buttonOne, R.drawable.button_pressed_ringer); Log.d("onReceive", "tried to switch"); } else{ Log.d("F!", "--naughty language used here!!!--"); } } super.onReceive(context, intent); } } so, I've been testing this and the onReceive method works great, I'm able to send notifications and all sorts of stuff (removed from code for ease of reading) the one thing I can't do is change any properties of the view elements. To try and fix this, I made RemoteViews a local and static private variable. Using log's I was able to see that When multiple instances of the app are on screen, they all refer to the one instance of RemoteViews. perfect for what I'm trying to do The trouble is in trying to change the image of the ImageButton. I can do this from within the onUpdate method using this. remoteViews.setImageViewResource(R.id.buttonOne, R.drawable.button_pressed_ringer); that doesn't do me any good though once the widget is created. For some reason, even though its inside the same class, being inside the onReceive method makes that line not work. That line used to throw a Null pointer as a matter of fact, until I changed the variable to static. now it passes the null test, refers to the same layoutId as it did at the start, reads the line, but it does nothing. Its like the code isn't even there, just keeps chugging along. SO...... Is there any way to modify layout elements from within a widget after the widget has been created!? I want to do this based on the environment, not with a configuration activity launch. I've been looking at various questions and this seems to be an issue that really hasn't been solved, such as link text and link text oh and for anyone who finds this and wants a good starting tutorial for widgets, this is easy to follow (though a bit old, it gets you comfortable with widgets) .pdf link text hopefully someone can help here. I kinda have the feeling that this is illegal and there is a different way to go about this. I would LOVE to be told another approach!!!! Thanks

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• Doing XML extracts with XSLT without having to read the whole DOM tree into memory?

  - by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

  I have a situation where I want to extract some information from some very large but regular XML files (just had to do it with a 500 Mb file), and where XSLT would be perfect. Unfortunately those XSLT implementations I am aware of (except the most expensive version of Saxon) does not support only having the necessary part of the DOM read in but reads in the whole tree. This cause the computer to swap to death. The XPath in question is //m/e[contains(.,'foobar') so it is essentially just a grep. Is there an XSLT implementation which can do this? Or an XSLT implementation which given suitable "advice" can do this trick of pruning away the parts in memory which will not be needed again? I'd prefer a Java implementation but both Windows and Linux are viable native platforms. EDIT: The input XML looks like: <log> <!-- Fri Jun 26 12:09:27 CEST 2009 --> <e h='12:09:27,284' l='org.apache.catalina.session.ManagerBase' z='1246010967284' t='ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Catalina]]' v='10000'> <m>Registering Catalina:type=Manager,path=/axsWHSweb-20090626,host=localhost</m></e> <e h='12:09:27,284' l='org.apache.catalina.session.ManagerBase' z='1246010967284' t='ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Catalina]]' v='10000'> <m>Force random number initialization starting</m></e> <e h='12:09:27,284' l='org.apache.catalina.session.ManagerBase' z='1246010967284' t='ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Catalina]]' v='10000'> <m>Getting message digest component for algorithm MD5</m></e> <e h='12:09:27,284' l='org.apache.catalina.session.ManagerBase' z='1246010967284' t='ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Catalina]]' v='10000'> <m>Completed getting message digest component</m></e> <e h='12:09:27,284' l='org.apache.catalina.session.ManagerBase' z='1246010967284' t='ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Catalina]]' v='10000'> <m>getDigest() 0</m></e> ...... </log> Essentialy I want to select some m-nodes (and I know the XPath is wrong for that, it was just a quick hack), but maintain the XML layout. EDIT: It appears that STX may be what I am looking for (I can live with another transformation language), and that Joost is an implementation hereof. Any experiences? EDIT: I found that Saxon 6.5.4 with -Xmx1500m could load my XML, so this allowed me to use my XPaths right now. This is just a lucky stroke so I'd still like to solve this generically - this means scriptable which in turn means no handcrafted Java filtering first. EDIT: Oh, by the way. This is a log file very similar to what is generated by the log4j XMLLayout. The reason for XML is to be able to do exactly this, namely do queries on the log. This is the initial try, hence the simple question. Later I'd like to be able to ask more complex questions - therefore I'd like the query language to be able to handle the input file.

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• Form inside a hidden div has no values on post

  - by Mick

  I have a html form that posts to a new page on submit. If required a user can click a button to make a small table visible in a div box. this adds more text input fields to my form. The problem is, regardless of the div box being hidden or visible none of the additional fields data is sent when the form is posted . the div box code function quotevisi() { document.getElementById("quote").style.visibility = "visible"; tdat = "" ; tdat += "<h2 align='center' >Client Quotation </h2>" ; tdat += "<table align='center'cellpadding='1' width='690px'><tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td>Additional 1</td>" ; tdat += "<td ><label><textarea id='line1' cols='50' rows='1'>" tdat += "</textarea></label></td></tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td >Additional 2 </td>" ; tdat += "<td ><label><textarea id='line2' name='line2' cols='50' rows='1'>" tdat += "</textarea></label></td></tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td >Additional 3 </td>" ; tdat += "<td ><label><textarea id='line3' name='line3' cols='50' rows='1'>" tdat += "</textarea></label></td></tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td >Special Instructions</td>" ; tdat += "<td ><label><textarea id='special' name='special' cols='50' rows='1'>" tdat += "</textarea></label></td></tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td ></td> <td>" ; tdat += "<input type='button' value='View Quote' onclick='view_quote()' /> " tdat += "<input type='button' value='Close' onclick='closequote()' /> " tdat += "<td ></td> " ; tdat += "</table> " // display in the quote div (style sheet) document.getElementById('quote').innerHTML= tdat } The form is a bit big to but the button for the hidden field is this <td ><input class="buttn" type="button" value="Extra Quote details " onclick="quotevisi();" /> </td> I would of thought that all this information would go with the form on post . But it doesent. Oh finally the div box code is placed after this line <form style='background-color:ccc' id='form1' name='form1' method='post' action='process.php' > Any help or thoughts would be much appreciated thanks Mick

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• Using AsyncTask, but experiencing unexpected behaviour

  - by capcom

  Please refer to the following code which continuously calls a new AsyncTask. The purpose of the AsyncTask is to make an HTTP request, and update the string result. package room.temperature; import java.io.BufferedReader; import java.io.InputStream; import java.io.InputStreamReader; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException; import org.apache.http.HttpEntity; import org.apache.http.HttpResponse; import org.apache.http.NameValuePair; import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient; import org.apache.http.client.entity.UrlEncodedFormEntity; import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost; import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient; import android.app.Activity; import android.os.AsyncTask; import android.os.Bundle; import android.util.Log; import android.widget.TextView; public class RoomTemperatureActivity extends Activity { String result = null; StringBuilder sb=null; TextView TemperatureText, DateText; ArrayList<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); TemperatureText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.temperature); DateText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.date); nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(); for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { RefreshValuesTask task = new RefreshValuesTask(); task.execute(""); } } // The definition of our task class private class RefreshValuesTask extends AsyncTask<String, Integer, String> { @Override protected void onPreExecute() { super.onPreExecute(); } @Override protected String doInBackground(String... params) { InputStream is = null; try { HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("http://mywebsite.com/roomtemp/tempscript.php"); httppost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs)); HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); is = entity.getContent(); } catch(Exception e) { Log.e("log_tag", "Error in http connection" + e.toString()); } try { BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is,"iso-8859-1"),8); sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.append(reader.readLine()); is.close(); result=sb.toString(); } catch(Exception e) { Log.e("log_tag", "Error converting result " + e.toString()); } return result; } @Override protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... values) { super.onProgressUpdate(values); } @Override protected void onPostExecute(String result) { super.onPostExecute(result); //System.out.println(result); setValues(result); } } public void setValues(String resultValue) { System.out.println(resultValue); String[] values = resultValue.split("&"); TemperatureText.setText(values[0]); DateText.setText(values[1]); } } The problem I am experiencing relates to the AsyncTask in some way or the function setValues(), but I am not sure how. Essentially, I want each call to the AsyncTask to run, eventually in an infinite while loop, and update the TextView fields as I have attempted in setValues. I have tried since yesterday after asking a question which led to this code, for reference. Oh yes, I did try using the AsyncTask get() method, but that didn't work either as I found out that it is actually a synchronous call, and renders the whole point of AsyncTask useless.

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• ?????Exadata????

  - by Liu Maclean(???)

  ??check Exadata Image & OS versions , GI & DB patches sundiag exacheck cellserv ==> imageinfo dbhost ==> /usr/local/bin/imagehistory Also check the version of the switch. Login to Switch and execute the following command [root@myswitch-1 sbin]# version [root@dmorlsw-ib2 sbin]# cd /usr/local/bin [root@dmorlsw-ib2 bin]# ls -lrt version -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 20356 Apr 4 2011 version Output will look as below. [root@dmorlsw-ib2 ~]# version SUN DCS 36p version: 1.3.3-2 Build time: Apr 4 2011 11:15:19 SP board info: Manufacturing Date: 2009.05.05 Serial Number: "NCD3X0178" Hardware Revision: 0x0006 Firmware Revision: 0x0102 BIOS version: NOW1R112 BIOS date: 04/24/2009 ib8# cat /sys/class/infiniband/is4_0/fw_ver 7.2.300 ib8 # cat /sys/class/dmi/id/bios_version NOW1R112 ib8 # nm2version NM2-36p version: 1.0.1-1 Build time: Sep 14 2009 12:52:51 ComExpress info: Manufacturing Date: 2009.08.19 Serial Number: Hardware Revision: 0x0006 Firmware Revision: 0x0102 { case `uname` in Linux ) ILOM="/usr/bin/ipmitool sunoem cli" ;; SunOS ) ILOM="/opt/ipmitool/bin/ipmitool sunoem cli" ;; esac ; ImageInfo="/opt/oracle.cellos/imageinfo" ; uname -srm ; head -1 /etc/*release ; uptime | cut -d, -f1 ; $ILOM "show /SP system_description system_identifier" | grep = ; $ImageInfo -activated -node -status -ver | grep -v ^$ ; } | tee /tmp/ExaInfo.log $GRID_HOME/OPatch/opatch lsinv -all -oh $GRID_HOME | tee /tmp/OPatchInv.log $ORACLE_HOME/OPatch/opatch lsinv -all | tee -a /tmp/OPatchInv.log cat /tmp/ExaInfo.log Linux 2.6.18-128.1.16.0.1.el5 x86_64 ==> /etc/enterprise-release <== Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Carthage) ==> /etc/redhat-release <== Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Carthage) 20:37:56 up 458 days system_description = SUN FIRE X4170 SERVER, ILOM v3.0.6.10.b, r52264 system_identifier = Sun Oracle Database Machine Active image version: 11.2.1.2.3 Active image activated: XXXX-XX-XX 12:27:12 +0800 Active image status: success Active node type: COMPUTE Inactive image version: undefined FileName: OPatchInv.log ---------------- ... Oracle Home       : /u01/app/11.2.0/grid Central Inventory : /u01/app/oraInventory   from           : /etc/oraInst.loc OPatch version    : 11.2.0.1.2 OUI version       : 11.2.0.1.0 OUI location      : /u01/app/11.2.0/grid/oui ... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- List of Oracle Homes:   Name                                       Location   Ora11g_gridinfrahome1         /u01/app/11.2.0/grid   OraDb11g_home1                  /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Installed Top-level Products (1): Oracle Grid Infrastructure                                           11.2.0.1.0 ... Interim patches (2) : Patch  9524394      : applied on Thu Jun 03 20:46:05 CST 2010 ... {TRACKING BUG FOR 11.2.0.1 DB MACHINE BUNDLE PATCH 3} Patch  9455587      : applied on Fri Apr 02 18:27:47 CST 2010 ... {MERGE REQUEST ON TOP OF 11.2.0.1.0 FOR BUGS 8483425 8667622 8702731 8730804} Rac system comprising of multiple nodes  Local node = dbserv01  Remote node = dbserv02  Remote node = dbserv03  Remote node = dbserv04 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OPatch succeeded. ... Oracle Home       : /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1 ... Oracle Database 11g                                                  11.2.0.1.0 ... Interim patches (5) : Patch  8888434      : applied on Sat Jan 08 00:27:33 CST 2011 ... {AIX-ASM-CF: LMHB TERMINATE INSTANCE WHEN OFFLINE ONE FAILGROUP IN ASM DG} Patch  8730312      : applied on Thu Jun 03 21:30:03 CST 2010 ... {FWD MERGE FOR BASE BUG 8715387 FOR 12G} Patch  9502717      : applied on Thu Jun 03 21:25:54 CST 2010 ... {LMS HIT ORA-600 [KJBLDRMNEXTPKEY:SEEN] AND CRASHED THE INSTANCE} { + same 2 as GI above} ?? cell server Cache Policy cell08# MegaCli64 -LDInfo -Lall -aALL | grep 'Current Cache Policy' Current Cache Policy: WriteThrough, ReadAheadNone, Direct, No Write Cache if Bad BBU cell09# MegaCli64 -LDInfo -Lall -aALL | grep 'Current Cache Policy' Current Cache Policy: WriteBack, ReadAheadNone, Direct, No Write Cache if Bad BBU Default Cache Policy: WriteBack, ReadAheadNone, Direct, No Write Cache if Bad BBU Current Cache Policy: WriteThrough, ReadAheadNone, Direct, No Write Cache if Bad BBU Cache policy is in WB Would recommend proactive  battery repalcement. Example : a. /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -LDGetProp  -Cache -LALL -aALL ####( Will list the cache policy) b. /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -LDSetProp  -WB  -LALL -aALL ####( Will try to change teh policy from xx to WB)     So policy Change to WB will not come into effect immediately     Set Write Policy to WriteBack on Adapter 0, VD 0 (target id: 0) success     Battery capacity is below the threshold value ??cell BBU??????: cell08# /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -AdpBbuCmd -GetBbuStatus -a0 BBU status for Adapter: 0 BatteryType: iBBU Voltage: 4061 mV Current: 0 mA Temperature: 36 C BBU Firmware Status: Charging Status : None Voltage : OK Temperature : OK Learn Cycle Requested : No Learn Cycle Active : No Learn Cycle Status : OK Learn Cycle Timeout : No I2c Errors Detected : No Battery Pack Missing : No Battery Replacement required : No Remaining Capacity Low : Yes Periodic Learn Required : No Battery state: GasGuageStatus: Fully Discharged : No Fully Charged : Yes Discharging : Yes Initialized : Yes Remaining Time Alarm : No Remaining Capacity Alarm: No Discharge Terminated : No Over Temperature : No Charging Terminated : No Over Charged : No Relative State of Charge: 99 % Charger System State: 49168 Charger System Ctrl: 0 Charging current: 0 mA Absolute state of charge: 21 % Max Error: 2 % Exit Code: 0x00 ????BBU ??: dcli -g ~/cell_group -l root -t '{ uname -srm ; head -1 /etc/*release ; uptime | cut -d, -f1 ; imagehistory ; ipmitool sunoem cli "show /SP system_description system_identifier" | grep = ; ipmitool sunoem cli "show /SP/policy FLASH_ACCELERATOR_CARD_INSTALLED /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -AdpBbuCmd -GetBbuStatus -a0 | egrep -i 'BBU|Battery|Charge:|Fully|Low|Learn' ; }' | tee /tmp/ExaInfo.log Target cells: ['cellserv01', 'cellserv02', 'cellserv03', 'cellserv04', 'cellserv05', 'cellserv06', 'cellserv07'] cellserv01: Linux 2.6.18-128.1.16.0.1.el5 x86_64 cellserv01: ==> /etc/enterprise-release <== cellserv01: Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Carthage) cellserv01: cellserv01: ==> /etc/redhat-release <== cellserv01: Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux Server release 5.3 (Carthage) cellserv01: 01:17:39 up 635 days cellserv01: Version : 11.2.1.2.1 cellserv01: Image activation date : 2011-03-25 11:59:34 -0800 cellserv01: Imaging mode : fresh cellserv01: Imaging status : success cellserv01: cellserv01: Version : 11.2.1.2.3 cellserv01: Image activation date : 2011-04-13 12:15:46 +0800 cellserv01: Imaging mode : patch cellserv01: Imaging status : success cellserv01: cellserv01: Version : 11.2.1.2.6 cellserv01: Image activation date : 2011-05-27 23:08:22 +0800 cellserv01: Imaging mode : patch cellserv01: Imaging status : success cellserv01: cellserv01: system_description = SUN FIRE X4275 SERVER, ILOM v3.0.6.10.b, r52264 cellserv01: system_identifier = Sun Oracle Database Machine cellserv01: Connected. Use ^D to exit. cellserv01: -> show /SP/policy FLASH_ACCELERATOR_CARD_INSTALLED cellserv01: show: No matching properties found. cellserv01: cellserv01: -> Session closed cellserv01: Disconnected cellserv01: BBU status for Adapter: 0 cellserv01: BatteryType: iBBU cellserv01: BBU Firmware Status: cellserv01: Learn Cycle Requested : No cellserv01: Learn Cycle Active : No cellserv01: Learn Cycle Status : OK cellserv01: Learn Cycle Timeout : No cellserv01: Battery Pack Missing : No cellserv01: Battery Replacement required : No cellserv01: Remaining Capacity Low : Yes cellserv01: Periodic Learn Required : No cellserv01: Battery state: cellserv01: Fully Discharged : No cellserv01: Fully Charged : Yes cellserv01: Relative State of Charge: 99 % cellserv01: Absolute state of charge: 21 % dcli -l root -g /root/all_group '/opt/MegaRAID/MegAaCli/MegaCli64 -AdpBbuCmd -a0' > BBU.out check ipmi: dcli -g ~/cell_group -l root -t '{ > ipmitool sunoem cli "show /SP/policy FLASH_ACCELERATOR_CARD_INSTALLED" | grep = ; MegaCli64 -LDInfo -Lall -aALL | grep 'Current Cache Policy' ; }' | tee /tmp/ExaCells.log

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• SQL Monitor’s data repository: Alerts

