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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 27, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 27, 2012Popular ReleasesHarness: Harness 2.0.2: change to .NET Framework Client Profile bug fix the download dialog auto answer. bug fix setFocus command. add "SendKeys" command. remove "closeAll" command. minor bugs fixed.BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.161: Below is a list of fixes in this release. Bug BGN-2092 - Link in Email "visit your profile" not functional BGN-2083 - Manager of bugnet can not edit project when it is not public BGN-2080 - clicking on a link in the project summary causes error (0.9.152.0) BGN-2070 - Missing Functionality On Feed.aspx BGN-2069 - Calendar View does not work BGN-2068 - Time tracking totals not ok BGN-2067 - Issues List Page Size Bug: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the si...YAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.6.1 RTW: v1.9.6.1 FINAL is .NET v4.0 ONLY v1.9.6.1 has: Performance Improvements .NET v4.0 improvements Improved FaceBook Integration More complete change list and discussion here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postst14201_v1-9-6-1-RTW-Dated--3-26-2012.aspxQuick Performance Monitor: Version 1.8.1: Added option to set main window to be 'Always On Top'. Use context (right-click) menu on graph to toggle.Asp.NET Url Router: v1.0: build for .net 2.0 and .net 4.0SQLinq - use LINQ to generate Ad-Hoc Sql Queries: SQLinq v1.1: Nuget Package:http://nuget.org/packages/sqlinq Install SQLinq via Nuget Change Log:Fixed "SELECT *" bug when no selector is specified Added ".Take(int)" and ".Skip(int)" methods to support paging Added ability to specify "ORDER BY"DbViewSharp: Sql Compact Edition plugins: The SQL CE plugins are new assemblies written to allow DbViewSharp to work with SQL Compact Edition databases. Some features available for Sql Server databases are unavailable because of restrictions in the Compact Edition engine. However there are plans to add different new features as compensation for this. See the Sql CE Plugin page for more details.TileSet Map Editor: Map Creator: can add maps/ layers can use only 1 tileset for now Have Save/Load Logics... added Fill Copy and Paste working towards better code and more optionsBagammon pc player: Baggamon pc player v.1.3: This a source code of a project "tool-game" Bagammon pc player. It has bug. Please do not fix them. Thank you. For your information : "If you want to use it buy it. Send an email."openSourceC.Daylife: Release v1.0a: This is a minor bug fix release with some minor internal refactoring as well. The Documentation page has some code samples that show how to use the library. If you discover any issues with this release, please check the existing Discussions and Issues to see if the issue has already been reported, and if not, create a new discussion with the details of the issue.menu4web: menu4web 0.0.3: menu4web 0.0.3Windawesome: Windawesome v1.4.0 x86: Added a SeparatorWidget. Implemented some xmonad-like functionality for multiple-monitors - see SwapCurrentWorkspaceWith, SwitchToNextMonitor and SwitchToPreviousMonitor. Thanks to mkocubinski for the idea and some of the implementation. Implemented AddBarToWorkspace and RemoveBarFromWorkspace. Small performance improvements. Any issues/recommendations/requests for future versions? This is the 32-bit version of the release. If you use a 32-bit Windows, this is the release you should u...Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms: Navigation 1.4: Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms manages movement and data passing between ASPX pages in a unit-testable manner. There is no client-side logic, so it works in all browsers, and no server-side cache, so it works with the browser back button. Comprehensive documentation and sample code can be found under the Documentation tab (Make sure to unblock all zip files prior to extraction) New - Added default State NavigationData. Supports strongly typed values and routing defaults New - Added mobi...Afrihost Usage Monitoring Gadget: Afrihost Gadget 1.2.0: This is the stable current download: Changes: Added support for Uncapped accounts. Added support for IS Uncapped Accounts.ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.0 Final: This release installs both the ArcGIS Editor for OSM Server Component and/or ArcGIS Editor for OSM Desktop components. The Desktop tools allow you to download data from the OpenStreetMap servers and store it locally in a geodatabase. You can then use the familiar editing environment of ArcGIS Desktop to create, modify, or delete data. Once you are done editing, you can post back the edit changes to OSM to make them available to all OSM users. The Server Component allows you to quickly create...Craig's Utility Library: Craig's Utility Library 3.1: This update adds about 60 new extension methods, a couple of new classes, and a number of fixes including: Additions Added DateSpan class Added GenericDelimited class Random additions Added static thread friendly version of Random.Next called ThreadSafeNext. AOP Manager additions Added Destroy function to AOPManager (clears out all data so system can be recreated. Really only useful for testing...) ORM additions Added PagedCommand and PageCount functions to ObjectBaseClass (same as M...DotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.1: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components are available as NuGet pa...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: C++, .NET Coding Guideline: Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Coding Guideline This document describes the coding style guideline for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team.WebDAV for WHS: Version 1.0.67: - Added: Check whether the Remote Web Access is turned on or not; - Added: Check for Add-In updates;Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (March 2012) for .NET 4.0: March release of Phalanger 3.0 significantly enhances performance, adds new features and fixes many issues. See following for the list of main improvements: New features: Phalanger Tools installable for Visual Studio 2011 Beta "filter" extension with several most used filters implemented DomDocument HTML parser, loadHTML() method mail() PHP compatible function PHP 5.4 T_CALLABLE token PHP 5.4 "callable" type hint PCRE: UTF32 characters in range support configuration supports <c...New Projects(MVC4) Character Creation: A simple web site to manage your Avalon CharactersAmfSample: Sample projectBismillah Quran Reader for Wp7: Bismillah Quran Reader is an application for reading Quran translations in WP7. Translations can be read in various languages. Also recitations can be listened to.BlogEngine Mvc: This is an MVC version of BlogEngine.net. Project Description Our plan is to convert the whole BlogEngine.NET into an MVC application by the end of June 2012. It's developed in C# ASP.NET MVC3.Db7: Db7EF4.3 Code First and Migration Sample: EF4.3 Code First and Migration Sampleemoji for windows phone: This project is a windows phone 7 enmoji libary.Excel Document Merger: Excel Document Merger is a utility for combining multiple Excel workbooks and worksheets into a single workbook.exceladdin: exceladdinfastBinaryJSON: Binary JSON serializer based on fastJSONFontographer: A metro style WPF app to demonstrate the capabilites of the fonts on the users systemGonte Web Desktop: Another web desktop using ExtJs javascript frameworkIndoor Cricket Stats: Indoor Cricket StatsKernel32 C# wrapper: Kernel32.dll C# wrapper. Mostly done for threading, pipes, mutexes and other stuff. Not all methods implemented.Live for Desktop: A simple app that lets you browse you Live accout from a webbrowser integrated in the software. Future version will also include a custom interface and a Metro style look.LogoScriptIDE: IDE for LogoScript, A logo and C like scripting languageMcCloud Service Framework: Monte Carlo Cloud Service Framework (McCloud) provides a generic service implementation of Monte Carlo method, based on Microsoft Windows Azure, to solve a wide range of scientific and engineering problems.NetView Control for Microsoft Access: A native control for Microsoft Access forms to display and interact with non-hierarchical data.Polygon: Polygon is a UI composition framework for ASP.NET Web Forms. It can be used for third-party plugin extensibility of ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Though it's developed in C#, plugins can also done in VB as well.Programmeerproject-LambdaOffice: Architectural project. Takes input from the user and prints it to various fileformats such as .docx and .pdfQuick Job Seeker: Final project of computer scienceSchool Education Management: Project Description School Management System helps schools in managing student's data. It is targeted for colleges in the Philippines. It is developed in ASp.Net MVC3 and uses SQL Server as the database. The system is divided into several modules: 1. Registrar Module - used by the Registrar. 2. Scheduling Module - used by Deans for creating course offerings schedule 3. Cashiering Module - used by the Accounting Department 4. Grading Entry Module - used by teachers for encoding grade...Sharepoint Carousel: Sharepoint Carousel\Slider is a webpart that allows you to have a carousel that contains an image with a link below it. it is fully customisable from styles to the actual javascript that generates the slider data it has currently only been tested with sharepoint 2010 This is carousel\slider for sharepoint is built of the JCarousel http://sorgalla.com/jcarousel/.Sieena Dashboard: Metro UI DashboardSimple Redirect Module for DotNetNuke: This module allows content editors in DotNetNuke to have a simple and easy way to properly redirect incoming URLs that are incorrectly indexed by search engines.software de entrenador 2.0: software de entrenador es un Programa diseñado para entrenadores de musculacion y personas cuyo proposito es mejorar en sus entrenamientos y desean llevar un control del mismo a modo de diario.Sqlite Loader: Tool to Import/Export data to an Sqlite database using CSV, XML with a GUI written in C#TestProject_Mercurial: Test Project with MercuriaTestProject_TFS: the test project with tfsThinkPHP-??、???PHP????: ??WEB??????，?????WEB?????? Twesh Ajax: TweshAjax is clientside javascript library for making asynchronous calls to server.UserProfilePropertiesSync: This utility allows to synchronize User Profile properties between different SharePoint 2010 environments.VRacer: Vektor Car racing on windows phone.Workflow Foundation State Machine Service: This is a sample project for workflow foundation 4 state machine exposed as a WCF serviceWPZilla: Bugzilla client for Windows Phone 7.1 and up.XNA GPU Particles Tool: This is a tool to help create particle effects based on the sample shaders provided in the XNA education catalogue. View the changes to the parameters in real time.Y.Music: Y.Music - ??? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????.?????? ???????? ??????. ?? ????????? ?? ??????? ???-??????? ????????? ??????????. ? ???? ?? ?? ?????????? ??????? ?????? ?????????? ?????? ? ????????????? ??????? ? ????????? ? ?????????. ????????? ?????????? ?? WPF/?#/.NET. ????? ? ??? ???????????? ?????????? NAudio ? Fluent Ribbon.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 08, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, June 08, 2010New ProjectsAD CMS: CMS software project still in its initial development and design stage.Animated panel: Animated Panel is a WPF control that supports animation of its content on resize. Can be used in item controls (ListBox for example) as ItemsPanelT...Anurag Pallaprolu's Code Repository: Hi there, this is Anurag P.'s public repository which contains most of c++ language examples and many command line(only) applications. Well , plea...atfas: atfasBibleNotes: A small application that uses BibleGateway to lookup scripture and add notes to themCarRental: How to Rent A Car.Food Innovation: This is the Food Innovation project.Generic Validation.NET: Generic Validation.NET is a flexible lightweight validation library for .NET, that can be used by any .NET project: ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC,...Komoi: Komoi is an app that will bring on a new form of web comic delivery.Liekhus Entity Framework XAF Extensions: Entity Framework extensions to support DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) code generation by Patrick Liekhus.Marketing: Desing Automation Marketing FlowMediaCoder.NET: MediaCoder.NET makes it easy for normal PC users to convert media files to other formats. It is developed in Visual Basic.NETMemetic NPC Behavior Toolkit: This is a library based on the NeverWinter Nights' Memetic AI Toolkit by William Bull. This is an attempt at creating a C# edition of this brillia...MeVisLab QT VR Export: -Mudbox: This project for personal test. Prog2: wi ss10 2010 PSAdmin: PSAdmin is a web based administration tool that allows the easy execution of Windows PowerShell scripts within your environment.RIA Services Essentials: The RIA Services Essentials project contains sample applications/extensions demonstrating using and extending WCF RIA Services v1.SCSM Service Request: The Service Request project defines a new work item class called 'Service Request' and the corresponding form for that work item class. It is a go...SFTP Component for .NET CSharp, VB.NET, and ASP.NET: The Ultimate SSH Secure File Transfer (SFTP) .NET Component offers a comprehensive interface for SFTP, enabling you to quickly and easily incorpora...shitcore: Application demonstrating how to turn a crappy application into something useful. Read more about the refactoring in http://blog.gauffin.com (sear...SystemCentered Operations Manager Reporting: SystemCentered Reporting give Microsoft System Center Operations Manager administrators an extended set of performance reports aimed towards all us...TokyoTyrantClient: makes it easier for c# developer to write code to connect the tokyo tyrant. it support: 1.utf-8 encode 2.tcpClient pool 3.rich setting about tc...Ultimate FTP Component for .NET C#, VB.NET and ASP.NET: Ultimate FTP is a 100%-managed .NET class library that adds powerful and comprehensive File Transfer capabilities to your .NET applications. WCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010: WCF 4 templates for Visual Studio 2010 providing a scenario-driven starting point.XCube: XCube is a basic command line interface, with support for files, user accounts(only in the GUI), and variables(only in DevMode). It is developed in...New ReleasesAdd-ons for EPiServer Relate+: EPiXternal.RelatePlus.Properties 0.1.0.0 Alpha: This is the Alpha release of EPiXternal.RelatePlus.Properties. The download is in the form of an .epimodule file that you can install with EPiServe...Add-ons for EPiServer Relate+: EPiXternal.RelatePlus.WebControl 0.1.0.0 Alpha: This is the Alpha release of EPiXternal.RelatePlus.WebControls. The download is in the form of an .epimodule file that you can install with EPiServ...Animated panel: AnimatedPanel v1: First version of AnimatedPanel.Anurag Pallaprolu's Code Repository: C.L.O.S.E - V3: C.L.O.S.E - V3 Smaller than ever. More Useful than ever Run only CLOSEV3.exeAnurag Pallaprolu's Code Repository: FLTK - 1.3.X: The Fast Lightining Tool Kit is back. This is the FLTK 1.3.X Tar ballAnurag Pallaprolu's Code Repository: KBHIT Function Code: This is a sample to teach about kbhit()Browser Gallese: Browser 1.0.0.15: Continua l'era del browser opensource con una novità:ho impiantato il P2P online. Adesso il browser ha bisogno di Java. Se non lo avete,cliccate qu...CC.Hearts Screen Saver: CC.Hearts Screen Saver 1.0.10.607: This is the initial release of CC.Hearts Screen Saver. Marking as stable but limited testing at this point so feedback is greatly welcomed.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V32: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...DotNetNuke® Skins: Default.css (beta): About The team has put together a cleaned up and optimized default.css file as a first step in moving toward more efficient CSS usage. Ideally, th...Dynamic Survey Forms - SharePoint Web Part: Code Fix 06-07-2010: Fix for editing existing forms Add: Requiered field option Add: Requiered field validation on submitFloe IRC Client: Floe 1.0 (2010-06): NOTE: You may have to uninstall your existing version for this installer to work properly. - Added /QUOTE command - Fixed bug where new message in...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.6.2.1: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.6.2.1), with new Mini-Menu UI changes (1.3). Once you have extracted the file, do not delete any files/f...Food Innovation: Food Innovation 1.0: This is the V1.0 release.HERB.IQ: Alpha 0.1 Source code release 7: Alpha 0.1 Source code release 7 (skipped uploading 6)Liekhus Entity Framework XAF Extensions: Version 1.1.0: Initial project release. Ported the XAFDSL tool into the Entity Framework and made it work with the Visual Studio 2010 extensions.LogikBug's IoC Container: LogikBug's IoC Container v 1.1: In this release, I add the ability to extend the container using the LogikBug.Injection.Extensibility namespace.MediaCoder.NET: MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta Source Code: Source code for MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta it includes everything - also the installer.Memetic NPC Behavior Toolkit: Wandering Meme Test: This was a code spike to see the first custom meme in action. The first meme chosen was the "Wander" meme. This is a Visual Studio 2010 solution. ...Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework: Silverlight Media Framework v2 (RC1): This is the first release candidate for the Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework v2. Note: The IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit assem...mwNSPECT: mwNSPECT Beta: mwNSPECT Mapwindow plugin dll. Place in your MapWindow or BASINS plugins directory. Presently for testing everything, though very much known issu...mwNSPECT: mwNSPECT Beta Installer: Simplistic mwNSPECT Mapwindow plugin installer using Inno setup. Installs all the files you'll need for NSPECT into the C:\NSPECT folder and insta...Near forums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Release 1: First release of the SEO friendly ASP.NET MVC forum engine.NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.06.07.001: Changes since the last build:2010-06-06 22:13:02 Jarek Kowalski Added unit tests for common target behaviors. 2010-06-06 19:36:44 Jarek Kowalski c...patterns & practices – Enterprise Library: Enterprise Library 5.0 - Dev Guide (RC): This is a Release Candidate of the Developer's Guide, C# EditionPSAdmin: 1.0.0.0: This is an alpha release of PSAdmin and should be tested before putting into a production environment. This package is pre-compiled and ready for ...Refix - .NET dependency management: Refix v0.1.0.59 ALPHA: Still a very early version. Functional changes: Added new pre (prebuild) and fix commands (rfx help pre and rfx help fix for explanations).SCSM Service Request: Service Request Management Pack v0.1: !This is an ALPHA release. Please use for testing purposes only.! The management pack is not sealed which means that when a new version of the Se...SFTP Component for .NET CSharp, VB.NET, and ASP.NET: SFTP WinForms Client: SFTP WinForms ClientSharePoint Feature - Version history list Export to Excel: Export Item List Version 1.1: - allows you to select columns to export - multilanguage support Czech, English - some bug fix Install: "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft S...SharePoint Outlook Connector: Source Code for Version 1.2.4.3: Source Code for Version 1.2.4.3SharePoint PowerRSS: v1.0: Easy/Clean way to get SharePoint list data via more standard RSS feed. I found CleanRSS.aspx as part of SPRSS: Enhanced RSS Functionality for WSS ...Smith Async .NET Memcached Client: Smith.Amc 0.7.3810.36347: Smith Async Memcached client release 0.7.3810.36347 available First public release available. All memcached operations has been implemented except...Star Trooper for XNA 2D Tutorial: Lesson five content: Here is Lesson five original content for the StarTrooper 2D XNA tutorial. The blog tutorial has now started over on http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkge...Star Trooper for XNA 2D Tutorial: Lesson six content: Here is Lesson six original content for the StarTrooper 2D XNA tutorial. The blog tutorial has now started over on http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgen...Stripper: Stripper.exe version 0.1.0: Stripper Remove Diacritics and other unwanted caracters to fabric a more standardized file naming. Especially French caracter and maybe other lang...SystemCentered Operations Manager Reporting: SystemCentered Reports V1: Reports Windows Computer General Performance When troubleshooting performance problems there are typically a set of "go to" performance counters t...TFS Buddy: TFS Buddy Beta 1.1: Minor changes +Added repeat function in action tab to simplyfy creating actions +Added app manifest to make the exe require run as Admin ~How the I...Thumbnail creator and image resizer: ThumbnailCreator1.2.1: ThumbnailCreator1.2.1 added importing of namespaces to .vb(previously in web.config)TokyoTyrantClient: TokyoTyrantClient release: 该客户端有如下特点： 1.支持TcpClient连接池 2.支持UTF-8编码 3.支持初始化链接数，链接过期时间，最大空闲时间，最长工作时间等设置。Ultimate FTP Component for .NET C#, VB.NET and ASP.NET: Build 519: New Release Download setup package at: http://www.componentsoft.net/component/download/?name=UltimateFtp Product Home Page: http://www.componentsof...visinia: visinia_1.2: The new stable version of visinia cms is out, it is visinia 1.2. It has many new features like the admin is one more time is given a new look. the ...WCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010: AnonymousOverHttp: This template generates a WCF service application that exposes a BasicHttpBinding endpoint with maxed message size and reader quotas to provide an ...WhiteMoon: WhiteMoon 0.2.10 Source: The Source code of WhiteMoon 0.2 build 10Most Popular ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeASP.NET MVC Time PlannerMoonyDesk (windows desktop widgets)NeatUploadOutSyncViperWorks IgnitionAgUnit - Silverlight unit testing with ReSharperSmith Async .NET Memcached ClientASP.NET MVC ExtensionsAviva Solutions C# Coding GuidelinesMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationN2 CMSStyleCopsmark C# LibraryBlogEngine.NET

