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Refreshing Your PC Won’t Help: Why Bloatware is Still a Problem on Windows 8

- by Chris Hoffman

Bloatware is still a big problem on new Windows 8 and 8.1 PCs. Some websites will tell you that you can easily get rid of manufacturer-installed bloatware with Windows 8′s Reset feature, but they’re generally wrong. This junk software often turns the process of powering on your new PC from what could be a delightful experience into a tedious slog, forcing you to spend hours cleaning up your new PC before you can enjoy it. Why Refreshing Your PC (Probably) Won’t Help Manufacturers install software along with Windows on their new PCs. In addition to hardware drivers that allow the PC’s hardware to work properly, they install more questionable things like trial antivirus software and other nagware. Much of this software runs at boot, cluttering the system tray and slowing down boot times, often dramatically. Software companies pay computer manufacturers to include this stuff. It’s installed to make the PC manufacturer money at the cost of making the Windows computer worse for actual users. Windows 8 includes “Refresh Your PC” and “Reset Your PC” features that allow Windows users to quickly get their computers back to a fresh state. It’s essentially a quick, streamlined way of reinstalling Windows. If you install Windows 8 or 8.1 yourself, the Refresh operation will give your PC a clean Windows system without any additional third-party software. However, Microsoft allows computer manufacturers to customize their Refresh images. In other words, most computer manufacturers will build their drivers, bloatware, and other system customizations into the Refresh image. When you Refresh your computer, you’ll just get back to the factory-provided system complete with bloatware. It’s possible that some computer manufacturers aren’t building bloatware into their refresh images in this way. It’s also possible that, when Windows 8 came out, some computer manufacturer didn’t realize they could do this and that refreshing a new PC would strip the bloatware. However, on most Windows 8 and 8.1 PCs, you’ll probably see bloatware come back when you refresh your PC. It’s easy to understand how PC manufacturers do this. You can create your own Refresh images on Windows 8 and 8.1 with just a simple command, replacing Microsoft’s image with a customized one. Manufacturers can install their own refresh images in the same way. Microsoft doesn’t lock down the Refresh feature. Desktop Bloatware is Still Around, Even on Tablets! Not only is typical Windows desktop bloatware not gone, it has tagged along with Windows as it moves to new form factors. Every Windows tablet currently on the market — aside from Microsoft’s own Surface and Surface 2 tablets — runs on a standard Intel x86 chip. This means that every Windows 8 and 8.1 tablet you see in stores has a full desktop with the capability to run desktop software. Even if that tablet doesn’t come with a keyboard, it’s likely that the manufacturer has preinstalled bloatware on the tablet’s desktop. Yes, that means that your Windows tablet will be slower to boot and have less memory because junk and nagging software will be on its desktop and in its system tray. Microsoft considers tablets to be PCs, and PC manufacturers love installing their bloatware. If you pick up a Windows tablet, don’t be surprised if you have to deal with desktop bloatware on it. Microsoft Surfaces and Signature PCs Microsoft is now selling their own Surface PCs that they built themselves — they’re now a “devices and services” company after all, not a software company. One of the nice things about Microsoft’s Surface PCs is that they’re free of the typical bloatware. Microsoft won’t take money from Norton to include nagging software that worsens the experience. If you pick up a Surface device that provides Windows 8.1 and 8 as Microsoft intended it — or install a fresh Windows 8.1 or 8 system — you won’t see any bloatware. Microsoft is also continuing their Signature program. New PCs purchased from Microsoft’s official stores are considered “Signature PCs” and don’t have the typical bloatware. For example, the same laptop could be full of bloatware in a traditional computer store and clean, without the nasty bloatware when purchased from a Microsoft Store. Microsoft will also continue to charge you $99 if you want them to remove your computer’s bloatware for you — that’s the more questionable part of the Signature program. Windows 8 App Bloatware is an Improvement There’s a new type of bloatware on new Windows 8 systems, which is thankfully less harmful. This is bloatware in the form of included “Windows 8-style”, “Store-style”, or “Modern” apps in the new, tiled interface. For example, Amazon may pay a computer manufacturer to include the Amazon Kindle app from the Windows Store. (The manufacturer may also just receive a cut of book sales for including it. We’re not sure how the revenue sharing works — but it’s clear PC manufacturers are getting money from Amazon.) The manufacturer will then install the Amazon Kindle app from the Windows Store by default. This included software is technically some amount of clutter, but it doesn’t cause the problems older types of bloatware does. It won’t automatically load and delay your computer’s startup process, clutter your system tray, or take up memory while you’re using your computer. For this reason, a shift to including new-style apps as bloatware is a definite improvement over older styles of bloatware. Unfortunately, this type of bloatware has not replaced traditional desktop bloatware, and new Windows PCs will generally have both. Windows RT is Immune to Typical Bloatware, But… Microsoft’s Windows RT can’t run Microsoft desktop software, so it’s immune to traditional bloatware. Just as you can’t install your own desktop programs on it, the Windows RT device’s manufacturer can’t install their own desktop bloatware. While Windows RT could be an antidote to bloatware, this advantage comes at the cost of being able to install any type of desktop software at all. Windows RT has also seemingly failed — while a variety of manufacturers came out with their own Windows RT devices when Windows 8 was first released, they’ve all since been withdrawn from the market. Manufacturers who created Windows RT devices have criticized it in the media and stated they have no plans to produce any future Windows RT devices. The only Windows RT devices still on the market are Microsoft’s Surface (originally named Surface RT) and Surface 2. Nokia is also coming out with their own Windows RT tablet, but they’re in the process of being purchased by Microsoft. In other words, Windows RT just isn’t a factor when it comes to bloatware — you wouldn’t get a Windows RT device unless you purchased a Surface, but those wouldn’t come with bloatware anyway. Removing Bloatware or Reinstalling Windows 8.1 While bloatware is still a problem on new Windows systems and the Refresh option probably won’t help you, you can still eliminate bloatware in the traditional way. Bloatware can be uninstalled from the Windows Control Panel or with a dedicated removal tool like PC Decrapifier, which tries to automatically uninstall the junk for you. You can also do what Windows geeks have always tended to do with new computers — reinstall Windows 8 or 8.1 from scratch with installation media from Microsoft. You’ll get a clean Windows system and you can install only the hardware drivers and other software you need. Unfortunately, bloatware is still a big problem for Windows PCs. Windows 8 tries to do some things to address bloatware, but it ultimately comes up short. Most Windows PCs sold in most stores to most people will still have the typical bloatware slowing down the boot process, wasting memory, and adding clutter. Image Credit: LG on Flickr, Intel Free Press on Flickr, Wilson Hui on Flickr, Intel Free Press on Flickr, Vernon Chan on Flickr

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WebSocket and Java EE 7 - Getting Ready for JSR 356 (TOTD #181)

- by arungupta

WebSocket is developed as part of HTML 5 specification and provides a bi-directional, full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP socket. It provides dramatic improvement over the traditional approaches of Polling, Long-Polling, and Streaming for two-way communication. There is no latency from establishing new TCP connections for each HTTP message. There is a WebSocket API and the WebSocket Protocol. The Protocol defines "handshake" and "framing". The handshake defines how a normal HTTP connection can be upgraded to a WebSocket connection. The framing defines wire format of the message. The design philosophy is to keep the framing minimum to avoid the overhead. Both text and binary data can be sent using the API. WebSocket may look like a competing technology to Server-Sent Events (SSE), but they are not. Here are the key differences: WebSocket can send and receive data from a client. A typical example of WebSocket is a two-player game or a chat application. Server-Sent Events can only push data data to the client. A typical example of SSE is stock ticker or news feed. With SSE, XMLHttpRequest can be used to send data to the server. For server-only updates, WebSockets has an extra overhead and programming can be unecessarily complex. SSE provides a simple and easy-to-use model that is much better suited. SSEs are sent over traditional HTTP and so no modification is required on the server-side. WebSocket require servers that understand the protocol. SSE have several features that are missing from WebSocket such as automatic reconnection, event IDs, and the ability to send arbitrary events. The client automatically tries to reconnect if the connection is closed. The default wait before trying to reconnect is 3 seconds and can be configured by including "retry: XXXX\n" header where XXXX is the milliseconds to wait before trying to reconnect. Event stream can include a unique event identifier. This allows the server to determine which events need to be fired to each client in case the connection is dropped in between. The data can span multiple lines and can be of any text format as long as EventSource message handler can process it. WebSockets provide true real-time updates, SSE can be configured to provide close to real-time by setting appropriate timeouts. OK, so all excited about WebSocket ? Want to convert your POJOs into WebSockets endpoint ? websocket-sdk and GlassFish 4.0 is here to help! The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. On the server-side, the WebSocket SDK converts a POJO into a WebSocket endpoint using simple annotations. Here is how a WebSocket endpoint will look like: @WebSocket(path="/echo")public class EchoBean { @WebSocketMessage public String echo(String message) { return message + " (from your server)"; }} In this code "@WebSocket" is a class-level annotation that declares a POJO to accept WebSocket messages. The path at which the messages are accepted is specified in this annotation. "@WebSocketMessage" indicates the Java method that is invoked when the endpoint receives a message. This method implementation echoes the received message concatenated with an additional string. The client-side HTML page looks like <div style="text-align: center;"> <form action=""> <input onclick="send_echo()" value="Press me" type="button"> <input id="textID" name="message" value="Hello WebSocket!" type="text"><br> </form></div><div id="output"></div> WebSocket allows a full-duplex communication. So the client, a browser in this case, can send a message to a server, a WebSocket endpoint in this case. And the server can send a message to the client at the same time. This is unlike HTTP which follows a "request" followed by a "response". In this code, the "send_echo" method in the JavaScript is invoked on the button click. There is also a <div> placeholder to display the response from the WebSocket endpoint. The JavaScript looks like: <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> var wsUri = "ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo"; var websocket = new WebSocket(wsUri); websocket.onopen = function(evt) { onOpen(evt) }; websocket.onmessage = function(evt) { onMessage(evt) }; websocket.onerror = function(evt) { onError(evt) }; function init() { output = document.getElementById("output"); } function send_echo() { websocket.send(textID.value); writeToScreen("SENT: " + textID.value); } function onOpen(evt) { writeToScreen("CONNECTED"); } function onMessage(evt) { writeToScreen("RECEIVED: " + evt.data); } function onError(evt) { writeToScreen('<span style="color: red;">ERROR:</span> ' + evt.data); } function writeToScreen(message) { var pre = document.createElement("p"); pre.style.wordWrap = "break-word"; pre.innerHTML = message; output.appendChild(pre); } window.addEventListener("load", init, false);</script> In this code The URI to connect to on the server side is of the format ws://<HOST>:<PORT>/websockets/<PATH> "ws" is a new URI scheme introduced by the WebSocket protocol. <PATH> is the path on the endpoint where the WebSocket messages are accepted. In our case, it is ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo WEBSOCKET_SDK-1 will ensure that context root is included in the URI as well. WebSocket is created as a global object so that the connection is created only once. This object establishes a connection with the given host, port and the path at which the endpoint is listening. The WebSocket API defines several callbacks that can be registered on specific events. The "onopen", "onmessage", and "onerror" callbacks are registered in this case. The callbacks print a message on the browser indicating which one is called and additionally also prints the data sent/received. On the button click, the WebSocket object is used to transmit text data to the endpoint. Binary data can be sent as one blob or using buffering. The HTTP request headers sent for the WebSocket call are: GET ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo HTTP/1.1Origin: http://localhost:8080Connection: UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Extensions: x-webkit-deflate-frameHost: localhost:8080Sec-WebSocket-Key: mDbnYkAUi0b5Rnal9/cMvQ==Upgrade: websocketSec-WebSocket-Version: 13 And the response headers received are Connection:UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Accept:q4nmgFl/lEtU2ocyKZ64dtQvx10=Upgrade:websocket(Challenge Response):00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 The headers are shown in Chrome as shown below: The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. The builds from websocket-sdk are integrated in GlassFish 4.0 builds. Would you like to live on the bleeding edge ? Then follow the instructions below to check out the workspace and install the latest SDK: Check out the source code svn checkout https://svn.java.net/svn/websocket-sdk~source-code-repository Build and install the trunk in your local repository as: mvn install Copy "./bundles/websocket-osgi/target/websocket-osgi-0.3-SNAPSHOT.jar" to "glassfish3/glassfish/modules/websocket-osgi.jar" in your GlassFish 4 latest promoted build. Notice, you need to overwrite the JAR file. Anybody interested in building a cool application using WebSocket and get it running on GlassFish ? :-) This work will also feed into JSR 356 - Java API for WebSocket. On a lighter side, there seems to be less agreement on the name. Here are some of the options that are prevalent: WebSocket (W3C API, the URL is www.w3.org/TR/websockets though) Web Socket (HTML5 Demos - html5demos.com/web-socket) Websocket (Jenkins Plugin - wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Websocket%2BPlugin) WebSockets (Used by Mozilla - developer.mozilla.org/en/WebSockets, but use WebSocket as well) Web sockets (HTML5 Working Group - www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/network.html) Web Sockets (Chrome Blog - blog.chromium.org/2009/12/web-sockets-now-available-in-google.html) I prefer "WebSocket" as that seems to be most common usage and used by the W3C API as well. What do you use ?