  - by Chris Lambrou

  In my previous post, I introduced the SQL Monitor data repository, and described how the monitored objects are stored in a hierarchy in the data schema, in a series of tables with a _Keys suffix. In this post I had planned to describe how the actual data for the monitored objects is stored in corresponding tables with _StableSamples and _UnstableSamples suffixes. However, I’m going to postpone that until my next post, as I’ve had a request from a SQL Monitor user to explain how alerts are stored. In the SQL Monitor data repository, alerts are stored in tables belonging to the alert schema, which contains the following five tables: alert.Alert alert.Alert_Cleared alert.Alert_Comment alert.Alert_Severity alert.Alert_Type In this post, I’m only going to cover the alert.Alert and alert.Alert_Type tables. I may cover the other three tables in a later post. The most important table in this schema is alert.Alert, as each row in this table corresponds to a single alert. So let’s have a look at it. SELECT TOP 100 AlertId, AlertType, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert ORDER BY AlertId DESC;  AlertIdAlertTypeTargetObjectReadSubType 165550397:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,10 265549387:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,7:Machine,1,4:Name,s0:,10 365548187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 465547157:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 565546147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 665545187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 765544157:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 865543147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 965542187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 1065541147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 11…     So what are we seeing here, then? Well, AlertId is an auto-incrementing identity column, so ORDER BY AlertId DESC ensures that we see the most recent alerts first. AlertType indicates the type of each alert, such as Job failed (6), Backup overdue (14) or Long-running query (12). The TargetObject column indicates which monitored object the alert is associated with. The Read column acts as a flag to indicate whether or not the alert has been read. And finally the SubType column is used in the case of a Custom metric (40) alert, to indicate which custom metric the alert pertains to. Okay, now lets look at some of those columns in more detail. The AlertType column is an easy one to start with, and it brings use nicely to the next table, data.Alert_Type. Let’s have a look at what’s in this table: SELECT AlertType, Event, Monitoring, Name, Description FROM alert.Alert_Type ORDER BY AlertType;  AlertTypeEventMonitoringNameDescription 1100Processor utilizationProcessor utilization (CPU) on a host machine stays above a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration 2210SQL Server error log entryAn error is written to the SQL Server error log with a severity level above a specified value. 3310Cluster failoverThe active cluster node fails, causing the SQL Server instance to switch nodes. 4410DeadlockSQL deadlock occurs. 5500Processor under-utilizationProcessor utilization (CPU) on a host machine remains below a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration 6610Job failedA job does not complete successfully (the job returns an error code). 7700Machine unreachableHost machine (Windows server) cannot be contacted on the network. 8800SQL Server instance unreachableThe SQL Server instance is not running or cannot be contacted on the network. 9900Disk spaceDisk space used on a logical disk drive is above a defined threshold for longer than a specified duration. 101000Physical memoryPhysical memory (RAM) used on the host machine stays above a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration. 111100Blocked processSQL process is blocked for longer than a specified duration. 121200Long-running queryA SQL query runs for longer than a specified duration. 131400Backup overdueNo full backup exists, or the last full backup is older than a specified time. 141500Log backup overdueNo log backup exists, or the last log backup is older than a specified time. 151600Database unavailableDatabase changes from Online to any other state. 161700Page verificationTorn Page Detection or Page Checksum is not enabled for a database. 171800Integrity check overdueNo entry for an integrity check (DBCC DBINFO returns no date for dbi_dbccLastKnownGood field), or the last check is older than a specified time. 181900Fragmented indexesFragmentation level of one or more indexes is above a threshold percentage. 192400Job duration unusualThe duration of a SQL job duration deviates from its baseline duration by more than a threshold percentage. 202501Clock skewSystem clock time on the Base Monitor computer differs from the system clock time on a monitored SQL Server host machine by a specified number of seconds. 212700SQL Server Agent Service statusThe SQL Server Agent Service status matches the status specified. 222800SQL Server Reporting Service statusThe SQL Server Reporting Service status matches the status specified. 232900SQL Server Full Text Search Service statusThe SQL Server Full Text Search Service status matches the status specified. 243000SQL Server Analysis Service statusThe SQL Server Analysis Service status matches the status specified. 253100SQL Server Integration Service statusThe SQL Server Integration Service status matches the status specified. 263300SQL Server Browser Service statusThe SQL Server Browser Service status matches the status specified. 273400SQL Server VSS Writer Service statusThe SQL Server VSS Writer status matches the status specified. 283501Deadlock trace flag disabledThe monitored SQL Server’s trace flag cannot be enabled. 293600Monitoring stopped (host machine credentials)SQL Monitor cannot contact the host machine because authentication failed. 303700Monitoring stopped (SQL Server credentials)SQL Monitor cannot contact the SQL Server instance because authentication failed. 313800Monitoring error (host machine data collection)SQL Monitor cannot collect data from the host machine. 323900Monitoring error (SQL Server data collection)SQL Monitor cannot collect data from the SQL Server instance. 334000Custom metricThe custom metric value has passed an alert threshold. 344100Custom metric collection errorSQL Monitor cannot collect custom metric data from the target object. Basically, alert.Alert_Type is just a big reference table containing information about the 34 different alert types supported by SQL Monitor (note that the largest id is 41, not 34 – some alert types have been retired since SQL Monitor was first developed). The Name and Description columns are self evident, and I’m going to skip over the Event and Monitoring columns as they’re not very interesting. The AlertId column is the primary key, and is referenced by AlertId in the alert.Alert table. As such, we can rewrite our earlier query to join these two tables, in order to provide a more readable view of the alerts: SELECT TOP 100 AlertId, Name, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType ORDER BY AlertId DESC;  AlertIdNameTargetObjectReadSubType 165550Monitoring error (SQL Server data collection)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,00 265549Monitoring error (host machine data collection)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,7:Machine,1,4:Name,s0:,00 365548Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 465547Log backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 565546Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 665545Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 765544Log backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 865543Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 965542Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 1065541Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 Okay, the next column to discuss in the alert.Alert table is TargetObject. Oh boy, this one’s a bit tricky! The TargetObject of an alert is a serialized string representation of the position in the monitored object hierarchy of the object to which the alert pertains. The serialization format is somewhat convenient for parsing in the C# source code of SQL Monitor, and has some helpful characteristics, but it’s probably very awkward to manipulate in T-SQL. I could document the serialization format here, but it would be very dry reading, so perhaps it’s best to consider an example from the table above. Have a look at the alert with an AlertID of 65543. It’s a Backup overdue alert for the SqlMonitorData database running on the default instance of granger, my laptop. Each different alert type is associated with a specific type of monitored object in the object hierarchy (I described the hierarchy in my previous post). The Backup overdue alert is associated with databases, whose position in the object hierarchy is root → Cluster → SqlServer → Database. The TargetObject value identifies the target object by specifying the key properties at each level in the hierarchy, thus: Cluster: Name = "granger" SqlServer: Name = "" (an empty string, denoting the default instance) Database: Name = "SqlMonitorData" Well, look at the actual TargetObject value for this alert: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,". It is indeed composed of three parts, one for each level in the hierarchy: Cluster: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger," SqlServer: "9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:," Database: "8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData," Each part is handled in exactly the same way, so let’s concentrate on the first part, "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,". It comprises the following: "7:Cluster," – This identifies the level in the hierarchy. "1," – This indicates how many different key properties there are to uniquely identify a cluster (we saw in my last post that each cluster is identified by a single property, its Name). "4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData," – This represents the Name property, and its corresponding value, SqlMonitorData. It’s split up like this: "4:Name," – Indicates the name of the key property. "s" – Indicates the type of the key property, in this case, it’s a string. "14:SqlMonitorData," – Indicates the value of the property. At this point, you might be wondering about the format of some of these strings. Why is the string "Cluster" stored as "7:Cluster,"? Well an encoding scheme is used, which consists of the following: "7" – This is the length of the string "Cluster" ":" – This is a delimiter between the length of the string and the actual string’s contents. "Cluster" – This is the string itself. 7 characters. "," – This is a final terminating character that indicates the end of the encoded string. You can see that "4:Name,", "8:Database," and "14:SqlMonitorData," also conform to the same encoding scheme. In the example above, the "s" character is used to indicate that the value of the Name property is a string. If you explore the TargetObject property of alerts in your own SQL Monitor data repository, you might find other characters used for other non-string key property values. The different value types you might possibly encounter are as follows: "I" – Denotes a bigint value. For example, "I65432,". "g" – Denotes a GUID value. For example, "g32116732-63ae-4ab5-bd34-7dfdfb084c18,". "d" – Denotes a datetime value. For example, "d634815384796832438,". The value is stored as a bigint, rather than a native SQL datetime value. I’ll describe how datetime values are handled in the SQL Monitor data repostory in a future post. I suggest you have a look at the alerts in your own SQL Monitor data repository for further examples, so you can see how the TargetObject values are composed for each of the different types of alert. Let me give one further example, though, that represents a Custom metric alert, as this will help in describing the final column of interest in the alert.Alert table, SubType. Let me show you the alert I’m interested in: SELECT AlertId, a.AlertType, Name, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType WHERE AlertId = 65769;  AlertIdAlertTypeNameTargetObjectReadSubType 16576940Custom metric7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master,12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2,02 An AlertType value of 40 corresponds to the Custom metric alert type. The Name taken from the alert.Alert_Type table is simply Custom metric, but this doesn’t tell us anything about the specific custom metric that this alert pertains to. That’s where the SubType value comes in. For custom metric alerts, this provides us with the Id of the specific custom alert definition that can be found in the settings.CustomAlertDefinitions table. I don’t really want to delve into custom alert definitions yet (maybe in a later post), but an extra join in the previous query shows us that this alert pertains to the CPU pressure (avg runnable task count) custom metric alert. SELECT AlertId, a.AlertType, at.Name, cad.Name AS CustomAlertName, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType JOIN settings.CustomAlertDefinitions cad ON a.SubType = cad.Id WHERE AlertId = 65769;  AlertIdAlertTypeNameCustomAlertNameTargetObjectReadSubType 16576940Custom metricCPU pressure (avg runnable task count)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master,12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2,02 The TargetObject value in this case breaks down like this: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger," – Cluster named "granger". "9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:," – SqlServer named "" (the default instance). "8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master," – Database named "master". "12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2," – Custom metric with an Id of 2. Note that the hierarchy for a custom metric is slightly different compared to the earlier Backup overdue alert. It’s root → Cluster → SqlServer → Database → CustomMetric. Also notice that, unlike Cluster, SqlServer and Database, the key property for CustomMetric is called MetricId (not Name), and the value is a bigint (not a string). Finally, delving into the custom metric tables is beyond the scope of this post, but for the sake of avoiding any future confusion, I’d like to point out that whilst the SubType references a custom alert definition, the MetricID value embedded in the TargetObject value references a custom metric definition. Although in this case both the custom metric definition and custom alert definition share the same Id value of 2, this is not generally the case. Okay, that’s enough for now, not least because as I’m typing this, it’s almost 2am, I have to go to work tomorrow, and my alarm is set for 6am – eek! In my next post, I’ll either cover the remaining three tables in the alert schema, or I’ll delve into the way SQL Monitor stores its monitoring data, as I’d originally planned to cover in this post.

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• When is a SQL function not a function?

  - by Rob Farley

  Should SQL Server even have functions? (Oh yeah – this is a T-SQL Tuesday post, hosted this month by Brad Schulz) Functions serve an important part of programming, in almost any language. A function is a piece of code that is designed to return something, as opposed to a piece of code which isn’t designed to return anything (which is known as a procedure). SQL Server is no different. You can call stored procedures, even from within other stored procedures, and you can call functions and use these in other queries. Stored procedures might query something, and therefore ‘return data’, but a function in SQL is considered to have the type of the thing returned, and can be used accordingly in queries. Consider the internal GETDATE() function. SELECT GETDATE(), SomeDatetimeColumn FROM dbo.SomeTable; There’s no logical difference between the field that is being returned by the function and the field that’s being returned by the table column. Both are the datetime field – if you didn’t have inside knowledge, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which was which. And so as developers, we find ourselves wanting to create functions that return all kinds of things – functions which look up values based on codes, functions which do string manipulation, and so on. But it’s rubbish. Ok, it’s not all rubbish, but it mostly is. And this isn’t even considering the SARGability impact. It’s far more significant than that. (When I say the SARGability aspect, I mean “because you’re unlikely to have an index on the result of some function that’s applied to a column, so try to invert the function and query the column in an unchanged manner”) I’m going to consider the three main types of user-defined functions in SQL Server: Scalar Inline Table-Valued Multi-statement Table-Valued I could also look at user-defined CLR functions, including aggregate functions, but not today. I figure that most people don’t tend to get around to doing CLR functions, and I’m going to focus on the T-SQL-based user-defined functions. Most people split these types of function up into two types. So do I. Except that most people pick them based on ‘scalar or table-valued’. I’d rather go with ‘inline or not’. If it’s not inline, it’s rubbish. It really is. Let’s start by considering the two kinds of table-valued function, and compare them. These functions are going to return the sales for a particular salesperson in a particular year, from the AdventureWorks database. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS TABLE AS  RETURN (     SELECT e.LoginID as EmployeeLogin, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ) ; GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_multi(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS @results TABLE (     EmployeeLogin nvarchar(512),     OrderDate datetime,     SalesOrderID int     ) AS BEGIN     INSERT @results (EmployeeLogin, OrderDate, SalesOrderID)     SELECT e.LoginID, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101')     ;     RETURN END ; GO You’ll notice that I’m being nice and responsible with the use of the DATEADD function, so that I have SARGability on the OrderDate filter. Regular readers will be hoping I’ll show what’s going on in the execution plans here. Here I’ve run two SELECT * queries with the “Show Actual Execution Plan” option turned on. Notice that the ‘Query cost’ of the multi-statement version is just 2% of the ‘Batch cost’. But also notice there’s trickery going on. And it’s nothing to do with that extra index that I have on the OrderDate column. Trickery. Look at it – clearly, the first plan is showing us what’s going on inside the function, but the second one isn’t. The second one is blindly running the function, and then scanning the results. There’s a Sequence operator which is calling the TVF operator, and then calling a Table Scan to get the results of that function for the SELECT operator. But surely it still has to do all the work that the first one is doing... To see what’s actually going on, let’s look at the Estimated plan. Now, we see the same plans (almost) that we saw in the Actuals, but we have an extra one – the one that was used for the TVF. Here’s where we see the inner workings of it. You’ll probably recognise the right-hand side of the TVF’s plan as looking very similar to the first plan – but it’s now being called by a stack of other operators, including an INSERT statement to be able to populate the table variable that the multi-statement TVF requires. And the cost of the TVF is 57% of the batch! But it gets worse. Let’s consider what happens if we don’t need all the columns. We’ll leave out the EmployeeLogin column. Here, we see that the inline function call has been simplified down. It doesn’t need the Employee table. The join is redundant and has been eliminated from the plan, making it even cheaper. But the multi-statement plan runs the whole thing as before, only removing the extra column when the Table Scan is performed. A multi-statement function is a lot more powerful than an inline one. An inline function can only be the result of a single sub-query. It’s essentially the same as a parameterised view, because views demonstrate this same behaviour of extracting the definition of the view and using it in the outer query. A multi-statement function is clearly more powerful because it can contain far more complex logic. But a multi-statement function isn’t really a function at all. It’s a stored procedure. It’s wrapped up like a function, but behaves like a stored procedure. It would be completely unreasonable to expect that a stored procedure could be simplified down to recognise that not all the columns might be needed, but yet this is part of the pain associated with this procedural function situation. The biggest clue that a multi-statement function is more like a stored procedure than a function is the “BEGIN” and “END” statements that surround the code. If you try to create a multi-statement function without these statements, you’ll get an error – they are very much required. When I used to present on this kind of thing, I even used to call it “The Dangers of BEGIN and END”, and yes, I’ve written about this type of thing before in a similarly-named post over at my old blog. Now how about scalar functions... Suppose we wanted a scalar function to return the count of these. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_scalar(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS int AS BEGIN     RETURN (         SELECT COUNT(*)         FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o         LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e         ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID         WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid         AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')         AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101')     ); END ; GO Notice the evil words? They’re required. Try to remove them, you just get an error. That’s right – any scalar function is procedural, despite the fact that you wrap up a sub-query inside that RETURN statement. It’s as ugly as anything. Hopefully this will change in future versions. Let’s have a look at how this is reflected in an execution plan. Here’s a query, its Actual plan, and its Estimated plan: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, dbo.FetchSales_scalar(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; We see here that the cost of the scalar function is about twice that of the outer query. Nicely, the query optimizer has worked out that it doesn’t need the Employee table, but that’s a bit of a red herring here. There’s actually something way more significant going on. If I look at the properties of that UDF operator, it tells me that the Estimated Subtree Cost is 0.337999. If I just run the query SELECT dbo.FetchSales_scalar(281,2003); we see that the UDF cost is still unchanged. You see, this 0.0337999 is the cost of running the scalar function ONCE. But when we ran that query with the CROSS JOIN in it, we returned quite a few rows. 68 in fact. Could’ve been a lot more, if we’d had more salespeople or more years. And so we come to the biggest problem. This procedure (I don’t want to call it a function) is getting called 68 times – each one between twice as expensive as the outer query. And because it’s calling it in a separate context, there is even more overhead that I haven’t considered here. The cheek of it, to say that the Compute Scalar operator here costs 0%! I know a number of IT projects that could’ve used that kind of costing method, but that’s another story that I’m not going to go into here. Let’s look at a better way. Suppose our scalar function had been implemented as an inline one. Then it could have been expanded out like a sub-query. It could’ve run something like this: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, (SELECT COUNT(*)     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = p.SalesPersonID     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,y.year-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,y.year-2000+1,'20000101')     ) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; Don’t worry too much about the Scan of the SalesOrderHeader underneath a Nested Loop. If you remember from plenty of other posts on the matter, execution plans don’t push the data through. That Scan only runs once. The Index Spool sucks the data out of it and populates a structure that is used to feed the Stream Aggregate. The Index Spool operator gets called 68 times, but the Scan only once (the Number of Executions property demonstrates this). Here, the Query Optimizer has a full picture of what’s being asked, and can make the appropriate decision about how it accesses the data. It can simplify it down properly. To get this kind of behaviour from a function, we need it to be inline. But without inline scalar functions, we need to make our function be table-valued. Luckily, that’s ok. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline2(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS table AS RETURN (SELECT COUNT(*) as NumSales     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ); GO But we can’t use this as a scalar. Instead, we need to use it with the APPLY operator. SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, n.NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID OUTER APPLY dbo.FetchSales_inline2(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS n; And now, we get the plan that we want for this query. All we’ve done is tell the function that it’s returning a table instead of a single value, and removed the BEGIN and END statements. We’ve had to name the column being returned, but what we’ve gained is an actual inline simplifiable function. And if we wanted it to return multiple columns, it could do that too. I really consider this function to be superior to the scalar function in every way. It does need to be handled differently in the outer query, but in many ways it’s a more elegant method there too. The function calls can be put amongst the FROM clause, where they can then be used in the WHERE or GROUP BY clauses without fear of calling the function multiple times (another horrible side effect of functions). So please. If you see BEGIN and END in a function, remember it’s not really a function, it’s a procedure. And then fix it. @rob_farley

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• Building a jQuery Plug-in to make an HTML Table scrollable

  - by Rick Strahl

  Today I got a call from a customer and we were looking over an older application that uses a lot of tables to display financial and other assorted data. The application is mostly meta-data driven with lots of layout formatting automatically driven through meta data rather than through explicit hand coded HTML layouts. One of the problems in this apps are tables that display a non-fixed amount of data. The users of this app don't want to use paging to see more data, but instead want to display overflow data using a scrollbar. Many of the forms are very densely populated, often with multiple data tables that display a few rows of data in the UI at the most. This sort of layout does not lend itself well to paging, but works much better with scrollable data. Unfortunately scrollable tables are not easily created. HTML Tables are mangy beasts as anybody who's done any sort of Web development knows. Tables are finicky when it comes to styling and layout, and they have many funky quirks, especially when it comes to scrolling both of the table rows themselves or even the child columns. There's no built-in way to make tables scroll and to lock headers while you do, and while you can embed a table (or anything really) into a scrolling div with something like this: <div style="position:relative; overflow: hidden; overflow-y: scroll; height: 200px; width: 400px;"> <table id="table" style="width: 100%" class="blackborder" > <thead> <tr class="gridheader"> <th>Column 1</th> <th>Column 2</th> <th>Column 3</th> <th >Column 4</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> … </tbody> </table> </div> </div> that won't give a very satisfying visual experience: Both the header and body scroll which looks odd. You lose context as soon as the header scrolls off the top and when you reach the bottom of the list the bottom outline of the table shows which also looks off. The the side bar shows all the way down the length of the table yet another visual miscue. In a pinch this will work, but it's ugly. What's out there? Before we go further here you should know that there are a few capable grid plug-ins out there already. Among them: Flexigrid (can work of any table as well as with AJAX data) jQuery Scrollable Table Plug-in (feature similar to what I need but not quite) jqGrid (mostly an Ajax Grid which is very powerful and works very well) But in the end none of them fit the bill of what I needed in this situation. All of these require custom CSS and some of them are fairly complex to restyle. Others are AJAX only or work better with AJAX loaded data. However, I need to actually try (as much as possible) to maintain the original styling of the tables without requiring extensive re-styling. Building the makeTableScrollable() Plug-in To make a table scrollable requires rearranging the table a bit. In the plug-in I built I create two <div> tags and split the table into two: one for the table header and one for the table body. The bottom <div> tag then contains only the table's row data and can be scrolled while the header stays fixed. Using jQuery the basic idea is pretty simple: You create the divs, copy the original table into the bottom, then clone the table, clear all content append the <thead> section, into new table and then copy that table into the second header <div>. Easy as pie, right? Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that as it's tricky to get the width of the table right to account for the scrollbar (by adding a small column) and making sure the borders properly line up for the two tables. A lot of style settings have to be made to ensure the table is a fixed size, to remove and reattach borders, to add extra space to allow for the scrollbar and so forth. The end result of my plug-in is a table with a scrollbar. Using the same table I used earlier the result looks like this: To create it, I use the following jQuery plug-in logic to select my table and run the makeTableScrollable() plug-in against the selector: $("#table").makeTableScrollable( { cssClass:"blackborder"} ); Without much further ado, here's the short code for the plug-in: (function ($) { $.fn.makeTableScrollable = function (options) { return this.each(function () { var $table = $(this); var opt = { // height of the table height: "250px", // right padding added to support the scrollbar rightPadding: "10px", // cssclass used for the wrapper div cssClass: "" } $.extend(opt, options); var $thead = $table.find("thead"); var $ths = $thead.find("th"); var id = $table.attr("id"); var cssClass = $table.attr("class"); if (!id) id = "_table_" + new Date().getMilliseconds().ToString(); $table.width("+=" + opt.rightPadding); $table.css("border-width", 0); // add a column to all rows of the table var first = true; $table.find("tr").each(function () { var row = $(this); if (first) { row.append($("<th>").width(opt.rightPadding)); first = false; } else row.append($("<td>").width(opt.rightPadding)); }); // force full sizing on each of the th elemnts $ths.each(function () { var $th = $(this); $th.css("width", $th.width()); }); // Create the table wrapper div var $tblDiv = $("<div>").css({ position: "relative", overflow: "hidden", overflowY: "scroll" }) .addClass(opt.cssClass); var width = $table.width(); $tblDiv.width(width).height(opt.height) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper") .css("border-top", "none"); // Insert before $tblDiv $tblDiv.insertBefore($table); // then move the table into it $table.appendTo($tblDiv); // Clone the div for header var $hdDiv = $tblDiv.clone(); $hdDiv.empty(); var width = $table.width(); $hdDiv.attr("style", "") .css("border-bottom", "none") .width(width) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper_header"); // create a copy of the table and remove all children var $newTable = $($table).clone(); $newTable.empty() .attr("id", $table.attr("id") + "_header"); $thead.appendTo($newTable); $hdDiv.insertBefore($tblDiv); $newTable.appendTo($hdDiv); $table.css("border-width", 0); }); } })(jQuery); Oh sweet spaghetti code :-) The code starts out by dealing the parameters that can be passed in the options object map: height The height of the full table/structure. The height of the outside wrapper container. Defaults to 200px. rightPadding The padding that is added to the right of the table to account for the scrollbar. Creates a column of this width and injects it into the table. If too small the rightmost column might get truncated. if too large the empty column might show. cssClass The CSS class of the wrapping container that appears to wrap the table. If you want a border around your table this class should probably provide it since the plug-in removes the table border. The rest of the code is obtuse, but pretty straight forward. It starts by creating a new column in the table to accommodate the width of the scrollbar and avoid clipping of text in the rightmost column. The width of the columns is explicitly set in the header elements to force the size of the table to be fixed and to provide the same sizing when the THEAD section is moved to a new copied table later. The table wrapper div is created, formatted and the table is moved into it. The new wrapper div is cloned for the header wrapper and configured. Finally the actual table is cloned and cleared of all elements. The original table's THEAD section is then moved into the new table. At last the new table is added to the header <div>, and the header <div> is inserted before the table wrapper <div>. I'm always amazed how easy jQuery makes it to do this sort of re-arranging, and given of what's happening the amount of code is rather small. Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary A word of warning: I make no guarantees about the code above. It's a first cut and I provided this here mainly to demonstrate the concepts of decomposing and reassembling an HTML layout :-) which jQuery makes so nice and easy. I tested this component against the typical scenarios we plan on using it for which are tables that use a few well known styles (or no styling at all). I suspect if you have complex styling on your <table> tag that things might not go so well. If you plan on using this plug-in you might want to minimize your styling of the table tag and defer any border formatting using the class passed in via the cssClass parameter, which ends up on the two wrapper div's that wrap the header and body rows. There's also no explicit support for footers. I rarely if ever use footers (when not using paging that is), so I didn't feel the need to add footer support. However, if you need that it's not difficult to add - the logic is the same as adding the header. The plug-in relies on a well-formatted table that has THEAD and TBODY sections along with TH tags in the header. Note that ASP.NET WebForm DataGrids and GridViews by default do not generate well-formatted table HTML. You can look at my Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView post for more info on how to get a GridView to render properly. The plug-in has no dependencies other than jQuery. Even with the limitations in mind I hope this might be useful to some of you. I know I've already identified a number of places in my own existing applications where I will be plugging this in almost immediately. Resources Download Sample and Plug-in code Latest version in the West Wind Web & AJAX Toolkit Repository © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery  HTML  ASP.NET  

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• Using the Data Form Web Part (SharePoint 2010) Site Agnostically!