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The Benefits of Smart Grid Business Software

- by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

Smart Grid Background What Are Smart Grids?Smart Grids use computer hardware and software, sensors, controls, and telecommunications equipment and services to: Link customers to information that helps them manage consumption and use electricity wisely. Enable customers to respond to utility notices in ways that help minimize the duration of overloads, bottlenecks, and outages. Provide utilities with information that helps them improve performance and control costs. What Is Driving Smart Grid Development? Environmental ImpactSmart Grid development is picking up speed because of the widespread interest in reducing the negative impact that energy use has on the environment. Smart Grids use technology to drive efficiencies in transmission, distribution, and consumption. As a result, utilities can serve customers’ power needs with fewer generating plants, fewer transmission and distribution assets,and lower overall generation. With the possible exception of wind farm sprawl, landscape preservation is one obvious benefit. And because most generation today results in greenhouse gas emissions, Smart Grids reduce air pollution and the potential for global climate change.Smart Grids also more easily accommodate the technical difficulties of integrating intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar into the grid, providing further greenhouse gas reductions. CostsThe ability to defer the cost of plant and grid expansion is a major benefit to both utilities and customers. Utilities do not need to use as many internal resources for traditional infrastructure project planning and management. Large T&D infrastructure expansion costs are not passed on to customers.Smart Grids will not eliminate capital expansion, of course. Transmission corridors to connect renewable generation with customers will require major near-term expenditures. Additionally, in the future, electricity to satisfy the needs of population growth and additional applications will exceed the capacity reductions available through the Smart Grid. At that point, expansion will resume—but with greater overall T&D efficiency based on demand response, load control, and many other Smart Grid technologies and business processes. Energy efficiency is a second area of Smart Grid cost saving of particular relevance to customers. The timely and detailed information Smart Grids provide encourages customers to limit waste, adopt energy-efficient building codes and standards, and invest in energy efficient appliances. Efficiency may or may not lower customer bills because customer efficiency savings may be offset by higher costs in generation fuels or carbon taxes. It is clear, however, that bills will be lower with efficiency than without it. Utility Operations Smart Grids can serve as the central focus of utility initiatives to improve business processes. Many utilities have long “wish lists” of projects and applications they would like to fund in order to improve customer service or ease staff’s burden of repetitious work, but they have difficulty cost-justifying the changes, especially in the short term. Adding Smart Grid benefits to the cost/benefit analysis frequently tips the scales in favor of the change and can also significantly reduce payback periods.Mobile workforce applications and asset management applications work together to deploy assets and then to maintain, repair, and replace them. Many additional benefits result—for instance, increased productivity and fuel savings from better routing. Similarly, customer portals that provide customers with near-real-time information can also encourage online payments, thus lowering billing costs. Utilities can and should include these cost and service improvements in the list of Smart Grid benefits. What Is Smart Grid Business Software? Smart Grid business software gathers data from a Smart Grid and uses it improve a utility’s business processes. Smart Grid business software also helps utilities provide relevant information to customers who can then use it to reduce their own consumption and improve their environmental profiles. Smart Grid Business Software Minimizes the Impact of Peak Demand Utilities must size their assets to accommodate their highest peak demand. The higher the peak rises above base demand: The more assets a utility must build that are used only for brief periods—an inefficient use of capital. The higher the utility’s risk profile rises given the uncertainties surrounding the time needed for permitting, building, and recouping costs. The higher the costs for utilities to purchase supply, because generators can charge more for contracts and spot supply during high-demand periods. Smart Grids enable a variety of programs that reduce peak demand, including: Time-of-use pricing and critical peak pricing—programs that charge customers more when they consume electricity during peak periods. Pilot projects indicate that these programs are successful in flattening peaks, thus ensuring better use of existing T&D and generation assets. Direct load control, which lets utilities reduce or eliminate electricity flow to customer equipment (such as air conditioners). Contracts govern the terms and conditions of these turn-offs. Indirect load control, which signals customers to reduce the use of on-premises equipment for contractually agreed-on time periods. Smart Grid business software enables utilities to impose penalties on customers who do not comply with their contracts. Smart Grids also help utilities manage peaks with existing assets by enabling: Real-time asset monitoring and control. In this application, advanced sensors safely enable dynamic capacity load limits, ensuring that all grid assets can be used to their maximum capacity during peak demand periods. Real-time asset monitoring and control applications also detect the location of excessive losses and pinpoint need for mitigation and asset replacements. As a result, utilities reduce outage risk and guard against excess capacity or “over-build”. Better peak demand analysis. As a result: Distribution planners can better size equipment (e.g. transformers) to avoid over-building. Operations engineers can identify and resolve bottlenecks and other inefficiencies that may cause or exacerbate peaks. As above, the result is a reduction in the tendency to over-build. Supply managers can more closely match procurement with delivery. As a result, they can fine-tune supply portfolios, reducing the tendency to over-contract for peak supply and reducing the need to resort to spot market purchases during high peaks. Smart Grids can help lower the cost of remaining peaks by: Standardizing interconnections for new distributed resources (such as electricity storage devices). Placing the interconnections where needed to support anticipated grid congestion. Smart Grid Business Software Lowers the Cost of Field Services By processing Smart Grid data through their business software, utilities can reduce such field costs as: Vegetation management. Smart Grids can pinpoint momentary interruptions and tree-caused outages. Spatial mash-up tools leverage GIS models of tree growth for targeted vegetation management. This reduces the cost of unnecessary tree trimming. Service vehicle fuel. Many utility service calls are “false alarms.” Checking meter status before dispatching crews prevents many unnecessary “truck rolls.” Similarly, crews use far less fuel when Smart Grid sensors can pinpoint a problem and mobile workforce applications can then route them directly to it. Smart Grid Business Software Ensures Regulatory Compliance Smart Grids can ensure compliance with private contracts and with regional, national, or international requirements by: Monitoring fulfillment of contract terms. Utilities can use one-hour interval meters to ensure that interruptible (“non-core”) customers actually reduce or eliminate deliveries as required. They can use the information to levy fines against contract violators. Monitoring regulations imposed on customers, such as maximum use during specific time periods. Using accurate time-stamped event history derived from intelligent devices distributed throughout the smart grid to monitor and report reliability statistics and risk compliance. Automating business processes and activities that ensure compliance with security and reliability measures (e.g. NERC-CIP 2-9). Grid Business Software Strengthens Utilities’ Connection to Customers While Reducing Customer Service Costs During outages, Smart Grid business software can: Identify outages more quickly. Software uses sensors to pinpoint outages and nested outage locations. They also permit utilities to ensure outage resolution at every meter location. Size outages more accurately, permitting utilities to dispatch crews that have the skills needed, in appropriate numbers. Provide updates on outage location and expected duration. This information helps call centers inform customers about the timing of service restoration. Smart Grids also facilitates display of outage maps for customer and public-service use. Smart Grids can significantly reduce the cost to: Connect and disconnect customers. Meters capable of remote disconnect can virtually eliminate the costs of field crews and vehicles previously required to change service from the old to the new residents of a metered property or disconnect customers for nonpayment. Resolve reports of voltage fluctuation. Smart Grids gather and report voltage and power quality data from meters and grid sensors, enabling utilities to pinpoint reported problems or resolve them before customers complain. Detect and resolve non-technical losses (e.g. theft). Smart Grids can identify illegal attempts to reconnect meters or to use electricity in supposedly vacant premises. They can also detect theft by comparing flows through delivery assets with billed consumption. Smart Grids also facilitate outreach to customers. By monitoring and analyzing consumption over time, utilities can: Identify customers with unusually high usage and contact them before they receive a bill. They can also suggest conservation techniques that might help to limit consumption. This can head off “high bill” complaints to the contact center. Note that such “high usage” or “additional charges apply because you are out of range” notices—frequently via text messaging—are already common among mobile phone providers. Help customers identify appropriate bill payment alternatives (budget billing, prepayment, etc.). Help customers find and reduce causes of over-consumption. There’s no waiting for bills in the mail before they even understand there is a problem. Utilities benefit not just through improved customer relations but also through limiting the size of bills from customers who might struggle to pay them. Where permitted, Smart Grids can open the doors to such new utility service offerings as: Monitoring properties. Landlords reduce costs of vacant properties when utilities notify them of unexpected energy or water consumption. Utilities can perform similar services for owners of vacation properties or the adult children of aging parents. Monitoring equipment. Power-use patterns can reveal a need for equipment maintenance. Smart Grids permit utilities to alert owners or managers to a need for maintenance or replacement. Facilitating home and small-business networks. Smart Grids can provide a gateway to equipment networks that automate control or let owners access equipment remotely. They also facilitate net metering, offering some utilities a path toward involvement in small-scale solar or wind generation. Prepayment plans that do not need special meters. Smart Grid Business Software Helps Customers Control Energy Costs There is no end to the ways Smart Grids help both small and large customers control energy costs. For instance: Multi-premises customers appreciate having all meters read on the same day so that they can more easily compare consumption at various sites. Customers in competitive regions can match their consumption profile (detailed via Smart Grid data) with specific offerings from competitive suppliers. Customers seeing inexplicable consumption patterns and power quality problems may investigate further. The result can be discovery of electrical problems that can be resolved through rewiring or maintenance—before more serious fires or accidents happen. Smart Grid Business Software Facilitates Use of Renewables Generation from wind and solar resources is a popular alternative to fossil fuel generation, which emits greenhouse gases. Wind and solar generation may also increase energy security in regions that currently import fossil fuel for use in generation. Utilities face many technical issues as they attempt to integrate intermittent resource generation into traditional grids, which traditionally handle only fully dispatchable generation. Smart Grid business software helps solves many of these issues by: Detecting sudden drops in production from renewables-generated electricity (wind and solar) and automatically triggering electricity storage and smart appliance response to compensate as needed. Supporting industry-standard distributed generation interconnection processes to reduce interconnection costs and avoid adding renewable supplies to locations already subject to grid congestion. Facilitating modeling and monitoring of locally generated supply from renewables and thus helping to maximize their use. Increasing the efficiency of “net metering” (through which utilities can use electricity generated by customers) by: Providing data for analysis. Integrating the production and consumption aspects of customer accounts. During non-peak periods, such techniques enable utilities to increase the percent of renewable generation in their supply mix. During peak periods, Smart Grid business software controls circuit reconfiguration to maximize available capacity. Conclusion Utility missions are changing. Yesterday, they focused on delivery of reasonably priced energy and water. Tomorrow, their missions will expand to encompass sustainable use and environmental improvement.Smart Grids are key to helping utilities achieve this expanded mission. But they come at a relatively high price. Utilities will need to invest heavily in new hardware, software, business process development, and staff training. Customer investments in home area networks and smart appliances will be large. Learning to change the energy and water consumption habits of a lifetime could ultimately prove even more formidable tasks.Smart Grid business software can ease the cost and difficulties inherent in a needed transition to a more flexible, reliable, responsive electricity grid. Justifying its implementation, however, requires a full understanding of the benefits it brings—benefits that can ultimately help customers, utilities, communities, and the world address global issues like energy security and climate change while minimizing costs and maximizing customer convenience. This white paper is available for download here. For further information about Oracle's Primavera Solutions for Utilities, please read our Utilities e-book.