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SharePoint 2010 Replaceable Parameter, some observations…

- by svdoever

SharePoint Tools for Visual Studio 2010 provides a rudimentary mechanism for replaceable parameters that you can use in files that are not compiled, like ascx files and your project property settings. The basics on this can be found in the documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee231545.aspx. There are some quirks however. For example: My Package name is MacawMastSP2010Templates, as defined in my Package properties: I want to use the $SharePoint.Package.Name$ replaceable parameter in my feature properties. But this parameter does not work in the “Deployment Path” property, while other parameters work there, while it works in the “Image Url” property. It just does not get expanded. So I had to resort to explicitly naming the first path of the deployment path: : You also see a special property for the “Receiver Class” in the format $SharePoint.Type.<GUID>.FullName$. The documentation gives the following description:The full name of the type matching the GUID in the token. The format of the GUID is lowercase and corresponds to the Guid.ToString(“D”) format (that is, xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx). Not very clear. After some searching it happened to be the guid as declared in my feature receiver code: In other properties you see a different set of replaceable parameters: We use a similar mechanism for replaceable parameter for years in our Macaw Solutions Factory for SharePoint 2007 development, where each replaceable parameter is a PowerShell function. This provides so much more power. For example in a feature declaration we can say: Code Snippet <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>  <Feature Id="[[$Feature.SampleFeature.ID]]" Title="MAST [[$MastSolutionName]] Sample Feature" Description="The MAST [[$MastSolutionName]] Sample Feature, where all possible elements in a feature are showcased" Version="1.0.0.0" Scope="Site" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="[[FeatureImage]]" ReceiverAssembly="[[FeatureReceiverAssemblySignature]]" ReceiverClass="[[FeatureReceiverClass]]" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> <ElementManifests> <ElementManifest Location="ExampleCustomActions.xml" /> <ElementManifest Location="ExampleSiteColumns.xml" /> <ElementManifest Location="ExampleContentTypes.xml" /> <ElementManifest Location="ExampleDocLib.xml" /> <ElementManifest Location="ExampleMasterPages.xml" />  [[GenerateXmlNodesForFiles -path 'ExampleDocLib\*.*' -node 'ElementFile' -attributes @{Location = { RelativePathToExpansionSourceFile -path $_ }}]] [[GenerateXmlNodesForFiles -path 'ExampleMasterPages\*.*' -node 'ElementFile' -attributes @{Location = { RelativePathToExpansionSourceFile -path $_ }}]] [[GenerateXmlNodesForFiles -path 'Resources\*.resx' -node 'ElementFile' -attributes @{Location = { RelativePathToExpansionSourceFile -path $_ }}]] </ElementManifests> </Feature> We have a solution level PowerShell script file named TemplateExpansionConfiguration.ps1 where we declare our variables (starting with a $) and include helper functions: Code Snippet # ============================================================================================== # NAME: product:\src\Wss3\Templates\TemplateExpansionConfiguration.ps1 # # AUTHOR: Serge van den Oever, Macaw # DATE : May 24, 2007 # # COMMENT: # Nota bene: define variable and function definitions global to be visible during template expansion. # # ============================================================================================== Set-PSDebug -strict -trace 0 #variables must have value before usage $global:ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop' # Stop on errors $global:VerbosePreference = 'Continue' # set to SilentlyContinue to get no verbose output # Load template expansion utility functions . product:\tools\Wss3\MastDeploy\TemplateExpansionUtil.ps1 # If exists add solution expansion utility functions $solutionTemplateExpansionUtilFile = $MastSolutionDir + "\TemplateExpansionUtil.ps1" if ((Test-Path -Path $solutionTemplateExpansionUtilFile)) { . $solutionTemplateExpansionUtilFile } # ============================================================================================== # Expected: $Solution.ID; Unique GUID value identifying the solution (DON'T INCLUDE BRACKETS). # function: guid:UpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{...}' ensures correct syntax $global:Solution = @{ ID = GuidUpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{d366ced4-0b98-4fa8-b256-c5a35bcbc98b}'; } # DON'T INCLUDE BRACKETS for feature id's!!! # function: GuidUpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{...}' ensures correct syntax $global:Feature = @{ SampleFeature = @{ ID = GuidUpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{35de59f4-0c8e-405e-b760-15234fe6885c}'; } } $global:SiteDefinition = @{ TemplateBlankSite = @{ ID = '12346'; } } # To inherit from this content type add the delimiter (00) and then your own guid # ID: <base>00<newguid> $global:ContentType = @{ ExampleContentType = @{ ID = '0x01008e5e167ba2db4bfeb3810c4a7ff72913'; } } # INCLUDE BRACKETS for column id's and make them LOWER CASE!!! # function: GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{...}' ensures correct syntax $global:SiteColumn = @{ ExampleChoiceField = @{ ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{69d38ce4-2771-43b4-a861-f14247885fe9}'; }; ExampleBooleanField = @{ ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{76f794e6-f7bd-490e-a53e-07efdf967169}'; }; ExampleDateTimeField = @{ ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{6f176e6e-22d2-453a-8dad-8ab17ac12387}'; }; ExampleNumberField = @{ ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{6026947f-f102-436b-abfd-fece49495788}'; }; ExampleTextField = @{ ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{23ca1c29-5ef0-4b3d-93cd-0d1d2b6ddbde}'; }; ExampleUserField = @{ ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{ee55b9f1-7b7c-4a7e-9892-3e35729bb1a5}'; }; ExampleNoteField = @{ ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{f9aa8da3-1f30-48a6-a0af-aa0a643d9ed4}'; }; } This gives so much more possibilities, like for example the elements file expansion where a PowerShell function iterates through a folder and generates the required XML nodes. I think I will bring back this mechanism, so it can work together with the built-in replaceable parameters, there are hooks to define you custom replacements as described by Waldek in this blog post.

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You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development Expert if…