  - by David Jacobus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/djacobus/archive/2013/10/24/154465.aspxAs a Developer whom has worked closely with web designers (Power users) in a SharePoint environment, I have come across the issue of making the Data Form Web Part reusable across the site collection! In SharePoint 2007 it was very easy and this blog pointed the way to make it happen: Josh Gaffey's Blog. In SharePoint 2010 something changed! This method failed except for using a Data Form Web Part that pointed to a list in the Site Collection Root! I am making this discussion relative to a developer whom creates a solution (WSP) with all the artifacts embedded and the user shouldn’t have any involvement in the process except to activate features. The Scenario: 1. A Power User creates a Data Form Web Part using SharePoint Designer 2010! It is a great web part the uses all the power of SharePoint Designer and XSLT (Conditional formatting, etc.). 2. Other Users in the site collection want to use that specific web part in sub sites in the site collection. Pointing to a list with the same name, not at the site collection root! The Issues: 1. The Data Form Web Part Data Source uses a List ID (GUID) to point to the specific list. Which means a list in a sub site will have a list with a new GUID different than the one which was created with SharePoint Designer! Obviously, the List needs to be the same List (Fields, Content Types, etc.) with different data. 2. How can we make this web part site agnostic, and dependent only on the lists Name? I had this problem come up over and over and decided to put my solution forward! The Solution: 1. Use the XSL of the Data Form Web Part Created By the Power User in SharePoint Designer! 2. Extend the OOTB Data Form Web Part to use this XSL and Point to a List by name. The solution points to a hybrid solution that requires some coding (Developer) and the XSL (Power User) artifacts put together in a Visual Studio SharePoint Solution. Here are the solution steps in summary: 1. Create an empty SharePoint project in Visual Studio 2. Create a Module and Feature and put the XSL file created by the Power User into it a. Scope the feature to web 3. Create a Feature Receiver to Create the List. The same list from which the Data Form Web Part was created with by the Power User. a. Scope the feature to web 4. Create a Web Part extending the Data Form Web a. Point the Data Form Web Part to point to the List by Name b. Point the Data Form Web Part XSL link to the XSL added using the Module feature c. Scope The feature to Site i. This is because all web parts are in the site collection web part gallery. So in a Narrative Summary: We are creating a list in code which has the same name and (site Columns) as the list from which the Power User created the Data Form Web Part Using SharePoint Designer. We are creating a Web Part in code which extends the OOTB Data Form Web Part to point to a list by name and use the XSL created by the Power User. Okay! Here are the steps with images and code! At the end of this post I will provide a link to the code for a solution which works in any site! I want to TOOT the HORN for the power of this solution! It is the mantra a use with all my clients! What is a basic skill a SharePoint Developer: Create an application that uses the data from a SharePoint list and make that data visible to the user in a manner which meets requirements! Create an Empty SharePoint 2010 Project Here I am naming my Project DJ.DataFormWebPart Create a Code Folder Copy and paste the Extension and Utilities classes (Found in the solution provided at the end of this post) Change the Namespace to match this project The List to which the Data Form Web Part which was used to make the XSL by the Power User in SharePoint Designer is now going to be created in code! If already in code, then all the better! Here I am going to create a list in the site collection root and add some data to it! For the purpose of this discussion I will actually create this list in code before using SharePoint Designer for simplicity! So here I create the List and deploy it within this solution before I do anything else. I will use a List I created before for demo purposes. Footer List is used within the footer of my master page. Add a new Feature: Here I name the Feature FooterList and add a Feature Event Receiver: Here is the code for the Event Receiver: I have a previous blog post about adding lists in code so I will not take time to narrate this code: using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Security.Permissions; using Microsoft.SharePoint; using DJ.DataFormWebPart.Code; namespace DJ.DataFormWebPart.Features.FooterList { /// <summary> /// This class handles events raised during feature activation, deactivation, installation, uninstallation, and upgrade. /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// The GUID attached to this class may be used during packaging and should not be modified. /// </remarks> [Guid("a58644fd-9209-41f4-aa16-67a53af7a9bf")] public class FooterListEventReceiver : SPFeatureReceiver { SPWeb currentWeb = null; SPSite currentSite = null; const string columnGroup = "DJ"; const string ctName = "FooterContentType"; // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised after a feature has been activated. public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { using (SPWeb spWeb = properties.GetWeb() as SPWeb) { using (SPSite site = new SPSite(spWeb.Site.ID)) { using (SPWeb rootWeb = site.OpenWeb(site.RootWeb.ID)) { //add the fields addFields(rootWeb); //add content type SPContentType testCT = rootWeb.ContentTypes[ctName]; // we will not create the content type if it exists if (testCT == null) { //the content type does not exist add it addContentType(rootWeb, ctName); } if ((spWeb.Lists.TryGetList("FooterList") == null)) { //create the list if it dosen't to exist CreateFooterList(spWeb, site); } } } } } #region ContentType public void addFields(SPWeb spWeb) { Utilities.addField(spWeb, "Link", SPFieldType.URL, false, columnGroup); Utilities.addField(spWeb, "Information", SPFieldType.Text, false, columnGroup); } private static void addContentType(SPWeb spWeb, string name) { SPContentType myContentType = new SPContentType(spWeb.ContentTypes["Item"], spWeb.ContentTypes, name) { Group = columnGroup }; spWeb.ContentTypes.Add(myContentType); addContentTypeLinkages(spWeb, myContentType); myContentType.Update(); } public static void addContentTypeLinkages(SPWeb spWeb, SPContentType ct) { Utilities.addContentTypeLink(spWeb, "Link", ct); Utilities.addContentTypeLink(spWeb, "Information", ct); } private void CreateFooterList(SPWeb web, SPSite site) { Guid newListGuid = web.Lists.Add("FooterList", "Footer List", SPListTemplateType.GenericList); SPList newList = web.Lists[newListGuid]; newList.ContentTypesEnabled = true; var footer = site.RootWeb.ContentTypes[ctName]; newList.ContentTypes.Add(footer); newList.ContentTypes.Delete(newList.ContentTypes["Item"].Id); newList.Update(); var view = newList.DefaultView; //add all view fields here //view.ViewFields.Add("NewsTitle"); view.ViewFields.Add("Link"); view.ViewFields.Add("Information"); view.Update(); } } } Basically created a content type with two site columns Link and Information. I had to change some code as we are working at the SPWeb level and need Content Types at the SPSite level! I’ll use a new Site Collection for this demo (Best Practice) keep old artifacts from impinging on development: Next we will add this list to the root of the site collection by deploying this solution, add some data and then use SharePoint Designer to create a Data Form Web Part. The list has been added, now let’s add some data: Okay let’s add a Data Form Web Part in SharePoint Designer. Create a new web part page in the site pages library: I will name it TestWP.aspx and edit it in advanced mode: Let’s add an empty Data Form Web Part to the web part zone: Click on the web part to add a data source: Choose FooterList in the Data Source menu: Choose appropriate fields and select insert as multiple item view: Here is what it look like after insertion: Let’s add some conditional formatting if the information filed is not blank: Choose Create (right side) apply formatting: Choose the Information Field and set the condition not null: Click Set Style: Here is the result: Okay! Not flashy but simple enough for this demo. Remember this is the job of the Power user! All we want from this web part is the XLS-Style Sheet out of SharePoint Designer. We are going to use it as the XSL for our web part which we will be creating next. Let’s add a web part to our project extending the OOTB Data Form Web Part. Add new item from the Visual Studio add menu: Choose Web Part: Change WebPart to DataFormWebPart (Oh well my namespace needs some improvement, but it will sure make it readily identifiable as an extended web part!) Below is the code for this web part: using System; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts; using Microsoft.SharePoint; using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls; using System.Text; namespace DJ.DataFormWebPart.DataFormWebPart { [ToolboxItemAttribute(false)] public class DataFormWebPart : Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.DataFormWebPart { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { base.OnInit(e); this.ChromeType = PartChromeType.None; this.Title = "FooterListDF"; try { //SPSite site = SPContext.Current.Site; SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web; SPList list = web.Lists.TryGetList("FooterList"); if (list != null) { string queryList1 = "<Query><Where><IsNotNull><FieldRef Name='Title' /></IsNotNull></Where><OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Title' Ascending='True' /></OrderBy></Query>"; uint maximumRowList1 = 10; SPDataSource dataSourceList1 = GetDataSource(list.Title, web.Url, list, queryList1, maximumRowList1); this.DataSources.Add(dataSourceList1); this.XslLink = web.Url + "/Assests/Footer.xsl"; this.ParameterBindings = BuildDataFormParameters(); this.DataBind(); } } catch (Exception ex) { this.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl("ERROR: " + ex.Message)); } } private SPDataSource GetDataSource(string dataSourceId, string webUrl, SPList list, string query, uint maximumRow) { SPDataSource dataSource = new SPDataSource(); dataSource.UseInternalName = true; dataSource.ID = dataSourceId; dataSource.DataSourceMode = SPDataSourceMode.List; dataSource.List = list; dataSource.SelectCommand = "" + query + ""; Parameter listIdParam = new Parameter("ListID"); listIdParam.DefaultValue = list.ID.ToString( "B").ToUpper(); Parameter maximumRowsParam = new Parameter("MaximumRows"); maximumRowsParam.DefaultValue = maximumRow.ToString(); QueryStringParameter rootFolderParam = new QueryStringParameter("RootFolder", "RootFolder"); dataSource.SelectParameters.Add(listIdParam); dataSource.SelectParameters.Add(maximumRowsParam); dataSource.SelectParameters.Add(rootFolderParam); dataSource.UpdateParameters.Add(listIdParam); dataSource.DeleteParameters.Add(listIdParam); dataSource.InsertParameters.Add(listIdParam); return dataSource; } private string BuildDataFormParameters() { StringBuilder parameters = new StringBuilder("<ParameterBindings><ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_apos\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/><ParameterBinding Name=\"UserID\" Location=\"CAMLVariable\" DefaultValue=\"CurrentUserName\"/><ParameterBinding Name=\"Today\" Location=\"CAMLVariable\" DefaultValue=\"CurrentDate\"/>"); parameters.Append("<ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_firstrow\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/>"); parameters.Append("<ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_nextpagedata\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/>"); parameters.Append("<ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_adhocmode\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/>"); parameters.Append("<ParameterBinding Name=\"dvt_adhocfiltermode\" Location=\"Postback;Connection\"/>"); parameters.Append("</ParameterBindings>"); return parameters.ToString(); } } } The OnInit method we use to set the list name and the XSL Link property of the Data Form Web Part. We do not have the link to XSL in our Solution so we will add the XSL now: Add a Module in the Visual Studio add menu: Rename Sample.txt in the module to footer.xsl and then copy the XSL from SharePoint Designer Look at elements.xml to where the footer.xsl is being provisioned to which is Assets/footer.xsl, make sure the Web parts xsl link is pointing to this url: Okay we are good to go! Let’s check our features and package: DataFormWebPart should be scoped to site and have the web part: The Footer List feature should be scoped to web and have the Assets module (Okay, I see, a spelling issue but it won’t affect this demo) If everything is correct we should be able to click a couple of sub site feature activations and have our list and web part in a sub site. (In fact this solution can be activated anywhere) Here is the list created at SubSite1 with new data It. Next let’s add the web part on a test page and see if it works as expected: It does! So we now have a repeatable way to use a WSP to move a Data Form Web Part around our sites! Here is a link to the code: DataFormWebPart Solution

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• SQL Server &ndash; Undelete a Table and Restore a Single Table from Backup