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 24, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 24, 2010Popular ReleasesEdinamarry Free Tarot Software for Windows: Edinamarry Free Tarot Software Version 3.12: Version 3.12 - 24th November, 2010::: Contains new features and components. Fixed bugs too. History: Version 3.10 - 19th November 2010::: Contains bug fixes and replacements for older features. Added Collapsible Panels support. Client profiles and all cards data import and export, storage is now done in standalone databases. A new 2010-2011 Windows 7/XP freeware Tarot and Divinity Software for PC and Windows 7. Edinamarry brings to you an open Tarot Scribe Kit by which you can create your ...Deep Zoom for WPF: First Release: This first release of the Deep Zoom control has the same source code, binaries and demos as the CodeProject article (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/DeepZoom.aspx).Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.2: Added cave and nether support. Added ability to enter a height (press enter or 'set height' button). Added View menu, moved 'Show Navigation Controls' there. Added View->Background Color menu to change the canvas background color (preference not currently saved). Improved handling of height change (still not perfect, think it can be made faster). Images are now cached in %APPDATA%\Minemapper, organized by world, then direction, then mode (cave, day, night, nether), then skylight, th...BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.0 RC: This is a Release Candidate version for BlogEngine.NET 2.0. The most current, stable version of BlogEngine.NET is version 1.6. Find out more about the BlogEngine.NET 2.0 RC here. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. To get started, be sure to check out our installation documentation and the installation screencast. If you are upgrading from a previous version, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0 instructions. As this ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.156: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release adds a feature for aggregating the overall metrics in a folder full of NodeXL workbooks, adds geographical coordinates to the Twitter import features, and fixes a memory-related bug. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Please Note: There is a new option in the setup program to install for "Just Me" or "Everyone." Most people...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.8.2 Beta: New in this release: - Update titles after language change - Tool tips for name/title - Transfer DVD to a specific image file - Download titles from wiitdb.com - Save Settings geometry - Titles and Cover language global in settings - Convert Files (images) to another format - Format WBFS partition - Create WBFS file - WIT path configurable in settings - Save last path in Files/Load - Sort game lists - Save column width - Sequenz of columns changeable - Set indicated columns in settings - Bus...SQL Monitor: SQL Monitor 1.3: 1. change sys.sysprocesses to DMV: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187997.aspx select * from sys.dm_exec_connections select * from sys.dm_exec_requests select * from sys.dm_exec_sessions 2. adjust columns to fit without scrollingVFPX: FoxBarcode v.0.11: FoxBarcode v.0.11 - Released 2010.11.22 FoxBarcode is a 100% Visual FoxPro class that provides a tool for generating images with different bar code symbologies to be used in VFP forms and reports, or exported to other applications. Its use and distribution is free for all Visual FoxPro Community. Whats is new? Added a third parameter to the BarcodeImage() method Fixed some minor bugs History FoxBarcode v.0.10 - Released 2010.11.19 - 85 Downloads Project page: FoxBarcodeASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.3.1 and demos: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form and Pager tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6DotSpatial: DotSpatial 11-21-2010: This release introduces the following Fixed bugs related to dispose, which caused issues when reordering layers in the legend Fixed bugs related to assigning categories where NULL values are in the fields New fast-acting resize using a bitmap "prediction" of what the final resize content will look like. ImageData.ReadBlock, ImageData.WriteBlock These allow direct file access for reading or writing a rectangular window. Bitmaps are used for holding the values. Removed the need to stor...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.24.6966: Fixed Updater; Fixed minor bugs;WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.1: Version: 2.0.0.1 (Milestone 1): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...Home Access Plus+: v5.4.4: Version 5.4.4Change Log: Added logic to the My Computer Browsers to allow for users with no home directories (set in ad anyhow) Renamed the My School Computer Enhanced page to My School Computer Extended Edition File Changes: ~/bin/hap.web.dll ~/clientbin/hap.silverlight.xap ~/mycomputersl.aspx.NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.01: Added new extensions for - object.CountLoopsToNull Added new extensions for DateTime: - DateTime.IsWeekend - DateTime.AddWeeks Added new extensions for string: - string.Repeat - string.IsNumeric - string.ExtractDigits - string.ConcatWith - string.ToGuid - string.ToGuidSave Added new extensions for Exception: - Exception.GetOriginalException Added new extensions for Stream: - Stream.Write (overload) And other new methods ... Release as of dotnetpro 01/2011Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-11-19: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010Prism Training Kit: Prism Training Kit 4.0: Release NotesThis is an updated version of the Prism training Kit that targets Prism 4.0 and added labs for some of the new features of Prism 4.0. This release consists of a Training Kit with Labs on the following topics Modularity Dependency Injection Bootstrapper UI Composition Communication MEF Navigation Note: Take into account that this is a Beta version. If you find any bugs please report them in the Issue Tracker PrerequisitesVisual Studio 2010 Microsoft Word 2...Free language translator and file converter: Free Language Translator 2.2: Starting with version 2.0, the translator encountered a major redesign that uses MEF based plugins and .net 4.0. I've also fixed some bugs and added support for translating subtitles that can show up in video media players. Version 2.1 shows the context menu 'Translate' in Windows Explorer on right click. Version 2.2 has links to start the media file with its associated subtitle. Download the zip file and expand it in a temporary location on your local disk. At a minimum , you should uninstal...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.4 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.4 with few bug fixes: * Multi-line Labels were getting clipped while exploding last DataPoint in Funnel and Pyramid chart. * ClosestPlotDistance property in Axis was not behaving as expected. * In DateTime Axis, Chart threw exception on mouse click over PlotArea if there were no DataPoints present in Chart. * ToolTip was not disappearing while changing the DataSource property of the DataSeries at real-time. * Chart threw exception ...Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: 00.00.05: This release of the DotNetNuke Module Development Templates replaces the NANT scripts with MSBuild scripts. You will need to download and install the MSBuildTasks MSI file from http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org/, it's pretty straight forward without needing any sort of customization during installation. To install these templates copy the ZIP file downloaded into your My Documents\Visual Studio 2008 (or 2010)\Templates\Project Templates\C#(or VB)\Web folder (if the WEB folder doesn't exist, cre...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks 2008R2 SR1: Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 (SR1)This release is dedicated to the sample databases that ship for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2. See Database Prerequisites for SQL Server 2008R2 for feature configurations required for installing the sample databases. See Installing SQL Server 2008R2 Databases for step by step installation instructions. The SR1 release contains minor bug fixes to the installer used to create the sample databases. There are no changes to the databases them...New ProjectsAdventureWorks Products: This is a very simple module built for DNN 5.01.00 and up which allows you to edit some basic AdventureWorks product data. The module displays skin techniques.Amnesia: Transacts all changes to a website to facilitate automated UI testing. Queries from the automated test can also query the application database without blocking and participate in the transaction.DBA Inventory: DBA Inventory is a SQL Server based project to help inventory, manage, control, and report on a large SQL Server infrastructure without requiring agents on the target. dcorp: ?????? cmsFoldingAnalysis: Software para monitoramento de cliente folding@homeHelpSystem2010: testei2iPortal: i2i Technologies projectLucandra.NET: Lucandra.NET is a Lucene + Cassandra implementation written in C# which is based on the Lucandra (Java) project by Jake Luciani. Apache's Lucene is a high-performance full-text search engine, and Apache's Cassandra is a promising NoSQL database, originally developed by Facebook.MSBuild ConfigTransform for Visual Studio: MSbuild ConfigTransform makes transforming of config files (xml) an integrated part of your Visual Studio 2010 build action (CTRL+SHIFT+B or SHIFT+F6 or what your keyboards shortcut are set to) Provides optional fail on build on failed transformation of xml with error messagesNyx Editor: Nyx is a free, open-source game development tool aimed at making the creation and edition of levels or maps easy and enjoyable. Nyx exports level data as JSON, XML, or binary making it malleable to your own projects, engines, and needs.openfleet: This is a modular open source project to control fleets. It's a fork of the gofleet project (http://gitorious.org/gofleet).PoShRabbit: A PowerShell module to enable messaging against a Rabbit MQ server. Provides deeply integrated facilities for handling message queues and subscriptions using scripts. Enables PowerShell scripts to publish messages in Rabbit exchanges.Silverlight and WP7 Exception Handling and Logging building block: This code will help you handle and log client side exceptions in your Silverlight 4 and WP7 projects. Errors that occur in clients can be sent to your loggingservice. The service will store them. It's developed in C#, using VS2010.student admission system: this is emerson college registration system.Useful Desktop Components: Este artigo discute o uso de alguns componentes que podem ser muito úteis no dia a dia de um programador desktop como por exemplo manipulação de textos RTF, criptografias, validações, armazenamento de arquivos, validações de CPF e CNPJ, entre outros.WPF Calendar and DatePicker Themes: WPF Calendar and DatePicker ThemesWPF PropertyGrid Control: WPF PropertyGrid ControlWrix Development Kit: One development kit for internet and enterprise both.XNAPF: This project aims to create a control for integrating easily an XNA rendering in a WPF picture. xSNMP Extensions for System Center OpsMgr 2007: Developed by OpsMgr users with substantial community input, and tested extensively in implementations around the world, the xSNMP Management Pack suite is a powerful open-source SNMP monitoring implementation for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 environments.

