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Why would GLCapabilities.setHardwareAccelerated(true/false) have no effect on performance?

- by Luke

I've got a JOGL application in which I am rendering 1 million textures (all the same texture) and 1 million lines between those textures. Basically it's a ball-and-stick graph. I am storing the vertices in a vertex array on the card and referencing them via index arrays, which are also stored on the card. Each pass through the draw loop I am basically doing this: gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glDrawElements(GL.GL_POINTS, <size>, GL.GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glDrawElements(GL.GL_LINES, <size>, GL.GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); I noticed that the JOGL library is pegging one of my CPU cores. Every frame, the run method internal to the library is taking quite long. I'm not sure why this is happening since I have called setHardwareAccelerated(true) on the GLCapabilities used to create my canvas. What's more interesting is that I changed it to setHardwareAccelerated(false) and there was no impact on the performance at all. Is it possible that my code is not using hardware rendering even when it is set to true? Is there any way to check? EDIT: As suggested, I have tested breaking my calls up into smaller chunks. I have tried using glDrawRangeElements and respecting the limits that it requests. All of these simply resulted in the same pegged CPU usage and worse framerates. I have also narrowed the problem down to a simpler example where I just render 4 million textures (no lines). The draw loop then just doing this: gl.glEnableClientState(GL.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL.GL_INDEX_ARRAY); gl.glClear(GL.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl.glMatrixMode(GL.GL_MODELVIEW); gl.glLoadIdentity(); <... Camera and transform related code ...> gl.glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_TEXTURE_2D); gl.glAlphaFunc(GL.GL_GREATER, ALPHA_TEST_LIMIT); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_ALPHA_TEST); <... Bind texture ...> gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glDrawElements(GL.GL_POINTS, <size>, GL.GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); gl.glDisable(GL.GL_TEXTURE_2D); gl.glDisable(GL.GL_ALPHA_TEST); gl.glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); gl.glFlush(); Where the first buffer contains 12 million floats (the x,y,z coords of the 4 million textures) and the second (element) buffer contains 4 million integers. In this simple example it is simply the integers 0 through 3999999. I really want to know what is being done in software that is pegging my CPU, and how I can make it stop (if I can). My buffers are generated by the following code: gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBufferData(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <size> * BufferUtil.SIZEOF_FLOAT, <buffer>, GL.GL_STATIC_DRAW); gl.glVertexAttribPointer(0, 3, GL.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, 0); and: gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBufferData(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <size> * BufferUtil.SIZEOF_INT, <buffer>, GL.GL_STATIC_DRAW); ADDITIONAL INFO: Here is my initialization code: gl.setSwapInterval(1); //Also tried 0 gl.glShadeModel(GL.GL_SMOOTH); gl.glClearDepth(1.0f); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_DEPTH_TEST); gl.glDepthFunc(GL.GL_LESS); gl.glHint(GL.GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL.GL_FASTEST); gl.glPointParameterfv(GL.GL_POINT_DISTANCE_ATTENUATION, POINT_DISTANCE_ATTENUATION, 0); gl.glPointParameterfv(GL.GL_POINT_SIZE_MIN, MIN_POINT_SIZE, 0); gl.glPointParameterfv(GL.GL_POINT_SIZE_MAX, MAX_POINT_SIZE, 0); gl.glPointSize(POINT_SIZE); gl.glTexEnvf(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE, GL.GL_COORD_REPLACE, GL.GL_TRUE); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE); gl.glClearColor(clearColor.getX(), clearColor.getY(), clearColor.getZ(), 0.0f); Also, I'm not sure if this helps or not, but when I drag the entire graph off the screen, the FPS shoots back up and the CPU usage falls to 0%. This seems obvious and intuitive to me, but I thought that might give a hint to someone else.

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First time shadow mapping problems

- by user1294203

I have implemented basic shadow mapping for the first time in OpenGL using shaders and I'm facing some problems. Below you can see an example of my rendered scene: The process of the shadow mapping I'm following is that I render the scene to the framebuffer using a View Matrix from the light point of view and the projection and model matrices used for normal rendering. In the second pass, I send the above MVP matrix from the light point of view to the vertex shader which transforms the position to light space. The fragment shader does the perspective divide and changes the position to texture coordinates. Here is my vertex shader, #version 150 core uniform mat4 ModelViewMatrix; uniform mat3 NormalMatrix; uniform mat4 MVPMatrix; uniform mat4 lightMVP; uniform float scale; in vec3 in_Position; in vec3 in_Normal; in vec2 in_TexCoord; smooth out vec3 pass_Normal; smooth out vec3 pass_Position; smooth out vec2 TexCoord; smooth out vec4 lightspace_Position; void main(void){ pass_Normal = NormalMatrix * in_Normal; pass_Position = (ModelViewMatrix * vec4(scale * in_Position, 1.0)).xyz; lightspace_Position = lightMVP * vec4(scale * in_Position, 1.0); TexCoord = in_TexCoord; gl_Position = MVPMatrix * vec4(scale * in_Position, 1.0); } And my fragment shader, #version 150 core struct Light{ vec3 direction; }; uniform Light light; uniform sampler2D inSampler; uniform sampler2D inShadowMap; smooth in vec3 pass_Normal; smooth in vec3 pass_Position; smooth in vec2 TexCoord; smooth in vec4 lightspace_Position; out vec4 out_Color; float CalcShadowFactor(vec4 lightspace_Position){ vec3 ProjectionCoords = lightspace_Position.xyz / lightspace_Position.w; vec2 UVCoords; UVCoords.x = 0.5 * ProjectionCoords.x + 0.5; UVCoords.y = 0.5 * ProjectionCoords.y + 0.5; float Depth = texture(inShadowMap, UVCoords).x; if(Depth < (ProjectionCoords.z + 0.001)) return 0.5; else return 1.0; } void main(void){ vec3 Normal = normalize(pass_Normal); vec3 light_Direction = -normalize(light.direction); vec3 camera_Direction = normalize(-pass_Position); vec3 half_vector = normalize(camera_Direction + light_Direction); float diffuse = max(0.2, dot(Normal, light_Direction)); vec3 temp_Color = diffuse * vec3(1.0); float specular = max( 0.0, dot( Normal, half_vector) ); float shadowFactor = CalcShadowFactor(lightspace_Position); if(diffuse != 0 && shadowFactor > 0.5){ float fspecular = pow(specular, 128.0); temp_Color += fspecular; } out_Color = vec4(shadowFactor * texture(inSampler, TexCoord).xyz * temp_Color, 1.0); } One of the problems is self shadowing as you can see in the picture, the crate has its own shadow cast on itself. What I have tried is enabling polygon offset (i.e. glEnable(POLYGON_OFFSET_FILL), glPolygonOffset(GLfloat, GLfloat) ) but it didn't change much. As you see in the fragment shader, I have put a static offset value of 0.001 but I have to change the value depending on the distance of the light to get more desirable effects , which not very handy. I also tried using front face culling when I render to the framebuffer, that didn't change much too. The other problem is that pixels outside the Light's view frustum get shaded. The only object that is supposed to be able to cast shadows is the crate. I guess I should pick more appropriate projection and view matrices, but I'm not sure how to do that. What are some common practices, should I pick an orthographic projection? From googling around a bit, I understand that these issues are not that trivial. Does anyone have any easy to implement solutions to these problems. Could you give me some additional tips? Please ask me if you need more information on my code. Here is a comparison with and without shadow mapping of a close-up of the crate. The self-shadowing is more visible.

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.NET 4: “Slim”-style performance boost!

- by Vitus

RTM version of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 is available, and now we can do some test with it. Parallel Extensions is one of the most valuable part of .NET 4.0. It’s a set of good tools for easily consuming multicore hardware power. And it also contains some “upgraded” sync primitives – Slim-version. For example, it include updated variant of widely known ManualResetEvent. For people, who don’t know about it: you can sync concurrency execution of some pieces of code with this sync primitive. Instance of ManualResetEvent can be in 2 states: signaled and non-signaled. Transition between it possible by Set() and Reset() methods call. Some shortly explanation: Thread 1 Thread 2 Time mre.Reset(); mre.WaitOne(); //code execution 0 //wating //code execution 1 //wating //code execution 2 //wating //code execution 3 //wating mre.Set(); 4 //code execution //… 5 Upgraded version of this primitive is ManualResetEventSlim. The idea in decreasing performance cost in case, when only 1 thread use it. Main concept in the “hybrid sync schema”, which can be done as following: internal sealed class SimpleHybridLock : IDisposable { private Int32 m_waiters = 0; private AutoResetEvent m_waiterLock = new AutoResetEvent(false); public void Enter() { if (Interlocked.Increment(ref m_waiters) == 1) return; m_waiterLock.WaitOne(); } public void Leave() { if (Interlocked.Decrement(ref m_waiters) == 0) return; m_waiterLock.Set(); } public void Dispose() { m_waiterLock.Dispose(); } } It’s a sample from Jeffry Richter’s book “CLR via C#”, 3rd edition. Primitive SimpleHybridLock have two public methods: Enter() and Leave(). You can put your concurrency-critical code between calls of these methods, and it would executed in only one thread at the moment. Code is really simple: first thread, called Enter(), increase counter. Second thread also increase counter, and suspend while m_waiterLock is not signaled. So, if we don’t have concurrent access to our lock, “heavy” methods WaitOne() and Set() will not called. It’s can give some performance bonus. ManualResetEvent use the similar idea. Of course, it have more “smart” technics inside, like a checking of recursive calls, and so on. I want to know a real difference between classic ManualResetEvent realization, and new –Slim. I wrote a simple “benchmark”: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { ManualResetEventSlim mres = new ManualResetEventSlim(false); ManualResetEventSlim mres2 = new ManualResetEventSlim(false); ManualResetEvent mre = new ManualResetEvent(false); long total = 0; int COUNT = 50; for (int i = 0; i < COUNT; i++) { mres2.Reset(); Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem((obj) => { //Method(mres, true); Method2(mre, true); mres2.Set(); }); //Method(mres, false); Method2(mre, false); mres2.Wait(); sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Pass {0}: {1} ms", i, sw.ElapsedMilliseconds); total += sw.ElapsedMilliseconds; } Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("==============================="); Console.WriteLine("Done in average=" + total / (double)COUNT); Console.ReadLine(); } private static void Method(ManualResetEventSlim mre, bool value) { for (int i = 0; i < 9000000; i++) { if (value) { mre.Set(); } else { mre.Reset(); } } } private static void Method2(ManualResetEvent mre, bool value) { for (int i = 0; i < 9000000; i++) { if (value) { mre.Set(); } else { mre.Reset(); } } } } I use 2 concurrent thread (the main thread and one from thread pool) for setting and resetting ManualResetEvents, and try to run test COUNT times, and calculate average execution time. Here is the results (I get it on my dual core notebook with T7250 CPU and Windows 7 x64): ManualResetEvent ManualResetEventSlim Difference is obvious and serious – in 10 times! So, I think preferable way is using ManualResetEventSlim, because not always on calling Set() and Reset() will be called “heavy” methods for working with Windows kernel-mode objects. It’s a small and nice improvement! ;)

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Inside Red Gate - Project teams