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This post is part of the monthly community event called T-SQL Tuesday started by Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) and hosted by someone else each month. This month the host is Sankar Reddy (blog|twitter) and the topic is Misconceptions in SQL Server. You can follow posts for this theme on Twitter by looking at #TSQL2sDay hashtag. Let me start by saying: This code is a crazy hack that is to never be used unless you really, really have to. Really! And I don’t think there’s a time when you would really have to use it for real. Because it’s a hack there are number of things that can go wrong so play with it knowing that. I’ve managed to totally corrupt one database. :) Oh… and for those saying: yeah yeah.. you have a single table in a file group and you’re restoring that, I say “nay nay” to you. As we all know SQL Server can’t do single table restores from backup. This is kind of a obvious thing due to different relational integrity (RI) concerns. Since we have to maintain that we have to restore all tables represented in a RI graph. For this exercise i say BAH! to those concerns. Note that this method “works” only for simple tables that don’t have LOB and off rows data. The code can be expanded to include those but I’ve tried to leave things “simple”. Note that for this to work our table needs to be relatively static data-wise. This doesn’t work for OLTP table. Products are a perfect example of static data. They don’t change much between backups, pretty much everything depends on them and their table is one of those tables that are relatively easy to accidentally delete everything from. This only works if the database is in Full or Bulk-Logged recovery mode for tables where the contents have been deleted or truncated but NOT when a table was dropped. Everything we’ll talk about has to be done before the data pages are reused for other purposes. After deletion or truncation the pages are marked as reusable so you have to act fast. The best thing probably is to put the database into single user mode ASAP while you’re performing this procedure and return it to multi user after you’re done. How do we do it? We will be using an undocumented but known DBCC commands: DBCC PAGE, an undocumented function sys.fn_dblog and a little known DATABASE RESTORE PAGE option. All tests will be on a copy of Production.Product table in AdventureWorks database called Production.Product1 because the original table has FK constraints that prevent us from truncating it for testing. -- create a duplicate table. This doesn't preserve indexes!SELECT *INTO AdventureWorks.Production.Product1FROM AdventureWorks.Production.Product   After we run this code take a full back to perform further testing.   First let’s see what the difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE is when it comes to logging. With DELETE every row deletion is logged in the transaction log. With TRUNCATE only whole data page deallocations are logged in the transaction log. Getting deleted data pages is simple. All we have to look for is row delete entry in the sys.fn_dblog output. But getting data pages that were truncated from the transaction log presents a bit of an interesting problem. I will not go into depths of IAM(Index Allocation Map) and PFS (Page Free Space) pages but suffice to say that every IAM page has intervals that tell us which data pages are allocated for a table and which aren’t. If we deep dive into the sys.fn_dblog output we can see that once you truncate a table all the pages in all the intervals are deallocated and this is shown in the PFS page transaction log entry as deallocation of pages. For every 8 pages in the same extent there is one PFS page row in the transaction log. This row holds information about all 8 pages in CSV format which means we can get to this data with some parsing. A great help for parsing this stuff is Peter Debetta’s handy function dbo.HexStrToVarBin that converts hexadecimal string into a varbinary value that can be easily converted to integer tus giving us a readable page number. The shortened (columns removed) sys.fn_dblog output for a PFS page with CSV data for 1 extent (8 data pages) looks like this: -- [Page ID] is displayed in hex format. -- To convert it to readable int we'll use dbo.HexStrToVarBin function found at -- http://sqlblog.com/blogs/peter_debetta/archive/2007/03/09/t-sql-convert-hex-string-to-varbinary.aspx -- This function must be installed in the master databaseSELECT Context, AllocUnitName, [Page ID], DescriptionFROM sys.fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)WHERE [Current LSN] = '00000031:00000a46:007d' The pages at the end marked with 0x00—> are pages that are allocated in the extent but are not part of a table. We can inspect the raw content of each data page with a DBCC PAGE command: -- we need this trace flag to redirect output to the query window.DBCC TRACEON (3604); -- WITH TABLERESULTS gives us data in table format instead of message format-- we use format option 3 because it's the easiest to read and manipulate further onDBCC PAGE (AdventureWorks, 1, 613, 3) WITH TABLERESULTS   Since the DBACC PAGE output can be quite extensive I won’t put it here. You can see an example of it in the link at the beginning of this section. Getting deleted data back When we run a delete statement every row to be deleted is marked as a ghost record. A background process periodically cleans up those rows. A huge misconception is that the data is actually removed. It’s not. Only the pointers to the rows are removed while the data itself is still on the data page. We just can’t access it with normal means. To get those pointers back we need to restore every deleted page using the RESTORE PAGE option mentioned above. This restore must be done from a full backup, followed by any differential and log backups that you may have. This is necessary to bring the pages up to the same point in time as the rest of the data.  However the restore doesn’t magically connect the restored page back to the original table. It simply replaces the current page with the one from the backup. After the restore we use the DBCC PAGE to read data directly from all data pages and insert that data into a temporary table. To finish the RESTORE PAGE  procedure we finally have to take a tail log backup (simple backup of the transaction log) and restore it back. We can now insert data from the temporary table to our original table by hand. Getting truncated data back When we run a truncate the truncated data pages aren’t touched at all. Even the pointers to rows stay unchanged. Because of this getting data back from truncated table is simple. we just have to find out which pages belonged to our table and use DBCC PAGE to read data off of them. No restore is necessary. Turns out that the problems we had with finding the data pages is alleviated by not having to do a RESTORE PAGE procedure. Stop stalling… show me The Code! This is the code for getting back deleted and truncated data back. It’s commented in all the right places so don’t be afraid to take a closer look. Make sure you have a full backup before trying this out. Also I suggest that the last step of backing and restoring the tail log is performed by hand. USE masterGOIF OBJECT_ID('dbo.HexStrToVarBin') IS NULL RAISERROR ('No dbo.HexStrToVarBin installed. Go to http://sqlblog.com/blogs/peter_debetta/archive/2007/03/09/t-sql-convert-hex-string-to-varbinary.aspx and install it in master database' , 18, 1) SET NOCOUNT ONBEGIN TRY DECLARE @dbName VARCHAR(1000), @schemaName VARCHAR(1000), @tableName VARCHAR(1000), @fullBackupName VARCHAR(1000), @undeletedTableName VARCHAR(1000), @sql VARCHAR(MAX), @tableWasTruncated bit; /* THE FIRST LINE ARE OUR INPUT PARAMETERS In this case we're trying to recover Production.Product1 table in AdventureWorks database. My full backup of AdventureWorks database is at e:\AW.bak */ SELECT @dbName = 'AdventureWorks', @schemaName = 'Production', @tableName = 'Product1', @fullBackupName = 'e:\AW.bak', @undeletedTableName = '##' + @tableName + '_Undeleted', @tableWasTruncated = 0, -- copy the structure from original table to a temp table that we'll fill with restored data @sql = 'IF OBJECT_ID(''tempdb..' + @undeletedTableName + ''') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE ' + @undeletedTableName + ' SELECT *' + ' INTO ' + @undeletedTableName + ' FROM [' + @dbName + '].[' + @schemaName + '].[' + @tableName + ']' + ' WHERE 1 = 0' EXEC (@sql) IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#PagesToRestore') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #PagesToRestore /* FIND DATA PAGES WE NEED TO RESTORE*/ CREATE TABLE #PagesToRestore ([ID] INT IDENTITY(1,1), [FileID] INT, [PageID] INT, [SQLtoExec] VARCHAR(1000)) -- DBCC PACE statement to run later RAISERROR ('Looking for deleted pages...', 10, 1) -- use T-LOG direct read to get deleted data pages INSERT INTO #PagesToRestore([FileID], [PageID], [SQLtoExec]) EXEC('USE [' + @dbName + '];SELECT FileID, PageID, ''DBCC TRACEON (3604); DBCC PAGE ([' + @dbName + '], '' + FileID + '', '' + PageID + '', 3) WITH TABLERESULTS'' as SQLToExecFROM (SELECT DISTINCT LEFT([Page ID], 4) AS FileID, CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), ' + 'CONVERT(INT, master.dbo.HexStrToVarBin(SUBSTRING([Page ID], 6, 20)))) AS PageIDFROM sys.fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)WHERE AllocUnitName LIKE ''%' + @schemaName + '.' + @tableName + '%'' ' + 'AND Context IN (''LCX_MARK_AS_GHOST'', ''LCX_HEAP'') AND Operation in (''LOP_DELETE_ROWS''))t');SELECT *FROM #PagesToRestore -- if upper EXEC returns 0 rows it means the table was truncated so find truncated pages IF (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #PagesToRestore) = 0 BEGIN RAISERROR ('No deleted pages found. Looking for truncated pages...', 10, 1) -- use T-LOG read to get truncated data pages INSERT INTO #PagesToRestore([FileID], [PageID], [SQLtoExec]) -- dark magic happens here -- because truncation simply deallocates pages we have to find out which pages were deallocated. -- we can find this out by looking at the PFS page row's Description column. -- for every deallocated extent the Description has a CSV of 8 pages in that extent. -- then it's just a matter of parsing it. -- we also remove the pages in the extent that weren't allocated to the table itself -- marked with '0x00-->00' EXEC ('USE [' + @dbName + '];DECLARE @truncatedPages TABLE(DeallocatedPages VARCHAR(8000), IsMultipleDeallocs BIT);INSERT INTO @truncatedPagesSELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(Description, ''Deallocated '', ''Y''), ''0x00-->00 '', ''N'') + '';'' AS DeallocatedPages, CHARINDEX('';'', Description) AS IsMultipleDeallocsFROM (SELECT DISTINCT LEFT([Page ID], 4) AS FileID, CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), CONVERT(INT, master.dbo.HexStrToVarBin(SUBSTRING([Page ID], 6, 20)))) AS PageID, DescriptionFROM sys.fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)WHERE Context IN (''LCX_PFS'') AND Description LIKE ''Deallocated%'' AND AllocUnitName LIKE ''%' + @schemaName + '.' + @tableName + '%'') t;SELECT FileID, PageID , ''DBCC TRACEON (3604); DBCC PAGE ([' + @dbName + '], '' + FileID + '', '' + PageID + '', 3) WITH TABLERESULTS'' as SQLToExecFROM (SELECT LEFT(PageAndFile, 1) as WasPageAllocatedToTable , SUBSTRING(PageAndFile, 2, CHARINDEX('':'', PageAndFile) - 2 ) as FileID , CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), CONVERT(INT, master.dbo.HexStrToVarBin(SUBSTRING(PageAndFile, CHARINDEX('':'', PageAndFile) + 1, LEN(PageAndFile))))) as PageIDFROM ( SELECT SUBSTRING(DeallocatedPages, delimPosStart, delimPosEnd - delimPosStart) as PageAndFile, IsMultipleDeallocs FROM ( SELECT *, CHARINDEX('';'', DeallocatedPages)*(N-1) + 1 AS delimPosStart, CHARINDEX('';'', DeallocatedPages)*N AS delimPosEnd FROM @truncatedPages t1 CROSS APPLY (SELECT TOP (case when t1.IsMultipleDeallocs = 1 then 8 else 1 end) ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY number) as N FROM master..spt_values) t2 )t)t)tWHERE WasPageAllocatedToTable = ''Y''') SELECT @tableWasTruncated = 1 END DECLARE @lastID INT, @pagesCount INT SELECT @lastID = 1, @pagesCount = COUNT(*) FROM #PagesToRestore SELECT @sql = 'Number of pages to restore: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), @pagesCount) IF @pagesCount = 0 RAISERROR ('No data pages to restore.', 18, 1) ELSE RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) -- If the table was truncated we'll read the data directly from data pages without restoring from backup IF @tableWasTruncated = 0 BEGIN -- RESTORE DATA PAGES FROM FULL BACKUP IN BATCHES OF 200 WHILE @lastID <= @pagesCount BEGIN -- create CSV string of pages to restore SELECT @sql = STUFF((SELECT ',' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), FileID) + ':' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), PageID) FROM #PagesToRestore WHERE ID BETWEEN @lastID AND @lastID + 200 ORDER BY ID FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 1, '') SELECT @sql = 'RESTORE DATABASE [' + @dbName + '] PAGE = ''' + @sql + ''' FROM DISK = ''' + @fullBackupName + '''' RAISERROR ('Starting RESTORE command:' , 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; RAISERROR (@sql , 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; EXEC(@sql); RAISERROR ('Restore DONE' , 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; SELECT @lastID = @lastID + 200 END /* If you have any differential or transaction log backups you should restore them here to bring the previously restored data pages up to date */ END DECLARE @dbccSinglePage TABLE ( [ParentObject] NVARCHAR(500), [Object] NVARCHAR(500), [Field] NVARCHAR(500), [VALUE] NVARCHAR(MAX) ) DECLARE @cols NVARCHAR(MAX), @paramDefinition NVARCHAR(500), @SQLtoExec VARCHAR(1000), @FileID VARCHAR(100), @PageID VARCHAR(100), @i INT = 1 -- Get deleted table columns from information_schema view -- Need sp_executeSQL because database name can't be passed in as variable SELECT @cols = 'select @cols = STUFF((SELECT '', ['' + COLUMN_NAME + '']''FROM ' + @dbName + '.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNSWHERE TABLE_NAME = ''' + @tableName + ''' AND TABLE_SCHEMA = ''' + @schemaName + '''ORDER BY ORDINAL_POSITIONFOR XML PATH('''')), 1, 2, '''')', @paramDefinition = N'@cols nvarchar(max) OUTPUT' EXECUTE sp_executesql @cols, @paramDefinition, @cols = @cols OUTPUT -- Loop through all the restored data pages, -- read data from them and insert them into temp table -- which you can then insert into the orignial deleted table DECLARE dbccPageCursor CURSOR GLOBAL FORWARD_ONLY FOR SELECT [FileID], [PageID], [SQLtoExec] FROM #PagesToRestore ORDER BY [FileID], [PageID] OPEN dbccPageCursor; FETCH NEXT FROM dbccPageCursor INTO @FileID, @PageID, @SQLtoExec; WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 BEGIN RAISERROR ('---------------------------------------------', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; SELECT @sql = 'Loop iteration: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), @i); RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; SELECT @sql = 'Running: ' + @SQLtoExec RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; -- if something goes wrong with DBCC execution or data gathering, skip it but print error BEGIN TRY INSERT INTO @dbccSinglePage EXEC (@SQLtoExec) -- make the data insert magic happen here IF (SELECT CONVERT(BIGINT, [VALUE]) FROM @dbccSinglePage WHERE [Field] LIKE '%Metadata: ObjectId%') = OBJECT_ID('['+@dbName+'].['+@schemaName +'].['+@tableName+']') BEGIN DELETE @dbccSinglePage WHERE NOT ([ParentObject] LIKE 'Slot % Offset %' AND [Object] LIKE 'Slot % Column %') SELECT @sql = 'USE tempdb; ' + 'IF (OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id(''' + @undeletedTableName + '''), ''TableHasIdentity'') = 1) ' + 'SET IDENTITY_INSERT ' + @undeletedTableName + ' ON; ' + 'INSERT INTO ' + @undeletedTableName + '(' + @cols + ') ' + STUFF((SELECT ' UNION ALL SELECT ' + STUFF((SELECT ', ' + CASE WHEN VALUE = '[NULL]' THEN 'NULL' ELSE '''' + [VALUE] + '''' END FROM ( -- the unicorn help here to correctly set ordinal numbers of columns in a data page -- it's turning STRING order into INT order (1,10,11,2,21 into 1,2,..10,11...21) SELECT [ParentObject], [Object], Field, VALUE, RIGHT('00000' + O1, 6) AS ParentObjectOrder, RIGHT('00000' + REVERSE(LEFT(O2, CHARINDEX(' ', O2)-1)), 6) AS ObjectOrder FROM ( SELECT [ParentObject], [Object], Field, VALUE, REPLACE(LEFT([ParentObject], CHARINDEX('Offset', [ParentObject])-1), 'Slot ', '') AS O1, REVERSE(LEFT([Object], CHARINDEX('Offset ', [Object])-2)) AS O2 FROM @dbccSinglePage WHERE t.ParentObject = ParentObject )t)t ORDER BY ParentObjectOrder, ObjectOrder FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 2, '') FROM @dbccSinglePage t GROUP BY ParentObject FOR XML PATH('') ), 1, 11, '') + ';' RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; EXEC (@sql) END END TRY BEGIN CATCH SELECT @sql = 'ERROR!!!' + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + 'ErrorNumber: ' + ERROR_NUMBER() + '; ErrorMessage' + ERROR_MESSAGE() + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + 'FileID: ' + @FileID + '; PageID: ' + @PageID RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; END CATCH DELETE @dbccSinglePage SELECT @sql = 'Pages left to process: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), @pagesCount - @i) + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13), @i = @i+1 RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; FETCH NEXT FROM dbccPageCursor INTO @FileID, @PageID, @SQLtoExec; END CLOSE dbccPageCursor; DEALLOCATE dbccPageCursor; EXEC ('SELECT ''' + @undeletedTableName + ''' as TableName; SELECT * FROM ' + @undeletedTableName)END TRYBEGIN CATCH SELECT ERROR_NUMBER() AS ErrorNumber, ERROR_MESSAGE() AS ErrorMessage IF CURSOR_STATUS ('global', 'dbccPageCursor') >= 0 BEGIN CLOSE dbccPageCursor; DEALLOCATE dbccPageCursor; ENDEND CATCH-- if the table was deleted we need to finish the restore page sequenceIF @tableWasTruncated = 0BEGIN -- take a log tail backup and then restore it to complete page restore process DECLARE @currentDate VARCHAR(30) SELECT @currentDate = CONVERT(VARCHAR(30), GETDATE(), 112) RAISERROR ('Starting Log Tail backup to c:\Temp ...', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; PRINT ('BACKUP LOG [' + @dbName + '] TO DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') EXEC ('BACKUP LOG [' + @dbName + '] TO DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') RAISERROR ('Log Tail backup done.', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; RAISERROR ('Starting Log Tail restore from c:\Temp ...', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; PRINT ('RESTORE LOG [' + @dbName + '] FROM DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') EXEC ('RESTORE LOG [' + @dbName + '] FROM DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') RAISERROR ('Log Tail restore done.', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT;END-- The last step is manual. Insert data from our temporary table to the original deleted table The misconception here is that you can do a single table restore properly in SQL Server. You can't. But with little experimentation you can get pretty close to it. One way to possible remove a dependency on a backup to retrieve deleted pages is to quickly run a similar script to the upper one that gets data directly from data pages while the rows are still marked as ghost records. It could be done if we could beat the ghost record cleanup task.

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• Pain Comes Instantly

  - by user701213

  When I look back at recent blog entries – many of which are not all that current (more on where my available writing time is going later) – I am struck by how many of them focus on public policy or legislative issues instead of, say, the latest nefarious cyberattack or exploit (or everyone’s favorite new pastime: coining terms for the Coming Cyberpocalypse: “digital Pearl Harbor” is so 1941). Speaking of which, I personally hope evil hackers from Malefactoria will someday hack into my bathroom scale – which in a future time will be connected to the Internet because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have absolutely everything in your life Internet-enabled? – and recalibrate it so I’m 10 pounds thinner. The horror. In part, my focus on public policy is due to an admitted limitation of my skill set. I enjoy reading technical articles about exploits and cybersecurity trends, but writing a blog entry on those topics would take more research than I have time for and, quite honestly, doesn’t play to my strengths. The first rule of writing is “write what you know.” The bigger contributing factor to my recent paucity of blog entries is that more and more of my waking hours are spent engaging in “thrust and parry” activity involving emerging regulations of some sort or other. I’ve opined in earlier blogs about what constitutes good and reasonable public policy so nobody can accuse me of being reflexively anti-regulation. That said, you have so many cycles in the day, and most of us would rather spend it slaying actual dragons than participating in focus groups on whether dragons are really a problem, whether lassoing them (with organic, sustainable and recyclable lassos) is preferable to slaying them – after all, dragons are people, too - and whether we need lasso compliance auditors to make sure lassos are being used correctly and humanely. (A point that seems to evade many rule makers: slaying dragons actually accomplishes something, whereas talking about “approved dragon slaying procedures and requirements” wastes the time of those who are competent to dispatch actual dragons and who were doing so very well without the input of “dragon-slaying theorists.”) Unfortunately for so many of us who would just get on with doing our day jobs, cybersecurity is rapidly devolving into the “focus groups on dragon dispatching” realm, which actual dragons slayers have little choice but to participate in. The general trend in cybersecurity is that powers-that-be – which encompasses groups other than just legislators – are often increasingly concerned and therefore feel they need to Do Something About Cybersecurity. Many seem to believe that if only we had the right amount of regulation and oversight, there would be no data breaches: a breach simply must mean Someone Is At Fault and Needs Supervision. (Leaving aside the fact that we have lots of home invasions despite a) guard dogs b) liberal carry permits c) alarm systems d) etc.) Also note that many well-managed and security-aware organizations, like the US Department of Defense, still get hacked. More specifically, many powers-that-be feel they must direct industry in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including how we actually build and deploy information technology systems. The more prescriptive the requirement, the more regulators or overseers a) can be seen to be doing something b) feel as if they are doing something regardless of whether they are actually doing something useful or cost effective. Note: an unfortunate concomitant of Doing Something is that often the cure is worse than the ailment. That is, doing what overseers want creates unfortunate byproducts that they either didn’t foresee or worse, don’t care about. After all, the logic goes, we Did Something. Prescriptive practice in the IT industry is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, prescriptive guidance is really only appropriate if: • It is cost effective• It is “current” (meaning, the guidance doesn’t require the use of the technical equivalent of buggy whips long after horse-drawn transportation has become passé)*• It is practical (that is, pragmatic, proven and effective in the real world, not theoretical and unproven)• It solves the right problem With the above in mind, heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. A little background on PCI before I get too wound up. In 2008, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) introduced the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). That standard requires vendors of payment applications to ensure that their products implement specific requirements and undergo security assessment procedures. In order to have an application listed as a Validated Payment Application (VPA) and available for use by merchants, software vendors are required to execute the PCI Payment Application Vendor Release Agreement (VRA). (Are you still with me through all the acronyms?) Beginning in August 2010, the VRA imposed new obligations on vendors that are extraordinary and extraordinarily bad, short-sighted and unworkable. Specifically, PCI requires vendors to disclose (dare we say “tell all?”) to PCI any known security vulnerabilities and associated security breaches involving VPAs. ASAP. Think about the impact of that. PCI is asking a vendor to disclose to them: • Specific details of security vulnerabilities • Including exploit information or technical details of the vulnerability • Whether or not there is any mitigation available (as in a patch) PCI, in turn, has the right to blab about any and all of the above – specifically, to distribute all the gory details of what is disclosed - to the PCI SSC, qualified security assessors (QSAs), and any affiliate or agent or adviser of those entities, who are in turn permitted to share it with their respective affiliates, agents, employees, contractors, merchants, processors, service providers and other business partners. This assorted crew can’t be more than, oh, hundreds of thousands of entities. Does anybody believe that several hundred thousand people can keep a secret? Or that several hundred thousand people are all equally trustworthy? Or that not one of the people getting all that information would blab vulnerability details to a bad guy, even by accident? Or be a bad guy who uses the information to break into systems? (Wait, was that the Easter Bunny that just hopped by? Bringing world peace, no doubt.) Sarcasm aside, common sense tells us that telling lots of people a secret is guaranteed to “unsecret” the secret. Notably, being provided details of a vulnerability (without a patch) is of little or no use to companies running the affected application. Few users have the technological sophistication to create a workaround, and even if they do, most workarounds break some other functionality in the application or surrounding environment. Also, given the differences among corporate implementations of any application, it is highly unlikely that a single workaround is going to work for all corporate users. So until a patch is developed by the vendor, users remain at risk of exploit: even more so if the details of vulnerability have been widely shared. Sharing that information widely before a patch is available therefore does not help users, and instead helps only those wanting to exploit known security bugs. There’s a shocker for you. Furthermore, we already know that insider information about security vulnerabilities inevitably leaks, which is why most vendors closely hold such information and limit dissemination until a patch is available (and frequently limit dissemination of technical details even with the release of a patch). That’s the industry norm, not that PCI seems to realize or acknowledge that. Why would anybody release a bunch of highly technical exploit information to a cast of thousands, whose only “vetting” is that they are members of a PCI consortium? Oracle has had personal experience with this problem, which is one reason why information on security vulnerabilities at Oracle is “need to know” (we use our own row level access control to limit access to security bugs in our bug database, and thus less than 1% of development has access to this information), and we don’t provide some customers with more information than others or with vulnerability information and/or patches earlier than others. Failure to remember “insider information always leaks” creates problems in the general case, and has created problems for us specifically. A number of years ago, one of the UK intelligence agencies had information about a non-public security vulnerability in an Oracle product that they circulated among other UK and Commonwealth defense and intelligence entities. Nobody, it should be pointed out, bothered to report the problem to Oracle, even though only Oracle could produce a patch. The vulnerability was finally reported to Oracle by (drum roll) a US-based commercial company, to whom the information had leaked. (Note: every time I tell this story, the MI-whatever agency that created the problem gets a bit shirty with us. I know they meant well and have improved their vulnerability handling/sharing processes but, dudes, next time you find an Oracle vulnerability, try reporting it to us first before blabbing to lots of people who can’t actually fix the problem. Thank you!) Getting back to PCI: clearly, these new disclosure obligations increase the risk of exploitation of a vulnerability in a VPA and thus, of misappropriation of payment card data and customer information that a VPA processes, stores or transmits. It stands to reason that VRA’s current requirement for the widespread distribution of security vulnerability exploit details -- at any time, but particularly before a vendor can issue a patch or a workaround -- is very poor public policy. It effectively publicizes information of great value to potential attackers while not providing compensating benefits - actually, any benefits - to payment card merchants or consumers. In fact, it magnifies the risk to payment card merchants and consumers. The risk is most prominent in the time before a patch has been released, since customers often have little option but to continue using an application or system despite the risks. However, the risk is not limited to the time before a patch is issued: customers often need days, or weeks, to apply patches to systems, based upon the complexity of the issue and dependence on surrounding programs. Rather than decreasing the available window of exploit, this requirement increases the available window of exploit, both as to time available to exploit a vulnerability and the ease with which it can be exploited. Also, why would hackers focus on finding new vulnerabilities to exploit if they can get “EZHack” handed to them in such a manner: a) a vulnerability b) in a payment application c) with exploit code: the “Hacking Trifecta!“ It’s fair to say that this is probably the exact opposite of what PCI – or any of us – would want. Established industry practice concerning vulnerability handling avoids the risks created by the VRA’s vulnerability disclosure requirements. Specifically, the norm is not to release information about a security bug until the associated patch (or a pretty darn good workaround) has been issued. Once a patch is available, the notice to the user community is a high-level communication discussing the product at issue, the level of risk associated with the vulnerability, and how to apply the patch. The notices do not include either the specific customers affected by the vulnerability or forensic reports with maps of the exploit (both of which are required by the current VRA). In this way, customers have the tools they need to prioritize patching and to help prevent an attack, and the information released does not increase the risk of exploit. Furthermore, many vendors already use industry standards for vulnerability description: Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVE helps ensure that customers know which particular issues a patch addresses and CVSS helps customers determine how severe a vulnerability is on a relative scale. Industry already provides the tools customers need to know what the patch contains and how bad the problem is that the patch remediates. So, what’s a poor vendor to do? Oracle is reaching out to other vendors subject to PCI and attempting to enlist then in a broad effort to engage PCI in rethinking (that is, eradicating) these requirements. I would therefore urge all who care about this issue, but especially those in the vendor community whose applications are subject to PCI and who may not have know they were being asked to tell-all to PCI and put their customers at risk, to do one of the following: • Contact PCI with your concerns• Contact Oracle (we are looking for vendors to sign our statement of concern)• And make sure you tell your customers that you have to rat them out to PCI if there is a breach involving the payment application I like to be charitable and say “PCI meant well” but in as important a public policy issue as what you disclose about vulnerabilities, to whom and when, meaning well isn’t enough. We need to do well. PCI, as regards this particular issue, has not done well, and has compounded the error by thus far being nonresponsive to those of us who have labored mightily to try to explain why they might want to rethink telling the entire planet about security problems with no solutions. By Way of Explanation… Non-related to PCI whatsoever, and the explanation for why I have not been blogging a lot recently, I have been working on Other Writing Venues with my sister Diane (who has also worked in the tech sector, inflicting upgrades on unsuspecting and largely ungrateful end users). I am pleased to note that we have recently (self-)published the first in the Miss Information Technology Murder Mystery series, Outsourcing Murder. The genre might best be described as “chick lit meets geek scene.” Our sisterly nom de plume is Maddi Davidson and (shameless plug follows): you can order the paper version of the book on Amazon, or the Kindle or Nook versions on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com, respectively. From our book jacket: Emma Jones, a 20-something IT consultant, is working on an outsourcing project at Tahiti Tacos, a restaurant chain offering Polynexican cuisine: refried poi, anyone? Emma despises her boss Padmanabh, a brilliant but arrogant partner in GD Consulting. When Emma discovers His-Royal-Padness’s body (verdict: death by cricket bat), she becomes a suspect.With her overprotective family and her best friend Stacey providing endless support and advice, Emma stumbles her way through an investigation of Padmanabh’s murder, bolstered by fusion food feeding frenzies, endless cups of frou-frou coffee and serious surfing sessions. While Stacey knows a PI who owes her a favor, landlady Magda urges Emma to tart up her underwear drawer before the next cute cop with a search warrant arrives. Emma’s mother offers to fix her up with a PhD student at Berkeley and showers her with self-defense gizmos while her old lover Keoni beckons from Hawai’i. And everyone, even Shaun the barista, knows a good lawyer. Book 2, Denial of Service, is coming out this summer. * Given the rate of change in technology, today’s “thou shalts” are easily next year’s “buggy whip guidance.”