- by Mark Rackley

So, all you aspiring SharePoint experts out there (especially those of you who put “expert” in your resumes). It’s time for a cold cool splash of reality. More than likely you are NOT an expert (I know I’m not). Yes, you may have some expertise in certain aspects in SharePoint (it’s questionable if I have THAT some days), but make sure you’ve got the basics down before you start throwing that word “expert” around. I know that it becomes frustrating to those looking to hire SharePoint people and having to sift through all the resumes of those who think very highly of themselves and their skills only to find those gaping holes in common best practices. I’m much more willing to hire a decent dev who KNOWS they are not an expert than to hire a decent+ dev who THINKS they are an expert. So… I’ve compiled a small reality check for you SharePoint Devs. and a “red flag” check for those of you wishing to hire a SharePoint developer. If any of these apply to you, you are probably not a SharePoint Development Expert. You are not a SharePoint Development Expert if you manually copy your DLLs Seriously, I don’t care if you write the best code in the world. If you are manually copying files to each web front end you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert. Yes, I realize the admins are generally the ones who do the actual deployments, but if you don’t know how to create solution packages for your admins, you are going to end up doing more damage than good some day. There are TONS of tools out there to help generate deployable solutions for you. You have ZERO excuse. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you can’t tell me the main artifacts of a solution package Directly related to the first one. If you don’t know what the Manifest, DDF, WSP, and Feature files are and how they are used in a solution package, you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. I’m not asking you to be able to write them all from scratch (heck, I can’t even do that), but you MUST know what they are and how to tweak them if necessary. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know what a Content Type or a Site Column is You would be absolutely amazed at how many “Expert” SharePoint Developers have NEVER EVER created a Content Type or Site Column or even know what they are. I mean, why would you ever want to create those when you can just do everything as a custom list or custom field? right???? (that’s sarcasm). You also need to know how to package a Content Type and a Site Column into a deployable package by the way. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you have not created at least one Web Part, Workflow, Timer Job, and Event Handler. If you haven’t written at least one of each, you don’t fully understand what they do or their limitations. Again, I expect NO ONE to be able to write these things blind. I think the last time I wrote an application from scratch without copying and pasting from another project I had done before was back in 1994? Seriously, coding is like a Sour Dough starter, you get it from someone else and keep adding to it. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know how to properly dispose of objects Another biggie with zero excuse for getting it wrong. It is so well known that you must dispose of your SPWeb and SPSite objects that if you aren’t doing it then you are not an expert. Heck, if you utilize “using” when handling SPWeb and SPSite objects and don’t realize that it disposes of those objects for you, then you are not a SharePoint Development expert. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you do not know how to properly elevate privileges Just one of those development basics that any decent SharePoint Developer has got to have down and understand how and why it’s used You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know all of the development options available to SharePoint and when they should be used Okay… so all you hard core .NET SharePoint dev geeks take a moment to listen. You may be the most top not SharePoint .NET developer in the world, but if you are opening Visual Studio to solve every problem in SharePoint, then you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. The SharePoint developer’s tool kit is growing every day with tools like Visual Studio, Data View Web Parts, XSL, jQuery, SPServices, etc. etc… If you don’t have the ability to at least recognize that “hey, you can basically do the same thing here but just dropping in Easy Tabs instead of writing some weird web part” then you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert AND you are doing a huge disservice to your clients and customers. You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development expert if you call yourself an Expert So, truth telling time. I’m not an expert. There, I said it. I feel so much better. Now, I realize the word “expert” has been used with my name before, but I am quick to point out that I KNOW the experts and know that they will help me if I need it, but I’m not an expert in all things SharePoint. The minute you take on that moniker you are setting yourself up for a fall. It’s too big, there’s too much to know, and there’s WAY too much you can do wrong. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you are not involved in the community I expect to get the most flack for this one, but it’s always a huge red flag for me when someone says they are an expert and has ZERO knowledge of the SharePoint community. The SharePoint community is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to be an effective SharePoint developer, admin, architect, power user or whatever the heck you are!! The community keeps you sane, tells you when you are NOT using a best practice, recommends the best practice, and even knows when Microsoft is giving you the wrong information (*gasp* it does happen). If you can’t tell me who you are following on twitter, who's blog you read, what conferences you attend, or name the experts who you monitor to make sure you are not doing something stupid, then you are probably doing something stupid. Again, not asking you to be a speaker, blogger, or the least bit extroverted but you should be at LEAST stalking the experts. So… what’s the point? So… yeah… what’s my point in all this. Well, first of all let me point out that this is by far not a finished list and I could come up with a LOT more specific “deep dive” questions, but these should be high enough level that even non experts can recognize and ask them. If you have some common ones you run into let me know and add them in the comments below. Also, keep in mind I’m not saying you as a developer HAVE to know EVERYTHING, but you DO need to know what you don’t know and proudly and honestly state “I don’t know, but I’ll learn and find out”. Those of us hiring SharePoint developers and know and have a passion for SharePoint are not looking for that elusive “expert” who knows everything. We are looking for someone who “gets it”, has a similar passion, great attitude, an understanding that they DON’T know everything, and a desire to do it right. I would bet money that most SharePoint development disasters happen because of “experts” who think they know everything rather than the developer who is cautious and knows he doesn’t. Lastly, I know there’s a raging debate over what a “SharePoint Developer” is (I should know, as I keep bringing it up). So, obviously this blog post is more closely tied to the .NET side of SharePoint development and less towards the client side, middle tier, or whatever you want to call it. So, let’s please not get that argument going here as well… Thanks

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Extending NerdDinner: Adding Geolocated Flair

- by Jon Galloway

NerdDinner is a website with the audacious goal of “Organizing the world’s nerds and helping them eat in packs.” Because nerds aren’t likely to socialize with others unless a website tells them to do it. Scott Hanselman showed off a lot of the cool features we’ve added to NerdDinner lately during his popular talk at MIX10, Beyond File | New Company: From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform. Did you miss it? Go ahead and watch it, I’ll wait. One of the features we wanted to add was flair. You know about flair, right? It’s a way to let folks who like your site show it off in their own site. For example, here’s my StackOverflow flair: Great! So how could we add some of this flair stuff to NerdDinner? What do we want to show? If we’re going to encourage our users to give up a bit of their beautiful website to show off a bit of ours, we need to think about what they’ll want to show. For instance, my StackOverflow flair is all about me, not StackOverflow. So how will this apply to NerdDinner? Since NerdDinner is all about organizing local dinners, in order for the flair to be useful it needs to make sense for the person viewing the web page. If someone visits from Egypt visits my blog, they should see information about NerdDinners in Egypt. That’s geolocation – localizing site content based on where the browser’s sitting, and it makes sense for flair as well as entire websites. So we’ll set up a simple little callout that prompts them to host a dinner in their area: Hopefully our flair works and there is a dinner near your viewers, so they’ll see another view which lists upcoming dinners near them: The Geolocation Part Generally website geolocation is done by mapping the requestor’s IP address to a geographic area. It’s not an exact science, but I’ve always found it to be pretty accurate. There are (at least) three ways to handle it: You pay somebody like MaxMind for a database (with regular updates) that sits on your server, and you use their API to do lookups. I used this on a pretty big project a few years ago and it worked well. You use HTML 5 Geolocation API or Google Gears or some other browser based solution. I think those are cool (I use Google Gears a lot), but they’re both in flux right now and I don’t think either has a wide enough of an install base yet to rely on them. You might want to, but I’ve heard you do all kinds of crazy stuff, and sometimes it gets you in trouble. I don’t mean talk out of line, but we all laugh behind your back a bit. But, hey, it’s up to you. It’s your flair or whatever. There are some free webservices out there that will take an IP address and give you location information. Easy, and works for everyone. That’s what we’re doing. I looked at a few different services and settled on IPInfoDB. It’s free, has a great API, and even returns JSON, which is handy for Javascript use. The IP query is pretty simple. We hit a URL like this: http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=74.125.45.100&timezone=false … and we get an XML response back like this… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Response> <Ip>74.125.45.100</Ip> <Status>OK</Status> <CountryCode>US</CountryCode> <CountryName>United States</CountryName> <RegionCode>06</RegionCode> <RegionName>California</RegionName> <City>Mountain View</City> <ZipPostalCode>94043</ZipPostalCode> <Latitude>37.4192</Latitude> <Longitude>-122.057</Longitude> </Response> So we’ll build some data transfer classes to hold the location information, like this: public class LocationInfo { public string Country { get; set; } public string RegionName { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string ZipPostalCode { get; set; } public LatLong Position { get; set; } } public class LatLong { public float Lat { get; set; } public float Long { get; set; } } And now hitting the service is pretty simple: public static LocationInfo HostIpToPlaceName(string ip) { string url = "http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip={0}&timezone=false"; url = String.Format(url, ip); var result = XDocument.Load(url); var location = (from x in result.Descendants("Response") select new LocationInfo { City = (string)x.Element("City"), RegionName = (string)x.Element("RegionName"), Country = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), ZipPostalCode = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), Position = new LatLong { Lat = (float)x.Element("Latitude"), Long = (float)x.Element("Longitude") } }).First(); return location; } Getting The User’s IP Okay, but first we need the end user’s IP, and you’d think it would be as simple as reading the value from HttpContext: HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress But you’d be wrong. Sorry. UserHostAddress just wraps HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"], but that doesn’t get you the IP for users behind a proxy. That’s in another header, “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR". So you can either hit a wrapper and then check a header, or just check two headers. I went for uniformity: string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; We’re almost set to wrap this up, but first let’s talk about our views. Yes, views, because we’ll have two. Selecting the View We wanted to make it easy for people to include the flair in their sites, so we looked around at how other people were doing this. The StackOverflow folks have a pretty good flair system, which allows you to include the flair in your site as either an IFRAME reference or a Javascript include. We’ll do both. We have a ServicesController to handle use of the site information outside of NerdDinner.com, so this fits in pretty well there. We’ll be displaying the same information for both HTML and Javascript flair, so we can use one Flair controller action which will return a different view depending on the requested format. Here’s our general flow for our controller action: Get the user’s IP Translate it to a location Grab the top three upcoming dinners that are near that location Select the view based on the format (defaulted to “html”) Return a FlairViewModel which contains the list of dinners and the location information public ActionResult Flair(string format = "html") { string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty( Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; var location = GeolocationService.HostIpToPlaceName(SourceIP); var dinners = dinnerRepository. FindByLocation(location.Position.Lat, location.Position.Long). OrderByDescending(p => p.EventDate).Take(3); // Select the view we'll return. // Using a switch because we'll add in JSON and other formats later. string view; switch (format.ToLower()) { case "javascript": view = "JavascriptFlair"; break; default: view = "Flair"; break; } return View( view, new FlairViewModel { Dinners = dinners.ToList(), LocationName = string.IsNullOrEmpty(location.City) ? "you" : String.Format("{0}, {1}", location.City, location.RegionName) } ); } Note: I’m not in love with the logic here, but it seems like overkill to extract the switch statement away when we’ll probably just have two or three views. What do you think? The HTML View The HTML version of the view is pretty simple – the only thing of any real interest here is the use of an extension method to truncate strings that are would cause the titles to wrap. public static string Truncate(this string s, int maxLength) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(s) || maxLength <= 0) return string.Empty; else if (s.Length > maxLength) return s.Substring(0, maxLength) + "..."; else return s; } So here’s how the HTML view ends up looking: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<FlairViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Nerd Dinner</title> <link href="/Content/Flair.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="nd-wrapper"> <h2 id="nd-header">NerdDinner.com</h2> <div id="nd-outer"> <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> <div id="nd-bummer"> Looks like there's no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create">host one</a>?</div> <% } else { %> <h3> Dinners Near You</h3> <ul> <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> <li> <%: Html.ActionLink(String.Format("{0} with {1} on {2}", item.Title.Truncate(20), item.HostedBy, item.EventDate.ToShortDateString()), "Details", "Dinners", new { id = item.DinnerID }, new { target = "_blank" })%></li> <% } %> </ul> <% } %> <div id="nd-footer"> More dinners and fun at <a target="_blank" href="http://nrddnr.com">http://nrddnr.com</a></div> </div> </div> </body> </html> You’d include this in a page using an IFRAME, like this: <IFRAME height=230 marginHeight=0 src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair" frameBorder=0 width=160 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME> The Javascript view The Javascript flair is written so you can include it in a webpage with a simple script include, like this: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair?format=javascript"></script> The goal of this view is very similar to the HTML embed view, with a few exceptions: We’re creating a script element and adding it to the head of the document, which will then document.write out the content. Note that you have to consider if your users will actually have a <head> element in their documents, but for website flair use cases I think that’s a safe bet. Since the content is being added to the existing page rather than shown in an IFRAME, all links need to be absolute. That means we can’t use Html.ActionLink, since it generates relative routes. We need to escape everything since it’s being written out as strings. We need to set the content type to application/x-javascript. The easiest way to do that is to use the <%@ Page ContentType%> directive. <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<NerdDinner.Models.FlairViewModel>" ContentType="application/x-javascript" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> document.write('<script>var link = document.createElement(\"link\");link.href = \"http://nerddinner.com/content/Flair.css\";link.rel = \"stylesheet\";link.type = \"text/css\";var head = document.getElementsByTagName(\"head\")[0];head.appendChild(link);</script>'); document.write('<div id=\"nd-wrapper\"><h2 id=\"nd-header\">NerdDinner.com</h2><div id=\"nd-outer\">'); <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-bummer\">Looks like there\'s no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create\">host one</a>?</div>'); <% } else { %> document.write('<h3> Dinners Near You</h3><ul>'); <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> document.write('<li><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com/<%: item.DinnerID %>\"><%: item.Title.Truncate(20) %> with <%: item.HostedBy %> on <%: item.EventDate.ToShortDateString() %></a></li>'); <% } %> document.write('</ul>'); <% } %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-footer\"> More dinners and fun at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com\">http://nrddnr.com</a></div></div></div>'); Getting IP’s for Testing There are a variety of online services that will translate a location to an IP, which were handy for testing these out. I found http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html to be most useful, but I’m open to suggestions if you know of something better. Next steps I think the next step here is to minimize load – you know, in case people start actually using this flair. There are two places to think about – the NerdDinner.com servers, and the services we’re using for Geolocation. I usually think about caching as a first attack on server load, but that’s less helpful here since every user will have a different IP. Instead, I’d look at taking advantage of Asynchronous Controller Actions, a cool new feature in ASP.NET MVC 2. Async Actions let you call a potentially long-running webservice without tying up a thread on the server while waiting for the response. There’s some good info on that in the MSDN documentation, and Dino Esposito wrote a great article on Asynchronous ASP.NET Pages in the April 2010 issue of MSDN Magazine. But let’s think of the children, shall we? What about ipinfodb.com? Well, they don’t have specific daily limits, but they do throttle you if you put a lot of traffic on them. From their FAQ: We do not have a specific daily limit but queries that are at a rate faster than 2 per second will be put in "queue". If you stay below 2 queries/second everything will be normal. If you go over the limit, you will still get an answer for all queries but they will be slowed down to about 1 per second. This should not affect most users but for high volume websites, you can either use our IP database on your server or we can whitelist your IP for 5$/month (simply use the donate form and leave a comment with your server IP). Good programming practices such as not querying our API for all page views (you can store the data in a cookie or a database) will also help not reaching the limit. So the first step there is to save the geolocalization information in a time-limited cookie, which will allow us to look up the local dinners immediately without having to hit the geolocation service.