- by Simon Cooper

Within each division in Red Gate, development effort is structured around one or more project teams; currently, each division contains 2-3 separate teams. These are self contained units responsible for a particular development project. Project team structure The typical size of a development team varies, but is normally around 4-7 people - one project manager, two developers, one or two testers, a technical author (who is responsible for the text within the application, website content, and help documentation) and a user experience designer (who designs and prototypes the UIs) . However, team sizes can vary from 3 up to 12, depending on the division and project. As an rule, all the team sits together in the same area of the office. (Again, this is my experience of what happens. I haven't worked in the DBA division, and SQL Tools might have changed completely since I moved to .NET. As I mentioned in my previous post, each division is free to structure itself as it sees fit.) Depending on the project, and the other needs in the division, the tech author and UX designer may be shared between several projects. Generally, developers and testers work on one project at a time. If the project is a simple point release, then it might not need a UX designer at all. However, if it's a brand new product, then a UX designer and tech author will be involved right from the start. Developers, testers, and the project manager will normally stay together in the same team as they work on different projects, unless there's a good reason to split or merge teams for a particular project. Technical authors and UX designers will normally go wherever they are needed in the division, depending on what each project needs at the time. In my case, I was working with more or less the same people for over 2 years, all the way through SQL Compare 7, 8, and Schema Compare for Oracle. This helped to build a great sense of camaraderie wihin the team, and helped to form and maintain a team identity. This, in turn, meant we worked very well together, and so the final result was that much better (as well as making the work more fun). How is a project started and run? The product manager within each division collates user feedback and ideas, does lots of research, throws in a few ideas from people within the company, and then comes up with a list of what the division should work on in the next few years. This is split up into projects, and after each project is greenlit (I'll be discussing this later on) it is then assigned to a project team, as and when they become available (I'm sure there's lots of discussions and meetings at this point that I'm not aware of!). From that point, it's entirely up to the project team. Just as divisions are autonomous, project teams are also given a high degree of autonomy. All the teams in Red Gate use some sort of vaguely agile methodology; most use some variations on SCRUM, some have experimented with Kanban. Some store the project progress on a whiteboard, some use our bug tracker, others use different methods. It all depends on what the team members think will work best for them to get the best result at the end. From that point, the project proceeds as you would expect; code gets written, tests pass and fail, discussions about how to resolve various problems are had and decided upon, and out pops a new product, new point release, new internal tool, or whatever the project's goal was. The project manager ensures that everyone works together without too much bloodshed and that thrown missiles are constrained to Nerf bullets, the developers write the code, the testers ensure it actually works, and the tech author and UX designer ensure that people will be able to use the final product to solve their problem (after all, developers make lousy UI designers and technical authors). Projects in Red Gate last a relatively short amount of time; most projects are less than 6 months. The longest was 18 months. This has evolved as the company has grown, and I suspect is a side effect of the type of software Red Gate produces. As an ISV, we sell packaged software; we only get revenue when customers purchase the ready-made tools. As a result, we only get a sellable piece of software right at the end of a project. Therefore, the longer the project lasts, the more time and money has to be invested by the company before we get any revenue from it, and the riskier the project becomes. This drives the average project time down. Small project teams are the core of how Red Gate produces software, and are what the whole development effort of the company is built around. In my next post, I'll be looking at the office itself, and how all 200 of us manage to fit on two floors of a small office building.

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2D Selective Gaussian Blur

- by Joshua Thomas

I am attempting to use Gaussian blur on a 2D platform game, selectively blurring specific types of platforms with different amounts. I am currently just messing around with simple test code, trying to get it to work correctly. What I need to eventually do is create three separate render targets, leave one normal, blur one slightly, and blur the last heavily, then recombine on the screen. Where I am now is I have successfully drawn into a new render target and performed the gaussian blur on it, but when I draw it back to the screen everything is purple aside from the platforms I drew to the target. This is my .fx file: #define RADIUS 7 #define KERNEL_SIZE (RADIUS * 2 + 1) //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Globals. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- float weights[KERNEL_SIZE]; float2 offsets[KERNEL_SIZE]; //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Textures. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- texture colorMapTexture; sampler2D colorMap = sampler_state { Texture = <colorMapTexture>; MipFilter = Linear; MinFilter = Linear; MagFilter = Linear; }; //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Pixel Shaders. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- float4 PS_GaussianBlur(float2 texCoord : TEXCOORD) : COLOR0 { float4 color = float4(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); for (int i = 0; i < KERNEL_SIZE; ++i) color += tex2D(colorMap, texCoord + offsets[i]) * weights[i]; return color; } //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Techniques. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- technique GaussianBlur { pass { PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PS_GaussianBlur(); } } This is the code I'm using for the gaussian blur: public Texture2D PerformGaussianBlur(Texture2D srcTexture, RenderTarget2D renderTarget1, RenderTarget2D renderTarget2, SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { if (effect == null) throw new InvalidOperationException("GaussianBlur.fx effect not loaded."); Texture2D outputTexture = null; Rectangle srcRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, srcTexture.Width, srcTexture.Height); Rectangle destRect1 = new Rectangle(0, 0, renderTarget1.Width, renderTarget1.Height); Rectangle destRect2 = new Rectangle(0, 0, renderTarget2.Width, renderTarget2.Height); // Perform horizontal Gaussian blur. game.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(renderTarget1); effect.CurrentTechnique = effect.Techniques["GaussianBlur"]; effect.Parameters["weights"].SetValue(kernel); effect.Parameters["colorMapTexture"].SetValue(srcTexture); effect.Parameters["offsets"].SetValue(offsetsHoriz); spriteBatch.Begin(0, BlendState.Opaque, null, null, null, effect); spriteBatch.Draw(srcTexture, destRect1, Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); // Perform vertical Gaussian blur. game.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(renderTarget2); outputTexture = (Texture2D)renderTarget1; effect.Parameters["colorMapTexture"].SetValue(outputTexture); effect.Parameters["offsets"].SetValue(offsetsVert); spriteBatch.Begin(0, BlendState.Opaque, null, null, null, effect); spriteBatch.Draw(outputTexture, destRect2, Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); // Return the Gaussian blurred texture. game.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); outputTexture = (Texture2D)renderTarget2; return outputTexture; } And this is the draw method affected: public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { device.SetRenderTarget(maxBlur); spriteBatch.Begin(); foreach (Brick brick in blueBricks) brick.Draw(spriteBatch); spriteBatch.End(); blue = gBlur.PerformGaussianBlur((Texture2D) maxBlur, helperTarget, maxBlur, spriteBatch); spriteBatch.Begin(); device.SetRenderTarget(null); foreach (Brick brick in redBricks) brick.Draw(spriteBatch); foreach (Brick brick in greenBricks) brick.Draw(spriteBatch); spriteBatch.Draw(blue, new Rectangle(0, 0, blue.Width, blue.Height), Color.White); foreach (Brick brick in purpleBricks) brick.Draw(spriteBatch); spriteBatch.End(); } I'm sorry about the massive brick of text and images(or not....new user, I tried, it said no), but I wanted to get my problem across clearly as I have been searching for an answer to this for quite a while now. As a side note, I have seen the bloom sample. Very well commented, but overly complicated since it deals in 3D; I was unable to take what I needed to learn form it. Thanks for any and all help.

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The Oracle Graduate Experience...A Graduates Perspective by Angelie Tierney

- by david.talamelli

[Note: Angelie has just recently joined Oracle in Australia in our 2011 Graduate Program. Last week I shared my thoughts on our 2011 Graduate Program, this week Angelie took some time to share her thoughts of our Graduate Program. The notes below are Angelie's overview from her experience with us starting with our first contact last year - David Talamelli] How does the 1 year program work? It consists of 3 weeks of training, followed by 2 rotations in 2 different Lines of Business (LoB's). The first rotation goes for 4 months, while your 2nd rotation goes for 7, when you are placed into your final LoB for the program. The interview process: After sorting through the many advertised graduate jobs, submitting so many resumes and studying at the same time, it can all be pretty stressful. Then there is the interview process. David called me on a Sunday afternoon and I spoke to him for about 30 minutes in a mini sort of phone interview. I was worried that working at Oracle would require extensive technical experience, but David stressed that even the less technical, and more business-minded person could, and did, work at Oracle. I was then asked if I would like to attend a group interview in the next weeks, to which I said of course! The first interview was a day long, consisting of a brief introduction, a group interview where we worked on a business plan with a group of other potential graduates and were marked by 3 Oracle employees, on our ability to work together and presentation. After lunch, we then had a short individual interview each, and that was the end of the first round. I received a call a few weeks later, and was asked to come into a second interview, at which I also jumped at the opportunity. This was an interview based purely on your individual abilities and would help to determine which Line of Business you would go to, should you land a graduate position. So how did I cope throughout the interview stages? I believe the best tool to prepare for the interview, was to research Oracle and its culture and to see if I thought I could fit into that. I personally found out about Oracle, its partners as well as competitors and along the way, even found out about their part (or Larry Ellison's specifically) in the Iron Man 2 movie. Armed with some Oracle information and lots of enthusiasm, I approached the Oracle Graduate Interview process. Why did I apply for an Oracle graduate position? I studied a Bachelor of Business/Bachelor of Science in IT, and wanted to be able to use both my degrees, while have the ability to work internationally in the future. Coming straight from university, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do in terms of my career. With the program, you are rotated across various lines of business, to not only expose you to different parts of the business, but to also help you to figure out what you want to achieve out of your career. As a result, I thought Oracle was the perfect fit. So what can an Oracle ANZ Graduate expect? First things first, you can expect to line up for your visitor pass. Really. Next you enter a room full of unknown faces, graduates just like you, and then you realise you're in this with 18 other people, going through the same thing as you. 3 weeks later you leave with many memories, colleagues you can call your friends, and a video of your presentation. Vanessa, the Graduate Manager, will also take lots of photos and keep you (well) fed. Well that's not all you leave with, you are also equipped with a wealth of knowledge and contacts within Oracle, both that will help you throughout your career there. What training is involved? We started our Oracle experience with 3 weeks of training, consisting of employee orientation, extensive product training, presentations on the various lines of business (LoB's), followed by sales and presentation training. While there was potential for an information overload, maybe even death by Powerpoint, we were able to have access to the presentations for future reference, which was very helpful. This period also allowed us to start networking, not only with the graduates, but with the managers who presented to us, as well as through the monthly chinwag, HR celebrations and even with the sharing of tea facilities. We also had a team bonding day when we recorded a "commercial" within groups, and learned how to play an Irish drum. Overall, the training period helped us to learn about Oracle, as well as ourselves, and to prepare us for our transition into our rotations. Where to now? I'm now into my 2nd week of my first graduate rotation. It has been exciting to finally get out into the work environment and utilise that knowledge we gained from training. My manager has been a great mentor, extremely knowledgeable, and it has been good being able to participate in meetings, conference calls and make a contribution towards the business. And while we aren't necessarily working directly with the other graduates, they are still reachable via email, Pidgin and lunch and they are important as a resource and support, after all, they are going through a similar experience to you. While it is only the beginning, there is a lot more to learn and a lot more to experience along the way, especially because, as we learned during training, at Oracle, the only constant is change.