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Looking into Enum Support in Entity Framework 5.0 Code First

- by nikolaosk

In this post I will show you with a hands-on demo the enum support that is available in Visual Studio 2012, .Net Framework 4.5 and Entity Framework 5.0. You can have a look at this post to learn about the support of multilple diagrams per model that exists in Entity Framework 5.0. We will demonstrate this with a step by step example. I will use Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate. You can also use Visual Studio 2012 Express Edition. Before I move on to the actual demo I must say that in EF 5.0 an enumeration can have the following types. Byte Int16 Int32 Int64 Sbyte Obviously I cannot go into much detail on what EF is and what it does. I will give again a short introduction.The .Net framework provides support for Object Relational Mapping through EF. So EF is a an ORM tool and it is now the main data access technology that microsoft works on. I use it quite extensively in my projects. Through EF we have many things out of the box provided for us. We have the automatic generation of SQL code.It maps relational data to strongly types objects.All the changes made to the objects in the memory are persisted in a transactional way back to the data store. You can find in this post an example on how to use the Entity Framework to retrieve data from an SQL Server Database using the "Database/Schema First" approach. In this approach we make all the changes at the database level and then we update the model with those changes. In this post you can see an example on how to use the "Model First" approach when working with ASP.Net and the Entity Framework. This model was firstly introduced in EF version 4.0 and we could start with a blank model and then create a database from that model.When we made changes to the model , we could recreate the database from the new model. You can search in my blog, because I have posted many posts regarding ASP.Net and EF. I assume you have a working knowledge of C# and know a few things about EF. The Code First approach is the more code-centric than the other two. Basically we write POCO classes and then we persist to a database using something called DBContext. Code First relies on DbContext. We create 2,3 classes (e.g Person,Product) with properties and then these classes interact with the DbContext class. We can create a new database based upon our POCOS classes and have tables generated from those classes.We do not have an .edmx file in this approach.By using this approach we can write much easier unit tests. DbContext is a new context class and is smaller,lightweight wrapper for the main context class which is ObjectContext (Schema First and Model First). Let's begin building our sample application. 1) Launch Visual Studio. Create an ASP.Net Empty Web application. Choose an appropriate name for your application. 2) Add a web form, default.aspx page to the application. 3) Now we need to make sure the Entity Framework is included in our project. Go to Solution Explorer, right-click on the project name.Then select Manage NuGet Packages...In the Manage NuGet Packages dialog, select the Online tab and choose the EntityFramework package.Finally click Install. Have a look at the picture below 4) Create a new folder. Name it CodeFirst . 5) Add a new item in your application, a class file. Name it Footballer.cs. This is going to be a simple POCO class.Place it in the CodeFirst folder. The code follows public class Footballer { public int FootballerID { get; set; } public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public double Weight { get; set; } public double Height { get; set; } public DateTime JoinedTheClub { get; set; } public int Age { get; set; } public List<Training> Trainings { get; set; } public FootballPositions Positions { get; set; } } Now I am going to define my enum values in the same class file, Footballer.cs public enum FootballPositions { Defender, Midfielder, Striker } 6) Now we need to create the Training class. Add a new class to your application and place it in the CodeFirst folder.The code for the class follows. public class Training { public int TrainingID { get; set; } public int TrainingDuration { get; set; } public string TrainingLocation { get; set; } } 7) Then we need to create a context class that inherits from DbContext.Add a new class to the CodeFirst folder.Name it FootballerDBContext.Now that we have the entity classes created, we must let the model know.I will have to use the DbSet<T> property.The code for this class follows public class FootballerDBContext:DbContext { public DbSet<Footballer> Footballers { get; set; } public DbSet<Training> Trainings { get; set; } } Do not forget to add (using System.Data.Entity;) in the beginning of the class file 8) We must take care of the connection string. It is very easy to create one in the web.config.It does not matter that we do not have a database yet.When we run the DbContext and query against it,it will use a connection string in the web.config and will create the database based on the classes. In my case the connection string inside the web.config, looks like this <connectionStrings> <add name="CodeFirstDBContext" connectionString="server=.\SqlExpress;integrated security=true;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/> </connectionStrings> 9) Now it is time to create Linq to Entities queries to retrieve data from the database . Add a new class to your application in the CodeFirst folder.Name the file DALfootballer.cs We will create a simple public method to retrieve the footballers. The code for the class follows public class DALfootballer { FootballerDBContext ctx = new FootballerDBContext(); public List<Footballer> GetFootballers() { var query = from player in ctx.Footballers where player.FirstName=="Jamie" select player; return query.ToList(); } } 10) Place a GridView control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name.Add an ObjectDataSource control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name. Set the DatasourceID property of the GridView control to the ID of the ObjectDataSource control.(DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1" ). Let's configure the ObjectDataSource control. Click on the smart tag item of the ObjectDataSource control and select Configure Data Source. In the Wizzard that pops up select the DALFootballer class and then in the next step choose the GetFootballers() method.Click Finish to complete the steps of the wizzard. Build your application. 11) Let's create an Insert method in order to insert data into the tables. I will create an Insert() method and for simplicity reasons I will place it in the Default.aspx.cs file. private void Insert() { var footballers = new List<Footballer> { new Footballer { FirstName = "Steven",LastName="Gerrard", Height=1.85, Weight=85,Age=32, JoinedTheClub=DateTime.Parse("12/12/1999"),Positions=FootballPositions.Midfielder, Trainings = new List<Training> { new Training {TrainingDuration = 3, TrainingLocation="MelWood"}, new Training {TrainingDuration = 2, TrainingLocation="Anfield"}, new Training {TrainingDuration = 2, TrainingLocation="MelWood"}, } }, new Footballer { FirstName = "Jamie",LastName="Garragher", Height=1.89, Weight=89,Age=34, JoinedTheClub=DateTime.Parse("12/02/2000"),Positions=FootballPositions.Defender, Trainings = new List<Training> { new Training {TrainingDuration = 3, TrainingLocation="MelWood"}, new Training {TrainingDuration = 5, TrainingLocation="Anfield"}, new Training {TrainingDuration = 6, TrainingLocation="Anfield"}, } } }; footballers.ForEach(foot => ctx.Footballers.Add(foot)); ctx.SaveChanges(); } 12) In the Page_Load() event handling routine I called the Insert() method. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Insert(); } 13) Run your application and you will see that the following result,hopefully. You can see clearly that the data is returned along with the enum value. 14) You must have also a look at the database.Launch SSMS and see the database and its objects (data) created from EF Code First.Have a look at the picture below. Hopefully now you have seen the support that exists in EF 5.0 for enums.Hope it helps !!!

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 02, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 02, 2011Popular ReleasesDocument.Editor: 2011.9: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.9: New Templates System New Plug-in System New Replace dialog New reset settings Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsTortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 2.0: TortoiseHg 2.0 is a complete rewrite of TortoiseHg 1.1, switching from PyGtk to PyQtVG Content Display Web Part: VG Content Display Web Part V1.0: Install package shall be installed using PowerShell or stsadm commands or using Central Administration interface. Please see instructions in the http://vgcdwp.codeplex.com/releases/view/61805#DownloadId=212622 file.DirectQ: Release 1.8.7 (Beta 3): Fixes some problems and adds some more enhancements.Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.2.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. NOTE: The included help file and the online help have not been completely updated to reflect all changes in this release. A refresh will be issue...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Microsoft Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2554: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, we have added 4 new protocol parsers and updated 79 existing parsers in the NetworkMonitor_Pa...Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.13: New features: switches and settings for turning off Conditional Compilation comment processing; for adding variable and/or function names that should not be renamed automatically; for adding manual renaming of variables/functions/properties; for automatic evaluation of certain literal expressions (but not all).Image Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 1: Prepare to have your minds blown. This is the first preview of what will eventually become 39613. There are still a lot of rough edges and plenty of areas still under construction, but for your basic needs, it should be relativly stable. Note: You will need the .NET Framework 4 installed to use this version. Below is a status report of where this release is in terms of the overall goal for version 3. If you're feeling a bit technically ambitious and want to check out some of the features th...JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 1.1: updated GetAllJsonObjects() method and GetAllProperties() methods to JsonObject and Properties propertiesFacebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 1.0: Refer to http://computerbeacon.net for Documentation and Tutorial New features:added FQL support added Expires property to Api object added support for publishing to a user's friend / Facebook Page added support for posting and removing comments on posts added support for adding and removing likes on posts and comments added static methods for Page class added support for Iframe Application Tab of Facebook Page added support for obtaining the user's country, locale and age in If...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.1: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager small improvements for some helpers and AjaxDropdown has Data like the Lookup except it's value gets reset and list refilled if any element from data gets changedManaged Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 3: This release aims .net 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0. Accordingly, there are two solutions files. The assemblies are named System.ComponentModel.Composition.Codeplex.dll as a way to avoid clashing with the version shipped with the 4th version of the framework. Introduced CompositionOptions to container instantiation CompositionOptions.DisableSilentRejection makes MEF throw an exception on composition errors. Useful for diagnostics Support for open generics Support for attribute-less registr...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.6 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.4: Version: 2.0.0.4 (Milestone 4): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...VidCoder: 0.8.2: Updated auto-naming to handle seconds and frames ranges as well. Deprecated the {chapters} token for auto-naming in favor of {range}. Allowing file drag to preview window and enabling main window shortcut keys to work no matter what window is focused. Added option in config to enable giving custom names to audio tracks. (Note that these names will only show up certain players like iTunes or on the iPod. Players that support custom track names normally may not show them.) Added tooltips ...SQL Server Compact Toolbox: Standalone version 2.0 for SQL Server Compact 4.0: Download the Visual Studio add-in for SQL Server Compact 4.0 and 3.5 from here Standalone version of (most of) the same functionality as the add-in, for SQL Server Compact 4.0. Useful for anyone not having Visual Studio Professional or higher installed. Requires .NET 4.0. Any feedback much appreciated.Claims Based Identity & Access Control Guide: Drop 1 - Claims Identity Guide V2: Highlights of drop #1 This is the first drop of the new "Claims Identity Guide" edition. In this release you will find: All previous samples updated and enhanced. All code upgraded to .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Extensive cleanup. Refactored Simulated Issuers: each solution now gets its own issuers. This results in much cleaner and simpler to understand code. Added Single Sign Out support. Added first sample using ACS ("ACS as a Federation Provider"). This sample extends the ori...Simple Notify: Simple Notify Beta 2011-02-25: Feature: host the service with a single click in console Feature: host the service as a windows service Feature: notification cient application Feature: push client application Feature: push notifications from your powershell script Feature: C# wrapper libraries for your applicationspatterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 3 - 25 Feb 2011: IntroductionWelcome to the third community drop of Project Silk. For this drop we are requesting feedback on overall application architecture, code review of the JavaScript Conductor and Widgets, and general direction of the application. Project Silk provides guidance and sample implementations that describe and illustrate recommended practices for building modern web applications using technologies such as HTML5, jQuery, CSS3 and Internet Explorer 9. This guidance is intended for experien...Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.5: Now supports new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format, thanks to updated mcmap. Disabled biomes, until Minecraft Biome Extractor supports new format.New ProjectsAndrea Angella Personal Repository: This is my personal code repository.Audipyme: Aplicación web para el análisis y gestión de riesgos basado en la norma ISO 27001.Backfire 4 Umbraco: An implementation of backfire to work with UmbracoBadminton: Source codeCarManagement: Car ManagementCEQuery: CEQuery is usefull for managing SQL Server CE databases. It is developed in C# and supports SQL Server CE 3.5 and 4.0.Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram enables you to make electronic circuit diagrams and allows them to be exported as images. Ideal for use in coursework, you no longer have to use image editing programs to paste components together.CodeI2iportal: fdfdfCycling waypoints for Windows Phone 7: Show cycling POI on the Windows Phone 7d3d test: no summarydaemoniq - windows service hosting for mere mortals: Daemoniq provides a layer of a abstraction on top of System.ServiceProcess. This allows developers to concentrate on the functionality of their windows services in .Net by providing functionality such as configuration, deployment and debuggability.DimMock: DimMock is an object mocking framework for .NET Framework 4.0 that enables developers to mock simple and mildly complex classes extremely quick. euler 11: euler 11 problemeuler 30: euler 30euler 36 problem: euler 36 problemFiverw: Fiverw with ASP.NETGameList Creator for Wario's Jewel (GameBoy emulator for Windows Phone 7): Cette application vous permet de créer un catalogue de jeux vidéo pour des émulateurs mobiles et notamment Wario's Jewels, un emulateur GameBoy pour WP7. This application make it easier to create a game list for mobile emulators like Wario's Jewels, an WP7 GameBoy emulator.Gestion no Conformes: Gestión de No ConformesIamV Silverlight player: SilverLight photo album and music playerIcon Manager for Umbraco: Icon Manager for Umbraco - manage the icons within the setting secion of Umbraco by adding / removing from an available icon poolIE9 Extensions 4 Umbraco: A set of IE 9 extensions for Umbracoie9ify: A jQuery Plugin for adding IE9 features (site pinning, site mode, etc.) to your websitesImgUR.NET: ImgUr.NET helps the new .NET programmer host images on ImgUr. Developed in Visual Basic 2010, it can be used using only one line of code! You don't even need to parse the XML, ImgUr.NET automagically extract the URL and gives it to you! You can also get raw XML to parse yourself.Markup Programmability: Markup Programmability extends Blend Interactivity to a full programming language in markup: control flow, expressions, functions, objects, commands, converters, events, and more. Write an MVVM prototype in markup-only or use it for enhanced interactivity.MSCRM 4.0 Appointment Reminders (popup application without needing Outlook!): MSCRM 4.0 Appointment Reminders (popup application without Outlook!). Want to have your CRM Appointments popup on your desktop but don't have Outlook? Frustated by the CRM connection always going down and disconnecting itself? Built for local network use.myAspPracticals: my Asp.net pacticals-practical2NickMaoMix: It is only a sample project in Spring.Net + NHibernate + ASP.NET MVCOrchard Content Permissions: Orchard module enabling users to permit access to specified content items.Orchard LatestTwitter Module: Display latest Tweets for a user in an Orchard widget.PDF Little Signer: PDF Little Signer is a .NET3.5 library for self signing PDF document. It's very easy to use. It uses iTextSharp.perolas: perolasPGeom2D: PGeom2D is an attempt to derive the project http://livegeometry.codeplex.com/ as a more CAD oriented / desktop application. - it should use GDI+ instead of silverlight / WPF. - it should provide layers and blocks features. - it should support more export/import formats.Practical4: This is my practical4 webApplicationQxado: A .net framework written by BillQianReactive Extensions (Rx) Koans: Use this VS2010 project to learn Reactive (Rx) by doing small hacks in prepared lessons. Koans are a great way to get started learning Rx. Included Topics are: Observable Streams Time Events Aggregations Subscriptions RegularPractice: It is a project where i can upload my own prectice and demo projects of asp.net .RSVP04: RSVP systemschool project: Studiegids Projectshowyourfrustration: This web site is made for fun and enjoy over the internat.Silverlight Classified Cabinet: The Silverlight Classified Cabinet is a component that makes it easier to show classified items in a nice way. With the power of Silverlight, it lets users zoom and drag the items, categorize them into shelves and see detailed view. SkilledRESKAT: This Module helps SKilledRES for Automating Student Knowledge AssessmentTera X Emulator: Tera Emulator based on C#Test Tasks: Collection of completed test exercises.VG Content Display Web Part: VG Content Display Web Part is an alternative to Content Query Web Part (CQWP). It is easy to set up, uses custom XSLT file and it works with SharePoint 2010 Foundation. It allows displaying context-related content using current page metadata as filter values.vkPlayer: The standalone player for VKontakte siteWarMap Downloader: Easy way for download Warcraft 3 maps, from popular epicwar.com server. Hope you Enjoy!Web Crawler Sample: Simple solution that shows how NUnit, RhinoMock, Unity 2.0 DI container, and Parallel Extensions can play together. It is not considered as a best practice but rather aims to serve as a quick start solution.WP7Clipboard: WP7Clipboard is a library to mimic a shared clipboard on Windows Phone 7. This enables the user to copy objects from one application and post them into another without having to use a webservice/etc.????????? ?????????: "????????? ?????????" - ??? ???????, ??????????????? ????? ??????????????? ??????? ??? ??????? ??????? ????????????. ????????? ???????? ??? ?????? ? ????? ??????????? ??????? ??????? ?? ?????????? ????? ???.