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T3 Internet - The Great Internet Network for your Call Center Company

The most beneficial internet connection to get for your contact center enterprise would be a T3 Internetconnection. You are able to assume so several fantastic points from this type of connection, co... [Author: Van Theodorou - Computers and Internet - May 29, 2010]

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Make your code gooder with the goodies gem

- by kerry

I have decided to publish all my Ruby tools via a gem called ‘goodies’. To install this gem simply type ‘gem install goodies’. The source is hosted on GitHub. The first version (0.1) has the Hash object accessors and the String file path utility methods discussed in the previous two posts. Enjoy! Ruby Goodies @ GitHub Goodies on gemcutter.org

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Crystal Reports for VS deployment to Web Application doesn't work (3 replies)

I've followed the "documentation" for getting crystal reports to work on a production web site. I've migrated a VS 2003 web project to a VS 2008 web application. Everything works fine on my dev box. publish the site out to the server (2003 X86) and no go on the reports, get the infamous: ***** Error Type: System.IO.FileLoadException ***** Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDeci...

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SQL SERVER – 5 Tips for Improving Your Data with expressor Studio

- by pinaldave

It’s no secret that bad data leads to bad decisions and poor results. However, how do you prevent dirty data from taking up residency in your data store? Some might argue that it’s the responsibility of the person sending you the data. While that may be true, in practice that will rarely hold up. It doesn’t matter how many times you ask, you will get the data however they decide to provide it. So now you have bad data. What constitutes bad data? There are quite a few valid answers, for example: Invalid date values Inappropriate characters Wrong data Values that exceed a pre-set threshold While it is certainly possible to write your own scripts and custom SQL to identify and deal with these data anomalies, that effort often takes too long and becomes difficult to maintain. Instead, leveraging an ETL tool like expressor Studio makes the data cleansing process much easier and faster. Below are some tips for leveraging expressor to get your data into tip-top shape. Tip 1: Build reusable data objects with embedded cleansing rules One of the new features in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to define constraints at the metadata level. Using expressor’s concept of Semantic Types, you can define reusable data objects that have embedded logic such as constraints for dealing with dirty data. Once defined, they can be saved as a shared atomic type and then re-applied to other data attributes in other schemas. As you can see in the figure above, I’ve defined a constraint on zip code. I can then save the constraint rules I defined for zip code as a shared atomic type called zip_type for example. The next time I get a different data source with a schema that also contains a zip code field, I can simply apply the shared atomic type (shown below) and the previously defined constraints will be automatically applied. Tip 2: Unlock the power of regular expressions in Semantic Types Another powerful feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the option to use regular expressions as a constraint. A regular expression is used to identify patterns within data. The patterns could be something as simple as a date format or something much more complex such as a street address. For example, I could define that a valid IP address should be made up of 4 numbers, each 0 to 255, and separated by a period. So 192.168.23.123 might be a valid IP address whereas 888.777.0.123 would not be. How can I account for this using regular expressions? A very simple regular expression that would look for any 4 sets of 3 digits separated by a period would be: ^[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}$ Alternatively, the following would be the exact check for truly valid IP addresses as we had defined above: ^(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])$ . In expressor, we would enter this regular expression as a constraint like this: Here we select the corrective action to be ‘Escalate’, meaning that the expressor Dataflow operator will decide what to do. Some of the options include rejecting the offending record, skipping it, or aborting the dataflow. Tip 3: Email pattern expressions that might come in handy In the example schema that I am using, there’s a field for email. Email addresses are often entered incorrectly because people are trying to avoid spam. While there are a lot of different ways to define what constitutes a valid email address, a quick search online yields a couple of really useful regular expressions for validating email addresses: This one is short and sweet: \b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b (Source: http://www.regular-expressions.info/) This one is more specific about which characters are allowed: ^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$ (Source: http://regexlib.com/REDetails.aspx?regexp_id=26 ) Tip 4: Reject “dirty data” for analysis or further processing Yet another feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to reject records based on constraint violations. To capture reject records on input, simply specify Reject Record in the Error Handling setting for the Read File operator. Then attach a Write File operator to the reject port of the Read File operator as such: Next, in the Write File operator, you can configure the expressor operator in a similar way to the Read File. The key difference would be that the schema needs to be derived from the upstream operator as shown below: Once configured, expressor will output rejected records to the file you specified. In addition to the rejected records, expressor also captures some diagnostic information that will be helpful towards identifying why the record was rejected. This makes diagnosing errors much easier! Tip 5: Use a Filter or Transform after the initial cleansing to finish the job Sometimes you may want to predicate the data cleansing on a more complex set of conditions. For example, I may only be interested in processing data containing males over the age of 25 in certain zip codes. Using an expressor Filter operator, you can define the conditional logic which isolates the records of importance away from the others. Alternatively, the expressor Transform operator can be used to alter the input value via a user defined algorithm or transformation. It also supports the use of conditional logic and data can be rejected based on constraint violations. However, the best tip I can leave you with is to not constrain your solution design approach – expressor operators can be combined in many different ways to achieve the desired results. For example, in the expressor Dataflow below, I can post-process the reject data from the Filter which did not meet my pre-defined criteria and, if successful, Funnel it back into the flow so that it gets written to the target table. I continue to be impressed that expressor offers all this functionality as part of their FREE expressor Studio desktop ETL tool, which you can download from here. Their Studio ETL tool is absolutely free and they are very open about saying that if you want to deploy their software on a dedicated Windows Server, you need to purchase their server software, whose pricing is posted on their website. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Developer’s Life – Disaster Lessons – Notes from the Field #039