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How To Get Web Site Thumbnail Image In ASP.NET

- by SAMIR BHOGAYTA

Overview One very common requirement of many web applications is to display a thumbnail image of a web site. A typical example is to provide a link to a dynamic website displaying its current thumbnail image, or displaying images of websites with their links as a result of search (I love to see it on Google). Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 makes it quite easier to do it in a ASP.NET application. Background In order to generate image of a web page, first we need to load the web page to get their html code, and then this html needs to be rendered in a web browser. After that, a screen shot can be taken easily. I think there is no easier way to do this. Before .NET framework 2.0 it was quite difficult to use a web browser in C# or VB.NET because we either have to use COM+ interoperability or third party controls which becomes headache later. WebBrowser control in .NET framework 2.0 In .NET framework 2.0 we have a new Windows Forms WebBrowser control which is a wrapper around old shwdoc.dll. All you really need to do is to drop a WebBrowser control from your Toolbox on your form in .NET framework 2.0. If you have not used WebBrowser control yet, it's quite easy to use and very consistent with other Windows Forms controls. Some important methods of WebBrowser control are. public bool GoBack(); public bool GoForward(); public void GoHome(); public void GoSearch(); public void Navigate(Uri url); public void DrawToBitmap(Bitmap bitmap, Rectangle targetBounds); These methods are self explanatory with their names like Navigate function which redirects browser to provided URL. It also has a number of useful overloads. The DrawToBitmap (inherited from Control) draws the current image of WebBrowser to the provided bitmap. Using WebBrowser control in ASP.NET 2.0 The Solution Let's start to implement the solution which we discussed above. First we will define a static method to get the web site thumbnail image. public static Bitmap GetWebSiteThumbnail(string Url, int BrowserWidth, int BrowserHeight, int ThumbnailWidth, int ThumbnailHeight) { WebsiteThumbnailImage thumbnailGenerator = new WebsiteThumbnailImage(Url, BrowserWidth, BrowserHeight, ThumbnailWidth, ThumbnailHeight); return thumbnailGenerator.GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage(); } The WebsiteThumbnailImage class will have a public method named GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage which will generate the website thumbnail image in a separate STA thread and wait for the thread to exit. In this case, I decided to Join method of Thread class to block the initial calling thread until the bitmap is actually available, and then return the generated web site thumbnail. public Bitmap GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage() { Thread m_thread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(_GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage)); m_thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); m_thread.Start(); m_thread.Join(); return m_Bitmap; } The _GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage will create a WebBrowser control object and navigate to the provided Url. We also register for the DocumentCompleted event of the web browser control to take screen shot of the web page. To pass the flow to the other controls we need to perform a method call to Application.DoEvents(); and wait for the completion of the navigation until the browser state changes to Complete in a loop. private void _GenerateWebSiteThumbnailImage() { WebBrowser m_WebBrowser = new WebBrowser(); m_WebBrowser.ScrollBarsEnabled = false; m_WebBrowser.Navigate(m_Url); m_WebBrowser.DocumentCompleted += new WebBrowserDocument CompletedEventHandler(WebBrowser_DocumentCompleted); while (m_WebBrowser.ReadyState != WebBrowserReadyState.Complete) Application.DoEvents(); m_WebBrowser.Dispose(); } The DocumentCompleted event will be fired when the navigation is completed and the browser is ready for screen shot. We will get screen shot using DrawToBitmap method as described previously which will return the bitmap of the web browser. Then the thumbnail image is generated using GetThumbnailImage method of Bitmap class passing it the required thumbnail image width and height. private void WebBrowser_DocumentCompleted(object sender, WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs e) { WebBrowser m_WebBrowser = (WebBrowser)sender; m_WebBrowser.ClientSize = new Size(this.m_BrowserWidth, this.m_BrowserHeight); m_WebBrowser.ScrollBarsEnabled = false; m_Bitmap = new Bitmap(m_WebBrowser.Bounds.Width, m_WebBrowser.Bounds.Height); m_WebBrowser.BringToFront(); m_WebBrowser.DrawToBitmap(m_Bitmap, m_WebBrowser.Bounds); m_Bitmap = (Bitmap)m_Bitmap.GetThumbnailImage(m_ThumbnailWidth, m_ThumbnailHeight, null, IntPtr.Zero); } One more example here : http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/Website_URL_Screenshot.aspx

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Using Delegates in C# (Part 1)

- by rajbk

This post provides a very basic introduction of delegates in C#. Part 2 of this post can be read here. A delegate is a class that is derived from System.Delegate. It contains a list of one or more methods called an invocation list. When a delegate instance is “invoked” with the arguments as defined in the signature of the delegate, each of the methods in the invocation list gets invoked with the arguments. The code below shows example with static and instance methods respectively: Static Methods 1: using System; 2: using System.Linq; 3: using System.Collections.Generic; 4: 5: public delegate void SayName(string name); 6: 7: public class Program 8: { 9: [STAThread] 10: static void Main(string[] args) 11: { 12: SayName englishDelegate = new SayName(SayNameInEnglish); 13: SayName frenchDelegate = new SayName(SayNameInFrench); 14: SayName combinedDelegate =(SayName)Delegate.Combine(englishDelegate, frenchDelegate); 15: 16: combinedDelegate.Invoke("Tom"); 17: Console.ReadLine(); 18: } 19: 20: static void SayNameInFrench(string name) { 21: Console.WriteLine("J'ai m'appelle " + name); 22: } 23: 24: static void SayNameInEnglish(string name) { 25: Console.WriteLine("My name is " + name); 26: } 27: } We have declared a delegate of type SayName with return type of void and taking an input parameter of name of type string. On line 12, we create a new instance of this delegate which refers to a static method - SayNameInEnglish. SayNameInEnglish has the same return type and parameter list as the delegate declaration. Once a delegate is instantiated, the instance will always refer to the same target. Delegates are immutable. On line 13, we create a new instance of the delegate but point to a different static method. As you may recall, a delegate instance encapsulates an invocation list. You create an invocation list by combining delegates using the Delegate.Combine method (there is an easier syntax as you will see later). When two non null delegate instances are combined, their invocation lists get combined to form a new invocation list. This is done in line 14. On line 16, we invoke the delegate with the Invoke method and pass in the required string parameter. Since the delegate has an invocation list with two entries, each of the method in the invocation list is invoked. If an unhandled exception occurs during the invocation of one of these methods, the exception gets bubbled up to the line where the invocation was made (line 16). If a delegate is null and you try to invoke it, you will get a System.NullReferenceException. We see the following output when the method is run: My name is TomJ'ai m'apelle Tom Instance Methods The code below outputs the same results as before. The only difference here is we are creating delegates that point to a target object (an instance of Translator) and instance methods which have the same signature as the delegate type. The target object can never be null. We also use the short cut syntax += to combine the delegates instead of Delegate.Combine. 1: public delegate void SayName(string name); 2: 3: public class Program 4: { 5: [STAThread] 6: static void Main(string[] args) 7: { 8: Translator translator = new Translator(); 9: SayName combinedDelegate = new SayName(translator.SayNameInEnglish); 10: combinedDelegate += new SayName(translator.SayNameInFrench); 11: 12: combinedDelegate.Invoke("Tom"); 13: Console.ReadLine(); 14: } 15: } 16: 17: public class Translator { 18: public void SayNameInFrench(string name) { 19: Console.WriteLine("J'ai m'appelle " + name); 20: } 21: 22: public void SayNameInEnglish(string name) { 23: Console.WriteLine("My name is " + name); 24: } 25: } A delegate can be removed from a combination of delegates by using the –= operator. Removing a delegate from an empty list or removing a delegate that does not exist in a non empty list will not result in an exception. Delegates are invoked synchronously using the Invoke method. We can also invoke them asynchronously using the BeginInvoke and EndInvoke methods which are compiler generated.

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Auto-Configuring SSIS Packages

- by Davide Mauri

SSIS Package Configurations are very useful to make packages flexible so that you can change objects properties at run-time and thus make the package configurable without having to open and edit it. In a complex scenario where you have dozen of packages (even in in the smallest BI project I worked on I had 50 packages), each package may have its own configuration needs. This means that each time you have to run the package you have to pass the correct Package Configuration. I usually use XML configuration files and I also force everyone that works with me to make sure that an object that is used in several packages has the same name in all package where it is used, in order to simplify configurations usage. Connection Managers are a good example of one of those objects. For example, all the packages that needs to access to the Data Warehouse database must have a Connection Manager named DWH. Basically we define a set of “global” objects so that we can have a configuration file for them, so that it can be used by all packages. If a package as some specific configuration needs, we create a specific – or “local” – XML configuration file or we set the value that needs to be configured at runtime using DTLoggedExec’s Package Parameters: http://dtloggedexec.davidemauri.it/Package%20Parameters.ashx Now, how we can improve this even more? I’d like to have a package that, when it’s run, automatically goes “somewhere” and search for global or local configuration, loads it and applies it to itself. That’s the basic idea of Auto-Configuring Packages. The “somewhere” is a SQL Server table, defined in this way In this table you’ll put the values that you want to be used at runtime by your package: The ConfigurationFilter column specify to which package that configuration line has to be applied. A package will use that line only if the value specified in the ConfigurationFilter column is equal to its name. In the above sample. only the package named “simple-package” will use the line number two. There is an exception here: the $$Global value indicate a configuration row that has to be applied to any package. With this simple behavior it’s possible to replicate the “global” and the “local” configuration approach I’ve described before. The ConfigurationValue contains the value you want to be applied at runtime and the PackagePath contains the object to which that value will be applied. The ConfiguredValueType column defined the data type of the value and the Checksum column is contains a calculated value that is simply the hash value of ConfigurationFilter plus PackagePath so that it can be used as a Primary Key to guarantee uniqueness of configuration rows. As you may have noticed the table is very similar to the table originally used by SSIS in order to put DTS Configuration into SQL Server tables: SQL Server SSIS Configuration Type: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141682.aspx Now, how it works? It’s very easy: you just have to call DTLoggedExec with the /AC option: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /AC:"localhost;ssis_auto_configuration;ssiscfg.configuration" the AC option expects a string with the following format: <database_server>;<database_name>;<table_name>; only Windows Authentication is supported. When DTLoggedExec finds an Auto-Configuration request, it injects a new connection manager in the loaded package. The injected connection manager is named $$DTLoggedExec_AutoConfigure and is used by the two SQL Server DTS Configuration ($$DTLoggedExec_Global and $$DTLoggedExec_Local) also injected by DTLoggedExec, used to load “local” and “global” configuration. Now, you may start to wonder why this approach cannot be used without having all this stuff going around, but just passing to a package always two XML DTS Configuration files, (to have to “local” and the “global” configurations) doing something like this: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /CONF:”global.dtsConfig” /CONF:”mypackage.dtsConfig” The problem is that this approach doesn’t work if you have, in one of the two configuration file, a value that has to be applied to an object that doesn’t exists in the loaded package. This situation will raise an error that will halt package execution. To solve this problem, you may want to create a configuration file for each package. Unfortunately this will make deployment and management harder, since you’ll have to deal with a great number of configuration files. The Auto-Configuration approach solve all these problems at once! We’re using it in a project where we have hundreds of packages and I can tell you that deployment of packages and their configuration for the pre-production and production environment has never been so easy! To use the Auto-Configuration option you have to download the latest DTLoggedExec release: http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/releases/view/62218 Feedback, as usual, are very welcome!

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How to make creating viewmodels at runtime less painful

- by Mr Happy

I apologize for the long question, it reads a bit as a rant, but I promise it's not! I've summarized my question(s) below In the MVC world, things are straightforward. The Model has state, the View shows the Model, and the Controller does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a controller has no state. To do stuff the Controller has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a controller you care about supplying those dependencies, nothing else. When you execute an action (method on Controller), you use those dependencies to retrieve or update the Model or calling some other domain service. If there's any context, say like some user wants to see the details of a particular item, you pass the Id of that item as parameter to the Action. Nowhere in the Controller is there any reference to any state. So far so good. Enter MVVM. I love WPF, I love data binding. I love frameworks that make data binding to ViewModels even easier (using Caliburn Micro a.t.m.). I feel things are less straightforward in this world though. Let's do the exercise again: the Model has state, the View shows the ViewModel, and the ViewModel does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a ViewModel does have state! (to clarify; maybe it delegates all the properties to one or more Models, but that means it must have a reference to the model one way or another, which is state in itself) To do stuff the ViewModel has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a ViewModel you care about supplying those dependencies, but also the state. And this, ladies and gentlemen, annoys me to no end. Whenever you need to instantiate a ProductDetailsViewModel from the ProductSearchViewModel (from which you called the ProductSearchWebService which in turn returned IEnumerable<ProductDTO>, everybody still with me?), you can do one of these things: call new ProductDetailsViewModel(productDTO, _shoppingCartWebService /* dependcy */);, this is bad, imagine 3 more dependencies, this means the ProductSearchViewModel needs to take on those dependencies as well. Also changing the constructor is painful. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelFactory.Create().Initialize(productDTO);, the factory is just a Func, they are easily generated by most IoC frameworks. I think this is bad because Init methods are a leaky abstraction. You also can't use the readonly keyword for fields that are set in the Init method. I'm sure there are a few more reasons. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelAbstractFactory.Create(productDTO); So... this is the pattern (abstract factory) that is usually recommended for this type of problem. I though it was genius since it satisfies my craving for static typing, until I actually started using it. The amount of boilerplate code is I think too much (you know, apart from the ridiculous variable names I get use). For each ViewModel that needs runtime parameters you'll get two extra files (factory interface and implementation), and you need to type the non-runtime dependencies like 4 extra times. And each time the dependencies change, you get to change it in the factory as well. It feels like I don't even use a DI container anymore. (I think Castle Windsor has some kind of solution for this [with it's own drawbacks, correct me if I'm wrong]). do something with anonymous types or dictionary. I like my static typing. So, yeah. Mixing state and behavior in this way creates a problem which don't exist at all in MVC. And I feel like there currently isn't a really adequate solution for this problem. Now I'd like to observe some things: People actually use MVVM. So they either don't care about all of the above, or they have some brilliant other solution. I haven't found an in-depth example of MVVM with WPF. For example, the NDDD-sample project immensely helped me understand some DDD concepts. I'd really like it if someone could point me in the direction of something similar for MVVM/WPF. Maybe I'm doing MVVM all wrong and I should turn my design upside down. Maybe I shouldn't have this problem at all. Well I know other people have asked the same question so I think I'm not the only one. To summarize Am I correct to conclude that having the ViewModel being an integration point for both state and behavior is the reason for some difficulties with the MVVM pattern as a whole? Is using the abstract factory pattern the only/best way to instantiate a ViewModel in a statically typed way? Is there something like an in depth reference implementation available? Is having a lot of ViewModels with both state/behavior a design smell?