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Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentDictionary

- by Simon Cooper

Using locks to implement a thread-safe collection is rather like using a sledgehammer - unsubtle, easy to understand, and tends to make any other tool redundant. Unlike the previous two collections I looked at, ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue, ConcurrentDictionary uses locks quite heavily. However, it is careful to wield locks only where necessary to ensure that concurrency is maximised. This will, by necessity, be a higher-level look than my other posts in this series, as there is quite a lot of code and logic in ConcurrentDictionary. Therefore, I do recommend that you have ConcurrentDictionary open in a decompiler to have a look at all the details that I skip over. The problem with locks There's several things to bear in mind when using locks, as encapsulated by the lock keyword in C# and the System.Threading.Monitor class in .NET (if you're unsure as to what lock does in C#, I briefly covered it in my first post in the series): Locks block threads The most obvious problem is that threads waiting on a lock can't do any work at all. No preparatory work, no 'optimistic' work like in ConcurrentQueue and ConcurrentStack, nothing. It sits there, waiting to be unblocked. This is bad if you're trying to maximise concurrency. Locks are slow Whereas most of the methods on the Interlocked class can be compiled down to a single CPU instruction, ensuring atomicity at the hardware level, taking out a lock requires some heavy lifting by the CLR and the operating system. There's quite a bit of work required to take out a lock, block other threads, and wake them up again. If locks are used heavily, this impacts performance. Deadlocks When using locks there's always the possibility of a deadlock - two threads, each holding a lock, each trying to aquire the other's lock. Fortunately, this can be avoided with careful programming and structured lock-taking, as we'll see. So, it's important to minimise where locks are used to maximise the concurrency and performance of the collection. Implementation As you might expect, ConcurrentDictionary is similar in basic implementation to the non-concurrent Dictionary, which I studied in a previous post. I'll be using some concepts introduced there, so I recommend you have a quick read of it. So, if you were implementing a thread-safe dictionary, what would you do? The naive implementation is to simply have a single lock around all methods accessing the dictionary. This would work, but doesn't allow much concurrency. Fortunately, the bucketing used by Dictionary allows a simple but effective improvement to this - one lock per bucket. This allows different threads modifying different buckets to do so in parallel. Any thread making changes to the contents of a bucket takes the lock for that bucket, ensuring those changes are thread-safe. The method that maps each bucket to a lock is the GetBucketAndLockNo method: private void GetBucketAndLockNo( int hashcode, out int bucketNo, out int lockNo, int bucketCount) { // the bucket number is the hashcode (without the initial sign bit) // modulo the number of buckets bucketNo = (hashcode & 0x7fffffff) % bucketCount; // and the lock number is the bucket number modulo the number of locks lockNo = bucketNo % m_locks.Length; } However, this does require some changes to how the buckets are implemented. The 'implicit' linked list within a single backing array used by the non-concurrent Dictionary adds a dependency between separate buckets, as every bucket uses the same backing array. Instead, ConcurrentDictionary uses a strict linked list on each bucket: This ensures that each bucket is entirely separate from all other buckets; adding or removing an item from a bucket is independent to any changes to other buckets. Modifying the dictionary All the operations on the dictionary follow the same basic pattern: void AlterBucket(TKey key, ...) { int bucketNo, lockNo; 1: GetBucketAndLockNo( key.GetHashCode(), out bucketNo, out lockNo, m_buckets.Length); 2: lock (m_locks[lockNo]) { 3: Node headNode = m_buckets[bucketNo]; 4: Mutate the node linked list as appropriate } } For example, when adding another entry to the dictionary, you would iterate through the linked list to check whether the key exists already, and add the new entry as the head node. When removing items, you would find the entry to remove (if it exists), and remove the node from the linked list. Adding, updating, and removing items all follow this pattern. Performance issues There is a problem we have to address at this point. If the number of buckets in the dictionary is fixed in the constructor, then the performance will degrade from O(1) to O(n) when a large number of items are added to the dictionary. As more and more items get added to the linked lists in each bucket, the lookup operations will spend most of their time traversing a linear linked list. To fix this, the buckets array has to be resized once the number of items in each bucket has gone over a certain limit. (In ConcurrentDictionary this limit is when the size of the largest bucket is greater than the number of buckets for each lock. This check is done at the end of the TryAddInternal method.) Resizing the bucket array and re-hashing everything affects every bucket in the collection. Therefore, this operation needs to take out every lock in the collection. Taking out mutiple locks at once inevitably summons the spectre of the deadlock; two threads each hold a lock, and each trying to acquire the other lock. How can we eliminate this? Simple - ensure that threads never try to 'swap' locks in this fashion. When taking out multiple locks, always take them out in the same order, and always take out all the locks you need before starting to release them. In ConcurrentDictionary, this is controlled by the AcquireLocks, AcquireAllLocks and ReleaseLocks methods. Locks are always taken out and released in the order they are in the m_locks array, and locks are all released right at the end of the method in a finally block. At this point, it's worth pointing out that the locks array is never re-assigned, even when the buckets array is increased in size. The number of locks is fixed in the constructor by the concurrencyLevel parameter. This simplifies programming the locks; you don't have to check if the locks array has changed or been re-assigned before taking out a lock object. And you can be sure that when a thread takes out a lock, another thread isn't going to re-assign the lock array. This would create a new series of lock objects, thus allowing another thread to ignore the existing locks (and any threads controlling them), breaking thread-safety. Consequences of growing the array Just because we're using locks doesn't mean that race conditions aren't a problem. We can see this by looking at the GrowTable method. The operation of this method can be boiled down to: private void GrowTable(Node[] buckets) { try { 1: Acquire first lock in the locks array // this causes any other thread trying to take out // all the locks to block because the first lock in the array // is always the one taken out first // check if another thread has already resized the buckets array // while we were waiting to acquire the first lock 2: if (buckets != m_buckets) return; 3: Calculate the new size of the backing array 4: Node[] array = new array[size]; 5: Acquire all the remaining locks 6: Re-hash the contents of the existing buckets into array 7: m_buckets = array; } finally { 8: Release all locks } } As you can see, there's already a check for a race condition at step 2, for the case when the GrowTable method is called twice in quick succession on two separate threads. One will successfully resize the buckets array (blocking the second in the meantime), when the second thread is unblocked it'll see that the array has already been resized & exit without doing anything. There is another case we need to consider; looking back at the AlterBucket method above, consider the following situation: Thread 1 calls AlterBucket; step 1 is executed to get the bucket and lock numbers. Thread 2 calls GrowTable and executes steps 1-5; thread 1 is blocked when it tries to take out the lock in step 2. Thread 2 re-hashes everything, re-assigns the buckets array, and releases all the locks (steps 6-8). Thread 1 is unblocked and continues executing, but the calculated bucket and lock numbers are no longer valid. Between calculating the correct bucket and lock number and taking out the lock, another thread has changed where everything is. Not exactly thread-safe. Well, a similar problem was solved in ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue by storing a local copy of the state, doing the necessary calculations, then checking if that state is still valid. We can use a similar idea here: void AlterBucket(TKey key, ...) { while (true) { Node[] buckets = m_buckets; int bucketNo, lockNo; GetBucketAndLockNo( key.GetHashCode(), out bucketNo, out lockNo, buckets.Length); lock (m_locks[lockNo]) { // if the state has changed, go back to the start if (buckets != m_buckets) continue; Node headNode = m_buckets[bucketNo]; Mutate the node linked list as appropriate } break; } } TryGetValue and GetEnumerator And so, finally, we get onto TryGetValue and GetEnumerator. I've left these to the end because, well, they don't actually use any locks. How can this be? Whenever you change a bucket, you need to take out the corresponding lock, yes? Indeed you do. However, it is important to note that TryGetValue and GetEnumerator don't actually change anything. Just as immutable objects are, by definition, thread-safe, read-only operations don't need to take out a lock because they don't change anything. All lockless methods can happily iterate through the buckets and linked lists without worrying about locking anything. However, this does put restrictions on how the other methods operate. Because there could be another thread in the middle of reading the dictionary at any time (even if a lock is taken out), the dictionary has to be in a valid state at all times. Every change to state has to be made visible to other threads in a single atomic operation (all relevant variables are marked volatile to help with this). This restriction ensures that whatever the reading threads are doing, they never read the dictionary in an invalid state (eg items that should be in the collection temporarily removed from the linked list, or reading a node that has had it's key & value removed before the node itself has been removed from the linked list). Fortunately, all the operations needed to change the dictionary can be done in that way. Bucket resizes are made visible when the new array is assigned back to the m_buckets variable. Any additions or modifications to a node are done by creating a new node, then splicing it into the existing list using a single variable assignment. Node removals are simply done by re-assigning the node's m_next pointer. Because the dictionary can be changed by another thread during execution of the lockless methods, the GetEnumerator method is liable to return dirty reads - changes made to the dictionary after GetEnumerator was called, but before the enumeration got to that point in the dictionary. It's worth listing at this point which methods are lockless, and which take out all the locks in the dictionary to ensure they get a consistent view of the dictionary: Lockless: TryGetValue GetEnumerator The indexer getter ContainsKey Takes out every lock (lockfull?): Count IsEmpty Keys Values CopyTo ToArray Concurrent principles That covers the overall implementation of ConcurrentDictionary. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of this sophisticated collection. That I leave to you. However, we've looked at enough to be able to extract some useful principles for concurrent programming: Partitioning When using locks, the work is partitioned into independant chunks, each with its own lock. Each partition can then be modified concurrently to other partitions. Ordered lock-taking When a method does need to control the entire collection, locks are taken and released in a fixed order to prevent deadlocks. Lockless reads Read operations that don't care about dirty reads don't take out any lock; the rest of the collection is implemented so that any reading thread always has a consistent view of the collection. That leads us to the final collection in this little series - ConcurrentBag. Lacking a non-concurrent analogy, it is quite different to any other collection in the class libraries. Prepare your thinking hats!