- by Pinal Dave

[Note from Pinal]: This is a 39th episode of Notes from the Field series. What is the best solution do you have when you encounter a disaster in your organization. Now many of you would answer that in this scenario you would have another standby machine or alternative which you will plug in. Now let me ask second question – What would you do if you as an individual faces disaster? In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Mike Walsh explains a very crucial issue we face in our career, which is not technical but more to relate to human nature. Read on this may be the best blog post you might read in recent times. Howdy! When it was my turn to share the Notes from the Field last time, I took a departure from my normal technical content to talk about Attitude and Communication.(http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2014/05/08/developers-life-attitude-and-communication-they-can-cause-problems-notes-from-the-field-027/) Pinal said it was a popular topic so I hope he won’t mind if I stick with Professional Development for another of my turns at sharing some information here. Like I said last time, the “soft skills” of the IT world are often just as important – sometimes more important – than the technical skills. As a consultant with Linchpin People – I see so many situations where the professional skills I’ve gained and use are more valuable to clients than knowing the best way to tune a query. Today I want to continue talking about professional development and tell you about the way I almost got myself hit by a train – and why that matters in our day jobs. Sometimes we can learn a lot from disasters. Whether we caused them or someone else did. If you are interested in learning about some of my observations in these lessons you can see more where I talk about lessons from disasters on my blog. For now, though, onto how I almost got my vehicle hit by a train… The Train Crash That Almost Was…. My family and I own a little schoolhouse building about a 10 mile drive away from our house. We use it as a free resource for families in the area that homeschool their children – so they can have some class space. I go up there a lot to check in on the property, to take care of the trash and to do work on the property. On the way there, there is a very small Stop Sign controlled railroad intersection. There is only two small freight trains a day passing there. Actually the same train, making a journey south and then back North. That’s it. This road is a small rural road, barely ever a second car driving in the neighborhood there when I am. The stop sign is pretty much there only for the train crossing. When we first bought the building, I was up there a lot doing renovations on the property. Being familiar with the area, I am also familiar with the train schedule and know the tracks are normally free of trains. So I developed a bad habit. You see, I’d approach the stop sign and slow down as I roll through it. Sometimes I’d do a quick look and come to an “almost” stop there but keep on going. I let my impatience and complacency take over. And that is because most of the time I was going there long after the train was done for the day or in between the runs. This habit became pretty well established after a couple years of driving the route. The behavior reinforced a bit by the success ratio. I saw others doing it as well from the neighborhood when I would happen to be there around the time another car was there. Well. You already know where this ends up by the title and backstory here. A few months ago I came to that little crossing, and I started to do the normal routine. I’d pretty much stopped looking in some respects because of the pattern I’d gotten into. For some reason I looked and heard and saw the train slowly approaching and slammed on my brakes and stopped. It was an abrupt stop, and it was close. I probably would have made it okay, but I sat there thinking about lessons for IT professionals from the situation once I started breathing again and watched the cars loaded with sand and propane slowly labored down the tracks… Here are Those Lessons… It’s easy to get stuck into a routine – That isn’t always bad. Except when it’s a bad routine. Momentum and inertia are powerful. Once you have a habit and a routine developed – it’s really hard to break that. Make sure you are setting the right routines and habits TODAY. What almost dangerous things are you doing today? How are you almost messing up your production environment today? Stop doing that. Be Deliberate – (Even when you are the only one) – Like I said – a lot of people roll through that stop sign. Perhaps the neighbors or other drivers think “why is he fully stopping and looking… The train only comes two times a day!” – they can think that all they want. Through deliberate actions and forcing myself to pay attention, I will avoid that oops again. Slow down. Take a deep breath. Be Deliberate in your job. Pay attention to the small stuff and go out of your way to be careful. It will save you later. Be Observant – Keep your eyes open. By looking around, observing the situation and understanding what your servers, databases, users and vendors are doing – you’ll notice when something is out of place. But if you don’t know what is normal, if you don’t look to make sure nothing has changed – that train will come and get you. Where can you be more observant? What warning signs are you ignoring in your environment today? In the IT world – trains are everywhere. Projects move fast. Decisions happen fast. Problems turn from a warning sign to a disaster quickly. If you get stuck in a complacent pattern of “Everything is okay, it always has been and always will be” – that’s the time that you will most likely get stuck in a bad situation. Don’t let yourself get complacent, don’t let your team get complacent. That will lead to being proactive. And a proactive environment spends less money on consultants for troubleshooting problems you should have seen ahead of time. You can spend your money and IT budget on improving for your customers. If you want to get started with performance analytics and triage of virtualized SQL Servers with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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Querying Networking Statistics: dlstat(1M)

- by user12612042

Oracle Solaris 11 took another big leap forward in networking technologies providing a reliable, secure and scalable infrastructure to meet the growing needs of today's datacenter implementations. Oracle Solaris 11 introduced a new and powerful network stack architecture, also known as Project Crossbow. From Solaris 11 onwards, we introduced a command line tool viz. dlstat(1M) to query network statistics. dlstat (for datalink statistics) is a statistics querying counterpart for dladm(1M) - the datalink administration tool. The tool is very easy to get started. Just type dlstat on a shell prompt on Solaris 11 (or later). For example,: # dlstat LINK IPKTS RBYTES OPKTS OBYTES net0 834.11K 145.91M 575.19K 104.24M net1 7.87K 2.04M 0 0 In this example, the system has two datalinks net0 and net1. The output columns denote input packets/bytes as well as output packets/bytes. The numbers are abbreviated in xxx.xxUnit format. However, one could get the actual counts by simply running dlstat -u R (R for raw): # dlstat -u R LINK IPKTS RBYTES OPKTS OBYTES net0 834271 145931244 575246 104242934 net1 7869 2036958 0 0 In addition, dlstat also supports various subcommands dlstat help The following subcommands are supported: Stats : show-aggr show-ether show-link show-phys show-bridge For more info, run: dlstat help {default|} I will only describe couple of interesting subcommands/options here. For a comprehensive description of all the dlstat subcommands refer dlstat's official manual . For NICs that support multiple rings (e.g. ixgbe), dlstat show-phys -r allows us to query per Rx ring statistics. For example: dlstat show-phys -r net4 LINK TYPE INDEX IPKTS RBYTES net4 rx 0 0 0 net4 rx 1 0 0 net4 rx 2 0 0 net4 rx 3 0 0 net4 rx 4 0 0 net4 rx 5 0 0 net4 rx 6 0 0 net4 rx 7 0 0 In this case, net4 is just a vanity name for an ixgbe datalink. This view is especially useful if one wants to look at the network traffic spread across all the available rings. Furthermore, any of the dlstat commands could be run with -i option to periodically query and display stats. For example, running dlstat show-phys -r net4 -i 5 will emit per Rx ring stats every 5 seconds. This is especially useful while analyzing a live system. Similarly, dlstat show-phys -t could be used to query per Tx ring stats. -r and -t could also be combined as dlstat show-phys -rt to query both Rx as well as Tx stats at the same time. Finally, there is also a quick way to dump ALL the stats. Just run dlstat -A. You probably want to redirect this output to a file because you are going to get a whole load of stats :-).

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Create a Shortcut to Put Your Windows Computer into Hibernation

- by Mysticgeek

Putting your Windows computer into Hibernation Mode allows you to save power, and quickly access your desktop again when you need it. Here we show how to create a shortcut to put your PC in Hibernation Mode quickly. Note: Here we show how to create the shortcut in Windows 7 and add it to the Taskbar. But creating the shortcut should work in XP and Vista as well. Create Shortcut Right-click an empty area on your desktop and select New \ Shortcut from the Context Menu. In the Create Shortcut window type or copy the following in the location field… C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll, SetSuspendState 0,1,0 Now give the shortcut a name such as Hibernate Computer or whatever you want to call it. Now you have the shortcut on your desktop, but you might want to change the icon to something else. Change Shortcut Icon Right-click the shortcut icon and select Properties. Select the Shortcut Tab and click the Change Icon button. In the Look for icons in this file field copy and past the following then click OK. %SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll This brings up a list of included Windows icons you can choose from. Select whatever you want it to be. There are a couple of Power icons in the directory…click OK. Of course you can choose any icon you want, if you customize your icons just browse to the directory they are in. For more on selecting icons check out our article on how to customize your icons in Windows 7 or how to change a file type’s icon. Now you will see the icon in the Shortcut Properties window, click OK. Here we have a nice looking shortcut that you can use to put your machine into Hibernation. Or here we used a customized Star Trek icon just to make things more interesting… You can pin the shortcut to the Taskbar for easy access. Conclusion If Hibernation is not enabled on your Windows 7 system you can easily manage it. By creating a shortcut and pinning to the Taskbar, it allows you to put your machine into Hibernation Mode quick and easy. If you like to customize your desktop with unique icons check out our posts on a Sci-Fi icon pack or Video Game icon pack. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create a Shortcut for Locking Your Computer Screen in Windows 7 or VistaCreate Shutdown / Restart / Lock Icons in Windows 7 or VistaHow To Manage Hibernate Mode in Windows 7Microsoft Releases Pre-SP1 Updates for Windows VistaCreate a Shortcut or Hotkey to Run CCleaner Silently TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 10 Superb Firefox Wallpapers OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides

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Tricks and Optimizations for you Sitecore website