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• Using Deployment Manager

  - by Jess Nickson

  One of the teams at Red Gate has been working very hard on a new product: Deployment Manager. Deployment Manager is a free tool that lets you deploy updates to .NET apps, services and databases through a central dashboard. Deployment Manager has been out for a while, but I must admit that even though I work in the same building, until now I hadn’t even looked at it. My job at Red Gate is to develop and maintain some of our community sites, which involves carrying out regular deployments. One of the projects I have to deploy on a fairly regular basis requires me to send my changes to our build server, TeamCity. The output is a Zip file of the build. I then have to go and find this file, copy it across to the staging machine, extract it, and copy some of the sub-folders to other places. In order to keep track of what builds are running, I need to rename the folders accordingly. However, even after all that, I still need to go and update the site and its applications in IIS to point at these new builds. Oh, and then, I have to repeat the process when I deploy on production. Did I mention the multiple configuration files that then need updating as well? Manually? The whole process can take well over half an hour. I’m ready to try out a new process. Deployment Manager is designed to massively simplify the deployment processes from what could be lots of manual copying of files, managing of configuration files, and database upgrades down to a few clicks. It’s a big promise, but I decided to try out this new tool on one of the smaller ASP.NET sites at Red Gate, Format SQL (the result of a Red Gate Down Tools week). I wanted to add some new functionality, but given it was a new site with no set way of doing things, I was reluctant to have to manually copy files around servers. I decided to use this opportunity as a chance to set the site up on Deployment Manager and check out its functionality. What follows is a guide on how to get set up with Deployment Manager, a brief overview of its features, and what I thought of the experience. To follow along with the instructions that follow, you’ll first need to download Deployment Manager from Red Gate. It has a free ‘Starter Edition’ which allows you to create up to 5 projects and agents (machines you deploy to), so it’s really easy to get up and running with a fully-featured version. The Initial Set Up After installing the product and setting it up using the administration tool it provides, I launched Deployment Manager by going to the URL and port I had set it to run on. This loads up the main dashboard. The dashboard does a good job of guiding me through the process of getting started, beginning with a prompt to create some environments. 1. Setting up Environments The dashboard informed me that I needed to add new ‘Environments’, which are essentially ways of grouping the machines you want to deploy to. The environments that get added will show up on the main dashboard. I set up two such environments for this project: ‘staging’ and ‘live’.   2. Add Target Machines Once I had created the environments, I was ready to add ‘target machine’s to them, which are the actual machines that the deployment will occur on.   To enable me to deploy to a new machine, I needed to download and install an Agent on it. The ‘Add target machine’ form on the ‘Environments’ page helpfully provides a link for downloading an Agent.   Once the agent has been installed, it is just a case of copying the server key to the agent, and the agent key to the server, to link them up.   3. Run Health Check If, after adding your new target machine, the ‘Status’ flags an error, it is possible that the Agent and Server keys have not been entered correctly on both Deployment Manager and the Agent service.     You can ‘Check Health’, which will give you more information on any issues. It is probably worth running this regardless of what status the ‘Environments’ dashboard is claiming, just to be on the safe side.     4. Add Projects Going back to the main Dashboard tab at this point, I found that it was telling me that I needed to set up a new project.   I clicked the ‘project’ link to get started, gave my new project a name and clicked ‘Create’. I was then redirected to the ‘Steps’ page for the project under the Projects tab.   5. Package Steps The ‘Steps’ page was fairly empty when it first loaded.   Adding a ‘step’ allowed me to specify what packages I wanted to grab for the deployment. This part requires a NuGet package feed to be set up, which is where Deployment Manager will look for the packages. At Red Gate, we already have one set up, so I just needed to tell Deployment Manager about it. Don’t worry; there is a nice guide included on how to go about doing all of this on the ‘Package Feeds’ page in ‘Settings’, if you need any help with setting these bits up.    At Red Gate we use a build server, TeamCity, which is capable of publishing built projects to the NuGet feed we use. This makes the workflow for Format SQL relatively simple: when I commit a change to the project, the build server is configured to grab those changes, build the project, and spit out a new NuGet package to the Red Gate NuGet package feed. My ‘package step’, therefore, is set up to look for this package on our feed. The final part of package step was simply specifying which machines from what environments I wanted to be able to deploy the project to.     Format SQL Now the main Dashboard showed my new project and environment in a rather empty looking grid. Clicking on my project presented me with a nice little message telling me that I am now ready to create my first release!   Create a release Next I clicked on the ‘Create release’ button in the Projects tab. If your feeds and package step(s) were set up correctly, then Deployment Manager will automatically grab the latest version of the NuGet package that you want to deploy. As you can see here, it was able to pick up the latest build for Format SQL and all I needed to do was enter a version number and description of the release.   As you can see underneath ‘Version number’, it keeps track of what version the previous release was given. Clicking ‘Create’ created the release and redirected me to a summary of it where I could check the details before deploying.   I clicked ‘Deploy this release’ and chose the environment I wanted to deploy to and…that’s it. Deployment Manager went off and deployed it for me.   Once I clicked ‘Deploy release’, Deployment Manager started to automatically update and provide continuing feedback about the process. If any errors do arise, then I can expand the results to see where it went wrong. That’s it, I’m done! Keep in mind, if you hit errors with the deployment itself then it is possible to view the log output to try and determine where these occurred. You can keep expanding the logs to narrow down the problem. The screenshot below is not from my Format SQL deployment, but I thought I’d post one to demonstrate the logging output available. Features One of the best bits of Deployment Manager for me is the ability to very, very easily deploy the same release to multiple machines. Deploying this same release to production was just a case of selecting the deployment and choosing the ‘live’ environment as the place to deploy to. Following on from this is the fact that, as Deployment Manager keeps track of all of your releases, it is extremely easy to roll back to a previous release if anything goes pear-shaped! You can view all your previous releases and select one to re-deploy. I needed this feature more than once when differences in my production and staging machines lead to some odd behavior.     Another option is to use the TeamCity integration available. This enables you to set Deployment Manager up so that it will automatically create releases and deploy these to an environment directly from TeamCity, meaning that you can always see the latest version up and running without having to do anything. Machine Specific Deployments ‘What about custom configuration files?’ I hear you shout. Certainly, it was one of my concerns. Our setup on the staging machine is not in line with that on production. What this means is that, should we deploy the same configuration to both, one of them is going to break. Thankfully, it turns out that Deployment Manager can deal with this. Given I had environments ‘staging’ and ‘live’, and that staging used the project’s web.config file, while production (‘live’) required the config file to undergo some transformations, I simply added a web.live.config file in the project, so that it would be included as part of the NuGet package. In this file, I wrote the XML document transformations I needed and Deployment Manager took care of the rest. Another option is to set up ‘variables’ for your project, which allow you to specify key-value pairs for your configuration file, and which environment to apply them to. You’ll find Variables as a full left-hand submenu within the ‘Projects’ tab. These features will definitely be of interest if you have a large number of environments! There are still many other features that I didn’t get a chance to play around with like running PowerShell scripts for more personalised deployments. Maybe next time! Also, let’s not forget that my use case in this article is a very simple one – deploying a single package. I don’t believe that all projects will be equally as simple, but I already appreciate how much easier Deployment Manager could make my life. I look forward to the possibility of moving our other sites over to Deployment Manager in the near future.   Conclusion In this article I have described the steps involved in setting up and configuring an instance of Deployment Manager, creating a new automated deployment process, and using this to actually carry out a deployment. I’ve tried to mention some of the features I found particularly useful, such as error logging, easy release management allowing you to deploy the same release multiple times, and configuration file transformations. If I had to point out one issue, then it would be that the releases are immutable, which from a development point of view makes sense. However, this causes confusion where I have to create a new release to deploy to a newly set up environment – I cannot simply deploy an old release onto a new environment, the whole release needs to be recreated. I really liked how easy it was to get going with the product. Setting up Format SQL and making a first deployment took very little time. Especially when you compare it to how long it takes me to manually deploy the other site, as I described earlier. I liked how it let me know what I needed to do next, with little messages flagging up that I needed to ‘create environments’ or ‘add some deployment steps’ before I could continue. I found the dashboard incredibly convenient. As the number of projects and environments increase, it might become awkward to try and search them and find out what state they are in. Instead, the dashboard handily keeps track of the latest deployments of each project and lets you know what version is running on each of the environments, and when that deployment occurred. Finally, do you remember my complaint about having to rename folders so that I could keep track of what build they came from? This is yet another thing that Deployment Manager takes care of for you. Each release is put into its own directory, which takes the name of whatever version number that release has, though these can be customised if necessary. If you’d like to take a look at Deployment Manager for yourself, then you can download it here.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 14, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 14, 2012Popular ReleasesAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.9.2: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.6: 20 Issue trackers are closed and a lot of bugs too Localize view is now MVVM and delete is working. Added the unused flag (take care that it goes to true only when displaying screen elements) Backstage - new input/output format choice control for the conversion Backstage - Add display, behaviour and register file type options in the extended options dialog Explorer list view has been transformed to a custom control. New group header, colunms order and size are saved Single insta...Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 Consumer Prv: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Preview Release v 1.2.0 Please download this for Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 functionality on Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The core features of the toolkit include: Automated Install – Scripted install of all dependencies including Visual Studio 2010 Express and the Windows Azure SDK on Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Project Templates – Windows 8 Metro Style app project templates in Dev 11 in both XAML/C# and HTML5/JS with a suppor...CODE Framework: 4.0.20312.0: This version includes significant improvements in the WPF system (and the WPF MVVM/MVC system). This includes new styles for Metro controls and layouts. Improved color handling. It also includes an improved theme/style swapping engine down to active (open) views. There also are various other enhancements and small fixes throughout the entire framework.Visual Studio ALM Quick Reference Guidance: v3 - For Visual Studio 11: RELEASE README Welcome to the BETA release of the Quick Reference Guide preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Documentation ...AvalonDock: AvalonDock 2.0.0345: Welcome to early alpha release of AvalonDock 2.0 I've completely rewritten AvalonDock in order to take full advantage of the MVVM pattern. New version also boost a lot of new features: 1) Deep separation between model and layout. 2) Full WPF binding support thanks to unified logical tree between main docking manager, auto-hide windows and floating windows. 3) Support for Aero semi-maximized windows feature. 4) Support for multiple panes in the same floating windows. For a short list of new f...Google Books Downloader for Windows: Google Books Downloader-1.9.0.0.: Google Books DownloaderWindows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets: Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets 2.2.2: Changes Added Start Menu Item for Easy Startup Added Link to Getting Started Document Added Ability to Persist Subscription Data to Disk Fixed Get-Deployment to not throw on empty slot Simplified numerous default values for cmdlets Breaking Changes: -SubscriptionName is now mandatory in Set-Subscription. -DefaultStorageAccountName and -DefaultStorageAccountKey parameters were removed from Set-Subscription. Instead, when adding multiple accounts to a subscription, each one needs to be added ...IronPython: 2.7.2.1: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm happy to announce the final release IronPython 2.7.2. This release includes everything from IronPython 54498 and 62475 as well. Like all IronPython 2.7-series releases, .NET 4 is required to install it. Installing this release will replace any existing IronPython 2.7-series installation. Unlike previous releases, the assemblies for all supported platforms are included in the installer as well as the zip package, in the "Platforms" directory. IronPython 2...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.2.0.0: Breaking changes: When upgrade from previous versions, MUST reset the all the content type templates, otherwise the content manager might get a compile error. New features Integrate with Windows azure. See: http://wiki.kooboo.com/?wiki=Kooboo CMS on Azure Complete solution to deploy on load balance servers. See: http://wiki.kooboo.com/?wiki=Kooboo CMS load balance Update Jquery and Jquery ui to the lastest version(Jquery 1.71, Jquery UI 1.8.16). Tree style text content editing. See:h...Home Access Plus+: v7.10: Don't forget to add your location to the list: http://www.nbdev.co.uk/projects/hap/locations.aspx Changes: Added: CompressJS controls to the Help Desk & Booking System (reduces page size) Fixed: Debug/Release mode detection in CompressJS control Added: Older Browsers will use an iframe and the old uploadh.aspx page (works better than the current implementation on older browsers) Added: Permalinks for my files, you can give out links that redirect to the correct location when you log i...SubExtractor: Release 1026: Fix: multi-colored bluray subs will no longer result in black blob for OCR Fix: dvds with no language specified will not cause exception in name creation of subtitle files Fix: Root directory Dvds will use volume label as their directory nameExtensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx): Rxx 1.3: Please read the latest release notes for details about what's new. Related Work Items Content SummaryRxx provides the following features. See the Documentation for details. Many IObservable<T> extension methods and IEnumerable<T> extension methods. Many wrappers that convert asynchronous Framework Class Library APIs into observables. Many useful types such as ListSubject<T>, DictionarySubject<T>, CommandSubject, ViewModel, ObservableDynamicObject, Either<TLeft, TRight>, Maybe<T>, Scala...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.47: Properly output escaped characters in CSS identifiers throw an EOF error when parsing a CSS selector that doesn't end in a declaration block chased down a stack-overflow issue with really large JS sources. Needed to flatten out the AST tree for adjacent expression statements that the application merges into a single expression statement, or that already contain large, comma-separated expressions in the original source. fix issue #17569: tie together the -debug switch with the DEBUG defi...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 Metro (Preview): Player Framework for HTML/JavaScript and XAML/C# Metro Style Applications. Additional DownloadsIIS Smooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows 8WPF Application Framework (WAF): WAF for .NET 4.5 (Experimental): Version: 2.5.0.440 (Experimental): This is an experimental release! It can be used to investigate the new .NET Framework 4.5 features. The ideas shown in this release might come in a future release (after 2.5) of the WPF Application Framework (WAF). More information can be found in this dicussion post. Requirements .NET Framework 4.5 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 11) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 11 Professional Changelog All: Upgrade all proje...SSH.NET Library: 2012.3.9: There are still few outstanding issues I wanted to include in this release but since its been a while and there are few new features already I decided to create a new release now. New Features Add SOCKS4, SOCKS5 and HTTP Proxy support when connecting to remote server. For silverlight only IP address can be used for server address when using proxy. Add dynamic port forwarding support using ForwardedPortDynamic class. Add new ShellStream class to work with SSH Shell. Add supports for mu...Test Case Import Utilities for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 11 Beta: V1.2 RTM: This release (V1.2 RTM) includes: Support for connecting to Hosted Team Foundation Server Preview. Support for connecting to Team Foundation Server 11 Beta. Fix to issue with read-only attribute being set for LinksMapping-ReportFile which may have led to problems when saving the report file. Fix to issue with “related links” not being set properly in certain conditions. Fix to ensure that tool works fine when the Excel file contained rich text data. Note: Data is still imported in pl...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.01.04: Major Highlights Fixed issue with loading the splash page skin in the login, privacy and terms of use pages Fixed issue when searching for words with special characters in them Fixed redirection issue when the user does not have permissions to access a resource Fixed issue when clearing the cache using the ClearHostCache() function Fixed issue when displaying the site structure in the link to page feature Fixed issue when inline editing the title of modules Fixed issue with ...Mayhem: Mayhem Developer Preview: This is the developer preview of Mayhem. Enjoy! If you are looking for the Phone applications, please visit this discussionNew ProjectsAD Test Tool: After trying to figure out replication and other user-based issues with a local domain system we built this simple tool to test what the directory was currently reflecting for each user who accessed the tool.BuildUp: MSBuild scripts for use with CI servers.CDRtoSQL: CDRtoSQLCloudStorage4Net: A set of C# wrapper used to access cloud storage services. Such aliyun, grandcloud, baiduyun etc. The project is created to generalize the interfaces of difference storeage platform. We expect programmers could use all these cloud storage in a uniform way. D.E.M.O.N MySQL Tweaker: D.E.M.O.N Studio MySQL Tweaker, a fast and easy-to-use Mysql tools. Add this to your project, install , start, and stop mysql service with a little coding work. Love MySQL , Love MySQL TweakerEarth2012: Earth2012 shows the possible 31 events of 2012 according to the research at www.heliwave.com. For each event, the Earth map shows the danger latitude and all danger and semi-danger cities around it. The user can adjust the starting date of the events once we see a 4-day event.fjyc documents: this is a documentation share for fjyc projectFolderDrive: FolderDrive is a small tool that turns your folders into drives. Imagine having your Dropbox folder behaving as the (almost real) harddrive. It's another handy solution in the ongoing quest for quick access to your favorite folders. The project is developed in C# using WPF - you'll need .NET framework 4 to use it.GralicNew: dHarness: Harness is Web Browser Automation Framework. implemented as COM (Common Object Library) Harness will automate the testing of Web applications by automatic operation the Internet Explorer. you can easily use from your favorite development language.IIS2SQL: Powershell script for IIS7.5 that will send IIS logs to an MSSQL database. Separate table is used to keep track of when the last update occurred so only new events are inserted. Writes to the Application log status messages.Inside Sales Api Client: InsideSales.com api client. Current valid operations are Login and AddLead only. Developed in C#, .NET Framework 4.jqGrid Helper Library: This library is intended for use with the jqGrid jQuery plugin. It provides classes for handling grid settings, building filter and order by expressions, and will build a JQGrid object and then serialize it to either JSON or XML. longSudoku: A simple sudoku game! Use WinForm development! Imitate Metro UI!MantisWare Proxy Switcher: This is a small application that runs in your task bar and gives you the capability to add a proxy list and switch between them quickly, either by selecting the appropriate proxy or using the shortcut keys. It's developed in C#.net, MSSQL Compact.Map Wisata: Map , Dotspatial , Ribbon, Visual Basic.Netmapabc?? API WP SDK: mapabc?? API WP SDKNetWinsock: Provides a simple, event-driven Windows Forms Component capable of serving as a TCP client or server. Utilizes an asynchronous/multithreaded pattern and raises data reception and error events on the UI thread for easy processing. Reminiscent of the VB6 Winsock control.Orchard Zencoder: Orchard module that enables usage of zencoder for encoding media files. http://zencoder.comPleXKeys Predictive Typing: PleXKeys is a predictive typing app for Microsoft Windows. It allows you to type faster and more accurately. With adaptive typing and instant spelling suggestions. Oh and Macros too! Automatic Word Prediction As you type, PleXKeys will predict the next word you are going to type. Then, by simply pressing the ENTER key, PleXKeys will insert the word for you, saving wasted keystrokes. After you have used PleXKeys enough for it to adapt to your typing style, typing entire sentences can b...Samples for my book "Getting Started with the Internet of Things": All examples for my book "Getting Started with the Internet of Things", the Gsiot.PachubeClient library, and the Gsiot.Server library are included in this project.SharePoint Hive - Projects & Articles: TBDSharePoint webparts for the community (Enterprise ready and free): SharePoint webparts for the community (Enterprise ready and free)SimpleCritters: An experiment with neural networks. This project is chiefly academic in nature. This project is concerned with evolving simple critter behavior using simulated neurons.Snip-A-Dillie-O Web: My venture into MVC3 / EF Code First / SQL CE. Snip-A-Dillie-O is just one piece of the bigger picture as a simple code snippet management toolTestMum: C#, Asp.net test projectVisDiskUse: Visualize how much disk space is being used by folders in your hard drive.Windows Phone App Accelerators (WPAA): Windows Phone App Accelerator aims to make creating a Windows Phone application even easier by creating a Visual Studio Template (or Templates) that do the bulk of the common work for you. This is NOT an app factory.

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• How to safely reboot via First Boot script