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 19, 2013

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 19, 2013Popular ReleasesSQL Compact Query Analyzer: 1.0.1.25676: Beta build of SQL Compact Query Analyzer Bug fixes: - Resolved issue where the application crashes when loading a database that contains tables without a primary key Features: - Displays database information (database version, filename, size, creation date) - Displays schema summary (number of tables, columns, primary keys, identity fields, nullable fields) - Displays the information schema views - Displays column information (database type, clr type, max length, allows null, etc) - Support...xFunc: xFunc (2.2.2.0): Added: hex, bin, oct numbers; gcd (greatest common factor) and lcm (least common multiple); Fixed: the "undef" function;Prism Model Factory Extensions: 1.0.0.0: Initial releaseCODE Framework: 4.0.30618.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.18): XrmToolbox improvement Use new connection controls (use of Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll) New display capabilities for tools (size, image and colors) Added prerequisites check Added Most Used Tools feature Tools improvementNew toolSolution Transfer Tool (v1.0.0.0) developed by DamSim Updated toolView Layout Replicator (v1.2013.6.17) Double click on source view to display its layoutXml All tools list Access Checker (v1.2013.6.17) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.6.18) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.6.1...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.570b: New* Movie - using XBMC TMDB - now renames movies if option selected. * Movie - using Xbmc Tmdb - Actor images saved from TMDb if option selected. Fixed* Movie - Checks for poster.jpg against missing poster filter * Movie - Fixed continual scraping of vob movie file (not DVD structure) * Both - Correctly display audio channels * Both - Correctly populate audio info in nfo's if multiple audio tracks. * Both - added icons and checked for DTS ES and Dolby TrueHD audio tracks. * Both - Stream d...LINQ Extensions Library: 1.0.4.2: New to release 1.0.4.2 Custom sorting extensions that perform up to 50% better than LINQ OrderBy, ThenBy extensions... Extensions allow for fine tuning of the sort by controlling the algorithm each sort uses.ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v3.3.0: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript，No CSS，No UpdatePanel，No ViewState，No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License v2.0 ?：ExtJS ?? GPL v3 ?????(http://www.sencha.com/license)。 ???? ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ FineUI???? ExtJS ?????????，???? ExtJS ?。 ????? FineUI ? ExtJS ?：http://fineui.com/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthrea...CMake Tools for Visual Studio: CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 RC2: This is the second release candidate of CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.0, which contains the following bug fixes and enhancements: The CMake Editor is now available for file extension mapping and in the Open With dialog box. A bug that caused CMake IntelliSense to appear when editing ordinary text files has been fixed. Commenting characters are now properly placed for large blocks of code. Smart indentation now behaves correctly when the cursor is not at the end of the line. Function...BarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 8.0: Check Version History for more information about this release.ExpressProfiler: ExpressProfiler v1.5: [+] added Start time, End time event columns [+] added SP:StmtStarting, SP:StmtCompleted events [*] fixed bug with Audit:Logout eventpatterns & practices: Data Access Guidance: Data Access Guidance Drop4 2013.06.17: Drop 4Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.94: add dstLine and dstCol attributes to the -Analyze output in XML mode. un-combine leftover comma-separates expression statements after optimizations are complete so downstream tools don't stack-overflow on really deep comma trees. add support for using a single source map generator instance with multiple runs of MinifyJavaScript, assuming that the results are concatenated to the same output file.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 4.1.1: The stable release of Kooboo CMS 4.1.0 with fixed the following issues: https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/1 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/11 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/13 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/15 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/19 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/20 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/24 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/43 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/45 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/46 https://github....VidCoder: 1.5.0 Beta: The betas have started up again! If you were previously on the beta track you will need to install this to get back on it. That's because you can now run both the Beta and Stable version of VidCoder side-by-side! Note that the OpenCL and Intel QuickSync changes being tested by HandBrake are not in the betas yet. They will appear when HandBrake integrates them into the main branch. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5590. This adds a new FDK AAC encoder. The FAAC encoder has been removed and now...Employee Info Starter Kit: v6.0 - ASP.NET MVC Edition: Release Home - Getting Started - Hands on Coding Walkthrough – Technology Stack - Design & Architecture EISK v6.0 – ASP.NET MVC edition bundles most of the greatest and successful platforms, frameworks and technologies together, to enable web developers to learn and build manageable and high performance web applications with rich user experience effectively and quickly. User End SpecificationsCreating a new employee record Read existing employee records Update an existing employee reco...OLAP PivotTable Extensions: Release 0.8.1: Use the 32-bit download for... Excel 2007 Excel 2010 32-bit (even Excel 2010 32-bit on a 64-bit operating system) Excel 2013 32-bit (even Excel 2013 32-bit on a 64-bit operating system) Use the 64-bit download for... Excel 2010 64-bit Excel 2013 64-bit Just download and run the EXE. There is no need to uninstall the previous release. If you have problems getting the add-in to work, see the Troubleshooting Installation wiki page. The new features in this release are: View #VALUE! Err...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 3.0.0.440: Version: 3.0.0.440 (Release Candidate): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Please build the whole solution before you start one of the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.5 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2012) Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete Samples: Use ValueConverters via StaticResource instead of x:Static. Other Downloads Downloads OverviewBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.1: 2013.06.13 Ver5.9.1 (1) Web??????SSI?#include???、CGI?????????????????????? (2) ???????????????????????????Free language translator and file converter: Free Language Translator 3.3: some bug fixes and a new link to video tutorials on Youtube.New ProjectsA model oriented programming language and IDE for model driven development: Mo+ Solution Builder is a model oriented programming language and integrated development environment for effective model driven development.ActiveWindowsStoreAppFromWin32: This is a dome of how to active Windows Store App From MFC and pass value to itAjax Jquery ASP.NET Control Toolkit: User Controls to facilitate ASP.NET integration to Ajax and JQuery components.Animations: empresaAricie - Distributed Caching Provider: Aricie - Distributed Caching Provider is a DotNetNuke module and a DNN caching provider, which leverages distributed caching technologies (AppFabric, Memcached)Background Action Pool<TParam, TReturn> (.Net Task Pool): Provides a generic typed Pool for running Tasks/Funcs in an extra thread with return value and various parameters for every task Bordecal.ImportsSorter: Visual Studio add-in for sorting imports/using blocksCodagenic Bootstrap Theme: Codagenic Ecommerce 3 ThemeeBook: eBook is an engine designed to perform text mining on TEI based document.Microsoft CRM 2011 RESTful Grid: MIcrosoft CRM 2011 RESTful Grid CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Destroy) data operations.MyHandsCursor 1.0: MyHandsCursor is a demo application that uses the Kinect for Windows SDK 1.7 .mylib2: mylib2nodejs chat server: nodejs websocket jquery chat serverPiGraph: Ph?n m?n h? tr? kh?o sát hàm s? - Pixels Ð?i H?c Khoa H?c T? Nhiên TP.HCM - Khoa Công Ngh? Thông TinPurpleKnife: The Swiss Army Knife for Extreme Networks XOS switches.PVMapper Desktop: PVMapper Open Source TeamSSQForecast: TESTStored Procedure Pager: Stored Procedure Pager is an open source asp.net/mvc user pager control.The most important feature is support for Stored Procedure.Tetris Online: A 2-player Tetris game you play against another person on the internet.ubdblib: A library providing multipolar model parameterization of electron density using ubdb aspherical atom data bank.Umbraco Multi User Picker: Multi User Picker is an Umbraco datatype for selecting one or more users.UnLinkAlbumTracks: Unlinks tracks in Windows Media Player, allowing them to have their album info updated independently.Vis på Google Maps hvor medlemmerne bor: This project is only relevant for people living in Denmark Ud fra en CSV-fil genererer dette lille program en KML fil indeholdende et koordinatsæt for hvor adresse i CSV-filen. Dette kan f.eks. bruges til at vise hvor medlemmerne af en forening bor.

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Pain Comes Instantly

- by user701213

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

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 11, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 11, 2012Popular ReleasesCasanova Language: Casanova IDE alpha release: This is the first release for the Casanova IDE. It features the major capabilities of the framework: support for rules, scripts, input management, and basic content management. The IDE is still under major development. Planned features include: multiplayer support 3D rendering syntax highlighting basic Intellisense slightly improved syntax for rules and scripts audio in-game menus Also, do not forget to download and install OpenAL: http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Download...Liberty: v3.2.1.0 Release 10th June 2012: Change Log -Added -Liberty is now digitally signed! If the certificate on Liberty.exe is missing, invalid, or does not state that it was developed by "Xbox Chaos, Open Source Developer," your copy of Liberty may have been altered in some (possibly malicious) way. -Reach Mass biped max health and shield changer -Fixed -H3/ODST Fixed all of the glitches that users kept reporting (also reverted the changes made in 3.2.0.2) -Reach Made some tag names clearer and more consistent between m...SVNUG.CodePlex: Cloud Development with Windows Azure: This release contains the slides for the Cloud Development with Windows Azure presentation.WCF Data Service (OData) Regression & Load Testing Tool: Latest: This is latest stable releaseSHA-1 Hash Checker: SHA-1 Hash Checker (for Windows): Fixed major bugs. Removed false negatives.AutoUpdaterdotNET: AutoUpdater.NET 1.0: Everything seems perfect if you find any problem you can report to http://www.rbsoft.org/contact.htmlMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.503b: It has been a while, so it's about time we release another build! Major effort has been for fixing trailer downloads, plus a little bit of work for episode guide tag in TV show NFOs.Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks Sample Reports 2008 R2: AdventureWorks Sample Reports 2008 R2.zip contains several reports include Sales Reason Comparisons SQL2008R2.rdl which uses Adventure Works DW 2008R2 as a data source reference. For more information, go to Sales Reason Comparisons report.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 7: Fix - Fixed Metro build to pass Windows Application Certification Kit on Windows 8 Release Preview Fix - Fixed Metro build error caused by an anonymous type Fix - Fixed ItemConverter not being used when serializing dictionaries Fix - Fixed an incorrect object being passed to the Error event when serializing dictionaries Fix - Fixed decimal properties not being correctly ignored with DefaultValueHandlingLINQ Extensions Library: 1.0.3.0: New to release 1.0.3.0:Combinatronics: Combinations (unique) Combinations (with repetition) Permutations (unique) Permutations (with repetition) Convert jagged arrays to fixed multidimensional arrays Convert fixed multidimensional arrays to jagged arrays ElementAtMax ElementAtMin ElementAtAverage New set of array extension (1.0.2.8):Rotate Flip Resize (maintaing data) Split Fuse Replace Append and Prepend extensions (1.0.2.7) IndexOf extensions (1.0.2.7) Ne...????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 1: 6?11????? ??? - ?Entities???????????EntityBase，???ToString()???????json???，??????4.0???????。2.0?3.5???！ ??? - Request????????AccessToken??????source=appkey?????。????，????????，???????public_timeline?????????。 ?? - ???ClinetLogin??????????RefreshToken???????false???。 ?? - ???RepostTimeline????Statuses???null???。 ?? - Utility?BuildPostData?，?WeiboParameter??value?NULL????????。 ??????? ??? - ??.Net 2.0/3.5/4.0????。??????VS2010??????????。VS2008????????，??????????。 ??? - ??.Net 4.0???SDK...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 4.5.0: Added Instruments tab for modules Open folder content feature Some bug fixesPython Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 Beta 1: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports CPython, IronPython, Jython and PyPy • Python editor with advanced member, signature intellisense and refactoring • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging •...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Beta 1: New in this release: Automatically flip components when placing Delete components using keyboard delete key Resize document Document properties window Print document Recent files list Confirm when exiting with unsaved changes Thumbnail previews in Windows Explorer for CDDX files Show shortcut keys in toolbox Highlight selected item in toolbox Zoom using mouse scroll wheel while holding down ctrl key Plugin support for: Custom export formats Custom import formats Open...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.2 Beta: The future of Umbracov5 represents the future architecture of Umbraco, so please be aware that while it's technically superior to v4 it's not yet on a par feature or performance-wise. What's new? For full details see our http://progress.umbraco.org task tracking page showing all items complete for 5.2. In a nutshellPackage Builder Starter Kits Dynamic Extension Methods Querying / IsHelpers Friendly alt template URLs Localization Various bug fixes / performance enhancements Gett...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.0.5: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript developers to query and update data from different sources like WebSQL, IndexedDB, OData, Facebook or YQL. See it in action in this 6 minutes video New features in JayData 1.0.5http://jaydata.org/blog/jaydata-1.0.5-is-here-with-authentication-support-and-more http://jaydata.org/blog/release-notes Sencha Touch 2 module (read-only)This module can be used to bind data retrieved by JayData to Sencha Touch 2 generated user interface. (exam...32feet.NET: 3.5: This version changes the 32feet.NET library (both desktop and NETCF) to use .NET Framework version 3.5. Previously we compiled for .NET v2.0. There are no code changes from our version 3.4. See the 3.4 release for more information. Changes due to compiling for .NET 3.5Applications should be changed to use NET/NETCF v3.5. Removal of class InTheHand.Net.Bluetooth.AsyncCompletedEventArgs, which we provided on NETCF. We now just use the standard .NET System.ComponentModel.AsyncCompletedEvent...Application Architecture Guidelines: Application Architecture Guidelines 3.0.7: 3.0.7Jolt Environment: Jolt v2 Stable: Many new features. Follow development here for more information: http://www.rune-server.org/runescape-development/rs-503-client-server/projects/298763-jolt-environment-v2.html Setup instructions in downloadSharePoint Euro 2012 - UEFA European Football Predictor: havivi.euro2012.wsp (1.5): New fetures:Multilingual Support Max users property in Standings Web Part Games time zone change (UTC +1) bug fix - Version 1.4 locking problem http://euro2012.codeplex.com/discussions/358262 bug fix - Field Title not found (v.1.3) German SP http://euro2012.codeplex.com/discussions/358189#post844228 Bug fix - Access is denied.for users with contribute rights Bug fix - Installing on non-English version of SharePoint Bug fix - Title Rules Installing SharePoint Euro 2012 PredictorSharePoint E...New Projects2D map editor for Game Tool Development class: This project contains a basic 2D map editor, which can read a tileset (or chipset) to create a custom map. The user can then load and save maps previously created (file format .map). ArtifexCore: ArtifexCore - a compilation of unique, original, and revamped RunUO/OrbSA projects.ASP.NET MVC 4 - Sports Store using Visual Studio 2011 Beta: This is a the output of "Sports Store" exercise in Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework by Adam Freeman and Steven Sanderson. Instead of MVC 3 as recommended in the book, I have used MVC 4.clabinet: clabinet is a cloud based file cabinetCopy File Location - Explorer Shortcut: This Explorer Extension adds a shortcut menu to all files and folders to copy the full location to the Clipboard.CSSSEVER: ???????????DoodleLabyrinthLogic: A starter '100 rogues' type logic library for rogue-like buildersEasyFlash Cart Builder: EasyFlash Cart Builder is a tool for linking files together into an EasyFlash cartridge. Generic enumeration: Provides string representation of C# enumerations.Hacker Typer for WP7: This is a hackertyper.net Windows Phone based application HTML Batch Logger: This is a simple Log class that can be used in any .NET C# Console Application. You can use it to log into an HTML file, console window, or database. kinect ????????????: ???、??????????????????????、????????????????。???、??????????????????。?????????、????????????????、??????????????????。laskjdfqewr131231: example omes projectnlite web libraray: Lite Web Framework,????Page，??Ndf???WebApiNMemory - an in-memory relational database for .NET: NMemory is a lightweight in-memory relational database engine that can be hosted by .NET applications. It supports traditional database features like indexes, foreign key relations, transaction handling and isolation.NoManaComponets: A attempt at a reusable library for common tasks in XNA like avatar management, text rendering and shading. Currently abandoned.NP: network client appObject Viewer: A UserControl that can display any object.PowerPoint Graph Creator: The main purpose of this PowerPoint add-in is to help people who sometimes need to draw graphs into the PPT and then for example add some animations or want to load to existing graphs into PPT but don't have a lot of time to re-draw every thing.Project Blue Tigris: This Project aims at enabling users to control and interact with Windows without the need to touch the keyboard or the mouse, through a new user interface using gestures and voice commands. This project will utilize webcam and microphones connected to the computer when installed. This is our vision. It would be great if you join us.QTP FT Uninstaller: KnowledgeInbox QTP/FT Uninstaller is a tool designed for uninstalling HP's QuickTest Professional or Functional Testing products in one click. The tool should only be used in cases where QTP was working fine earlier and after some update or installation it stopped working. The tool scans the system registry for all files associated with QTP and deletes them. Note: Using this uninstaller may impact tools like HP Sprinter, Quality Center. You should re-install those tools also after using t...Radius Client for Microsoft® .NET Micro Framework: Client for Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS)Regression Suite: RegressionSuite is a software test suite that incorporates measurement of the startup lag, measurement of accurate execution times, generating execution statistics, customized input distributions, and processable regression specific details as part of the regular unit tests. Essentially, RegressionSuite provides the frame-work around which the individual unit regressors are invoked (and details and statistics collected). Unit regressors are grouped into named regressor sets (or modules), a...Sern: Nothing yet.SharePoint List Number to Text Custom Column: Number to text custom column in SharePoint is a project that is useful in any financial SharePoint implementation to automatically generate the corresponding number representation in textual format, this feature is designed to be easy extended to any language and it’s initially in Arabic and English languages.you can find all related source code in download section SharpDND: A attempt to create a open source DLL for the openSRD. Designed with customization in mind if completed the tools included could build out pathfinder and other RPG rulesets.SmartSense: SmartSense is a wearable holographic gesture and voice controlled intelligent system. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a heavily researched area in today’s technology driven world. Most people experience HCI using a mouse and keyboard as input devices. We wanted a more natural way to interact with the computer that also allows instant access to information. We are developing a real-time system that is always on and available to collect data at any moment but also is accessible “on-the-fly...Sumzlib: sumzlib is a set of class library that provides useful algorithms in static method. this project is written in vb.netWCF Data Service (OData) Regression & Load Testing Tool: This is a tool that is especially being developed to regress OData Services. Current release only support few test like ($select, Top, etc ), more test will be added over the time. It is a Multithreaded Regression Test Tool that can generate result in Excel format including diagnostic error data and performance data like turnaround time as well. It can be used for bulk testing of several services at the same time It can be quite useful to for those who are developing several service...X.Web.Microdata: This project is intended to represent an mitcrodata entitie in the .NET Framework. (Particularly in ASP.NET) The X.Web.Microdata represent the http://www.data-vocabulary.org/ (and Google) microdata notation And X.Web.Microdata.SchemaOrg represent http://schema.org/ microdata notatio