- by amaniar

When working with Sitecore there are some optimizations/configurations I usually repeat in order to make my app production ready. Following is a small list I have compiled from experience, Sitecore documentation, communicating with Sitecore Engineers etc. This is not supposed to be technically complete and might not be fit for all environments. Simple configurations that can make a difference: 1) Configure Sitecore Caches. This is the most straight forward and sure way of increasing the performance of your website. Data and item cache sizes (/databases/database/ [id=web] ) should be configured as needed. You may start with a smaller number and tune them as needed. <cacheSizes hint="setting"> <data>300MB</data> <items>300MB</items> <paths>5MB</paths> <standardValues>5MB</standardValues> </cacheSizes> Tune the html, registry etc cache sizes for your website. <cacheSizes> <sites> <website> <html>300MB</html> <registry>1MB</registry> <viewState>10MB</viewState> <xsl>5MB</xsl> </website> </sites> </cacheSizes> Tune the prefetch cache settings under the App_Config/Prefetch/ folder. Sample /App_Config/Prefetch/Web.Config: <configuration> <cacheSize>300MB</cacheSize>  <template desc="mytemplate">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}</template>  <item desc="myitem">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX }</item>  <children desc="childitems">{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}</children> </configuration> Break your page into sublayouts so you may cache most of them. Read the caching configuration reference: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/sc62keywords/cache_configuration_reference_a4.pdf 2) Disable Analytics for the Shell Site <site name="shell" virtualFolder="/sitecore/shell" physicalFolder="/sitecore/shell" rootPath="/sitecore/content" startItem="/home" language="en" database="core" domain="sitecore" loginPage="/sitecore/login" content="master" contentStartItem="/Home" enableWorkflow="true" enableAnalytics="false" xmlControlPage="/sitecore/shell/default.aspx" browserTitle="Sitecore" htmlCacheSize="2MB" registryCacheSize="3MB" viewStateCacheSize="200KB" xslCacheSize="5MB" /> 3) Increase the Check Interval for the MemoryMonitorHook so it doesn’t run every 5 seconds (default). <hook type="Sitecore.Diagnostics.MemoryMonitorHook, Sitecore.Kernel"> <param desc="Threshold">800MB</param> <param desc="Check interval">00:05:00</param> <param desc="Minimum time between log entries">00:01:00</param> <ClearCaches>false</ClearCaches> <GarbageCollect>false</GarbageCollect> <AdjustLoadFactor>false</AdjustLoadFactor> </hook> 4) Set Analytics.PeformLookup (Sitecore.Analytics.config) to false if your environment doesn’t have access to the internet or you don’t intend to use reverse DNS lookup. <setting name="Analytics.PerformLookup" value="false" /> 5) Set the value of the “Media.MediaLinkPrefix” setting to “-/media”: <setting name="Media.MediaLinkPrefix" value="-/media" /> Add the following line to the customHandlers section: <customHandlers> <handler trigger="-/media/" handler="sitecore_media.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/media/" handler="sitecore_media.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/api/" handler="sitecore_api.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/xaml/" handler="sitecore_xaml.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/icon/" handler="sitecore_icon.ashx" /> <handler trigger="~/feed/" handler="sitecore_feed.ashx" /> </customHandlers> Link: http://squad.jpkeisala.com/2011/10/sitecore-media-library-performance-optimization-checklist/ 6) Performance counters should be disabled in production if not being monitored <setting name="Counters.Enabled" value="false" /> 7) Disable Item/Memory/Timing threshold warnings. Due to the nature of this component, it brings no value in production.  <!--<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.StopMeasurements, Sitecore.Kernel"> <TimingThreshold desc="Milliseconds">1000</TimingThreshold> <ItemThreshold desc="Item count">1000</ItemThreshold> <MemoryThreshold desc="KB">10000</MemoryThreshold> </processor>—> 8) The ContentEditor.RenderCollapsedSections setting is a hidden setting in the web.config file, which by default is true. Setting it to false will improve client performance for authoring environments. <setting name="ContentEditor.RenderCollapsedSections" value="false" /> 9) Add a machineKey section to your Web.Config file when using a web farm. Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649308.aspx 10) If you get errors in the log files similar to: WARN Could not create an instance of the counter 'XXX.XXX' (category: 'Sitecore.System') Exception: System.UnauthorizedAccessException Message: Access to the registry key 'Global' is denied. Make sure the ApplicationPool user is a member of the system “Performance Monitor Users” group on the server. 11) Disable WebDAV configurations on the CD Server if not being used. More: http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2011/04/disable-webdav-in-sitecore.html 12) Change Log4Net settings to only log Errors on content delivery environments to avoid unnecessary logging. <root> <priority value="ERROR" /> <appender-ref ref="LogFileAppender" /> </root> 13) Disable Analytics for any content item that doesn’t add value. For example a page that redirects to another page. 14) When using Web User Controls avoid registering them on the page the asp.net way: <%@ Register Src="~/layouts/UserControls/MyControl.ascx" TagName="MyControl" TagPrefix="uc2" %> Use Sublayout web control instead – This way Sitecore caching could be leveraged <sc:Sublayout ID="ID" Path="/layouts/UserControls/MyControl.ascx" Cacheable="true" runat="server" /> 15) Avoid querying for all children recursively when all items are direct children. Sitecore.Context.Database.SelectItems("/sitecore/content/Home//*"); //Use: Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem("/sitecore/content/Home"); 16) On IIS — you enable static & dynamic content compression on CM and CD More: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754668%28WS.10%29.aspx 17) Enable HTTP Keep-alive and content expiration in IIS. 18) Use GUID’s when accessing items and fields instead of names or paths. Its faster and wont break your code when things get moved or renamed. Context.Database.GetItem("{324DFD16-BD4F-4853-8FF1-D663F6422DFF}") Context.Item.Fields["{89D38A8F-394E-45B0-826B-1A826CF4046D}"]; //is better than Context.Database.GetItem("/Home/MyItem") Context.Item.Fields["FieldName"] Hope this helps.

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Architects overcoming challenges in the cloud

- by stephen.g.bennett

Computerworld has released an article based on an Silver Clouds, Dark Linings : A Concise Guide to Cloud Computing. This exceprt is from the roadmap chapter of the book. The book highlights common techniques in building roadmaps such as current reality, future vision, gap analysis, roadmap but also goes into detail in identifying the type of organization you are and what the common challenges you will need to address within your roadmap. In addition over at ArchBeat they have released a four part interview dicussing the book. Have a happy holiday

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SEO - Articles Are the Way Forward

Writing articles for websites is different from other forms of writing because it uses SEO keywords, designed to improve your site and achieve higher rankings within the search engine. This type of writing is often referred to as copy writing or writing content. Writing articles for websites is one of the most effective marketing methods for a website and they are often used to promote the use of keywords and diverting traffic to a website.

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Using Rich Text Editor (WYSIWYG) in ASP.NET MVC

- by imran_ku07

Introduction: In ASP.NET MVC forum I found some question regarding a sample HTML Rich Text Box Editor(also known as wysiwyg).So i decided to create a sample ASP.NET MVC web application which will use a Rich Text Box Editor. There are are lot of Html Editors are available, but for creating a sample application, i decided to use cross-browser WYSIWYG editor from openwebware. In this article I will discuss what changes needed to work this editor with ASP.NET MVC. Also I had attached the sample application for download at http://www.speedfile.org/155076. Also note that I will only show the important features, not discuss every feature in detail. Description: So Let's start create a sample ASP.NET MVC application. You need to add the following script files, jquery-1.3.2.min.js jquery_form.js wysiwyg.js wysiwyg-settings.js wysiwyg-popup.js Just put these files inside Scripts folder. Also put wysiwyg.css in your Content Folder and add the following folders in your project addons popups Also create a empty folder Uploads to store the uploaded images. Next open wysiwyg.js and set your configuration // Images Directory this.ImagesDir = "/addons/imagelibrary/images/"; // Popups Directory this.PopupsDir = "/popups/"; // CSS Directory File this.CSSFile = "/Content/wysiwyg.css"; Next create a simple View TextEditor.aspx inside View / Home Folder and add the folllowing HTML. <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html > <head runat="server"> <title>TextEditor</title> <script src="../../Scripts/wysiwyg.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="../../Scripts/wysiwyg-settings.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> WYSIWYG.attach('text', full); </script> </head> <body> <% using (Html.BeginForm()){ %> <textarea id="text" name="test2" style="width:850px;height:200px;"> </textarea> <input type="submit" value="submit" /> <%} %> </body> </html> Here i have just added a text area control and a submit button inside a form. Note the id of text area and WYSIWYG.attach function's first parameter is same and next to watch is the HomeController.cs using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.IO; namespace HtmlTextEditor.Controllers { [HandleError] public class HomeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { ViewData["Message"] = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!"; return View(); } public ActionResult About() { return View(); } public ActionResult TextEditor() { return View(); } [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] [ValidateInput(false)] public ActionResult TextEditor(string test2) { Session["html"] = test2; return RedirectToAction("Index"); } public ActionResult UploadImage() { if (Request.Files[0].FileName != "") { Request.Files[0].SaveAs(Server.MapPath("~/Uploads/" + Path.GetFileName(Request.Files[0].FileName))); return Content(Url.Content("~/Uploads/" + Path.GetFileName(Request.Files[0].FileName))); } return Content("a"); } } } So simple code, just save the posted Html into Session. Here the parameter of TextArea action is test2 which is same as textarea control name of TextArea.aspx View. Also note ValidateInputAttribute is false, so it's up to you to defends against XSS. Also there is an Action method which simply saves the file inside Upload Folder. I am uploading the file using Jquery Form Plugin. Here is the code which is found in insert_image.html inside addons folder, function ChangeImage() { var myform=document.getElementById("formUpload"); $(myform).ajaxSubmit({success: function(responseText){ insertImage(responseText); window.close(); } }); } and here is the Index View which simply renders the html of Editor which was saved in Session <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %> <asp:Content ID="indexTitle" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> Home Page </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="indexContent" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2><%= Html.Encode(ViewData["Message"]) %></h2> <p> To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>. </p> <%if (Session["html"] != null){ Response.Write(Session["html"].ToString()); } %> </asp:Content> Summary: Hopefully you will enjoy this article. Just download the code and see the effect. From security point, you must handle the XSS attack your self. I had uploaded the sample application in http://www.speedfile.org/155076

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Search files blazing fast

If you know there is a file somewhere on your machine, but you cannot find it with the default Windows Search Tools (that why they tend to call it Windows Search and not Windows Find ) then switch to a tool that really works. Go to http://www.voidtools.com/ to download your copy of Everything. The download is only small (350KB), it indexes fast (within 5 mins) and searches my complete computer even faster then I can type. I only blame David Carpenter for not spreading the word more aggressively and for not developing this earlier.

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Customize the Five Windows Folder Templates