  - by unixman

  With the cost and performance benefits of the SPARC T4 and SPARC T5 systems undeniably validated, the banking sector is actively moving to Solaris 11.  I was recently asked to help a banking customer of ours look at migrating some of their Solaris 10 logic over to Solaris 11.  While we've introduced a number of holistic improvements in Solaris 11, in terms of how we ease long-term software lifecycle management, it is important to appreciate that customers may not be able to move all of their Solaris 10 scripts and procedures at once; there are years of scripts that reflect fine-tuned requirements of proprietary banking software that gets layered on top of the operating system. One of these requirements is to go through a cycle of reboots, after the system is installed, in order to ensure appropriate software dependencies and various configuration files are in-place. While Solaris 10 introduced a facility that aids here, namely SMF, many of our customers simply haven't yet taken the time to take advantage of this - proceeding with logic that, while functional, without further analysis has an appearance of not being optimal in terms of taking advantage of all the niceties bundled in Solaris 11 at no extra cost. When looking at Solaris 11, we recognize that one of the vehicles that bridges the gap between getting the operating system image payload delivered, and the customized banking software installed, is a notion of a First Boot script.  I had a working example of this at one of the Oracle OpenWorld sessions a few years ago - we've since improved our documentation and have introduced sections where this is described in better detail.   If you're looking at this for the first time and you've not worked with IPS and SMF previously, you might get the sense that the tasks are daunting.   There is a set of technologies involved that are jointly engineered in order to make the process reliable, predictable and extensible. As you go down the path of writing your first boot script, you'll be faced with a need to wrap it into a SMF service and then packaged into a IPS package. The IPS package would then need to be placed onto your IPS repository, in order to subsequently be made available to all of your AI (Automated Install) clients (i.e. the systems that you're installing Solaris and your software onto).     With this blog post, I wanted to create a single place that outlines the entire process (simplistically), and provide a hint of how a good old "at" command may make the requirement of forcing an initial reboot handy. The syntax and references to commands here is based on running this on a version of Solaris 11 that has been updated since its initial release in 2011 (i.e. I am writing this on Solaris 11.1) Assuming you've built an AI server (see this How To article for an example), you might be asking yourself: "Ok, I've got some logic that I need executed AFTER Solaris is deployed and I need my own little script that would make that happen. How do I go about hooking that script into the Solaris 11 AI framework?"  You might start here, in Chapter 13 of the "Installing Oracle Solaris 11.1 Systems" guide, which talks about "Running a Custom Script During First Boot".  And as you do, you'll be confronted with command that might be unfamiliar to you if you're new to Solaris 11, like our dear new friend: svcbundle svcbundle is an aide to creating manifests and profiles.  It is awesome, but don't let its awesomeness overwhelm you. (See this How To article by my colleague Glynn Foster for a nice working example).  In order to get your script's logic integrated into the Solaris 11 deployment process, you need to wrap your (shell) script into 2 manifests -  a SMF service manifest and a IPS package manifest.  ....and if you're new to XML, well then -- buckle up We have some examples of small first boot scripts shown here, as templates to build upon. Necessary structure of the script, particularly in leveraging SMF interfaces, is key. I won't go into that here as that is covered nicely in the doc link above.    Let's say your script ends up looking like this (btw: if things appear to be cut-off in your browser, just select them, copy and paste into your editor and it'll be grabbed - the source gets captured eventhough the browser may not render it "correctly" - ah, computers). #!/bin/sh # Load SMF shell support definitions . /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh # If nothing to do, exit with temporary disable completed=`svcprop -p config/completed site/first-boot-script-svc:default` [ "${completed}" = "true" ] && \ smf_method_exit $SMF_EXIT_TEMP_DISABLE completed "Configuration completed" # Obtain the active BE name from beadm: The active BE on reboot has an R in # the third column of 'beadm list' output. Its name is in column one. bename=`beadm list -Hd|nawk -F ';' '$3 ~ /R/ {print $1}'` beadm create ${bename}.orig echo "Original boot environment saved as ${bename}.orig" # ---- Place your one-time configuration tasks here ---- # For example, if you have to pull some files from your own pre-existing system: /usr/bin/wget -P /var/tmp/ $PULL_DOWN_ADDITIONAL_SCRIPTS_FROM_A_CORPORATE_SYSTEM /usr/bin/chmod 755 /var/tmp/$SCRIPTS_THAT_GOT_PULLED_DOWN_IN_STEP_ABOVE # Clearly the above 2 lines represent some logic that you'd have to customize to fit your needs. # # Perhaps additional things you may want to do here might be of use, like # (gasp!) configuring ssh server for root login and X11 forwarding (for testing), and the like... # # Oh and by the way, after we're done executing all of our proprietary scripts we need to reboot # the system in accordance with our operational software requirements to ensure all layered bits # get initialized properly and pull-in their own modules and components in the right sequence, # subsequently. # We need to set a "time bomb" reboot, that would take place upon completion of this script. # We already know that *this* script depends on multi-user-server SMF milestone, so it should be # safe for us to schedule a reboot for 5 minutes from now. The "at" job get scheduled in the queue # while our little script continues thru the rest of the logic. /usr/bin/at now + 5 minutes <<REBOOT /usr/bin/sync /usr/sbin/reboot REBOOT # ---- End of your customizations ---- # Record that this script's work is done svccfg -s site/first-boot-script-svc:default setprop config/completed = true svcadm refresh site/first-boot-script-svc:default smf_method_exit $SMF_EXIT_TEMP_DISABLE method_completed "Configuration completed"  ...and you're happy with it and are ready to move on. Where do you go and what do you do? The next step is creating the IPS package for your script. Since running the logic of your script constitutes a service, you need to create a service manifest. This is described here, in the middle of Chapter 13 of "Creating an IPS package for the script and service".  Assuming the name of your shell script is first-boot-script.sh, you could end up doing the following: $ cd some_working_directory_for_this_project$ mkdir -p proto/lib/svc/manifest/site$ mkdir -p proto/opt/site $ cp first-boot-script.sh proto/opt/site  Then you would create the service manifest  file like so: $ svcbundle -s service-name=site/first-boot-script-svc \ -s start-method=/opt/site/first-boot-script.sh \ -s instance-property=config:completed:boolean:false -o \ first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml   ...as described here, and place it into the directory hierarchy above. But before you place it into the directory, make sure to inspect the manifest and adjust the appropriate service dependencies.  That is to say, you want to properly specify what milestone should be reached before your service runs.  There's a <dependency> section that looks like this, before you modify it: <dependency restart_on="none" type="service" name="multi_user_dependency" grouping="require_all"> <service_fmri value="svc:/milestone/multi-user"/>  </dependency>  So if you'd like to have your service run AFTER the multi-user-server milestone has been reached (i.e. later, as multi-user-server has more dependencies then multi-user and our intent to reboot the system may have significant ramifications if done prematurely), you would modify that section to read:  <dependency restart_on="none" type="service" name="multi_user_server_dependency" grouping="require_all"> <service_fmri value="svc:/milestone/multi-user-server"/>  </dependency> Save the file and validate it: $ svccfg validate first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml Assuming there are no errors returned, copy the file over into the directory hierarchy: $ cp first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml proto/lib/svc/manifest/site Now that we've created the service manifest (.xml), create the package manifest (.p5m) file named: first-boot-script.p5m.  Populate it as follows: set name=pkg.fmri value=first-boot-script-AT-1-DOT-0,5.11-0 set name=pkg.summary value="AI first-boot script" set name=pkg.description value="Script that runs at first boot after AI installation" set name=info.classification value=\ "org.opensolaris.category.2008:System/Administration and Configuration" file lib/svc/manifest/site/first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml \ path=lib/svc/manifest/site/first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml owner=root \ group=sys mode=0444 dir path=opt/site owner=root group=sys mode=0755 file opt/site/first-boot-script.sh path=opt/site/first-boot-script.sh \ owner=root group=sys mode=0555 Now we are going to publish this package into a IPS repository. If you don't have one yet, don't worry. You have 2 choices: You can either  publish this package into your mirror of the Oracle Solaris IPS repo or create your own customized repo.  The best practice is to create your own customized repo, leaving your mirror of the Oracle Solaris IPS repo untouched.  From this point, you have 2 choices as well - you can either create a repo that will be accessible by your clients via HTTP or via NFS.  Since HTTP is how the default Solaris repo is accessed, we'll go with HTTP for your own IPS repo.   This nice and comprehensive How To by Albert White describes how to create multiple internal IPS repos for Solaris 11. We'll zero in on the basic elements for our needs here: We'll create the IPS repo directory structure hanging off a separate ZFS file system, and we'll tie it into an instance of pkg.depotd. We do this because we want our IPS repo to be accessible to our AI clients through HTTP, and the pkg.depotd SMF service bundled in Solaris 11 can help us do this. We proceed as follows: # zfs create rpool/export/MyIPSrepo # pkgrepo create /export/MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server add MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpg pkg application # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/port=10081 # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/inst_root=/export/MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpg general framework # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpropvalue general/complete astring: MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpropvalue general/enabled boolean: true # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/readonly=true # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/proxy_base = astring: http://your_internal_websrvr/MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/threads = 200 # svcadm refresh application/pkg/server:MyIPSrepo # svcadm enable application/pkg/server:MyIPSrepo Now that the IPS repo is created, we need to publish our package into it: # pkgsend publish -d ./proto -s /export/MyIPSrepo first-boot-script.p5m If you find yourself making changes to your script, remember to up-rev the version in the .p5m file (which is your IPS package manifest), and re-publish the IPS package. Next, you need to go to your AI install server (which might be the same machine) and modify the AI manifest to include a reference to your newly created package.  We do that by listing an additional publisher, which would look like this (replacing the IP address and port with your own, from the "svccfg" commands up above): <publisher name="firstboot"> <origin name="http://192.168.1.222:10081"/> </publisher>  Further down, in the  <software_data action="install">  section add: <name>pkg:/first-boot-script</name> Make sure to update your Automated Install service with the new AI manifest via installadm update-manifest command.  Don't forget to boot your client from the network to watch the entire process unfold and your script get tested.  Once the system makes the initial reboot, the first boot script will be executed and whatever logic you've specified in it should be executed, too, followed by a nice reboot. When the system comes up, your service should stay in a disabled state, as specified by the tailing lines of your SMF script - this is normal and should be left as is as it helps provide an auditing trail for you.   Because the reboot is quite a significant action for the system, you may want to add additional logic to the script that actually places and then checks for presence of certain lock files in order to avoid doing a reboot unnecessarily. You may also want to, alternatively, remove the SMF service entirely - if you're unsure of the potential for someone to try and accidentally enable that service -- eventhough its role in life is to only run once upon the system's first boot. That is how I spent a good chunk of my pre-Halloween time this week, hope yours was just as SPARCkly^H^H^H^H fun!    

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• Converting Encrypted Values

  - by Johnm

  Your database has been protecting sensitive data at rest using the cell-level encryption features of SQL Server for quite sometime. The employees in the auditing department have been inviting you to their after-work gatherings and buying you drinks. Thousands of customers implicitly include you in their prayers of thanks giving as their identities remain safe in your company's database. The cipher text resting snuggly in a column of the varbinary data type is great for security; but it can create some interesting challenges when interacting with other data types such as the XML data type. The XML data type is one that is often used as a message type for the Service Broker feature of SQL Server. It also can be an interesting data type to capture for auditing or integrating with external systems. The challenge that cipher text presents is that the need for decryption remains even after it has experienced its XML metamorphosis. Quite an interesting challenge nonetheless; but fear not. There is a solution. To simulate this scenario, we first will want to create a plain text value for us to encrypt. We will do this by creating a variable to store our plain text value: -- set plain text value DECLARE @PlainText NVARCHAR(255); SET @PlainText = 'This is plain text to encrypt'; The next step will be to create a variable that will store the cipher text that is generated from the encryption process. We will populate this variable by using a pre-defined symmetric key and certificate combination: -- encrypt plain text value DECLARE @CipherText VARBINARY(MAX); OPEN SYMMETRIC KEY SymKey     DECRYPTION BY CERTIFICATE SymCert     WITH PASSWORD='mypassword2010';     SET @CipherText = EncryptByKey                          (                            Key_GUID('SymKey'),                            @PlainText                           ); CLOSE ALL SYMMETRIC KEYS; The value of our newly generated cipher text is 0x006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583--. This will be important as we reference our cipher text later in this post. Our final step in preparing our scenario is to create a table variable to simulate the existence of a table that contains a column used to hold encrypted values. Once this table variable has been created, populate the table variable with the newly generated cipher text: -- capture value in table variable DECLARE @tbl TABLE (EncVal varbinary(MAX)); INSERT INTO @tbl (EncVal) VALUES (@CipherText); We are now ready to experience the challenge of capturing our encrypted column in an XML data type using the FOR XML clause: -- capture set in xml DECLARE @xml XML; SET @xml = (SELECT               EncVal             FROM @tbl AS MYTABLE             FOR XML AUTO, BINARY BASE64, ROOT('root')); If you add the SELECT @XML statement at the end of this portion of the code you will see the contents of the XML data in its raw format: <root>   <MYTABLE EncVal="AG4Skzy/sEafeavMeaWDBwEAAACE--" /> </root> Strangely, the value that is captured appears nothing like the value that was created through the encryption process. The result being that when this XML is converted into a readable data set the encrypted value will not be able to be decrypted, even with access to the symmetric key and certificate used to perform the decryption. An immediate thought might be to convert the varbinary data type to either a varchar or nvarchar before creating the XML data. This approach makes good sense. The code for this might look something like the following: -- capture set in xml DECLARE @xml XML; SET @xml = (SELECT              CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),EncVal) AS EncVal             FROM @tbl AS MYTABLE             FOR XML AUTO, BINARY BASE64, ROOT('root')); However, this results in the following error: Msg 9420, Level 16, State 1, Line 26 XML parsing: line 1, character 37, illegal xml character A quick query that returns CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),EncVal) reveals that the value that is causing the error looks like something off of a genuine Chinese menu. While this situation does present us with one of those spine-tingling, expletive-generating challenges, rest assured that this approach is on the right track. With the addition of the "style" argument to the CONVERT method, our solution is at hand. When dealing with converting varbinary data types we have three styles available to us: - The first is to not include the style parameter, or use the value of "0". As we see, this style will not work for us. - The second option is to use the value of "1" will keep our varbinary value including the "0x" prefix. In our case, the value will be 0x006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583-- - The third option is to use the value of "2" which will chop the "0x" prefix off of our varbinary value. In our case, the value will be 006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583-- Since we will want to convert this back to varbinary when reading this value from the XML data we will want the "0x" prefix, so we will want to change our code as follows: -- capture set in xml DECLARE @xml XML; SET @xml = (SELECT              CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),EncVal,1) AS EncVal             FROM @tbl AS MYTABLE             FOR XML AUTO, BINARY BASE64, ROOT('root')); Once again, with the inclusion of the SELECT @XML statement at the end of this portion of the code you will see the contents of the XML data in its raw format: <root>   <MYTABLE EncVal="0x006E12933CBFB0469F79ABCC79A583--" /> </root> Nice! We are now cooking with gas. To continue our scenario, we will want to parse the XML data into a data set so that we can glean our freshly captured cipher text. Once we have our cipher text snagged we will capture it into a variable so that it can be used during decryption: -- read back xml DECLARE @hdoc INT; DECLARE @EncVal NVARCHAR(MAX); EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @hDoc OUTPUT, @xml; SELECT @EncVal = EncVal FROM OPENXML (@hdoc, '/root/MYTABLE') WITH ([EncVal] VARBINARY(MAX) '@EncVal'); EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hDoc; Finally, the decryption of our cipher text using the DECRYPTBYKEYAUTOCERT method and the certificate utilized to perform the encryption earlier in our exercise: SELECT     CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),                     DecryptByKeyAutoCert                          (                            CERT_ID('AuditLogCert'),                            N'mypassword2010',                            @EncVal                           )                     ) EncVal; Ah yes, another hurdle presents itself! The decryption produced the value of NULL which in cryptography means that either you don't have permissions to decrypt the cipher text or something went wrong during the decryption process (ok, sometimes the value is actually NULL; but not in this case). As we see, the @EncVal variable is an nvarchar data type. The third parameter of the DECRYPTBYKEYAUTOCERT method requires a varbinary value. Therefore we will need to utilize our handy-dandy CONVERT method: SELECT     CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),                     DecryptByKeyAutoCert                          (                             CERT_ID('AuditLogCert'),                             N'mypassword2010',                             CONVERT(VARBINARY(MAX),@EncVal)                           )                     ) EncVal; Oh, almost. The result remains NULL despite our conversion to the varbinary data type. This is due to the creation of an varbinary value that does not reflect the actual value of our @EncVal variable; but rather a varbinary conversion of the variable itself. In this case, something like 0x3000780030003000360045003--. Considering the "style" parameter got us past XML challenge, we will want to consider its power for this challenge as well. Knowing that the value of "1" will provide us with the actual value including the "0x", we will opt to utilize that value in this case: SELECT     CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),                     DecryptByKeyAutoCert                          (                            CERT_ID('SymCert'),                            N'mypassword2010',                            CONVERT(VARBINARY(MAX),@EncVal,1)                           )                     ) EncVal; Bingo, we have success! We have discovered what happens with varbinary data when captured as XML data. We have figured out how to make this data useful post-XML-ification. Best of all we now have a choice in after-work parties now that our very happy client who depends on our XML based interface invites us for dinner in celebration. All thanks to the effective use of the style parameter.

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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part I)

  Ive spent the better part of the last two years doing nothing but K2 workflow development, which until very recently could only be done in Visual Studio 2005 so I am a bit behind the times. I seem to have skipped over using Visual Studio 2008 entirely, and I am now ready to stumble through all that Ive missed. Not that I will abandon my K2 ramblings, but I need to get back to some of the other technologies I am passionate about but havent had the option of working with them on a day-to-day basis as I have with K2 blackpearl. Specifically, I am going to be focusing my efforts on what is new in the Entity Framework and WPF in Visual Studio 2010, though you have to keep in mind that since I have skipped VS 2008, I may be giving VS 2010 credit for things that really have been around for a while (hey, if I havent seen it, it is new to me!). I have the following simple goals in mind for this exercise: Entity Framework Model an inherited class Entity Framework Model a lookup entity WPF Bind a list of entities WPF - on selection of an entity in the bound list, display values of the selected entity WPF For the lookup field, provide a dropdown of potential values to lookup All of these goals must be accomplished using as little code as possible, relying on the features we get out of the box in Visual Studio 2010. This isnt going to be rocket science here, Im not even looking to get or save this data from/to a data source, but I gotta start somewhere and hopefully it will grow into something more interesting. For this exercise, I am going to try to model some fictional data about football players and personnel (maybe turning this into some sort of NFL simulation game if I lose my job and can play with this all day), so Ill start with a Person class that has a name property, and extend that with a Player class to include a Position lookup property. The idea is that a Person can be a Player, Coach or whatever other personnel type may be associated with a football team but well only flesh out the Player aspect of a person for this. So to get started, I fired up Visual Studio 2010 and created a new WPF Application: To this project, I added a new ADO.NET Entity Data Model named PlayerModel (for now, not sure what will be an appropriate name so this may be revisited): I chose for it to be an empty model, as I dont have a database designed for this yet: Using the toolbox, I dragged out an entity for each of the items we identified earlier: Person, Player and Position, and gave them some simple properties (note that I kept the default Id property for each of them): Now to figure out how to link these things together the way I want to first, lets try to tell it that Player extends Person. I see that Inheritance is one of the items in the toolbox, but I cant seem to drag it out anywhere onto the canvas. However, when I right-click an element, I get the option to Add Inheritance to it, which gives us exactly what we want: Ok, now that we have that, how do we tell it that each player has a position? Well, despite association being in the toolbox, I have learned that you cant just drag and drop those elements so I right click Player and select Add -> Association to get the following dialog: I see the option here to Add foreign key properties to my entities Ive read somewhere this this is a new and highly-sought after feature so Ill see what it does. Selecting it includes a PositionId on the Player element for me, which seems pretty database-centric and I would like to see if I can live without it for now given that we also got the Position property out of this association. Ill bring it back into the fold if it ends up being useful later. Here is what we end up with now: Trying to compile this resulted in an error stating that the Player entity cannot have an Id, because the Person element it extends already has a property named Id. Makes sense, so I remove it and compile again. Success, but with a warning but success is a good thing so Ill pretend I didnt see that warning for now. It probably has to do with the fact that my Player entity is now pretty useless as it doesnt have any non-navigation properties. So things seem to match what we are going for, great now what the heck do we do with this? Lets switch gears and see what we get for free dealing with this model from the UI. Lets open up the MainWindow.xaml and see if we can connect to our entities as a data source. Hey, whats this? Have you read my mind, Visual Studio? Our entities are already listed in the Data Sources panel: I do notice, however, that our Player entity is missing. Is this due to that compilation warning? Ill add a bogus property to our player entity just to see if that is the case no, still no love. The warning reads: Error 2062: No mapping specified for instances of the EntitySet and AssociationSet in the EntityContainer PlayerModelContainer. Well if everything worked without any issues, then I wouldnt be stumbling through at all, so lets get to the bottom of this. My good friend google indicates that the warning is due to the model not being tied up to a database. Hmmm, so why dont Players show up in my data sources? A little bit of drill-down shows that they are, in fact, exposed under Positions: Well now that isnt quite what I want. While you could get to players through a position, it shouldnt be that way exclusively. Oh well, I can ignore that for now lets drag Players out onto the canvas after selecting List from the dropdown: Hey, what the heck? I wanted a list not a listview. Get rid of that list view that was just dropped, drop in a listbox and then drop the Players entity into it. That will bind it for us. Of course, there isnt any data to show, which brings us to the really hacky part of all this and that is to stuff some test data into our view source without actually getting it from any data source. To do this through code, we need to grab a reference to the positionsPlayersViewSource resource that was created for us when we dragged out our Players entity. We then set the source of that reference equal to a populated list of Players.  Well add a couple of players that way as well as a few positions via the positionsViewSource resource, and Ill ensure that each player has a position specified.  Ultimately, the code looks like this: System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource positionViewSource = ((System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource)(this.FindResource("positionsViewSource")));             List<Position> positions = new List<Position>();             Position newPosition = new Position();             newPosition.Id = 0;             newPosition.Name = "WR";             positions.Add(newPosition);             newPosition = new Position();             newPosition.Id = 1;             newPosition.Name = "RB";             positions.Add(newPosition);             newPosition = new Position();             newPosition.Id = 2;             newPosition.Name = "QB";             positions.Add(newPosition);             positionViewSource.Source = positions;             System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource playerViewSource = ((System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource)(this.FindResource("positionsPlayersViewSource")));             List<Player> players = new List<Player>();             Player newPlayer = new Player();             newPlayer.Id = 0;             newPlayer.Name = "Test Dude";             newPlayer.Position = positions[0];             players.Add(newPlayer);             newPlayer = new Player();             newPlayer.Id = 1;             newPlayer.Name = "Test Dude II";             newPlayer.Position = positions[1];             players.Add(newPlayer);             newPlayer = new Player();             newPlayer.Id = 2;             newPlayer.Name = "Test Dude III";             newPlayer.Position = positions[2];             players.Add(newPlayer);             playerViewSource.Source = players; Now that our views are being loaded with data, we can go about tying things together visually. Drop a text box (to show the selected players name) and a combo box (to show the selected players position). Drag the Positions entity from the data sources panel to the combo box to wire it up to the positions view source. Click the text box that was dragged, and find its Text property in the properties pane. There is a little glyph next to it that displays Advanced Properties when hovered over click this and then select Apply Data Binding. In the dialog that appears, we can select the current players name as the value to bind to: Similarly, we can wire up the combo boxs SelectedItem value to the current players position: When the application is executed and we navigate through the various players, we automatically get their name and position bound to the appropriate fields: All of this was accomplished with no code save for loading the test data, and I might add, it was pretty intuitive to do so via the drag and drop of entities straight from the data sources panel. So maybe all of this was old hat to you, but I was very impressed with this experience and I look forward to stumbling through the caveats of doing more complex data modeling and binding in this fashion. Next up, I suppose, will be figuring out how to get the entities to get real data from a data source instead of stuffing it with test data as well as trying to figure out why Players ended up being under Positions in the data sources panel.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• .NET Code Evolution