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, July 31, 2013

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, July 31, 2013Popular ReleasesSharePoint 2010 Export User Information to Text file, SQL server: Full Source code of the project: Please change SharePoint server address. I have used my sharepoint server -> http://sneakpreviewWINJS CTK (Control Toolkit): Initial Release: Initial release supports the following. Expander NumericBoxXMLPreprocess: 2.0.18: What's new in this release For XML Spreadsheet 2003 format, used the frozen row at the top of the worksheet to indicate the beginning of the values. This prevents you from having to start your values at row 7. This can be overridden with the /firstValueRow (or /vr) argument. Issues Fixed Fix for Issue 13006 : Corrected default treatment of the value "false" Beginning with this version, the FixFalse behavior that has caused confusion to so many, has hopefully been addressed in a way that st...MVVM.EventToCommand: Tommy.MVVM.EventToCommand: Tommy.MVVM.EventToCommand is a free, open source developer focused event2command via WinRT for MVVM Pattern.MVC Generator: MVC Generator Visual Studio Addin: This is the latest build, this includes the MVCGenerator.dll, and Visual Studio Addin file. See the home page of this project for installation instructions.Project Nonnon: 2013_07_30: ----------==========----------==========----------==========---------- "No news is good news." ----------==========----------==========----------==========---------- Change Log 2013/07/30 BUGFIX game/sound/directsound.c n_directsound_loop() OLD : crash when DirectSound is not supported NEW : fixed game/sound/waveout.c when included OLD : compile error NEW : fixed game/chara.c when included OLD : compile error NEW : fixed game/direct2d.c when included ...Dynamics CRM 2011 EasyPlugins: EasyPlugins-1.2.3.1-managed: V1.2.3.1 - Bug Fix : Condition expression is not saved on action creation - Bug Fix : Request Param with single attribute result - Some style changes v1.2.3.0 - Bug Fix : Twice plugins execution. - New Abort action - Depth Plugin Execution management on each action - Turn On/Off EasyPlugins feature (can be useful in some cases of imports) v1.2.0.0 Associate / Disassociate actions are now available Import / Export features Better management of Lookups Trigger NamingXmlObjectMapper: XOM Alpha 1.0: first Alpha Version of XOM: read and write xml nodes and attributes mapping to IList or Interfaces simple property attribute mapping creates new xml nodes at run time IList changes (add, remove) implemented in the next releasenopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopCommerce 3.10: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • New more user-friendly product/product-variant logic. Now we'll have only products (simple and grouped). • Bundle products support added. • Allow a store owner to associate product image for product variant attribute values. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v3.3.1: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript，No CSS，No UpdatePanel，No ViewState，No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License v2.0 ?：ExtJS ?? GPL v3 ?????(http://www.sencha.com/license)。 ???? ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ FineUI ???? ExtJS ????????，???? ExtJS ?，???????????ExtJS?： 1. ????? FineUI ? ExtJS ?：http://fineui.com/bbs/fo...AutoNLayered - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.5: AutoNLayered v1.0.5: - Fix Dtos. Abstract collections replaced by concrete (correct serialization WCF). - OrderBy in navigation properties. - Unit Test with Fakes. - Map of entities/dto moved to application services. - Libraries updated. Warning using Fakes: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/782031/visual-studio-2012-add-fakes-assembly-does-not-add-all-needed-referencesPath Copy Copy: 11.1: Minor release with two new features: Submenu's contextual menu item now has an icon next to it Added reference to JavaScript regular expression format in Settings application Since this release does not have any glaring bug fixes, it is more of an optional update for existing users. It depends on whether you want to be able to spot the Path Copy Copy submenu more easily. I recommend you install it to see if the icon makes sense. As always, please don't hesitate to leave feedback via Discus...CMake Tools for Visual Studio: CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 RC3: This is the third release candidate of CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.0, which contains the following bug fixes: Opening a CMake file from Windows Explorer while Visual Studio is already open will no start a new instance of Visual Studio. Typing a symbol while the IntelliSense list box is visible and the text typed so far does not match any item in the list will dismiss the list box and insert the symbol typed.R.NET: R.NET 1.5: The major changes in v1.5 are: Initialize method must be called before using R. Settings should be passed to the method. EagerEvaluate method renamed to Evaluate (use Defer method when you want old version of Evaluate).Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.574b: Some good bug fixes been going on with the new XBMC-Link function. Thanks to all who were able to do testing and gave feedback. New:* Added some adhoc extra General movie filters, one of which is Plot = Outline (see fixes above). To see the filters, add the following line to your config.xml: <ShowExtraMovieFilters>True</ShowExtraMovieFilters>. The others are: Imdb in folder name, Imdb in not folder name & Imdb not in folder name & year mismatch. * Movie - display <tag> list on browser tab ...OfflineBrowser: Preview Release with Search: I've added search to this release.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.46: changes FIXED LoginMath.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.6.0: What's New in Math.NET Numerics 2.6 - Announcement, Explanations and Sample Code. New: Linear Curve Fitting Linear least-squares fitting (regression) to lines, polynomials and linear combinations of arbitrary functions. Multi-dimensional fitting. Also works well in F# with the F# extensions. New: Root Finding Brent's method. ~Candy Chiu, Alexander Täschner Bisection method. ~Scott Stephens, Alexander Täschner Broyden's method, for multi-dimensional functions. ~Alexander Täschner ...AJAX Control Toolkit: July 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - July 2013 Release Version 7.0725July 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Specular Antialiasing Sample: Sample code to complement my presentation that's part of the Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course at SIGGRAPH 2013, entitled "Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886". Demonstrates various methods of preventing aliasing from specular BRDF's when using high-frequency normal maps. The zip file contains source code as well as a pre-compiled x64 binary.New ProjectsA Simple Java Encryption program: This is my very first Java project. It's a file encryptor. It's purpose is to codify a file to make it look like it contain random information.AA??: aa??，????。Browser Chooser 2: Browser Chooser 2 is an updated fork of the original. It's primary goal is to simplify using multiple browser.campuscloud-mobile: Dieses Projekt enthält die mobilen Apps zur Campuscloud App.campuscloud-owncloudplugins: Dieses Projekt enthält die ownCloud-Plugins zu den CampuCloud-Apps, die ownCloud-Server um weitere Funktionalitäten ergänzen.campuscloud-windowsphone8: Diese Projekt enthält die Windows Phone 8 App zur Campuscloud App.Chronos .Net Performance Profiler: Free .Net Performance ProfilerConvertServer: a pet project i works onDevelopment Tools for Solid Edge: Development tools for Solid Edge.DocAssist: The project is to facilitate user's day-to-day management of her files in a customisable way on Windows System equipped with .NET framework.epe: epeETP 3: prueba de asp mvc para desarrollar conjuntamente en un repositorio tfsHello World in MVC4: Application to testInvoke-MsTest PowerShell Module: A PowerShell module that makes unit testing Visual Studio projects fast and easy. Uses MsTest.exe to launch all test associated with your project or solution.MarathonTP: MarathonTP (TP stands for Transport Protocol) is a lightweight communication protocol specificaly developped for machine to machine communication.Multicopter Simulator: A simulation environment for multicopter built with Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4.MVC Rags: A bunch of ASP.NET MVC4 helpersMVVM.EventToCommand: Tommy.MVVM.EventToCommand is a free, open source developer focused event2command via WinRT for MVVM Pattern.RNT.Common: rnt.commonStorageOrizer: Software to manage disk space, e.g. move Programs without damaging function. Subset Sum Problem Solver: SubsetThirdPartyLogin: ?????twitterBootstrapAspNetMVCControls: Asp.net MVC Controls based on twiiter Boostrap( a beautiful html & css framework published by Twitter).Unify: Unify is an automatic IoC Container Configurator, based on layers approach via annotations.V32 Assembler: The assembler for my assembly language for my 32-bit virtual machine with a home-made instruction set.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 24, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, January 24, 2011Popular ReleasesDeveloper Guidance - Onboarding Windows Phone 7: Fuel Tracker Source: Release NotesThis project is almost complete. We'll be making small updates to the code and documentation over the next week or so. We look forward to your feedback. This documentation and accompanying sample application will get you started creating a complete application for Windows Phone 7. You will learn about common developer issues in the context of a simple fuel-tracking application named Fuel Tracker. Some of the tasks that you will learn include the following: Creating a UI that...Password Generator: 2.2: Parallel password generation Password strength calculation ( Same method used by Microsoft here : https://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx ) Minor code refactoringProcess Enactment Tool Framework: PET 1.2.3: Bug fixing release. Introduced installer. General Upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 Created installer PET Wizard Fixed log bug if PET is placed in read-only folder SharePoint Tool Provider Fixed provider crash in case SharePoint.dll is not availableVisual Studio 2010 Architecture Tooling Guidance: Spanish - Architecture Guidance: Francisco Fagas http://geeks.ms/blogs/ffagas, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), localized the Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance for the Spanish communities, based on http://vsarchitectureguide.codeplex.com/releases/view/47828. Release Notes The guidance is available in a xps-only (default) or complete package. The complete package contains the files in xps, pdf and Office 2007 formats. 2011-01-24 Publish version 1.0 of the Spanish localized bits.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6.2: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager the html generation has been optimized, the html page size is much smaller nowSSH.NET Library: 2011.1.24: No new features in this release, only fixes to issues reported by users: Fixes Fix SFTP path resolution to allow for client to work with glibc and BSD based servers. Close handle when file download completes Fix reusing command object to execute different commands.Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.6: new Facebook Graph objects: Application, Page, Post, Comment Improved Intellisense documentation new Graph Api connections: albums, photos, posts, feed, home, friends JSON Toolkit upgraded to version 0.9 (beta release) with bug fixes and new features bug fixed: error when handling empty JSON arrays bug fixed: error when handling JSON array with square or large brackets in the message bug fixed: error when handling JSON obejcts with double quotation in the message bug fixed: erro...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2008 Code Samples 2011-01-23: Code samples for Visual Studio 2008BloodSim: BloodSim - 1.4.0.0: This version requires an update for WControls.dll. - Removed option to use Old Rune Strike - Fixed an issue that was causing Ratings to not properly update when running Progressive simulations - Ability data is now loaded from an XML file in the BloodSim directory that is user editable. This data will be reloaded each time a fresh simulation is run. - Added toggle for showing Graph window. When unchecked, output data will instead be saved to a text file in the BloodSim directory based on the...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (3): Instructions for installation: http://www.galasoft.ch/mvvm/installing/manually/ Includes the hotfix templates for Windows Phone 7 development. This is only relevant if you didn't already install the hotfix described at http://blog.galasoft.ch/archive/2010/07/22/mvvm-light-hotfix-for-windows-phone-7-developer-tools-beta.aspx.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V42: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has added some features / bugfixes: Bugfix: Decoding of Subject now also supports multi-line subjects (occurs only if you have very long subjects with non-ASCII characters)Minecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.3: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds automatic block list updates, so MTS will recognize blocks added in game updates properly rather than drawing them in bright pink. New in this version of MTS: Support for all new blocks added since the Halloween update Auto-update of blockcolors.xml to support future game updates A splash screen that shows while the program searches for upd...