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Mocking property sets

- by mehfuzh

In this post, i will be showing how you can mock property sets with your expected values or even action using JustMock. To begin, we have a sample interface: public interface IFoo { int Value { get; set; } } Now, we can create a mock that will throw on any call other than the one expected, generally its a strict mock and we can do it like: bool expected = false; var foo = Mock.Create<IFoo>(BehaviorMode.Strict); Mock.ArrangeSet(() => { foo.Value = 1; }).DoInstead(() => expected = true); foo.Value = 1; Assert.True(expected); Here , the method for running though our expectation for set is Mock.ArrangeSet , where we can directly set our expectations or can even set matchers into it like: var foo = Mock.Create<IFoo>(BehaviorMode.Strict); Mock.ArrangeSet(() => foo.Value = Arg.Matches<int>(x => x > 3)); foo.Value = 4; foo.Value = 5; Assert.Throws<MockException>(() => foo.Value = 3); In the example, any set for value not satisfying matcher expression will throw an MockException as this is a strict mock but what will be the case for loose mocks, where we also have to assert it. Here, let’s take an interface with an indexed property. Indexers are treated in the same way as properties, as with basic indexers let you access your class if it were an array. public interface IFooIndexed { string this[int key] { get; set; } } We want to setup a value for a particular index, we then will pass that mock to some implementer where it will be actually called. Once done, we want to assert that if it has been invoked properly. var foo = Mock.Create<IFooIndexed>(); Mock.ArrangeSet(() => foo[0] = "ping"); foo[0] = "ping"; Mock.AssertSet(() => foo[0] = "ping"); In the above example, both the values are user defined, it might happen that we want to make it more dynamic, In this example, i set it up for set with any value and finally checked if it is set with the one i am looking for. var foo = Mock.Create<IFooIndexed>(); Mock.ArrangeSet(() => foo[0] = Arg.Any<string>()); foo[0] = "ping"; Mock.AssertSet(() => foo[0] = Arg.Matches<string>(x => string.Compare("ping", x) == 0)); This is more or less of mocking user sets , but we can further have it to throw exception or even do our own task for a particular set , like : Mock.ArrangeSet(() => foo.MyProperty = 10).Throws(new ArgumentException()); Or bool expected = false; var foo = Mock.Create<IFoo>(BehaviorMode.Strict); Mock.ArrangeSet(() => { foo.Value = 1; }).DoInstead(() => expected = true); foo.Value = 1; Assert.True(expected); Or call the original setter , in this example it will throw an NotImplementedExpectation var foo = Mock.Create<FooAbstract>(BehaviorMode.Strict); Mock.ArrangeSet(() => { foo.Value = 1; }).CallOriginal(); Assert.Throws<NotImplementedException>(() => { foo.Value = 1; }); Finally, try all these, find issues, post them to forum and make it work for you :-). Hope that helps,

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Real World Nuget

- by JoshReuben

Why Nuget A higher level of granularity for managing references When you have solutions of many projects that depend on solutions of many projects etc à escape from Solution Hell. Links · Using A GUI (Package Explorer) to build packages - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/creating-packages/using-a-gui-to-build-packages · Creating a Nuspec File - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_aspnetmvcnuget_topic2.aspx · consuming a Nuget Package - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_aspnetmvcnuget_topic3 · Nuspec reference - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/nuspec-reference · updating packages - http://nuget.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Updating%20All%20Packages · versioning - http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/versioning POC Folder Structure POC Setup Steps · Install package explorer · Source o Create a source solution – configure output directory for projects (Project > Properties > Build > Output Path) · Package o Add assemblies to package from output directory (D&D)- add net folder o File > Export – save .nuspec files and lib contents <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package > <metadata> <id>MyPackage</id> <version>1.0.0.3</version> <title /> <authors>josh-r</authors> <owners /> <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance> <description>My package description.</description> <summary /> </metadata> </package> o File > Save – saves .nupkg file · Create Target Solution o In Tools > Options: Configure package source & Add package Select projects: Output from package manager (powershell console) ------- Installing...MyPackage 1.0.0 ------- Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyA.dll' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyA.pdb' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyB.dll' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'NugetSource.AssemblyB.pdb' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0\lib'. Added file 'MyPackage.1.0.0.nupkg' to folder 'MyPackage.1.0.0'. Successfully installed 'MyPackage 1.0.0'. Added reference 'NugetSource.AssemblyA' to project 'AssemblyX' Added reference 'NugetSource.AssemblyB' to project 'AssemblyX' Added file 'packages.config'. Added file 'packages.config' to project 'AssemblyX' Added file 'repositories.config'. Successfully added 'MyPackage 1.0.0' to AssemblyX. ============================== o Packages folder created at solution level o Packages.config file generated in each project: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <packages> <package id="MyPackage" version="1.0.0" targetFramework="net40" /> </packages> A local Packages folder is created for package versions installed: Each folder contains the downloaded .nupkg file and its unpacked contents – eg of dlls that the project references Note: this folder is not checked in UpdatePackages o Configure Package Manager to automatically check for updates o Browse packages - It automatically picked up the updates Update Procedure · Modify source · Change source version in assembly info · Build source · Open last package in package explorer · Increment package version number and re-add assemblies · Save package with new version number and export its definition · In target solution – Tools > Manage Nuget Packages – click on All to trigger refresh , then click on recent packages to see updates · If problematic, delete packages folder Versioning uninstall-package mypackage install-package mypackage –version 1.0.0.3 uninstall-package mypackage install-package mypackage –version 1.0.0.4 Dependencies · <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2012/06/nuspec.xsd"> <metadata> <id>MyDependentPackage</id> <version>1.0.0</version> <title /> <authors>josh-r</authors> <owners /> <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance> <description>My package description.</description> <dependencies> <group targetFramework=".NETFramework4.0"> <dependency id="MyPackage" version="1.0.0.4" /> </group> </dependencies> </metadata> </package> Using NuGet without committing packages to source control http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/using-nuget-without-committing-packages Right click on the Solution node in Solution Explorer and select Enable NuGet Package Restore. — Recall that packages folder is not part of solution If you get downloading package ‘Nuget.build’ failed, config proxy to support certificate for https://nuget.org/api/v2/ & allow unrestricted access to packages.nuget.org To test connectivity: get-package –listavailable To test Nuget Package Restore – delete packages folder and open vs as admin. In nugget msbuild: <Import Project="$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\nuget.targets" /> TFSBuild Integration Modify Nuget.Targets file <RestorePackages Condition=" '$(RestorePackages)' == '' "> True </RestorePackages> … <PackageSource Include="\\IL-CV-004-W7D\Packages" /> Add System Environment variable EnableNuGetPackageRestore=true & restart the “visual studio team foundation build service host” service. Important: Ensure Network Service has access to Packages folder Nugetter TFS Build integration Add Nugetter build process templates to TFS source control For Build Controller - Specify location of custom assemblies Generate .nuspec file from Package Explorer: File > Export Edit the file elements – remove path info from src and target attributes <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2012/06/nuspec.xsd"> <metadata> <id>Common</id> <version>1.0.0</version> <title /> <authors>josh-r</authors> <owners /> <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance> <description>My package description.</description> <dependencies> <group targetFramework=".NETFramework3.5" /> </dependencies> </metadata> <files> <file src="CommonTypes.dll" target="CommonTypes.dll" /> <file src="CommonTypes.pdb" target="CommonTypes.pdb" /> … Add .nuspec file to solution so that it is available for build: Dev\NovaNuget\Common\NuSpec\common.1.0.0.nuspec Add a Build Process Definition based on the Nugetter build process template: Configure the build process – specify: · .sln to build · Base path (output directory) · Nuget.exe file path · .nuspec file path Copy DLLs to a binary folder 1) Set copy local for an assembly reference to false 2) MSBuild Copy Task – modify .csproj file: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3e54c37h.aspx <ItemGroup> <MySourceFiles Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\SourceAssemblies\**\*.*" /> </ItemGroup> <Target Name="BeforeBuild"> <Copy SourceFiles="@(MySourceFiles)" DestinationFolder="bin\debug\SourceAssemblies" /> </Target> 3) Set Probing assembly search path from app.config - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/823z9h8w(v=vs.80).aspx - <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <runtime> <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1"> <probing privatePath="SourceAssemblies"/> </assemblyBinding> </runtime> </configuration> Forcing 'copy local = false' The following generic powershell script was added to the packages install.ps1: param($installPath, $toolsPath, $package, $project) if( $project.Object.Project.Name -ne "CopyPackages") { $asms = $package.AssemblyReferences | %{$_.Name} foreach ($reference in $project.Object.References) { if ($asms -contains $reference.Name + ".dll") { $reference.CopyLocal = $false; } } } An empty project named "CopyPackages" was added to the solution - it references all the packages and is the only one set to CopyLocal="true". No MSBuild knowledge required.