- by Mark Virtue

Are you’re particular about the way Windows Explorer presents each folder’s contents? Here we show you how to take advantage of Explorer’s built-in templates, which cuts down the time it takes to do customizations. Note: The techniques in this article apply to Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. When opening a folder for the first time in Windows Explorer, we are presented with a standard default view of the files and folders in that folder. It may be that the items are presented are perfectly fine, but on the other hand, we may want to customize the view. The aspects of it that we can customize are the following: The display type (list view, details, tiles, thumbnails, etc) Which columns are displayed, and in which order The widths of the visible columns The order in which the files and folders are sorted Any file groupings Thankfully, Windows offers us a shortcut. A particular folder’s settings can be used as a “template” for other, similar folders. In fact, we can store up to five separate sets of folder presentation configurations. Once we save the settings for a particular template, that template can then be applied to other folders. Customize Your First Folder We’ll start by setting up the first of our templates – the default one. Once we create this template and apply it, the vast majority of the folders in our file system will change to match it, so it’s important that we set it up very carefully. The first step in creating and applying the template is to customize one folder with the settings that all the rest will have. Choose a folder that is typical of the folders that you wish to have this default template. Select it in Windows Explorer. To ensure that it is a suitable candidate, right-click the folder name and select Properties, then go to the Customize tab. Ensure that this folder is marked as General Items. If it is not, either choose a different folder or select General Items from the list. Click OK. Now we’re ready to customize our first folder. Changing the way one single folder is presented is straightforward. We start with the folder’s display type. Click the Change your view button in the top-right corner of every Explorer window. Each time you click the button, the folder’s view cycles to the next view type. Alternatively you can click the little down-arrow next to the button to see all the display types at once, and select the one you want. Click the view you want, or drag the slider next to the one you want. If you have chosen Details, then the next thing you may wish to change is which columns are displayed, and the order of these. To choose which columns are displayed, simply right-click on any column heading. A list of the columns currently being display appears. Simply uncheck a column if you don’t want it displayed, and check the columns that you want displayed. If you want some information displayed about your files that is not listed here, then click the More… button for a full list of file attributes. There’s a lot of them! To change the order of the columns that are currently being displayed, simply click on a column heading and drag it to where you think it should be. To change the width of a column, click the line that represents the right-hand edge of the column and drag it left or right. To sort by a column, click once on that column. To reverse the sort-order, click that same column again. To change the groupings of the files in the folder, right-click in a blank area of the folder, select Group by, and select the appropriate column. Apply This Default Template to All Similar Folders Once you have the folder exactly the way you want it, we now use this folder as our default template for most of the folders in our file system. To do this, ensure that you are still in the folder you just customized, and then, from the Organize menu in Explorer, click on Folder and search options. Then select the View tab and click the Apply to Folders button. After you’ve clicked OK, visit some of the other folders in your file system. You should see that most have taken on these new settings. What we’ve just done, in effect, is we have customized the General Items template. This is one of five templates that Windows Explorer uses to display folder contents. The five templates are called (in Windows 7): General Items Documents Pictures Music Videos When a folder is opened, Windows Explorer examines the contents to see if it can automatically determine which folder template to use to display the folder contents. If it is not obvious that the folder contents falls into any of the last four templates, then Windows Explorer chooses the General Items template. That’s why most of the folders in your file system are shown using the General Items template. Changing the Other Four Templates If you want to adjust the other four templates, the process is very similar to what we’ve just done. If you wanted to change the “Music” template, for example, the steps would be as follows: Select a folder that contains music items Apply the existing Music template to the folder (even if it doesn’t look like you want it to) Customize the folder to your personal preferences Apply the new template to all “Music” folders A fifth step would be: When you open a folder that contains music items but is not automatically displayed using the Music template, you manually select the Music template for that folder. First, select a folder that contains music items. It will probably be displayed using the existing Music template: Next, ensure that it is using the Music template. If it’s not, then manually select the Music template. Next, customize the folder to suit your personal preferences (here we’ve added a couple of columns, and sorted by Artist). Now we can set this view to be our Music template. Choose Organize, then the View tab, and click the Apply to Folders button. Note: The only folders that will inherit these settings are the ones that are currently (or will soon be) using the Music template. Now, if you have any folder that contains music items, and you want it to inherit all of these settings, then right-click the folder name, choose Properties, and select that this folder should use the Music template. You can also cehck the box entitled Also apply this template to all subfolders if you want to save yourself even more time with all the sub-folders. Conclusion It’s neat to be able to set up templates for your folder views like this. It’s a shame that Microsoft didn’t take the concept just a little further and allow you to create as many templates as you want. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fix For When Windows Explorer in Vista Stops Showing File NamesCustomize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuFix for New Contact Group Button Not Displaying in VistaWhy Did Windows Vista’s Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?Make Your Last Minute Holiday Cards with Microsoft Word TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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EM12c Release 4: New EMCLI Verbs

- by SubinDaniVarughese

Here are the new EM CLI verbs in Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 (12.1.0.4). This helps you in writing new scripts or enhancing your existing scripts for further automation. Basic Administration Verbs invoke_ws - Invoke EM web service.ADM Verbs associate_target_to_adm - Associate a target to an application data model. export_adm - Export Application Data Model to a specified .xml file. import_adm - Import Application Data Model from a specified .xml file. list_adms - List the names, target names and application suites of existing Application Data Models verify_adm - Submit an application data model verify job for the target specified.Agent Update Verbs get_agent_update_status - Show Agent Update Results get_not_updatable_agents - Shows Not Updatable Agents get_updatable_agents - Show Updatable Agents update_agents - Performs Agent Update Prereqs and submits Agent Update JobBI Publisher Reports Verbs grant_bipublisher_roles - Grants access to the BI Publisher catalog and features. revoke_bipublisher_roles - Revokes access to the BI Publisher catalog and features.Blackout Verbs create_rbk - Create a Retro-active blackout.CFW Verbs cancel_cloud_service_requests - To cancel cloud service requests delete_cloud_service_instances - To delete cloud service instances delete_cloud_user_objects - To delete cloud user objects. get_cloud_service_instances - To get information about cloud service instances get_cloud_service_requests - To get information about cloud requests get_cloud_user_objects - To get information about cloud user objects.Chargeback Verbs add_chargeback_entity - Adds the given entity to Chargeback. assign_charge_plan - Assign a plan to a chargeback entity. assign_cost_center - Assign a cost center to a chargeback entity. create_charge_entity_type - Create charge entity type export_charge_plans - Exports charge plans metadata to file export_custom_charge_items - Exports user defined charge items to a file import_charge_plans - Imports charge plans metadata from given file import_custom_charge_items - Imports user defined charge items metadata from given file list_charge_plans - Gives a list of charge plans in Chargeback. list_chargeback_entities - Gives a list of all the entities in Chargeback list_chargeback_entity_types - Gives a list of all the entity types that are supported in Chargeback list_cost_centers - Lists the cost centers in Chargeback. remove_chargeback_entity - Removes the given entity from Chargeback. unassign_charge_plan - Un-assign the plan associated to a chargeback entity. unassign_cost_center - Un-assign the cost center associated to a chargeback entity.Configuration/Association History disable_config_history - Disable configuration history computation for a target type. enable_config_history - Enable configuration history computation for a target type. set_config_history_retention_period - Sets the amount of time for which Configuration History is retained.ConfigurationCompare config_compare - Submits the configuration comparison job get_config_templates - Gets all the comparison templates from the repositoryCompliance Verbs fix_compliance_state - Fix compliance state by removing references in deleted targets.Credential Verbs update_credential_setData Subset Verbs export_subset_definition - Exports specified subset definition as XML file at specified directory path. generate_subset - Generate subset using specified subset definition and target database. import_subset_definition - Import a subset definition from specified XML file. import_subset_dump - Imports dump file into specified target database. list_subset_definitions - Get the list of subset definition, adm and target nameDelete pluggable Database Job Verbs delete_pluggable_database - Delete a pluggable databaseDeployment Procedure Verbs get_runtime_data - Get the runtime data of an executionDiscover and Push to Agents Verbs generate_discovery_input - Generate Discovery Input file for discovering Auto-Discovered Domains refresh_fa - Refresh Fusion Instance run_fa_diagnostics - Run Fusion Applications DiagnosticsFusion Middleware Provisioning Verbs create_fmw_domain_profile - Create a Fusion Middleware Provisioning Profile from a WebLogic Domain create_fmw_home_profile - Create a Fusion Middleware Provisioning Profile from an Oracle Home create_inst_media_profile - Create a Fusion Middleware Provisioning Profile from Installation MediaGold Agent Image Verbs create_gold_agent_image - Creates a gold agent image. decouple_gold_agent_image - Decouples the agent from gold agent image. delete_gold_agent_image - Deletes a gold agent image. get_gold_agent_image_activity_status - Gets gold agent image activity status. get_gold_agent_image_details - Get the gold agent image details. list_agents_on_gold_image - Lists agents on a gold agent image. list_gold_agent_image_activities - Lists gold agent image activities. list_gold_agent_image_series - Lists gold agent image series. list_gold_agent_images - Lists the available gold agent images. promote_gold_agent_image - Promotes a gold agent image. stage_gold_agent_image - Stages a gold agent image.Incident Rules Verbs add_target_to_rule_set - Add a target to an enterprise rule set. delete_incident_record - Delete one or more open incidents remove_target_from_rule_set - Remove a target from an enterprise rule set. Job Verbs export_jobs - Export job details in to an xml file import_jobs - Import job definitions from an xml file job_input_file - Supply details for a job verb in a property file resume_job - Resume a job or set of jobs suspend_job - Suspend a job or set of jobs Oracle Database as Service Verbs config_db_service_target - Configure DB Service target for OPCPrivilege Delegation Settings Verbs clear_default_privilege_delegation_setting - Clears the default privilege delegation setting for a given list of platforms set_default_privilege_delegation_setting - Sets the default privilege delegation setting for a given list of platforms test_privilege_delegation_setting - Tests a Privilege Delegation Setting on a hostSSA Verbs cleanup_dbaas_requests - Submit cleanup request for failed request create_dbaas_quota - Create Database Quota for a SSA User Role create_service_template - Create a Service Template delete_dbaas_quota - Delete the Database Quota setup for a SSA User Role delete_service_template - Delete a given service template get_dbaas_quota - List the Database Quota setup for all SSA User Roles get_dbaas_request_settings - List the Database Request Settings get_service_template_detail - Get details of a given service template get_service_templates - Get the list of available service templates rename_service_template - Rename a given service template update_dbaas_quota - Update the Database Quota for a SSA User Role update_dbaas_request_settings - Update the Database Request Settings update_service_template - Update a given service template. SavedConfigurations get_saved_configs - Gets the saved configurations from the repository Server Generated Alert Metric Verbs validate_server_generated_alerts - Server Generated Alert Metric VerbServices Verbs edit_sl_rule - Edit the service level rule for the specified serviceSiebel Verbs list_siebel_enterprises - List Siebel enterprises currently monitored in EM list_siebel_servers - List Siebel servers under a specified siebel enterprise update_siebel- Update a Siebel enterprise or its underlying serversSiteGuard Verbs add_siteguard_aux_hosts - Associate new auxiliary hosts to the system configure_siteguard_lag - Configure apply lag and transport lag limit for databases delete_siteguard_aux_host - Delete auxiliary host associated with a site delete_siteguard_lag - Erases apply lag or transport lag limit for databases get_siteguard_aux_hosts - Get all auxiliary hosts associated with a site get_siteguard_health_checks - Shows schedule of health checks get_siteguard_lag - Shows apply lag or transport lag limit for databases schedule_siteguard_health_checks - Schedule health checks for an operation plan stop_siteguard_health_checks - Stops all future health check execution of an operation plan update_siteguard_lag - Updates apply lag and transport lag limit for databasesSoftware Library Verbs stage_swlib_entity_files - Stage files of an entity from Software Library to a host target.Target Data Verbs create_assoc - Creates target associations delete_assoc - Deletes target associations list_allowed_pairs - Lists allowed association types for specified source and destination list_assoc - Lists associations between source and destination targets manage_agent_partnership - Manages partnership between agents. Used for explicitly assigning agent partnershipsTrace Reports generate_ui_trace_report - Generate and download UI Page performance report (to identify slow rendering pages)VI EMCLI Verbs add_virtual_platform - Add Oracle Virtual PLatform(s). modify_virtual_platform - Modify Oracle Virtual Platform.To get more details about each verb, execute$ emcli help <verb_name>Example: $ emcli help list_assocNew resources in list verbThese are the new resources in EM CLI list verb :Certificates WLSCertificateDetails Credential Resource Group PreferredCredentialsDefaultSystemScope - Preferred credentials (System Scope) PreferredCredentialsSystemScope - Target preferred credentialPrivilege Delegation Settings TargetPrivilegeDelegationSettingDetails - List privilege delegation setting details on a host TargetPrivilegeDelegationSetting - List privilege delegation settings on a host PrivilegeDelegationSettings - Lists all Privilege Delegation Settings PrivilegeDelegationSettingDetails - Lists details of Privilege Delegation Settings To get more details about each resource, execute$ emcli list -resource="<resource_name>" -helpExample: $ emcli list -resource="PrivilegeDelegationSettings" -helpDeprecated Verbs:Agent Administration Verbs resecure_agent - Resecure an agentTo get the complete list of verbs, execute:$ emcli help Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Mobile app