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/07/24/153504.aspxAt my day job I do look at a lot of code written by other people. Most of the code is quite good and some is even a masterpiece. And there is also code which makes you think WTF… oh it was written by me. Hm not so bad after all. There are many excuses reasons for bad code. Most often it is time pressure followed by not enough ambition (who cares) or insufficient training. Normally I do care about code quality quite a lot which makes me a (perceived) slow worker who does write many tests and refines the code quite a lot because of the design deficiencies. Most of the deficiencies I do find by putting my design under stress while checking for invariants. It does also help a lot to step into the code with a debugger (sometimes also Windbg). I do this much more often when my tests are red. That way I do get a much better understanding what my code really does and not what I think it should be doing. This time I do want to show you how code can evolve over the years with different .NET Framework versions. Once there was  time where .NET 1.1 was new and many C++ programmers did switch over to get rid of not initialized pointers and memory leaks. There were also nice new data structures available such as the Hashtable which is fast lookup table with O(1) time complexity. All was good and much code was written since then. At 2005 a new version of the .NET Framework did arrive which did bring many new things like generics and new data structures. The “old” fashioned way of Hashtable were coming to an end and everyone used the new Dictionary<xx,xx> type instead which was type safe and faster because the object to type conversion (aka boxing) was no longer necessary. I think 95% of all Hashtables and dictionaries use string as key. Often it is convenient to ignore casing to make it easy to look up values which the user did enter. An often followed route is to convert the string to upper case before putting it into the Hashtable. Hashtable Table = new Hashtable(); void Add(string key, string value) { Table.Add(key.ToUpper(), value); } This is valid and working code but it has problems. First we can pass to the Hashtable a custom IEqualityComparer to do the string matching case insensitive. Second we can switch over to the now also old Dictionary type to become a little faster and we can keep the the original keys (not upper cased) in the dictionary. Dictionary<string, string> DictTable = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); void AddDict(string key, string value) { DictTable.Add(key, value); } Many people do not user the other ctors of Dictionary because they do shy away from the overhead of writing their own comparer. They do not know that .NET has for strings already predefined comparers at hand which you can directly use. Today in the many core area we do use threads all over the place. Sometimes things break in subtle ways but most of the time it is sufficient to place a lock around the offender. Threading has become so mainstream that it may sound weird that in the year 2000 some guy got a huge incentive for the idea to reduce the time to process calibration data from 12 hours to 6 hours by using two threads on a dual core machine. Threading does make it easy to become faster at the expense of correctness. Correct and scalable multithreading can be arbitrarily hard to achieve depending on the problem you are trying to solve. Lets suppose we want to process millions of items with two threads and count the processed items processed by all threads. A typical beginners code might look like this: int Counter; void IJustLearnedToUseThreads() { var t1 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t1.Start(); var t2 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t2.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception("Hmm " + Counter + " != " + 2 * Increments); } const int Increments = 10 * 1000 * 1000; void ThreadWorkMethod() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counter++; } } It does throw an exception with the message e.g. “Hmm 10.222.287 != 20.000.000” and does never finish. The code does fail because the assumption that Counter++ is an atomic operation is wrong. The ++ operator is just a shortcut for Counter = Counter + 1 This does involve reading the counter from a memory location into the CPU, incrementing value on the CPU and writing the new value back to the memory location. When we do look at the generated assembly code we will see only inc dword ptr [ecx+10h] which is only one instruction. Yes it is one instruction but it is not atomic. All modern CPUs have several layers of caches (L1,L2,L3) which try to hide the fact how slow actual main memory accesses are. Since cache is just another word for redundant copy it can happen that one CPU does read a value from main memory into the cache, modifies it and write it back to the main memory. The problem is that at least the L1 cache is not shared between CPUs so it can happen that one CPU does make changes to values which did change in meantime in the main memory. From the exception you can see we did increment the value 20 million times but half of the changes were lost because we did overwrite the already changed value from the other thread. This is a very common case and people do learn to protect their  data with proper locking.   void Intermediate() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Action acc = ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate; var ar1 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); var ar2 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); ar1.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); ar2.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Intermediate did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { lock (this) { Counter++; } } } This is better and does use the .NET Threadpool to get rid of manual thread management. It does give the expected result but it can result in deadlocks because you do lock on this. This is in general a bad idea since it can lead to deadlocks when other threads use your class instance as lock object. It is therefore recommended to create a private object as lock object to ensure that nobody else can lock your lock object. When you read more about threading you will read about lock free algorithms. They are nice and can improve performance quite a lot but you need to pay close attention to the CLR memory model. It does make quite weak guarantees in general but it can still work because your CPU architecture does give you more invariants than the CLR memory model. For a simple counter there is an easy lock free alternative present with the Interlocked class in .NET. As a general rule you should not try to write lock free algos since most likely you will fail to get it right on all CPU architectures. void Experienced() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Experienced did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Interlocked.Increment(ref Counter); } } Since time does move forward we do not use threads explicitly anymore but the much nicer Task abstraction which was introduced with .NET 4 at 2010. It is educational to look at the generated assembly code. The Interlocked.Increment method must be called which does wondrous things right? Lets see: lock inc dword ptr [eax] The first thing to note that there is no method call at all. Why? Because the JIT compiler does know very well about CPU intrinsic functions. Atomic operations which do lock the memory bus to prevent other processors to read stale values are such things. Second: This is the same increment call prefixed with a lock instruction. The only reason for the existence of the Interlocked class is that the JIT compiler can compile it to the matching CPU intrinsic functions which can not only increment by one but can also do an add, exchange and a combined compare and exchange operation. But be warned that the correct usage of its methods can be tricky. If you try to be clever and look a the generated IL code and try to reason about its efficiency you will fail. Only the generated machine code counts. Is this the best code we can write? Perhaps. It is nice and clean. But can we make it any faster? Lets see how good we are doing currently. Level Time in s IJustLearnedToUseThreads Flawed Code Intermediate 1,5 (lock) Experienced 0,3 (Interlocked.Increment) Master 0,1 (1,0 for int[2]) That lock free thing is really a nice thing. But if you read more about CPU cache, cache coherency, false sharing you can do even better. int[] Counters = new int[12]; // Cache line size is 64 bytes on my machine with an 8 way associative cache try for yourself e.g. 64 on more modern CPUs void Master() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, 0); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, Counters.Length - 1); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); Counter = Counters[0] + Counters[Counters.Length - 1]; if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Master did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Master(object number) { int index = (int) number; for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counters[index]++; } } The key insight here is to use for each core its own value. But if you simply use simply an integer array of two items, one for each core and add the items at the end you will be much slower than the lock free version (factor 3). Each CPU core has its own cache line size which is something in the range of 16-256 bytes. When you do access a value from one location the CPU does not only fetch one value from main memory but a complete cache line (e.g. 16 bytes). This means that you do not pay for the next 15 bytes when you access them. This can lead to dramatic performance improvements and non obvious code which is faster although it does have many more memory reads than another algorithm. So what have we done here? We have started with correct code but it was lacking knowledge how to use the .NET Base Class Libraries optimally. Then we did try to get fancy and used threads for the first time and failed. Our next try was better but it still had non obvious issues (lock object exposed to the outside). Knowledge has increased further and we have found a lock free version of our counter which is a nice and clean way which is a perfectly valid solution. The last example is only here to show you how you can get most out of threading by paying close attention to your used data structures and CPU cache coherency. Although we are working in a virtual execution environment in a high level language with automatic memory management it does pay off to know the details down to the assembly level. Only if you continue to learn and to dig deeper you can come up with solutions no one else was even considering. I have studied particle physics which does help at the digging deeper part. Have you ever tried to solve Quantum Chromodynamics equations? Compared to that the rest must be easy ;-). Although I am no longer working in the Science field I take pride in discovering non obvious things. This can be a very hard to find bug or a new way to restructure data to make something 10 times faster. Now I need to get some sleep ….

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• Fibre channel long distance woes

  - by Marki

  I need a fresh pair of eyes. We're using a 15km fibre optic line across which fibrechannel and 10GbE is multiplexed (passive optical CWDM). For FC we have long distance lasers suitable up to 40km (Skylane SFCxx0404F0D). The multiplexer is limited by the SFPs which can do max. 4Gb fibrechannel. The FC switch is a Brocade 5000 series. The respective wavelengths are 1550,1570,1590 and 1610nm for FC and 1530nm for 10GbE. The problem is the 4GbFC fabrics are almost never clean. Sometimes they are for a while even with a lot of traffic on them. Then they may suddenly start producing errors (RX CRC, RX encoding, RX disparity, ...) even with only marginal traffic on them. I am attaching some error and traffic graphs. Errors are currently in the order of 50-100 errors per 5 minutes when with 1Gb/s traffic. Optics Here is the power output of one port summarized (collected using sfpshow on different switches) SITE-A units=uW (microwatt) SITE-B ********************************************** FAB1 SW1 TX 1234.3 RX 49.1 SW3 1550nm (ko) RX 95.2 TX 1175.6 FAB2 SW2 TX 1422.0 RX 104.6 SW4 1610nm (ok) RX 54.3 TX 1468.4 What I find curious at this point is the asymmetry in the power levels. While SW2 transmits with 1422uW which SW4 receives with 104uW, SW2 only receives the SW4 signal with similar original power only with 54uW. Vice versa for SW1-3. Anyway the SFPs have RX sensitivity down to -18dBm (ca. 20uW) so in any case it should be fine... But nothing is. Some SFPs have been diagnosed as malfunctioning by the manufacturer (the 1550nm ones shown above with "ko"). The 1610nm ones apparently are ok, they have been tested using a traffic generator. The leased line has also been tested more than once. All is within tolerances. I'm awaiting the replacements but for some reason I don't believe it will make things better as the apparently good ones don't produce ZERO errors either. Earlier there was active equipment involved (some kind of 4GFC retimer) before putting the signal on the line. No idea why. That equipment was eliminated because of the problems so we now only have: the long distance laser in the switch, (new) 10m LC-SC monomode cable to the mux (for each fabric), the leased line, the same thing but reversed on the other side of the link. FC switches Here is a port config from the Brocade portcfgshow (it's like that on both sides, obviously) Area Number: 0 Speed Level: 4G Fill Word(On Active) 0(Idle-Idle) Fill Word(Current) 0(Idle-Idle) AL_PA Offset 13: OFF Trunk Port ON Long Distance LS VC Link Init OFF Desired Distance 32 Km Reserved Buffers 70 Locked L_Port OFF Locked G_Port OFF Disabled E_Port OFF Locked E_Port OFF ISL R_RDY Mode OFF RSCN Suppressed OFF Persistent Disable OFF LOS TOV enable OFF NPIV capability ON QOS E_Port OFF Port Auto Disable: OFF Rate Limit OFF EX Port OFF Mirror Port OFF Credit Recovery ON F_Port Buffers OFF Fault Delay: 0(R_A_TOV) NPIV PP Limit: 126 CSCTL mode: OFF Forcing the links to 2GbFC produces no errors, but we bought 4GbFC and we want 4GbFC. I don't know where to look anymore. Any ideas what to try next or how to proceed? If we can't make 4GbFC work reliably I wonder what the people working with 8 or 16 do... I don't assume that "a few errors here and there" are acceptable. Oh and BTW we are in contact with everyone of the manufacturers (FC switch, MUX, SFPs, ...) Except for the SFPs to be changed (some have been changed before) nobody has a clue. Brocade SAN Health says the fabric is ok. MUX, well, it's passive, it's only a prism, nature at it's best. Any shots in the dark? APPENDIX: Answers to your questions @Chopper3: This is the second generation of Brocades exhibiting the problem. Before we had 5000s, now we have 5100s. In the beginning when we still had the active MUX we rented a longdistance laser once to put it into the switch directly in order to make tests for a day, during that day of course it was clean. But as I said, sometimes it's clean just like that. And sometimes it's not. Alternative switches would mean to rebuild the entire SAN with those only to test. Alternative SFPs, well they're hard to come by just like that. @longneck: The line is rented. It's a dark fibre (9um monomode) so there's noone else on it. Sure there are splices. I can't go and look but I have to trust they have been done correctly. As I said the line has been checked and rechecked (using an optical time-domain reflectometer). Obviously you don't have all this equipment yourself because it's way too expensive. @mdpc: What would be the "wrong" type of cable according to you? Up to the switch everything is monomode, yes. The connectors are the correct ones too. Yeah I know there are the green ones where the fibre is cut off at a certain angle etc. But we have the correct ones for all that I know. Progress Report #1 We have had two fabrics (=2x2 switches) with Brocade 5100s with FabricOS 6.4.1 and two fabrics (another 2x4 switches) on FabricOS 7.0.2. On the longdistance ISLs (one in each fabric) it turned out that with FOS 6.4.1 setting it to long distance issues warnings about the VC Init setting and consequently the fill word. But those are only warnings. FOS 7.0.2 requires you to do modifications to VCI and the fillword for long distance links. Setting FOS 6.4.1 to the LS (long-distance static distance) setting with wrong VCI and fillword setting made the whole fabric inoperational (stuck in an SCN loop, use fabriclog -s to see, you don't see it anywhere else, no port error counters or anything increasing). Currently I'm giving the one fabric with the IMHO more correct settings a beating and it seems to do fine, whereas the other one without much traffic still has errors here and there. In short: We have eliminated the active part of the MUX (the FC retimer). We are putting the long distance SFPs into the end equipment themselves. Just to be sure we bought new monomode cables to connect the end equipment to the remaining passive part of the MUX. We are now trying out several long distance configs. It's almost black magic. Everything that happens is mostly empirical, noone seems to have a clue what are the exact reasons to do something. ("We have tried this, and it didn't work, then we tried that and it worked, so we stuck with that." But noone really seems to know why.) I'll keep you updated. Progress Report #2 We got the new lasers for one of the fabrics on warranty. It's ultra clean even on 4GbFC. They're transmitting with roughly 2mW (3dBm) whereas the others are only at 1.5mW (1.5dBm) although that should really be enough. The other fabric (where the lasers are apparently ok) still produces one or two CRCs infrequently. Using sfpshow the SFP producing the actual RX errors shows Status/Ctrl: 0x82 Alarm flags[0,1] = 0x5, 0x40 Warn Flags[0,1] = 0x5, 0x40 Now I'll have to find out what that means. Not sure if it was there before. Well I'll first clear my head with a week of vacation. 8-)

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• How to populate a drop down list in Spring MVC

  - by GigaPr

  Hi, would like to populate a drop down list on a jsp page i have my page that looks like <form:form method="POST" action="addRss.htm" commandName="addNewRss" cssClass="addUserForm"> <div class="floatL"> <div class="padding5"> <div class="fieldContainer"> <strong>Title:</strong>&nbsp; </div> <form:errors path="title" cssClass="error"/> <form:input path="title" cssClass="textArea" /> </div> <div class="padding5"> <div class="fieldContainer"> <strong>Description:</strong>&nbsp; </div> <form:errors path="description" cssClass="error"/> <form:input path="description" cssClass="textArea" /> </div> <div class="padding5"> <div class="fieldContainer"> <strong>Language:</strong>&nbsp; </div> <form:errors path="language" cssClass="error"/> <form:select path="language" cssClass="textArea" /> </div> </div> <div class="floatR"> <div class="padding5"> <div class="fieldContainer"> <strong>Link:</strong>&nbsp; </div> <form:errors path="link" cssClass="error"/> <form:input path="link" cssClass="textArea" /> </div> <div class="padding5"> <div class="fieldContainer"> <strong>Url:</strong>&nbsp; </div> <form:errors path="url" cssClass="error"/> <form:input path="url" cssClass="textArea" /> </div> <div class="padding5"> <div class="fieldContainer"> <strong>Url</strong>&nbsp; </div> <form:errors path="url" cssClass="error"/> <form:input path="url" cssClass="textArea" /> </div> </div> <input type="submit" class="floatR" value="Add New Rss"> </form:form> and my controller public class AddRssController extends BaseController { private static final String[] LANGUAGES = { "AL", "AK", "AZ", "AR", "CA", "CO", "CT", "DE", "DC", "FL", "GA", "HI", "ID", "IL", "IN", "IA", "KS", "KY", "LA", "ME", "MD", "MA", "MI", "MN", "MS", "MO", "MT", "NE", "NV", "NH", "NJ", "NM", "NY", "NC", "ND", "OH", "OK", "OR", "PA", "RI", "SC", "SD", "TN", "TX", "UT", "VA", "VT", "WA", "WV", "WI", "WY" }; public AddRssController() { setCommandClass(RSS.class); setCommandName("addNewRss"); } @Override protected Object formBackingObject(HttpServletRequest request) throws Exception { RSS rantForm = (RSS) super.formBackingObject(request); // rantForm.setVehicle(new Vehicle()); return rantForm; } @Override protected Map referenceData(HttpServletRequest request) throws Exception { Map referenceData = new HashMap(); referenceData.put("language", LANGUAGES); return referenceData; } @Override protected ModelAndView onSubmit(Object command, BindException bindException) throws Exception { RSS rss = (RSS) command; rssServiceImplementation.add(rss); return new ModelAndView(getSuccessView()); } } and my BaseController public class BaseController extends SimpleFormController implements Controller { public UserServiceImplementation userServiceImplementation; public UserServiceImplementation getUserServiceImplementation() { return userServiceImplementation; } public void setUserServiceImplementation(UserServiceImplementation userServiceImplementation) { this.userServiceImplementation = userServiceImplementation; } public RssServiceImplementation rssServiceImplementation; public RssServiceImplementation getRssServiceImplementation() { return rssServiceImplementation; } public void setRssServiceImplementation(RssServiceImplementation rssServiceImplementation) { this.rssServiceImplementation = rssServiceImplementation; } } But it doesn t work Any suggestion?

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• Please help me correct the small bugs in this image editor

  - by Alex

  Hi, I'm working on a website that will sell hand made jewelry and I'm finishing the image editor, but it's not behaving quite right. Basically, the user uploads an image which will be saved as a source and then it will be resized to fit the user's screen and saved as a temp. The user will then go to a screen that will allow them to crop the image and then save it to it's final versions. All of that works fine, except, the final versions have 3 bugs. First is some black horizontal line on the very bottom of the image. Second is an outline of sorts that follows the edges. I thought it was because I was reducing the quality, but even at 100% it still shows up... And lastly, I've noticed that the cropped image is always a couple of pixels lower than what I'm specifying... Anyway, I'm hoping someone whose got experience in editing images with C# can maybe take a look at the code and see where I might be going off the right path. Oh, by the way, this in an ASP.NET MVC application. Here's the code: using System; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Drawing2D; using System.Drawing.Imaging; using System.IO; using System.Linq; using System.Web; namespace Website.Models.Providers { public class ImageProvider { private readonly ProductProvider ProductProvider = null; private readonly EncoderParameters HighQualityEncoder = new EncoderParameters(); private readonly ImageCodecInfo JpegCodecInfo = ImageCodecInfo.GetImageEncoders().Single( c => (c.MimeType == "image/jpeg")); private readonly string Path = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/Resources/Images/Products"); private readonly short[][] Dimensions = new short[3][] { new short[2] { 640, 480 }, new short[2] { 240, 0 }, new short[2] { 80, 60 } }; ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Constructor ////////////////////////////////////////// ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// public ImageProvider( ProductProvider ProductProvider) { this.ProductProvider = ProductProvider; HighQualityEncoder.Param[0] = new EncoderParameter(Encoder.Quality, 100L); } ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Crop ////////////////////////////////////////////// ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// public void Crop( string FileName, Image Image, Crop Crop) { using (Bitmap Source = new Bitmap(Image)) { using (Bitmap Target = new Bitmap(Crop.Width, Crop.Height)) { using (Graphics Graphics = Graphics.FromImage(Target)) { Graphics.InterpolationMode = InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic; Graphics.SmoothingMode = SmoothingMode.HighQuality; Graphics.PixelOffsetMode = PixelOffsetMode.HighQuality; Graphics.CompositingQuality = CompositingQuality.HighQuality; Graphics.DrawImage(Source, new Rectangle(0, 0, Target.Width, Target.Height), new Rectangle(Crop.Left, Crop.Top, Crop.Width, Crop.Height), GraphicsUnit.Pixel); }; Target.Save(FileName, JpegCodecInfo, HighQualityEncoder); }; }; } ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Crop & Resize ////////////////////////////////////// ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// public void CropAndResize( Product Product, Crop Crop) { using (Image Source = Image.FromFile(String.Format("{0}/{1}.source", Path, Product.ProductId))) { using (Image Temp = Image.FromFile(String.Format("{0}/{1}.temp", Path, Product.ProductId))) { float Percent = ((float)Source.Width / (float)Temp.Width); short Width = (short)(Temp.Width * Percent); short Height = (short)(Temp.Height * Percent); Crop.Height = (short)(Crop.Height * Percent); Crop.Left = (short)(Crop.Left * Percent); Crop.Top = (short)(Crop.Top * Percent); Crop.Width = (short)(Crop.Width * Percent); Img Img = new Img(); this.ProductProvider.AddImageAndSave(Product, Img); this.Crop(String.Format("{0}/{1}.cropped", Path, Img.ImageId), Source, Crop); using (Image Cropped = Image.FromFile(String.Format("{0}/{1}.cropped", Path, Img.ImageId))) { this.Resize(this.Dimensions[0], String.Format("{0}/{1}-L.jpg", Path, Img.ImageId), Cropped, HighQualityEncoder); this.Resize(this.Dimensions[1], String.Format("{0}/{1}-T.jpg", Path, Img.ImageId), Cropped, HighQualityEncoder); this.Resize(this.Dimensions[2], String.Format("{0}/{1}-S.jpg", Path, Img.ImageId), Cropped, HighQualityEncoder); }; }; }; this.Purge(Product); } ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Queue ////////////////////////////////////////////// ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// public void QueueFor( Product Product, HttpPostedFileBase PostedFile) { using (Image Image = Image.FromStream(PostedFile.InputStream)) { this.Resize(new short[2] { 1152, 0 }, String.Format("{0}/{1}.temp", Path, Product.ProductId), Image, HighQualityEncoder); }; PostedFile.SaveAs(String.Format("{0}/{1}.source", Path, Product.ProductId)); } ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Purge ////////////////////////////////////////////// ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// private void Purge( Product Product) { string Source = String.Format("{0}/{1}.source", Path, Product.ProductId); string Temp = String.Format("{0}/{1}.temp", Path, Product.ProductId); if (File.Exists(Source)) { File.Delete(Source); }; if (File.Exists(Temp)) { File.Delete(Temp); }; foreach (Img Img in Product.Imgs) { string Cropped = String.Format("{0}/{1}.cropped", Path, Img.ImageId); if (File.Exists(Cropped)) { File.Delete(Cropped); }; }; } ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Resize ////////////////////////////////////////////// ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// public void Resize( short[] Dimensions, string FileName, Image Image, EncoderParameters EncoderParameters) { if (Dimensions[1] == 0) { Dimensions[1] = (short)(Image.Height / ((float)Image.Width / (float)Dimensions[0])); }; using (Bitmap Bitmap = new Bitmap(Dimensions[0], Dimensions[1])) { using (Graphics Graphics = Graphics.FromImage(Bitmap)) { Graphics.InterpolationMode = InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic; Graphics.SmoothingMode = SmoothingMode.HighQuality; Graphics.PixelOffsetMode = PixelOffsetMode.HighQuality; Graphics.CompositingQuality = CompositingQuality.HighQuality; Graphics.DrawImage(Image, 0, 0, Dimensions[0], Dimensions[1]); }; Bitmap.Save(FileName, JpegCodecInfo, EncoderParameters); }; } } } Here's one of the images this produces:

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• understand SimpleTimeZone and DST Test

  - by Cygnusx1

  I Have an issue with the use of SimpleTimeZone class in Java. First, the JavaDoc is nice but not quite easy to understand in regards of the start and end Rules. But with the help of some example found on the web, i managed to get it right (i still don't understand why 8 represents the second week of a month in day_of_month!!! but whatever) Now i have written a simple Junit test to validate what i understand: package test; import static org.junit.Assert.assertEquals; import java.sql.Timestamp; import java.util.Calendar; import java.util.GregorianCalendar; import java.util.SimpleTimeZone; import org.apache.log4j.Logger; import org.junit.Test; public class SimpleTimeZoneTest { Logger log = Logger.getLogger(SimpleTimeZoneTest.class); @Test public void testTimeZoneWithDST() throws Exception { Calendar testDateEndOut = new GregorianCalendar(2012, Calendar.NOVEMBER, 4, 01, 59, 59); Calendar testDateEndIn = new GregorianCalendar(2012, Calendar.NOVEMBER, 4, 02, 00, 00); Calendar testDateStartOut = new GregorianCalendar(2012, Calendar.MARCH, 11, 01, 59, 59); Calendar testDateStartIn = new GregorianCalendar(2012, Calendar.MARCH, 11, 02, 00, 00); SimpleTimeZone est = new SimpleTimeZone(-5 * 60 * 60 * 1000, "EST"); est.setStartRule(Calendar.MARCH, 8, -Calendar.SUNDAY, 2 * 60 * 60 * 1000); est.setEndRule(Calendar.NOVEMBER, 1, Calendar.SUNDAY, 2 * 60 * 60 * 1000); Calendar theCal = new GregorianCalendar(est); theCal.setTimeInMillis(testDateEndOut.getTimeInMillis()); log.info(" Cal date = " + new Timestamp(theCal.getTimeInMillis()) + " : " + theCal.getTimeZone().getDisplayName()); log.info(" Cal use DST = " + theCal.getTimeZone().useDaylightTime()); log.info(" Cal In DST = " + theCal.getTimeZone().inDaylightTime(theCal.getTime())); log.info("offset = " + theCal.getTimeZone().getOffset(theCal.getTimeInMillis())); log.info("DTS offset= " + theCal.getTimeZone().getDSTSavings()); assertEquals("End date Should be In DST", true, theCal.getTimeZone().inDaylightTime(theCal.getTime())); theCal.setTimeInMillis(testDateEndIn.getTimeInMillis()); log.info(" Cal date = " + new Timestamp(theCal.getTimeInMillis()) + " : " + theCal.getTimeZone().getDisplayName()); log.info(" Cal use DST = " + theCal.getTimeZone().useDaylightTime()); log.info(" Cal In DST = " + theCal.getTimeZone().inDaylightTime(theCal.getTime())); log.info("offset = " + theCal.getTimeZone().getOffset(theCal.getTimeInMillis())); log.info("DTS offset= " + theCal.getTimeZone().getDSTSavings()); assertEquals("End date Should be Out DST", false, theCal.getTimeZone().inDaylightTime(theCal.getTime())); theCal.setTimeInMillis(testDateStartIn.getTimeInMillis()); log.info(" Cal date = " + new Timestamp(theCal.getTimeInMillis()) + " : " + theCal.getTimeZone().getDisplayName()); log.info(" Cal use DST = " + theCal.getTimeZone().useDaylightTime()); log.info(" Cal In DST = " + theCal.getTimeZone().inDaylightTime(theCal.getTime())); log.info("offset = " + theCal.getTimeZone().getOffset(theCal.getTimeInMillis())); log.info("DTS offset= " + theCal.getTimeZone().getDSTSavings()); assertEquals("Start date Should be in DST", true, theCal.getTimeZone().inDaylightTime(theCal.getTime())); theCal.setTimeInMillis(testDateStartOut.getTimeInMillis()); log.info(" Cal date = " + new Timestamp(theCal.getTimeInMillis()) + " : " + theCal.getTimeZone().getDisplayName()); log.info(" Cal use DST = " + theCal.getTimeZone().useDaylightTime()); log.info(" Cal In DST = " + theCal.getTimeZone().inDaylightTime(theCal.getTime())); log.info("offset = " + theCal.getTimeZone().getOffset(theCal.getTimeInMillis())); log.info("DTS offset= " + theCal.getTimeZone().getDSTSavings()); assertEquals("Start date Should be Out DST", false, theCal.getTimeZone().inDaylightTime(theCal.getTime())); } } Ok, i want to test the date limits to see if the inDaylightTime return the right thing! So, my rules are : DST start the second sunday of March at 2am DST end the first sunday of november at 2am In 2012 (now) this give us the march 11 at 2am and November 4 at 2am You can see my test dates are set properly!!! Well here is the output of my test run: 2012-11-01 18:22:44,344 INFO [test.SimpleTimeZoneTest] - < Cal date = 2012-11-04 01:59:59.0 : Eastern Standard Time> 2012-11-01 18:22:44,345 INFO [test.SimpleTimeZoneTest] - < Cal use DST = true> 2012-11-01 18:22:44,345 INFO [test.SimpleTimeZoneTest] - < Cal In DST = false> 2012-11-01 18:22:44,345 INFO [test.SimpleTimeZoneTest] - <offset = -18000000> 2012-11-01 18:22:44,345 INFO [test.SimpleTimeZoneTest] - <DTS offset= 3600000> My first assert just fails and tell me that 2012-11-04 01:59:59 is not inDST... !!!!??? If i put 2012-11-04 00:59:59, the test pass! This 1 hour gap just puzzle me... can anyone explain this behavior? Oh, btw, if anyone could elaborate on the : est.setStartRule(Calendar.MARCH, 8, -Calendar.SUNDAY, 2 * 60 * 60 * 1000); Why 8 means second week of march... and the -SUNDAY. I can't figure out this thing on a real calendar example!!! Thanks

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• Complex sound handling (I.E. pitch change while looping)

  - by Matthew

  Hi everyone I've been meaning to learn Java for a while now (I usually keep myself in languages like C and Lua) but buying an android phone seems like an excellent time to start. now after going through the lovely set of tutorials and a while spent buried in source code I'm beginning to get the feel for it so what's my next step? well to dive in with a fully featured application with graphics, sound, sensor use, touch response and a full menu. hmm now there's a slight conundrum since i can continue to use cryptic references to my project or risk telling you what the application is but at the same time its going to make me look like a raving sci-fi nerd so bare with me for the brief... A semi-working sonic screwdriver (oh yes!) my grand idea was to make an animated screwdriver where sliding the controls up and down modulate the frequency and that frequency dictates the sensor data it returns. now I have a semi-working sound system but its pretty poor for what its designed to represent and I just wouldn't be happy producing a sub-par end product whether its my first or not. the problem : sound must begin looping when the user presses down on the control the sound must stop when the user releases the control when moving the control up or down the sound effect must change pitch accordingly if the user doesn't remove there finger before backing out of the application it must plate the casing of there device with gold (Easter egg ;P) now I'm aware of how monolithic the first 3 look and that's why I would really appreciate any help I can get. sorry for how bad this code looks but my general plan is to create the functional components then refine the code later, no good painting the walls if the roofs not finished. here's my user input, he set slide stuff is used in the graphics for the control @Override public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) { //motion event for the screwdriver view if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN) { //make sure the users at least trying to touch the slider if (event.getY() > SonicSlideYTop && event.getY() < SonicSlideYBottom) { //power setup, im using 1.5 to help out the rate on soundpool since it likes 0.5 to 1.5 SonicPower = 1.5f - ((event.getY() - SonicSlideYTop) / SonicSlideLength); //just goes into a method which sets a private variable in my sound pool class thing mSonicAudio.setPower(1, SonicPower); //this handles the slides graphics setSlideY ( (int) event.getY() ); @Override public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) { //motion event for the screwdriver view if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN) { //make sure the users at least trying to touch the slider if (event.getY() > SonicSlideYTop && event.getY() < SonicSlideYBottom) { //power setup, im using 1.5 to help out the rate on soundpool since it likes 0.5 to 1.5 SonicPower = 1.5f - ((event.getY() - SonicSlideYTop) / SonicSlideLength); //just goes into a method which sets a private variable in my sound pool class thing mSonicAudio.setPower(1, SonicPower); //this handles the slides graphics setSlideY ( (int) event.getY() ); //this is from my latest attempt at loop pitch change, look for this in my soundPool class mSonicAudio.startLoopedSound(); } } if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE) { if (event.getY() > SonicSlideYTop && event.getY() < SonicSlideYBottom) { SonicPower = 1.5f - ((event.getY() - SonicSlideYTop) / SonicSlideLength); mSonicAudio.setPower(1, SonicPower); setSlideY ( (int) event.getY() ); } } if(event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_UP) { mSonicAudio.stopLoopedSound(); SonicPower = 1.5f - ((event.getY() - SonicSlideYTop) / SonicSlideLength); mSonicAudio.setPower(1, SonicPower); } return true; } and here's where those methods end up in my sound pool class its horribly messy but that's because I've been trying a ton of variants to get this to work, you will also notice that I begin to hard code the index, again I was trying to get the methods to work before making them work well. package com.mattster.sonicscrewdriver; import java.util.HashMap; import android.content.Context; import android.media.AudioManager; import android.media.SoundPool; public class SoundManager { private float mPowerLvl = 1f; private SoundPool mSoundPool; private HashMap mSoundPoolMap; private AudioManager mAudioManager; private Context mContext; private int streamVolume; private int LoopState; private long mLastTime; public SoundManager() { } public void initSounds(Context theContext) { mContext = theContext; mSoundPool = new SoundPool(2, AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC, 0); mSoundPoolMap = new HashMap<Integer, Integer>(); mAudioManager = (AudioManager)mContext.getSystemService(Context.AUDIO_SERVICE); streamVolume = mAudioManager.getStreamVolume(AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC); } public void addSound(int index,int SoundID) { mSoundPoolMap.put(1, mSoundPool.load(mContext, SoundID, 1)); } public void playUpdate(int index) { if( LoopState == 1) { long now = System.currentTimeMillis(); if (now > mLastTime) { mSoundPool.play(mSoundPoolMap.get(1), streamVolume, streamVolume, 1, 0, mPowerLvl); mLastTime = System.currentTimeMillis() + 250; } } } public void stopLoopedSound() { LoopState = 0; mSoundPool.setVolume(mSoundPoolMap.get(1), 0, 0); mSoundPool.stop(mSoundPoolMap.get(1)); } public void startLoopedSound() { LoopState = 1; } public void setPower(int index, float mPower) { mPowerLvl = mPower; mSoundPool.setRate(mSoundPoolMap.get(1), mPowerLvl); } } ah ha! I almost forgot, that looks pretty ineffective but I omitted my thread which actuality updates it, nothing fancy it just calls : mSonicAudio.playUpdate(1); thanks in advance, Matthew

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• Issue with 'selected' value within form

  - by JM4

  I currently have a form built in which after validation, if errors exist, the data stays on screen for the consumer to correct. An example of how this works for say the 'Year of Birth' is: <select name="DOB3"> <option value="">Year</option> <?php for ($i=date('Y'); $i>=1900; $i--) { echo "<option value='$i'"; if ($fields["DOB3"] == $i) echo " selected"; echo ">$i</option>"; } ?> </select> If an error is found, the year of birth value returns the year previously entered. I am able to have this work on all field with the exception of my 'State' field. I build the array and function for the drop down with the following code: <?php $states_arr = array('AL'=>"Alabama",'AK'=>"Alaska",'AZ'=>"Arizona",'AR'=>"Arkansas",'CA'=>"California",'CO'=>"Colorado",'CT'=>"Connecticut",'DE'=>"Delaware",'DC'=>"District Of Columbia",'FL'=>"Florida",'GA'=>"Georgia",'HI'=>"Hawaii",'ID'=>"Idaho",'IL'=>"Illinois", 'IN'=>"Indiana", 'IA'=>"Iowa", 'KS'=>"Kansas",'KY'=>"Kentucky",'LA'=>"Louisiana",'ME'=>"Maine",'MD'=>"Maryland", 'MA'=>"Massachusetts",'MI'=>"Michigan",'MN'=>"Minnesota",'MS'=>"Mississippi",'MO'=>"Missouri",'MT'=>"Montana",'NE'=>"Nebraska",'NV'=>"Nevada",'NH'=>"New Hampshire",'NJ'=>"New Jersey",'NM'=>"New Mexico",'NY'=>"New York",'NC'=>"North Carolina",'ND'=>"North Dakota",'OH'=>"Ohio",'OK'=>"Oklahoma", 'OR'=>"Oregon",'PA'=>"Pennsylvania",'RI'=>"Rhode Island",'SC'=>"South Carolina",'SD'=>"South Dakota",'TN'=>"Tennessee",'TX'=>"Texas",'UT'=>"Utah",'VT'=>"Vermont",'VA'=>"Virginia",'WA'=>"Washington",'WV'=>"West Virginia",'WI'=>"Wisconsin",'WY'=>"Wyoming"); function showOptionsDrop($array, $active, $echo=true){ $string = ''; foreach($array as $k => $v){ $s = ($active == $k)? ' selected="selected"' : ''; $string .= '<option value="'.$k.'"'.$s.'>'.$v.'</option>'."\n"; } if($echo) { echo $string;} else { return $string;} } ?> I then call the function from within the form using: <td><select name="State"><option value="">Choose a State</option><?php showOptionsDrop($states_arr, null, true); ?></select></td> Not sure what I'm missing but would love any assistance if somebody sees the error in my code. Thanks!

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• App crashes when adding array data to table cells

  - by bassmandan

  I am trying to create a table view that loads a number of tweets into the table (one per cell etc). I am using NSXMLParser to get the information and have got as far as creating an array with the selection of tweets that I want. However, when I try to add them to the table cells, the app crashes on the line: cell.textLabel.text = cellValue; An NSLog before this shows in the console that the app is getting the correct data, so I am a bit stumped as to why this isn't working. This is the block of code that appears to be having the problem: - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; } // Set up the cell... NSString *cellValue = [statuses objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; NSLog(@"%@", cellValue); cell.textLabel.text = cellValue; return cell;} If it makes a difference, I am using ARC and the latest version of XCode. I'm still quite new to all this, so if I need to give some extra information, let me know. Thanks in advance. Edit: Backtrace gives the following: * thread #1: tid = 0x2003, 0x918a19c6 libsystem_kernel.dylib`__pthread_kill + 10, stop reason = signal SIGABRT frame #0: 0x918a19c6 libsystem_kernel.dylib`__pthread_kill + 10 frame #1: 0x9968ff78 libsystem_c.dylib`pthread_kill + 106 frame #2: 0x99680bdd libsystem_c.dylib`abort + 167 frame #3: 0x03c93e78 libc++abi.dylib`_Unwind_DeleteException frame #4: 0x03c9189e libc++abi.dylib`_ZL17default_terminatev + 34 frame #5: 0x0154df4b libobjc.A.dylib`_objc_terminate + 94 frame #6: 0x03c918de libc++abi.dylib`_ZL19safe_handler_callerPFvvE + 13 frame #7: 0x03c91946 libc++abi.dylib`std::terminate() + 23 frame #8: 0x03c92ab2 libc++abi.dylib`__cxa_throw + 110 frame #9: 0x0154de15 libobjc.A.dylib`objc_exception_throw + 311 frame #10: 0x013bdced CoreFoundation`-[NSObject doesNotRecognizeSelector:] + 253 frame #11: 0x01322f00 CoreFoundation`___forwarding___ + 432 frame #12: 0x01322ce2 CoreFoundation`_CF_forwarding_prep_0 + 50 frame #13: 0x0015168f UIKit`-[UILabel setText:] + 56 frame #14: 0x00003088 Twitter`-[TwitterViewController tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:] + 376 at TwitterViewController.m:131 frame #15: 0x000ace0f UIKit`-[UITableView(UITableViewInternal) _createPreparedCellForGlobalRow:withIndexPath:] + 494 frame #16: 0x000ad589 UIKit`-[UITableView(UITableViewInternal) _createPreparedCellForGlobalRow:] + 69 frame #17: 0x00098dfd UIKit`-[UITableView(_UITableViewPrivate) _updateVisibleCellsNow:] + 1350 frame #18: 0x000a7851 UIKit`-[UITableView layoutSubviews] + 242 frame #19: 0x00052301 UIKit`-[UIView(CALayerDelegate) layoutSublayersOfLayer:] + 145 frame #20: 0x013bde72 CoreFoundation`-[NSObject performSelector:withObject:] + 66 frame #21: 0x01d6692d QuartzCore`-[CALayer layoutSublayers] + 266 frame #22: 0x01d70827 QuartzCore`CA::Layer::layout_if_needed(CA::Transaction*) + 231 frame #23: 0x01cf6fa7 QuartzCore`CA::Context::commit_transaction(CA::Transaction*) + 377 frame #24: 0x01cf8ea6 QuartzCore`CA::Transaction::commit() + 374 frame #25: 0x01d8430c QuartzCore`+[CATransaction flush] + 52 frame #26: 0x000124c6 UIKit`-[UIApplication _reportAppLaunchFinished] + 39 frame #27: 0x00012bd6 UIKit`-[UIApplication _runWithURL:payload:launchOrientation:statusBarStyle:statusBarHidden:] + 1324 frame #28: 0x00021743 UIKit`-[UIApplication handleEvent:withNewEvent:] + 1027 frame #29: 0x000221f8 UIKit`-[UIApplication sendEvent:] + 68 frame #30: 0x00015aa9 UIKit`_UIApplicationHandleEvent + 8196 frame #31: 0x012a6fa9 GraphicsServices`PurpleEventCallback + 1274 frame #32: 0x013901c5 CoreFoundation`__CFRUNLOOP_IS_CALLING_OUT_TO_A_SOURCE1_PERFORM_FUNCTION__ + 53 frame #33: 0x012f5022 CoreFoundation`__CFRunLoopDoSource1 + 146 frame #34: 0x012f390a CoreFoundation`__CFRunLoopRun + 2218 frame #35: 0x012f2db4 CoreFoundation`CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 212 frame #36: 0x012f2ccb CoreFoundation`CFRunLoopRunInMode + 123 frame #37: 0x000122a7 UIKit`-[UIApplication _run] + 576 frame #38: 0x00013a9b UIKit`UIApplicationMain + 1175 frame #39: 0x0000239d Twitter`main + 141 at main.m:16 frame #40: 0x00002305 Twitter`start + 53 Debugging console shows this: 2012-04-08 10:10:05.084 Twitter[25309:f803] ( { text = "Have you shared the Shakedown yet? http://t.co/WHrIC9w7"; }, { text = "For all you closet rocknrollas pencil in Sat 12th May The Rebirth of Rock n Roll Party. Haywire Saint @ The Good... http://t.co/OXHKlLIV"; }, { text = "4 weeks today: Vocal tracks will be getting recorded at The Premises Studios"; }, { text = "Rehearsal tonight in preparation to some big recording next month!"; }, { text = "haywire saint 'great taste.' Tune. \n\nhttp://t.co/GKmu5Lna http://t.co/0fii55Hw"; }, { text = "Meeting up with an old roadie for The Cure today. oh the stories...... http://t.co/UeUYccme"; }, { text = "Satisfying day of programming today.. Haywire Saint app coming along nicely with the custom music player ready to rock 'n' roll!"; }, { text = "Happy Friday Everyone!"; }, { text = "We had a great time at The Premises Studios yesterday. We'll be back there before long :D x"; }, { text = "I posted a new photo to Facebook http://t.co/73qAnCvk"; } ) 2012-04-08 10:10:05.093 Twitter[25309:f803] { text = "Have you shared the Shakedown yet? http://t.co/WHrIC9w7"; } 2012-04-08 10:10:05.094 Twitter[25309:f803] -[__NSCFDictionary isEqualToString:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x6877a50 2012-04-08 10:10:05.096 Twitter[25309:f803] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[__NSCFDictionary isEqualToString:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x6877a50' *** First throw call stack: (0x13bc052 0x154dd0a 0x13bdced 0x1322f00 0x1322ce2 0x15168f 0x3088 0xace0f 0xad589 0x98dfd 0xa7851 0x52301 0x13bde72 0x1d6692d 0x1d70827 0x1cf6fa7 0x1cf8ea6 0x1d8430c 0x124c6 0x12bd6 0x21743 0x221f8 0x15aa9 0x12a6fa9 0x13901c5 0x12f5022 0x12f390a 0x12f2db4 0x12f2ccb 0x122a7 0x13a9b 0x239d 0x2305) terminate called throwing an exception2012-04-08 10:10:05.924 Twitter[25309:f803] -[__NSCFConstantString count]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x5b30

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