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FAQ: Highlight GridView Row on Click and Retain Selected Row on Postback

- by Vincent Maverick Durano

A couple of months ago I’ve written a simple demo about “Highlighting GridView Row on MouseOver”. I’ve noticed many members in the forums (http://forums.asp.net) are asking how to highlight row in GridView and retain the selected row across postbacks. So I’ve decided to write this post to demonstrate how to implement it as reference to others who might need it. In this demo I going to use a combination of plain JavaScript and jQuery to do the client-side manipulation. I presumed that you already know how to bind the grid with data because I will not include the codes for populating the GridView here. For binding the gridview you can refer this post: Binding GridView with Data the ADO.Net way or this one: GridView Custom Paging with LINQ. To get started let’s implement the highlighting of GridView row on row click and retain the selected row on postback. For simplicity I set up the page like this: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>You have selected Row: (<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" />)</h2> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfCurrentRowIndex" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfParentContainer" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" onclick="Button1_Click" Text="Trigger Postback" /> <asp:GridView ID="grdCustomer" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" onrowdatabound="grdCustomer_RowDataBound"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="Company" HeaderText="Company" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Title" HeaderText="Title" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Address" HeaderText="Address" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> </asp:Content> Note: Since the action is done at the client-side, when we do a postback like (clicking on a button) the page will be re-created and you will lose the highlighted row. This is normal because the the server doesn't know anything about the client/browser not unless if you do something to notify the server that something has changed. To persist the settings we will use some HiddenFields control to store the data so that when it postback we can reference the value from there. Now here’s the JavaScript functions below: <asp:content id="Content1" runat="server" contentplaceholderid="HeadContent"> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var prevRowIndex; function ChangeRowColor(row, rowIndex) { var parent = document.getElementById(row); var currentRowIndex = parseInt(rowIndex) + 1; if (prevRowIndex == currentRowIndex) { return; } else if (prevRowIndex != null) { parent.rows[prevRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFFF"; } parent.rows[currentRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFD6"; prevRowIndex = currentRowIndex; $('#<%= Label1.ClientID %>').text(currentRowIndex); $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val(row); $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val(rowIndex); } $(function () { RetainSelectedRow(); }); function RetainSelectedRow() { var parent = $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val(); var currentIndex = $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val(); if (parent != null) { ChangeRowColor(parent, currentIndex); } } </script> </asp:content> The ChangeRowColor() is the function that sets the background color of the selected row. It is also where we set the previous row and rowIndex values in HiddenFields. The $(function(){}); is a short-hand for the jQuery document.ready event. This event will be fired once the page is posted back to the server that’s why we call the function RetainSelectedRow(). The RetainSelectedRow() function is where we referenced the current selected values stored from the HiddenFields and pass these values to the ChangeRowColor() function to retain the highlighted row. Finally, here’s the code behind part: protected void grdCustomer_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow) { e.Row.Attributes.Add("onclick", string.Format("ChangeRowColor('{0}','{1}');", e.Row.ClientID, e.Row.RowIndex)); } } The code above is responsible for attaching the javascript onclick event for each row and call the ChangeRowColor() function and passing the e.Row.ClientID and e.Row.RowIndex to the function. Here’s the sample output below: That’s it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: jQuery,GridView,JavaScript,TipTricks

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A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables in SSIS

Error: 0xC001405C at SQL Log Status: A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables "User::RowCount" for read/write access. A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out. Have you ever considered variable locking when building your SSIS packages? I expect many people haven’t just because most of the time you never see an error like the one above. I’ll try and explain a few key concepts about variable locking and hopefully you never will see that error. First of all, what is all this variable locking all about? Put simply SSIS variables have to be locked before they can be accessed, and then of course unlocked once you have finished with them. This is baked into SSIS, presumably to reduce the risk of race conditions, but with that comes some additional overhead in that you need to be careful to avoid lock conflicts in some scenarios. The most obvious place you will come across any hint of locking (no pun intended) is the Script Task or Script Component with their ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. These two properties allow you to enter lists of variables to be used within the task, or to put it another way, these lists of variables to be locked, so that they are available within the task. During the task pre-execute phase the variables and locked, you then use them during the execute phase when you code is run, and then unlocked for you during the post-execute phase. So by entering the variable names in one of the two list, the locking is taken care of for you, and you just read and write to the Dts.Variables collection that is exposed in the task for the purpose. As you can see in the image above, the variable PackageInt is specified, which means when I write the code inside that task I don’t have to worry about locking at all, as shown below. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new Dts.Variables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } As you can see as well as accessing the variable, hassle free, I also raise an event. Now consider a scenario where I have an event hander as well as shown below. Now what if my event handler uses tries to use the same variable as well? Well obviously for the point of this post, it fails with the error quoted previously. The reason why is clearly illustrated if you consider the following sequence of events. Package execution starts Script Task in Control Flow starts Script Task in Control Flow locks the PackageInt variable as specified in the ReadWriteVariables property Script Task in Control Flow executes script, and the On Information event is raised The On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler attempts to lock the PackageInt variable (for either read or write it doesn’t matter), but will fail because the variable is already locked. The problem is caused by the event handler task trying to use a variable that is already locked by the task in Control Flow. Events are always raised synchronously, therefore the task in Control Flow that is raising the event will not regain control until the event handler has completed, so we really do have un-resolvable locking conflict, better known as a deadlock. In this scenario we can easily resolve the problem by managing the variable locking explicitly in code, so no need to specify anything for the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new, with explicit lock control Variables lockedVariables = null; Dts.VariableDispenser.LockOneForWrite("PackageInt", ref lockedVariables); lockedVariables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; lockedVariables.Unlock(); // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } Now the package will execute successfully because the variable lock has already been released by the time the event is raised, so no conflict occurs. For those of you with a SQL Engine background this should all sound strangely familiar, and boils down to getting in and out as fast as you can to reduce the risk of lock contention, be that SQL pages or SSIS variables. Unfortunately we cannot always manage the locking ourselves. The Execute SQL Task is very often used in conjunction with variables, either to pass in parameter values or get results out. Either way the task will manage the locking for you, and will fail when it cannot lock the variables it requires. The scenario outlined above is clear cut deadlock scenario, both parties are waiting on each other, so it is un-resolvable. The mechanism used within SSIS isn’t actually that clever, and whilst the message says it is a deadlock, it really just means it tried a few times, and then gave up. The last part of the error message is actually the most accurate in terms of the failure, A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out. Now this may come across as a recommendation to always manage locking manually in the Script Task or Script Component yourself, but I think that would be an overreaction. It is more of a reminder to be aware that in high concurrency scenarios, especially when sharing variables across multiple objects, locking is important design consideration. Update – Make sure you don’t try and use explicit locking as well as leaving the variable names in the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables lock lists otherwise you’ll get the deadlock error, you cannot lock a variable twice!

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First Foray–About timeout

- by SQLMonger

It has been quite a while since I signed up for this blog site and high time that something was posted. I have a list of topics that I will be working through and posting. Some I am sure will have been posted by others, but I will be sticking to the technical problems and challenges that I’ve recently faced, and the solutions that worked for me. My motto when learning something new has always been “My kingdom for an example!”, and I plan on delivering useful examples here so others can learn from my efforts, failures and successes. A bit of background about me… My name is Clayton Groom. I am a founding partner of a consulting firm in St. Louis Missouri, Covenant Technology Partners, LLC and focus on SQL Server Data Warehouse design, Analysis Services and Enterprise Reporting solutions. I have been working with SQL Server since the early nineties, when it still only ran on OS/2. I love solving puzzles and technical challenges. Enough about me… On to a real problem… SSIS Connection Time outs versus Command Time outs Last week, I was working on automating the processing for a large Analysis Services cube. I had reworked an SSIS package and script task originally posted by Vidas Matelis that automates the process of adding new and dropping old partitions to/from an Analysis Services cube. I had the package working great, tested, and ready for deployment. It basically performs a query against the source system to determine if there is new data in the warehouse that will require a new partition to be added to the cube, and it checks the cube to see if there are any partitions that are present that are no longer needed in a rolling 60 month window. My client uses Tivoli for running all their production jobs, and not SQL Agent, so I had to build a command line file for Tivoli to use to run the package. Everything was going great. I had tested the command file from my development workstation using an XML configuration file to pass in server-specific parameters into the package when executed using the DTExec utility. With all the pieces ready, I updated the dtsconfig file to point to the UAT environment and started working with the Tivoli developer to test the job. On the first run, the job failed, and from what I could see in the SSIS log, it had failed because of a timeout. Other errors in the log made me think that perhaps the connection string had not been passed into the package correctly. We bumped the Connection Manager timeout values from 20 seconds to 120 seconds and tried again. The job still failed. After changing the command line to use the /SET option instead of the /CONFIGFILE option, we tested again, and again failure. After a number more failed attempts, and getting the Teradata DBA involved to monitor and see if we were connecting and failing or just failing to connect, we determined that the job was indeed connecting to the server and then disconnecting itself after 30 seconds. This seemed odd, as we had the timeout values for the connection manager set to 180 seconds by then. At this point one of the DBA’s found a post on the Teradata forum that had the clues to the puzzle: There is a separate “CommandTimeout” custom property on the Data source object that may needed to be adjusted for longer running queries. I opened up the SSIS package, opened the data flow task that generated the partition list table and right-clicked on the data source. from the context menu, I selected “Show Advanced Editor” and found the property. Sure enough, it was set to 30 seconds. The CommandTimeout property can also be edited in the SSIS Properties sheet. In order to determine how long the timeout needed to be, I ran the query from the task in the development environment and received a response in a matter of seconds. I then tried the same query against the production database and waited several minutes for a response. This did not seem to be a reasonable response time for the query involved, and indeed it wasn’t. The Teradata DBA’s adjusted the query governor settings for the service account I was testing with, and we were able to get the response back down under a minute. Still, I set the CommandTimeout property to a much higher value in case the job was ever started during a time of high-demand on the production server. With this change in place, the job finally completed successfully. The lesson learned for me was two-fold: Always compare query execution times between development and production environments, and don’t assume that production will always be faster. With higher user demands, query governors, and a whole lot more data, the execution time of even what might seem to be simple queries can vary greatly. SSIS Connection time out settings do not affect command time outs. Connection timeouts control how long the package will wait for a response from the server before assuming the server is not available or is not responding. Command time outs control how long a task will wait for results to start being returned before deciding that the server is not responding. Both lessons seem pretty straight forward, and I felt pretty sheepish once I finally figured out what the issue was. To be fair though, In the 5+ years that I have been working with SSIS, I could only recall one other time where I had to set the CommandTimeout property, and that memory only resurfaced while I was penning this post.

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For Programmers familiar with ACM API? Drawing Initials [closed]

- by user71992

Possible Duplicate: For Programmers familiar with ACM API? Drawing Initials I came across an exercise (in the book "The Art and Science of Java" by Eric Roberts) that requires using only GArc and GLine classes to create a lettering library which draws your initials on the canvas. This should be made independent of the GLabel class. I'd like to know the correct approach to use in solving this problem. I'm not sure what I have so far is good enough (I'm thinking it's too long). The questions requires that I use a good Top-Down approach. Here's my code so far: //Passes letters to GLetter objects and draws them on the canvas package artScienceJavaExercises.chapter8; import acm.program.*; //import acm.graphics.*; public class DrawInitials extends GraphicsProgram{ public void init(){ resize(400,400); } public void run(){ //String let = readLine("Letter?: "); letter = new GLetter("l"); add(letter, (getWidth()-letter.getWidth()*2)/2, (getHeight()-letter.getHeight())/2); add(new GLetter("o"), (letter.getX()+letter.getWidth()), letter.getY()); } private GLetter letter; } //GLetter Class package artScienceJavaExercises.chapter8; import acm.graphics.*; import java.awt.*; public class GLetter extends GCompound{ private static final int ONE_THIRD = 30; private static final int ROW_2_HEIGHT = 40; private GArc[] arc = new GArc[4]; private GLine[] line = new GLine[24]; public GLetter(String s){ line[0] = new GLine(0,0, ONE_THIRD, 0); line[1] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD,0, ONE_THIRD*2, 0); line[2] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*2,0, ONE_THIRD*3, 0); line[3] = new GLine(0,0, 0,ONE_THIRD); line[4] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD,0, ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD); line[5] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*2,0, ONE_THIRD*2, ONE_THIRD); line[6] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*3,0, ONE_THIRD*3, ONE_THIRD); line[7] = new GLine(0,ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD*2, ONE_THIRD); line[8] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD,ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD*2, ONE_THIRD); line[9] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*2,ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD*3, ONE_THIRD); line[10] = new GLine(0,ONE_THIRD, 0, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[11] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[12] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*2,ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD*2, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[13] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*3,ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD*3, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[14] = new GLine(0, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT, ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[15] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT, ONE_THIRD*2, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[16] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*2, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT, ONE_THIRD*3, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[17] = new GLine(0, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT, 0, ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[18] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT, ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[19] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*2, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT, ONE_THIRD*2, ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[20] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*3, ONE_THIRD+ROW_2_HEIGHT, ONE_THIRD*3, ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[21] = new GLine(0,ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT, ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[22] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD, ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT, ONE_THIRD*2, ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT); line[23] = new GLine(ONE_THIRD*2,ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT, ONE_THIRD*3, ONE_THIRD*2+ROW_2_HEIGHT); for(int i = 0; i<line.length; i++){ add(line[i]); line[i].setColor(Color.BLACK); line[i].setVisible(false); } arc[0] = new GArc(getWidth(), getHeight(), 106.699, 49.341); arc[1] = new GArc(getWidth(), getHeight(), 23.96, 49.341); arc[2] = new GArc(getWidth(), getHeight(), -23.96, -49.341); arc[3] = new GArc(0,0,getWidth(), getHeight(), -106.699, -49.341); for(int i = 0; i<arc.length; i++){ add(arc[i],0,0); arc[i].setColor(Color.BLACK); arc[i].setVisible(false); } paintLetter(s); } private void paintLetter(String s){ if (s.equalsIgnoreCase("l")){ turnOn(line[3]); turnOn(line[10]); turnOn(line[17]); turnOn(line[21]); turnOn(line[22]); turnOn(line[23]); } else if(s.equalsIgnoreCase("o")){ for(int i = 0; i<4; ++i){ turnOn(arc[i]); } turnOn(line[1]); turnOn(line[10]); turnOn(line[13]); turnOn(line[22]); } } private void turnOn(GObject g){ g.setVisible(true); } } I created a class (GLetter.java) with arrays for GArc and GLine objects. They are positioned in certain ways thereby turning certain Glines and/or GArcs on or off (changing visiblity) would create a pattern for a letter. This Gletter uses the if/else statements to determine which pattern to create - this makes me feel my code is too long. There is another class (DrawInitials.java) that simulates a GraphicsProgram and allows the user to pass certain letters as arguments to the GLetter object. I've used 'L' and 'O' as examples. However, I posted this because I'm not sure I'm using the right approach. That's why I need your help. I feel MY CODE IS TOO LONG! The code above is not the complete project...it only draws letters 'L' and 'O' for now.