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ASP.NET MVC localization DisplayNameAttribute alternatives: a better way

- by Brian Schroer

In my last post, I talked bout creating a custom class inheriting from System.ComponentModel.DisplayNameAttribute to retrieve display names from resource files: [LocalizedDisplayName("RememberMe")] public bool RememberMe { get; set; } That’s a lot of work to put an attribute on all of my model properties though. It would be nice if I could intercept the ASP.NET MVC code that analyzes the model metadata to retrieve display names to make it automatically get localized text from my resource files. That way, I could just set up resource file entries where the keys are the property names, and not have to put attributes on all of my properties. That’s done by creating a custom class inheriting from System.Web.Mvc.DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider: 1: public class LocalizedDataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider : 2: DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider 3: { 4: protected override ModelMetadata CreateMetadata( 5: IEnumerable<Attribute> attributes, 6: Type containerType, 7: Func<object> modelAccessor, 8: Type modelType, 9: string propertyName) 10: { 11: var meta = base.CreateMetadata 12: (attributes, containerType, modelAccessor, modelType, propertyName); 13: 14: if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(propertyName)) 15: return meta; 16: 17: if (meta.DisplayName == null) 18: GetLocalizedDisplayName(meta, propertyName); 19: 20: if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(meta.DisplayName)) 21: meta.DisplayName = string.Format("[[{0}]]", propertyName); 22: 23: return meta; 24: } 25: 26: private static void GetLocalizedDisplayName(ModelMetadata meta, string propertyName) 27: { 28: ResourceManager resourceManager = MyResource.ResourceManager; 29: CultureInfo culture = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture; 30: 31: meta.DisplayName = resourceManager.GetString(propertyName, culture); 32: } 33: } Line 11 calls the base CreateMetadata method. Line 17 checks whether the metadata DisplayName property has already been populated by a DisplayNameAttribute (or my LocalizedDisplayNameAttribute). If so, it respects that and doesn’t use my custom localized text lookup. The GetLocalizedDisplayName method checks for the property name as a resource file key. If found, it uses the localized text from the resource files. If the key is not found in the resource file, as with my LocalizedDisplayNameAttribute, I return a formatted string containing the property name (e.g. “[[RememberMe]]”) so I can tell by looking at my web pages which resource keys I haven’t defined yet. It’s hooked up with this code in the Application_Start method of Global.asax: ModelMetadataProviders.Current = new LocalizedDataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider();

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RequestValidation Changes in ASP.NET 4.0

- by Rick Strahl

There’s been a change in the way the ValidateRequest attribute on WebForms works in ASP.NET 4.0. I noticed this today while updating a post on my WebLog all of which contain raw HTML and so all pretty much trigger request validation. I recently upgraded this app from ASP.NET 2.0 to 4.0 and it’s now failing to update posts. At first this was difficult to track down because of custom error handling in my app – the custom error handler traps the exception and logs it with only basic error information so the full detail of the error was initially hidden. After some more experimentation in development mode the error that occurs is the typical ASP.NET validate request error (‘A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detetected…’) which looks like this in ASP.NET 4.0: At first when I got this I was real perplexed as I didn’t read the entire error message and because my page does have: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="NewEntry.aspx.cs" Inherits="Westwind.WebLog.NewEntry" MasterPageFile="~/App_Templates/Standard/AdminMaster.master" ValidateRequest="false" EnableEventValidation="false" EnableViewState="false" %> WTF? ValidateRequest would seem like it should be enough, but alas in ASP.NET 4.0 apparently that setting alone is no longer enough. Reading the fine print in the error explains that you need to explicitly set the requestValidationMode for the application back to V2.0 in web.config: <httpRuntime executionTimeout="300" requestValidationMode="2.0" /> Kudos for the ASP.NET team for putting up a nice error message that tells me how to fix this problem, but excuse me why the heck would you change this behavior to require an explicit override to an optional and by default disabled page level switch? You’ve just made a relatively simple fix to a solution a nasty morass of hard to discover configuration settings??? The original way this worked was perfectly discoverable via attributes in the page. Now you can set this setting in the page and get completely unexpected behavior and you are required to set what effectively amounts to a backwards compatibility flag in the configuration file. It turns out the real reason for the .config flag is that the request validation behavior has moved from WebForms pipeline down into the entire ASP.NET/IIS request pipeline and is now applied against all requests. Here’s what the breaking changes page from Microsoft says about it: The request validation feature in ASP.NET provides a certain level of default protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. In previous versions of ASP.NET, request validation was enabled by default. However, it applied only to ASP.NET pages (.aspx files and their class files) and only when those pages were executing. In ASP.NET 4, by default, request validation is enabled for all requests, because it is enabled before the BeginRequest phase of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation applies to requests for all ASP.NET resources, not just .aspx page requests. This includes requests such as Web service calls and custom HTTP handlers. Request validation is also active when custom HTTP modules are reading the contents of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation errors might now occur for requests that previously did not trigger errors. To revert to the behavior of the ASP.NET 2.0 request validation feature, add the following setting in the Web.config file: <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> However, we recommend that you analyze any request validation errors to determine whether existing handlers, modules, or other custom code accesses potentially unsafe HTTP inputs that could be XSS attack vectors. Ok, so ValidateRequest of the form still works as it always has but it’s actually the ASP.NET Event Pipeline, not WebForms that’s throwing the above exception as request validation is applied to every request that hits the pipeline. Creating the runtime override removes the HttpRuntime checking and restores the WebForms only behavior. That fixes my immediate problem but still leaves me wondering especially given the vague wording of the above explanation. One thing that’s missing in the description is above is one important detail: The request validation is applied only to application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST content not to all inbound POST data. When I first read this this freaked me out because it sounds like literally ANY request hitting the pipeline is affected. To make sure this is not really so I created a quick handler: public class Handler1 : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World <hr>" + context.Request.Form.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } } and called it with Fiddler by posting some XML to the handler using a default form-urlencoded POST content type: and sure enough – hitting the handler also causes the request validation error and 500 server response. Changing the content type to text/xml effectively fixes the problem however, bypassing the request validation filter so Web Services/AJAX handlers and custom modules/handlers that implement custom protocols aren’t affected as long as they work with special input content types. It also looks that multipart encoding does not trigger event validation of the runtime either so this request also works fine: POST http://rasnote/weblog/handler1.ashx HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=------7cf2a327f01ae User-Agent: West Wind Internet Protocols 5.53 Host: rasnote Content-Length: 40 Pragma: no-cache <xml>asdasd</xml>--------7cf2a327f01ae *That* probably should trigger event validation – since it is a potential HTML form submission, but it doesn’t. New Runtime Feature, Global Scope Only? Ok, so request validation is now a runtime feature but sadly it’s a feature that’s scoped to the ASP.NET Runtime – effective scope to the entire running application/app domain. You can still manually force validation using Request.ValidateInput() which gives you the option to do this in code, but that realistically will only work with the requestValidationMode set to V2.0 as well since the 4.0 mode auto-fires before code ever gets a chance to intercept the call. Given all that, the new setting in ASP.NET 4.0 seems to limit options and makes things more difficult and less flexible. Of course Microsoft gets to say ASP.NET is more secure by default because of it but what good is that if you have to turn off this flag the very first time you need to allow one single request that bypasses request validation??? This is really shortsighted design… <sigh>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET

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Microsoft F#

- by Aamir Hasan

F# brings you type safe, succinct, efficient and expressive functional programming language on the .NET platform. It is a simple and pragmatic language, and has particular strengths in data-oriented programming, parallel I/O programming, parallel CPU programming, scripting and algorithmic development. F# cannot solve any problem C# could. F# is a functional language, statically typed. F# is a functional language that supports O-O-Programming References:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/fsharp/cc835246.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/fsharp/

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Crystal Reports for VS deployment to Web Application doesn't work (3 replies)

I've followed the "documentation" for getting crystal reports to work on a production web site. I've migrated a VS 2003 web project to a VS 2008 web application. Everything works fine on my dev box. publish the site out to the server (2003 X86) and no go on the reports, get the infamous: ***** Error Type: System.IO.FileLoadException ***** Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDeci...

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How do install graphics drivers for radeon HD 6380g on a HP pavilion g6?

- by Ryan

I installed ubuntu from wubi using a live cd but when i booted i just got a black screen so i followed the instructions from this forum http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10089820&postcount=8 which successfully completed the ubuntu installation but now when i boot ubuntu i just get a command prompt. when i type in startx it comes up with an error. I am told i need to install graphics drivers, how do i do this? Thanks in advance Ryan

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SQL Server v.Next (Denali) : Troubleshooting Error 18456

- by AaronBertrand

I think we've all dealt with error 18456, whether it be an application unable to access SQL Server, credentials changing over time, or a user who can't type a password correctly. The trick to troubleshooting this error number is that the error message returned to the client or application trying to connect is intentionally vague (the error message is similar for most errors, and the state is always 1). In a few cases, some additional information is included, but for the most part several of these...(read more)

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