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3 Trends for SMBs around Social, Mobile, and Sensor

- by Socially_Aware_Enterprise

While I often am talking to big companies or discussing enterprise solutions. There are times when individuals ask me about Small or Medium sized business trends. Interestingly, the Enterprise Social, Mobile, and Sensor initiatives I regularly discuss are in fact related to even the Mom and Pop storefront. The eco-system of new service players in the Social-Mobile-Sensor space generally emerge developing partnerships with enterprises as they develop and bring economy to scale to their services for the larger market. And of course Oracle has an entire division dedicated for delivering products and support to help emerging companies compete without the need to open an industrial strength credit line.. So here are some trends that we are helping large enterprises to deploy today, but small and medium businesses should be able to take advantage of by the end of this year and starting into 2015. 1) The typical small business is generally "Localized". But the ability to be "Hyper-Localized" will come as location based services become ubiquitous. Many small businesses have one or several storefronts and theirs are typically within a single regional economic footprint. While the internet provides global reach, it will be the businesses that invest in social, mobile and local that will win in the end. Of course I am a huge SoMoLo evangelist. The SMBs' content and targeting with platforms for Geo-Fencing, Geo-Conquesting and Path-Matching to HHI are all going to be accessible to them, if not for Mobile Apps, then via Mobile messaging in Social Networks that offer it.. Expect to be able to target FaceBook messaging not by city, but by store or mall… This makes being able to be "Hyper-Local" even more important. And with new proximity services coming online more than ever before, SMBs will operate and service customers with pinpoint accuracy right down to where they stand in an aisle. Geo-Conquesting will be huge for small players to place ads when customers pass through competitors regions. Car Dealers are doing this now.. But also of course iBeacons are now very cheap and getting easier to put in retail stores. The ability for sales to happen anywhere in the store via a mobile phone or tablet is huge, as it will give the small shop the flexibility to not have to "Guard the Register" as more or most transactions will be digital. Thus, M-Commerce and T-Commerce will change the job of cashier dramatically.. 2) Intra-Brand Advocacy, the idea now is that rather than just depend on your trusty social media manager and his team, you are going to push more and more individuals with expertise inside the organization to help manage, reach-out, and utilize social channels to manage the incoming questions and answers customers need. While for years CRM was the tool of the enterprise, today CRMs enable this now "Salesforce et al" capability to trickle throughout the company. This gives greater pressure to organize roles, but also flatten out the organization. Internal collaboration around topics and customer needs is going to be the key for SMBs to finally get serious about customer experiences. Their customers are online and in social networks. This includes not just B2C SMBs but also B2B companies as well. Don't believe me? To find the players just use hashtag #SocialSelling and you will see… 3) The Visual Networks will begin to move from Content Aggregators to Content Collaboration platforms, which means Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, & others will begin to move to add more features brands want, first marketing platforms, rather than unique brand partnerships as they do today, but this will open ways for SMBs to engage with clear brand messaging and metrics. Eventually providing more "Collaboration" between Brand and Consumer.. Don't think for a minute Facebook bought Oculus Rift so you could see your timeline in 3-D. The Social Networks I advise customers to invest in are ones that are audio and visual intrinsically. Players from SoundCloud to Pinterest are deploying ways for brands to harness their interactive visual or audio based social networks to sell ad units aka brand messaging. While the Social Media revolution is going on, the emphasis was on the social, today it more and more about the media in social, that enterprises soon small and medium businesses will be connected to.

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Many Different Things Rolled into a Ball

- by MOSSLover

Yeah I know I don’t blog much anymore, because life has taken me places that don’t involve the interwebs unfortunately. I am in the midst of planning two events, starting a non for profit, creating more sessions for various conferences, submitting to various conferences, working a 40 hour a week job, attempting to hang out with boyfriend/friends/family. So you can see that list does not include this blog sadly that’s how it goes sometimes. The bottom piece very important over any of the top pieces. I haven’t seen St. Louis in a while and I get to go back. I was gone from home for MVP Summit and Best Practices Conference, so the boyfriend and cat didn’t get to see me either for a bit. Then you have to add in the whole toilet being broken fiasco this week. Maintenance really thought it would be cool to turn off the ability to flush. I mean who does that? Then when we call the owner he comes by turns it on and we figure it was an accident, because well the next day no one came by to tell us there was a leak. It was all kinds of strangeness and involved me running to other people’s toilets. As Dan Usher would say, I was a sad panda for a few days. So I guess I wanted to post a few thoughts here just because I can. I do not like multiple content editor webparts embedded with html files in numerous pages doing the same thing. I will tell you why I don’t like these particular webparts and the way they are being used. First off if you have a bunch of pages with script includes it’s about time you should just dump them into the masterpage. Why bother finding all 20 pages and changing those pages when you can just use a single masterpage that already exists? The other thing that is bothering me days is screen scraping. Just don’t do it, because in 2010 you will find the UI is substantially slower. I understand you are new and you have no idea what to do. You are also using 2007 am I right? So then you need to go to codeplex.com and type in a search for SPServices. Download it, use it, love it and then have it’s babies (well maybe don’t go so far this is not the GRID in Tron). If you have a ton of constants in your code why did you not go in and create a webpart with a bunch of properties and/or link to a configuration list hidden in the browser? This type of property and list could help you out in the long run. The power users and administrators can now change the control without you having to compile it over and over again. It’s good stuff. Also, you can change the control without compiling it, especially in 2007 where you have to do a farm solution. In 2010 you can do a sandbox solution I guess, but shouldn’t you make it as easy and supportable as possible for other users? In conclusion I’m an angry person when it comes to viewing something repeatedly and analyzing it in a system. Now we will move on to the next topic…MVP Summit…So yeah I can’t really talk about particulars, but I can talk about my experience as a person. Don’t build something up to be cooler than it is only to be dropped from your 10,000 foot perch. My experience was great, but the content overall was something to be desired. It’s ok I got to meet a lot of people I would not have met if I had not gone. Some of it was surreal, such as product group members showing up and talking to us. It was pretty neat. Plus I never had the chance to get to that mythical MS Office in Redmond. Prior to Summit it was like Rainbow Brites unicorn trying taunting me on television when I was a kid. So I guess with all that said I give it a B. It was awesome in some way, but lacking in other ways. The cool part is that I got to go. Would I have lived without going? Yes, but it was still cool. I could prattle on about other things and make this post massive, but I’m going to pass and give myself a piece of Sunday to play Rockband and do 800 other things. I hope the two of you who read this blog are well. I’ll catch you all at another juncture. Have a good weekend and varying holidays in between. Technorati Tags: SharePoint,MVP Summit,JQuery,Javascript

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A Visual Studio Release Grows in Brooklyn

- by andrewbrust

Yesterday, Microsoft held its flagship launch event for Office 2010 in Manhattan. Today, the Redmond software company is holding a local launch event for Visual Studio (VS) 2010, in Brooklyn. How come information workers get the 212 treatment and developers are relegated to 718? Well, here’s the thing: the Brooklyn Marriott is actually a great place for an event, but you need some intimate knowledge of New York City to know that. NBC’s Studio 8H, where the Office launch was held yesterday (and from where SNL is broadcast) is a pretty small venue, but you’d need some inside knowledge to recognize that. Likewise, while Office 2010 is a product whose value is apparent. Appreciating VS 2010’s value takes a bit more savvy. Setting aside its year-based designation, this release of VS, counting the old Visual Basic releases, is the 10th version of the product. How can a developer audience get excited about an integrated development environment when it reaches double-digit version numbers? Well, it can be tough. Luckily, Microsoft sent Jay Schmelzer, a Group Program Manager from the Visual Studio team in Redmond, to come tell the Brooklyn audience why they should be excited. Turns out there’s a lot of reasons. Support fro SharePoint development is a big one. In previous versions of VS, that support has been anemic, at best. Shortage of SharePoint developers is a huge issue in the industry, and this should help. There’s also built in support for Windows Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) and, through a download, support for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 platform. ASP.NET MVC, a “close-to-the-metal” Web development option that does away with the Web Forms abstraction layer, has a first-class presence in VS. So too does jQuery, the Open Source environment that makes JavaScript development a breeze. The jQuery support is so good that Microsoft now contributes to that Open Source project and offers IntelliSense support for it in the code editor. Speaking of the VS code editor, it now supports multi-monitor setups, zoom-in, and block selection. If you’re not a developer, this may sound confusing and minute. I’ll just say that for people who are developers these are little things that really contribute to productivity, and that translates into lower development costs. The really cool demo, though, was around Visual Studio 2010’s new debugging features. This stuff is hard to showcase, but I believe it’s truly breakthrough technology: imagine being able to step backwards in time to see what might have caused a bug. Cool? Now imagine being able to do that, even if you weren’t the tester and weren’t present while the testing was being done. Then imagine being able to see a video screen capture of what the tester was doing with your app when the bug occurred. VS 2010 allows all that. This could be the demise of the IWOMM (“it works on my machine”) syndrome. After the keynote, I asked Schmelzer if any of Microsoft’s competitors have debugging tools that come close to VS 2010’s. His answer was an earnest “we don’t think so.” If that’s true, that’s a big deal, and a huge advantage for developer teams who adopt it. It will make software development much cheaper and more efficient. Kind of like holding a launch event at the Brooklyn Marriott instead of 30 Rock in Manhattan! VS 2010 (version 10) and Office 2010 (version 14) aren’t the only new product versions Microsoft is releasing right now. There’s also SQL Server 2008 R2 (version 10.5), Exchange 2010 (version 8, I believe), SharePoint 2010 (version 4) and, of course, Windows 7. With so many new versions at such levels of maturity, I think it’s fair to say Microsoft has reached middle-age. How does a company stave off a potential mid-life crisis, especially when with young Turks like Google coming along and competing so fiercely? Hard to say. But if focusing on core value, including value that’s hard to play into a sexy demo, is part oft the answer, then Microsoft’s doing OK. And if some new tricks, like Windows Phone 7, can gain some traction, that might round things out nicely. Are the legacy products old tricks, or are they revised classics? I honestly don’t know, because it’s the market’s prerogative to pass that judgement. I can say this though: based on today’s show, I think Microsoft’s been doing its homework.

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Swap partition not recognized (The disk drive with UUID=... is not ready yet or not present)

- by ladaghini

I think I had an encrypted swap partition, because I chose to encrypt my home directory during the installation. I believe that's what the line with /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 ... in my /etc/fstab is all about. I did something to bork my swap because on the next boot, I got a message (paraphrased): The disk drive for /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 is not ready yet or not present. Wait to continue. Press S to skip or M to manually recover. (As a side note, pressing S or M seemed to do nothing different from just waiting.) Here's what I've tried: This tutorial on how to fix the swap partition not mounting. However, in the above, the mkswap command fails because the device is busy. So I booted from a live USB, ran GParted to reformat the swap partition (which showed up as an unknown fs type), and chrooted into the broken system to try that tutorial again. I also adjusted /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume and /etc/fstab to reflect the new UUID generated from formatting the partition as a swap. That still didn't work; instead of /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 not present, "The disk drive with UUID=[swap partition's UUID] is not ready yet or not present..." So I decided to start afresh as though I never had created a swap partition in the first place. From the Live USB, I deleted the swap partition altogether (which, again showed up in GParted as an unknown fs type), removed the swap and cryptswap entries in /etc/fstab as well as removed /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume and /etc/crypttab. At this point the main system shouldn't be considered broken because there is no swap partition and no instructions to mount one, right? I didn't get any errors during startup. I followed the same instructions to create and encrypt the swap partition, starting with creating a partition for the swap, though I think fdisk said a reboot was necessary to see changes. I was confident the 3rd process above would work, but the problem yet persists. Some relevant info (/dev/sda8 is the swap partition): /etc/fstab file: # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=4c11e82c-5fe9-49d5-92d9-cdaa6865c991 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # /boot was on /dev/sda5 during installation UUID=4031413e-e89f-49a9-b54c-e887286bb15e /boot ext4 defaults 0 2 # /home was on /dev/sda7 during installation UUID=d5bbfc6f-482a-464e-9f26-fd213230ae84 /home ext4 defaults 0 2 # swap was on /dev/sda8 during installation UUID=5da2c720-8787-4332-9317-7d96cf1e9b80 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 none swap sw 0 0 output of sudo mount: /dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) /dev/sda5 on /boot type ext4 (rw) /dev/sda7 on /home type ext4 (rw) /home/undisclosed/.Private on /home/undisclosed type ecryptfs (ecryptfs_check_dev_ruid,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_unlink_sigs,ecryptfs_sig=cbae1771abd34009,ecryptfs_fnek_sig=7cefe2f59aab8e58) gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/undisclosed/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=undisclosed) output of sudo blkid (note that /dev/sda8 is missing): /dev/sda1: LABEL="SYSTEM" UUID="960490E80490CC9D" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda2: UUID="D4043140043126C0" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda3: LABEL="Shared" UUID="80F613E1F613D5EE" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda5: UUID="4031413e-e89f-49a9-b54c-e887286bb15e" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda6: UUID="4c11e82c-5fe9-49d5-92d9-cdaa6865c991" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda7: UUID="d5bbfc6f-482a-464e-9f26-fd213230ae84" TYPE="ext4" /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: UUID="41fa147a-3e2c-4e61-b29b-3f240fffbba0" TYPE="swap" output of sudo fdisk -l: Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xdec3fed2 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 409599 203776 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 409600 210135039 104862720 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 210135040 415422463 102643712 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda4 415424510 625141759 104858625 5 Extended /dev/sda5 415424512 415922175 248832 83 Linux /dev/sda6 415924224 515921919 49998848 83 Linux /dev/sda7 515923968 621389823 52732928 83 Linux /dev/sda8 621391872 625141759 1874944 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: 1919 MB, 1919942656 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 233 cylinders, total 3749888 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xaf5321b5 /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume file: RESUME=UUID=5da2c720-8787-4332-9317-7d96cf1e9b80 /etc/crypttab file: cryptswap1 /dev/sda8 /dev/urandom swap,cipher=aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 output of sudo swapon -as: Filename Type Size Used Priority /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 partition 1874940 0 -1 output of sudo free -m: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1476 1296 179 0 35 671 -/+ buffers/cache: 590 886 Swap: 1830 0 1830 So, how can this be fixed?

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Updating a database connection password using a script

- by Tim Dexter

An interesting customer requirement that I thought was worthy of sharing today. Thanks to James for the requirement and Bryan for the proposed solution and me for testing the solution and proving it works :0) A customers implementation of Sarbanes Oxley requires them to change all database account passwords every 90 days. This is scripted leveraging shell scripts today for most of their environments. But how can they manage the BI Publisher connections? Now, the customer is running 11g and therefore using weblogic on the middle tier, which is the first clue to Bryans proposed solution. To paraphrase and embellish Bryan's solution a little; why not use a JNDI connection from BIP to the database. Then employ the web logic scripting engine to make updates to the JNDI as needed? BIP is completely uninvolved and with a little 'timing' users will be completely unaware of the password updates i.e. change the password when reports are not being executed. Perfect! James immediately tracked down the WLST script that could be used here, http://middlewaremagic.com/weblogic/?p=4261 (thanks Ravish) Now it was just a case of testing the theory. Some steps: Create the JNDI connection in WLS Create the JNDI connection in BI Publisher pointing to the WLS connection Build new data models using or re-point data sources to use the JNDI connection. Create the WLST script to update the WLS JNDI password as needed. Test! Some details. Creating the JNDI connection in web logic is pretty straightforward. Log into hte console and look for Data Sources under the Services section of the home page and click it Click New >> Generic Datasource Give the connection a name. For the JNDI name, prefix it with 'jdbc/' so I have 'jdbc/localdb' - this name is important you'll need it on the BIP side. Select your db type - this will influence the drivers and information needed on the next page. Being a company man, Im using an Oracle db. Click Next Select the driver of choice, theres lots I know, you can read about them I just chose 'Oracle's Driver (Thin) for Instance connections; Versions 9.0.1 and later' Click Next >> Next Fill out the db name (SID), server, port, username to connect and password >> Next Test the config to ensure you can connect. >> Next Now you need to deploy the connection to your BI server, select it and click Next. You're done with the JNDI config. Creating the JNDI connection on the Publisher side is covered here. Just remember to the connection name you created in WLS e.g. 'jdbc/localdb' Not gonna tell you how to do this, go read the user guide :0) Suffice to say, it works. This requires a little reading around the subject to understand the scripting engine and how to execute scripts. Nicely covered here. However a bit of googlin' and I found an even easier way of running the script. ${ServerHome}/common/bin/wlst.sh updatepwd.py Where updatepwd.py is my script file, it can be in another directory. As part of the wlst.sh script your environment is set up for you so its very simple to execute. The nitty gritty: Need to take Ravish's script above and create a file with a .py extension. Its going to need some modification, as he explains on the web page, to make it work in your environment. I played around with it for a while but kept running into errors. The script as is, tries to loop through all of your connections and modify the user and passwords for each. Not quite what we are looking for. Remember our requirement is to just update the password for a given connection. I also found another issue with the script. WLS 10.x does not allow updates to passwords using clear type ie un-encrypted text while the server is in production mode. Its a bit much to set it back to developer mode bounce it, change the passwords and then bounce and then change back to production and bounce again. After lots of messing about I finally came up with the following: ############################################################################# # # Update password for JNDI connections # ############################################################################# print("*** Trying to Connect.... *****") connect('weblogic','welcome1','t3://localhost:7001') print("*** Connected *****") edit() startEdit() print ("*** Encrypt the password ***") en = encrypt('hr') print "Encrypted pwd: ", en print ("*** Changing pwd for LocalDB ***") dsName = 'LocalDB' print 'Changing Password for DataSource ', dsName cd('/JDBCSystemResources/'+dsName+'/JDBCResource/'+dsName+'/JDBCDriverParams/'+dsName) set('PasswordEncrypted',en) save() activate() Its pretty simple and you can expand on it to loop through the data sources and change each as needed. I have hardcoded the password into the file but you can pass it as a parameter as needed using the properties file method. Im not going to get into the detail of that here but its covered with an example here. Couple of points to note: 1. The change to the password requires a server bounce to get the changes picked up. You can add that to the shell script you will use to call the script above. 2. The script above needs to be run from the MW_HOME\user_projects\domains\bifoundation_domain directory to get the encryption libraries set correctly. My command to run the whole script was: d:\oracle\bi_mw\wlserver_10.3\common\bin\wlst.cmd updatepwd.py - where wlst.cmd is the scripting command line and updatepwd.py was my update password script above. I have not quite spoon fed everything you need to make it a robust script but at least you know you can do it and you can work out the rest I think :0)

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TFS API Add Favorites programmatically

- by Tarun Arora

01 – What are we trying to achieve? In this blog post I’ll be showing you how to add work item queries as favorites, it is also possible to use the same technique to add build definition as favorites. Once a shared query or build definition has been added as favorite it will show up on the team web access. In this blog post I’ll be showing you a work around in the absence of a proper API how you can add queries to team favorites. 02 – Disclaimer There is no official API for adding favorites programmatically. In the work around below I am using the Identity service to store this data in a property bag which is used during display of favorites on the team web site. This uses an internal data structure that could change over time, there is no guarantee about the key names or content of the values. What is shown below is a workaround for a missing API. 03 – Concept There is no direct API support for favorites, but you could work around it using the identity service in TFS. Favorites are stored in the property bag associated with the TeamFoundationIdentity (either the ‘team’ identity or the users identity depending on if these are ‘team’ or ‘my’ favorites). The data is stored as json in the property bag of the identity, the key being prefixed by ‘Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server.IdentityFavorites’. References - Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client - using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client; - using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Client; - using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Common; - using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.ProcessConfiguration.Client; - using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server; - using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client; Services - IIdentityManagementService2 - TfsTeamService - WorkItemStore 04 – Solution Lets start by connecting to TFS programmatically // Create an instance of the services to be used during the program private static TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs; private static ProjectInfo _selectedTeamProject; private static WorkItemStore _wis; private static TfsTeamService _tts; private static TeamSettingsConfigurationService _teamConfig; private static IIdentityManagementService2 _ids; // Connect to TFS programmatically public static bool ConnectToTfs() { var isSelected = false; var tfsPp = new TeamProjectPicker(TeamProjectPickerMode.SingleProject, false); tfsPp.ShowDialog(); _tfs = tfsPp.SelectedTeamProjectCollection; if (tfsPp.SelectedProjects.Any()) { _selectedTeamProject = tfsPp.SelectedProjects[0]; isSelected = true; } return isSelected; } Lets get all the work item queries from the selected team project static readonly Dictionary<string, string> QueryAndGuid = new Dictionary<string, string>(); // Get all queries and query guid in the selected team project private static void GetQueryGuidList(IEnumerable<QueryItem> query) { foreach (QueryItem subQuery in query) { if (subQuery.GetType() == typeof(QueryFolder)) GetQueryGuidList((QueryFolder)subQuery); else { QueryAndGuid.Add(subQuery.Name, subQuery.Id.ToString()); } } } Pass the name of a valid Team in your team project and a name of a valid query in your team project. The team details will be extracted using the team name and query GUID will be extracted using the query name. These details will be used to construct the key and value that will be passed to the SetProperty method in the Identity service. Key “Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server.IdentityFavorites..<TeamProjectURI>.<TeamId>.WorkItemTracking.Queries.<newGuid1>” Value "{"data":"<QueryGuid>","id":"<NewGuid1>","name":"<QueryKey>","type":"Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.QueryItem”}" // Configure a Work Item Query for the given team private static void ConfigureTeamFavorites(string teamName, string queryName) { _ids = _tfs.GetService<IIdentityManagementService2>(); var g = Guid.NewGuid(); var guid = string.Empty; var teamDetail = _tts.QueryTeams(_selectedTeamProject.Uri).FirstOrDefault(t => t.Name == teamName); foreach (var q in QueryAndGuid.Where(q => q.Key == queryName)) { guid = q.Value; } if(guid == string.Empty) { Console.WriteLine("Query '{0}' - Not found!", queryName); return; } var key = string.Format( "Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server.IdentityFavorites..{0}.{1}.WorkItemTracking.Queries{2}", new Uri(_selectedTeamProject.Uri).Segments.LastOrDefault(), teamDetail.Identity.TeamFoundationId, g); var value = string.Format( @"{0}""data"":""{1}"",""id"":""{2}"",""name"":""{3}"",""type"":""Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.QueryItem""{4}", "{", guid, g, QueryAndGuid.FirstOrDefault(q => q.Value==guid).Key, "}"); teamDetail.Identity.SetProperty(IdentityPropertyScope.Local, key, value); _ids.UpdateExtendedProperties(teamDetail.Identity); Console.WriteLine("{0}Added Query '{1}' as Favorite", Environment.NewLine, queryName); } If you have any questions or suggestions leave a comment. Enjoy!

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Disaster Recovery Discovery

- by Rodney Landrum

Last weekend I joined several of my IT staff on a mission to perform a DR test in our remote CoLo center in a large South East city of the US. Can I be more obtuse? The goal was simple for me as the sole DBA in a throng of Windows, Storage, Network and SAN admins – restore the databases and make them work. There were 4 applications that back ended to 7 SQL Server databases on 4 different SQL Server instances. We would maintain the original server names, but beyond that it was fair game. We had time to prepare so I was able to script out or otherwise automate the recovery process. I used sp_help_revlogin for three of the servers, a bit of a cheat actually because restoring the Master database on the target DR servers was the specified course of action according to the DR procedures ( the caveat “IF REQUIRED” left it open to interpretation. I really wanted to avoid the step of restoring Master for a number of reasons but mainly because I did not want to deal with issues starting SQL Services afterward. Having to account for the location of TempDB and the version conflicts of the resource DBs were just two of the battles I chose not to fight. Not to mention other system database location problems that might arise and prevent SQL from starting. I was going to have to restore all of the user databases anyway, so I would not really gain any benefit, outside of logins, for taking the time to restore the source Master database over the newly installed one on the fresh server. What I wanted was the ability to restore the Master database as a user database, call it Master_Mine, from a backup on the source system and then use that restored database to script the SQL Logins and passwords on the DR systems. While I did not attempt this on the trip, the thought stuck in my mind and this past week I succeeded at scripting user accounts and passwords using only a restored copy of the Master database. Granted there were several challenges to overcome. Also, as is usual for any work like this the usual disclaimers apply: This is not something that I would imagine Microsoft would condone or support and this was really only an experiment for me to learn if it was even possible. While I have tested the process with success, I do not know that I would use this technique in a documented procedure because future updates for SQL Server will render this technique non-functional. I thought at first, incorrectly of course, that I could use sp_help_revlogin on a restored copy of the master database I named Master_Mine. Since sp_help_revlogin uses system schema objects, sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals, this was not going to work because all results would come from the main Master database. To test this I added a SQL login via SSMS, backed up Master, restored it as Master_Mine, and then deleted the login. Even though the test account I created should presumably still be in the Master_Mine database, I should be able to get to it and script out its creation with its password hash so that I would not need to know the password, but any applications that stored that password would not have to be altered in the DR scenario. They would just work as expected. Once I realized that would not work I began looking deeper. Knowing that sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals are system views, their underlying code should be available with sp_helptext, right? They were. And this led me to discover the two tables sys.sysxlgns and sys.sysprivs, where the data I needed was stored. These tables existed in both the real Master and the restored copy, Master_Mine. I used this information to tweak the sp_help_revlogin stored procedure to use these tables instead to create the logins cursor used in sp_help_revlogin. For the password hash, sp_help_revlogin uses the function LoginProperty() which takes a user name and option ‘passwordhash’ to return the hash for the user. Unfortunately, it requires the login to exist in the Master database. This would not work. So another slight modification I had to make was to pull the password hash itself (pwdhash from sys.sysxlgns) into the logins cursor and comment out the section of sp_help_revlogin that uses LoginProperty. Instead, I pass the pwdhash value as the variable @PWD_varbinary to the sp_hexadecimal stored procedure which is also created by and used within the code provided by Microsoft in the link above for sp_help_revlogin. The final challenge: sys.sysxlgns and sys.server_principals are visible only within a Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) query window in SSMS or within SQLCDMD. To open a DAC connection you have to be logged in on the SQL Server itself, via RDP in my case, and you preface the server name in the query connection with ADMIN:, so that the server connection looks like ADMIN:ServerName. From there you can create the modified stored procedure in the restored copy of a Master database from a source system as whatever name you like, and then run the modified stored procedure. I named my new stored procedure usp_help_revlogin_MyMaster. Upon execution I was happy to see the logins and password hashes that I needed to apply from the source Master database without having to restore over the new Master system database and without the need to access the original server (assuming it was down due to whatever disaster put it in that state). You will note that I am not providing full code samples here of the modifications. I will say that it was a slight bit of work and anyone who needed to do this for whatever reason, could fairly easily roll their own solution with the information provided herein. My goal, as I said was to prove that this could be done and provide another option if required to ease the burden of getting SQL Servers up and available in an emergency situation where alternatives may be more challenging or otherwise unavailable.

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Memento with optional state?

- by Korey Hinton

EDIT: As pointed out by Steve Evers and pdr, I am not correctly implementing the Memento pattern, my design is actually State pattern. Menu Program I built a console-based menu program with multiple levels that selects a particular test to run. Each level more precisely describes the operation. At any level you can type back to go back one level (memento). Level 1: Server Type? [1] Server A [2] Server B Level 2: Server environment? [1] test [2] production Level 3: Test type? [1] load [2] unit Level 4: Data Collection? [1] Legal docs [2] Corporate docs Level 4.5 (optional): Load Test Type [2] Multi TIF [2] Single PDF Level 5: Command Type? [1] Move [2] Copy [3] Remove [4] Custom Level 6: Enter a keyword [setup, cleanup, run] Design States PROBLEM: Right now the STATES enum is the determining factor as to what state is BACK and what state is NEXT yet it knows nothing about what the current memento state is. Has anyone experienced a similar issue and found an effective way to handle mementos with optional state? static enum STATES { SERVER, ENVIRONMENT, TEST_TYPE, COLLECTION, COMMAND_TYPE, KEYWORD, FINISHED } Possible Solution (Not-flexible) In reference to my code below, every case statement in the Menu class could check the state of currentMemo and then set the STATE (enum) accordingly to pass to the Builder. However, this doesn't seem flexible very flexible to change and I'm struggling to see an effective way refactor the design. class Menu extends StateConscious { private State state; private Scanner reader; private ServerUtils utility; Menu() { state = new State(); reader = new Scanner(System.in); utility = new ServerUtils(); } // Recurring menu logic public void startPromptingLoop() { List<State> states = new ArrayList<>(); states.add(new State()); boolean redoInput = false; boolean userIsDone = false; while (true) { // get Memento from last loop Memento currentMemento = states.get(states.size() - 1) .saveMemento(); if (currentMemento == null) currentMemento = new Memento.Builder(0).build(); if (!redoInput) System.out.println(currentMemento.prompt); redoInput = false; // prepare Memento for next loop Memento nextMemento = null; STATES state = STATES.values()[states.size() - 1]; // get user input String selection = reader.nextLine(); switch (selection) { case "exit": reader.close(); return; // only escape case "quit": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); states.clear(); break; case "back": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(previous(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); if (states.size() <= 1) { states.remove(0); } else { states.remove(states.size() - 1); states.remove(states.size() - 1); } break; case "1": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "2": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "3": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; case "4": nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); break; default: if (state.equals(STATES.CATEGORY)) { String command = selection; System.out.println("Executing " + command + " command on: " + currentMemento.type + " " + currentMemento.environment); utility.executeCommand(currentMemento.nickname, command); userIsDone = true; states.clear(); nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); } else if (state.equals(STATES.KEYWORD)) { nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(next(state), currentMemento, selection).build(); states.clear(); nextMemento = new Memento.Builder(first(), currentMemento, selection).build(); } else { redoInput = true; System.out.println("give it another try"); continue; } break; } if (userIsDone) { // start the recurring menu over from the beginning for (int i = 0; i < states.size(); i++) { if (i != 0) { states.remove(i); // remove all except first } } reader = new Scanner(System.in); this.state = new State(); userIsDone = false; } if (!redoInput) { this.state.restoreMemento(nextMemento); states.add(this.state); } } } }

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yield – Just yet another sexy c# keyword?

- by George Mamaladze

yield (see NSDN c# reference) operator came I guess with .NET 2.0 and I my feeling is that it’s not as wide used as it could (or should) be. I am not going to talk here about necessarity and advantages of using iterator pattern when accessing custom sequences (just google it). Let’s look at it from the clean code point of view. Let's see if it really helps us to keep our code understandable, reusable and testable. Let’s say we want to iterate a tree and do something with it’s nodes, for instance calculate a sum of their values. So the most elegant way would be to build a recursive method performing a classic depth traversal returning the sum. private int CalculateTreeSum(Node top) { int sumOfChildNodes = 0; foreach (Node childNode in top.ChildNodes) { sumOfChildNodes += CalculateTreeSum(childNode); } return top.Value + sumOfChildNodes; } “Do One Thing” Nevertheless it violates one of the most important rules “Do One Thing”. Our method CalculateTreeSum does two things at the same time. It travels inside the tree and performs some computation – in this case calculates sum. Doing two things in one method is definitely a bad thing because of several reasons: · Understandability: Readability / refactoring · Reuseability: when overriding - no chance to override computation without copying iteration code and vice versa. · Testability: you are not able to test computation without constructing the tree and you are not able to test correctness of tree iteration. I want to spend some more words on this last issue. How do you test the method CalculateTreeSum when it contains two in one: computation & iteration? The only chance is to construct a test tree and assert the result of the method call, in our case the sum against our expectation. And if the test fails you do not know wether was the computation algorithm wrong or was that the iteration? At the end to top it all off I tell you: according to Murphy’s Law the iteration will have a bug as well as the calculation. Both bugs in a combination will cause the sum to be accidentally exactly the same you expect and the test will PASS. J Ok let’s use yield! That’s why it is generally a very good idea not to mix but isolate “things”. Ok let’s use yield! private int CalculateTreeSumClean(Node top) { IEnumerable<Node> treeNodes = GetTreeNodes(top); return CalculateSum(treeNodes); } private int CalculateSum(IEnumerable<Node> nodes) { int sumOfNodes = 0; foreach (Node node in nodes) { sumOfNodes += node.Value; } return sumOfNodes; } private IEnumerable<Node> GetTreeNodes(Node top) { yield return top; foreach (Node childNode in top.ChildNodes) { foreach (Node currentNode in GetTreeNodes(childNode)) { yield return currentNode; } } } Two methods does not know anything about each other. One contains calculation logic another jut the iteration logic. You can relpace the tree iteration algorithm from depth traversal to breath trevaersal or use stack or visitor pattern instead of recursion. This will not influence your calculation logic. And vice versa you can relace the sum with product or do whatever you want with node values, the calculateion algorithm is not aware of beeng working on some tree or graph. How about not using yield? Now let’s ask the question – what if we do not have yield operator? The brief look at the generated code gives us an answer. The compiler generates a 150 lines long class to implement the iteration logic. [CompilerGenerated] private sealed class <GetTreeNodes>d__0 : IEnumerable<Node>, IEnumerable, IEnumerator<Node>, IEnumerator, IDisposable { ... 150 Lines of generated code ... } Often we compromise code readability, cleanness, testability, etc. – to reduce number of classes, code lines, keystrokes and mouse clicks. This is the human nature - we are lazy. Knowing and using such a sexy construct like yield, allows us to be lazy, write very few lines of code and at the same time stay clean and do one thing in a method. That's why I generally welcome using staff like that. Note: The above used recursive depth traversal algorithm is possibly the compact one but not the best one from the performance and memory utilization point of view. It was taken to emphasize on other primary aspects of this post.

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