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14996.000: New Features: ============= This release is just compiled against the latest release of JetBrains ReSharper 5.1.1766.4 Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes...jqGrid ASP.Net MVC Control: Version 1.2.0.0: jqGrid 3.8 support jquery 1.4 support New and exciting features Many bugfixes Complete separation from the jquery, & jqgrid codeMediaScout: MediaScout 3.0 Preview 4: Update ReleaseCoding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1MFCMAPI: January 2011 Release: Build: 6.0.0.1024 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the tool, get the executable. If you want to debug it, get the symbol file and the source. The 64 bit build will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit build, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.4: Added champion: Renekton Removed automatic file association Fix: The recent files combobox didn't always open a file when an item was selected Fix: Removing a recently opened file caused an errorDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01: Major Highlights Fixed issue to remove preCondition checks when upgrading to .Net 4.0 Fixed issue where some valid domains were failing email validation checks. Fixed issue where editing Host menu page settings assigns the page to a Portal. Fixed issue which caused XHTML validation problems in 5.6.0 Fixed issue where an aspx page in any subfolder was inaccessible. Fixed issue where Config.Touch method signature had an unintentional breaking change in 5.6.0 Fixed issue which caused...iTracker Asp.Net Starter Kit: Version 3.0.0: This is the inital release of the version 3.0.0 Visual Studio 2010 (.Net 4.0) remake of the ITracker application. I connsider this a working, stable application but since there are still some features missing to make it "complete" I'm leaving it listed as a "beta" release. I am hoping to make it feature complete for v3.1.0 but anything is possible.New ProjectsAIMP2 .NET Interop Plugin: AIMP2 .NET Interop Plugin allows to write plugin for AIMP2 with managed code (C#, VB and so on).asp.net c# website: hot millions project is an asp.net c# sql express website where you can login and book and order your menu items. This project is built in Visual studio 2008 with asp.net c# sql express editionAutomatic Build Updater: A small tool with scripts to show the recent build of your program on your homepage or blog. It works fully automatically and is easy to use. Works with each IDE which supports Build-Events.BurakoNET: Burako OnLineDelNet: Tool created in C # to automate the development process. With this tool, you do not need to spend time with the creation of classes of connection, data access layer, view or update data with Windows Forms. Everything is here, ready.Droid Builder: Droid Builder is a WPF based application that can help Android ROM maker to create customized ROM. The basic functions of Droid Build are: 1. Deodex 2. Packaging 3. Signing In future, Droid Builder will provide more function on Android ROM customization.eatables: Eatables 2011Food information system: Food information system makes it easier for content providers to deliver information about food producers, contents and information about quality, recipes, allergy and other considerations to the consumers. ForceHttps: Very simple httpModule to ensure that all http requests are https. 1. Drop the dll into your website's bin directory 2. Update httpModules section of your web.config to reference the dll 3. Make sure your Web Server can handle SSL requests for the URL ALL http requests will be redirected as https.Frolic Game Engine for .NET: The Frolic game engine is an attempt at creating a retained style game engine that is agnostic to the rendering technology, allowing for easier inplementations of rendering engines for various graphics layers.Import VCF to MS Outlook: simple tools to import many *.vcf files to default contact in MS OutlookLe blog à TiK: Le blog à TiK is a blog engine written for the Windows Azure platformLearning CPP: Learning CPP.MinConsole: A minimilastic console application with configurable logging and debuggingMineSweeperChallenge: C# programming exercise. Simulates a given number of minesweeper games using a given ISweeper implementation (or use the step by step mode to study how the ISweeper implementations work). Create your own implementation and see how it compares to other implementations.MvcCss: MvcCss brings the convention-based simplicity of MVC to CSS.Natur Map Editor: Natur allows you to easily create and manage maps in 3D using the Xna framework. As you build your map, you can enter simulation mode at any time; this will activate bounds, physics, and any game logic such as animations and triggers.OneGames Open Framework: Projeto open-source da OneGames de desenvolvimento de jogos 2D com a engine SpriteCraft(tm).QQFindX: QQFindXsadd.practical.approach: SADD workshop is a project testorage to demonstrate practical approach of sadd while Lessons Learned site was developing. ?????? ???? ?????????? ??????????? ??? ?? ???????? ?????????? SADD ??? ???????? ????? "????????? ??????", ??????????? ????????? ??????????????? ?????? ?????.Seesmic Feed Reader: A simple plugin for Seesmic Desktop 2 that allows you to read syndication feeds (Rss 2.0 and Atom 1.0) inside Seesmic.Simple Farseer physics platform: Sample described on rabidlion.comSIN Generator: Social Insurance Number (SIN) Generator is a utility designed to generate SIN numbers to testing application software. It uses SIN generation algorithm provided on fakenamegenerator.com It is developed in C# and is meant for application testing ONLY!UsingLib: A library of automatically removed utilities: 1.Changing cursor to hourglass in Windows Forms 2.Logging It's developed in C#WP7Contrib: WP7 Contrib is a set of components to help build WP7 Apps. It can be plugged into MVVM Light or used as separate components in your App. Our goal is to provide a set of tools and patterns that help WP7 developers.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, November 17, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, November 17, 2012Popular ReleasesPaint.NET PSD Plugin: 2.2.0: Changes: Layer group visibility is now applied to all layers within the group. This greatly improves the visual fidelity of complex PSD files that have hidden layer groups. Layer group names are prefixed so that users can get an indication of the layer group hierarchy. (Paint.NET has a flat list of layers, so the hierarchy is flattened out on load.) The progress bar now reports status when saving PSD files, instead of showing an indeterminate rolling bar. Performance improvement of 1...Water Entity for SunBurn: Sunburn Water Entity For 2.0.1.8 (Deffered Only): Sunburn water entity for Sunburn 2.0.1.8 for deffered rendering only, forward water is not working yet. You need to download water normal maps, from Sunburn Reflection/Refraction example from Here.CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1116.7): [IMPROVED] Detailed error message descriptions for FaultException [FIX] Fixed bug in rule CrmOfflineAccessStateRule which had incorrect State attribute name [FIX] Fixed bug in rule EntityPropertyRule which was missing PropertyValue attribute [FIX] Current connection information was not displayed in status bar while refreshing list of entitiesSuper Metroid Randomizer: Super Metroid Randomizer v5: v5 -Added command line functionality for automation purposes. -Implented Krankdud's change to randomize the Etecoon's item. NOTE: this version will not accept seeds from a previous version. The seed format has changed by necessity. v4 -Started putting version numbers at the top of the form. -Added a warning when suitless Maridia is required in a parsed seed. v3 -Changed seed to only generate filename-legal characters. Using old seeds will still work exactly the same. -Files can now be saved...Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight, WP7 and WinRT/Metro made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.4: Changes This version includes many bug fixes across all platforms, improvements to nuget support and...the biggest news of all...full support for both WinRT and WP8. Download Contents Debug and Release Assemblies Samples Readme.txt License.txt Packages Available on Nuget Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly. Caliburn.Micro.Start - Includes Caliburn.Micro plus a starting bootstrapper, view model and view. Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro invers...DirectX Tool Kit: November 15, 2012: November 15, 2012 Added support for WIC2 when available on Windows 8 and Windows 7 with KB 2670838 Cleaned up warning level 4 warningsDotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.05: Major Highlights Updated the system so that it supports nested folders in the App_Code folder Updated the Global Error Handling so that when errors within the global.asax handler happen, they are caught and shown in a page displaying the original HTTP error code Fixed issue that stopped users from specifying Link URLs that open on a new window Security FixesFixed issue in the Member Directory module that could show members to non authenticated users Fixed issue in the Lists modul...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib-resharper 0.7 (RS 7.1, 6.1.1): xunitcontrib release 0.6.1 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 7.1 RTM and 6.1.1, targetting all versions of xUnit.net. (See the xUnit.net project to download xUnit.net itself.) This release drops 7.0 support and targets the latest revisions of the last two major versions of ReSharper (namely 7.0 and 6.1.1). Copies of the plugin that support previous verions of ReSharper can be downloaded from this release. Also note that all builds work against ALL ...MVC Bootstrap: MVC Boostrap 0.5.6: A small demo site, based on the default ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, showing off some of the features of MVC Bootstrap. Added features to the Membership provider, a "lock out" feature to help fight brute force hacking of accounts. After a set number of log in attempts, the account is locked for a set time. If you download and use this project, please give some feedback, good or bad!Home Access Plus+: v8.4: This release only contains fixes for the 97576 release, you can download the v8.3 release files which aren't in this release from 97576 Changes: Fixed: Setup.aspx wrong jquery reference Fixed: Issue with loading the user's photo Changed: The JSON Urls to use a number of a date rather than a string Added: Code to hopefully, finally, fix the AD Browser not working some times File Changes: ~/bin/hap.ad.dll ~/bin/hap.web.dll ~/bin/hap.web.configuration.dll ~/bin/hap.web.livetiles.dl...OnTopReplica: Release 3.4: Update to the 3 version with major fixes and improvements. Compatible with Windows 8. Now runs (and requires) .NET Framework v.4.0. Added relative mode for region selection (allows the user to select regions as margins from the borders of the thumbnail, useful for windows which have a variable size but fixed size controls, like video players). Improved window seeking when restoring cloned thumbnail or cloning a window by title or by class. Improved settings persistence. Improved co...DotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.4: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Tutorials are available. Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components ...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.5: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Controls Converters Debugging helpers Extension methods Imaging helpers IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes Docum...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.3: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...????: ???? 1.0: ????Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office: Unicode IVS Add-in for Microsoft Office ??? ?????、Unicode IVS?????????????????Unicode IVS???????????????。??、??????????????、?????????????????????????????。Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.74: fix for issue #18836 - sometimes throws null-reference errors in ActivationObject.AnalyzeScope method. add back the Context object's 8-parameter constructor, since someone has code that's using it. throw a low-pri warning if an expression statement is == or ===; warn that the developer may have meant an assignment (=). if window.XXXX or window"XXXX" is encountered, add XXXX (as long as it's a valid JavaScript identifier) to the known globals so subsequent references to XXXX won't throw ...???????: Monitor 2012-11-11: This is the first releasehttpclient?????????: httpclient??????? 1.0: httpclient??????? （1）?????????? （2）????????? （3）??2012-11-06??，???????。VidCoder: 1.4.5 Beta: Removed the old Advanced user interface and moved x264 preset/profile/tune there instead. The functionality is still available through editing the options string. Added ability to specify the H.264 level. Added ability to choose VidCoder's interface language. If you are interested in translating, we can get VidCoder in your language! Updated WPF text rendering to use the better Display mode. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5045. Removed logic that forced the .m4v extension in certain ...New Projects40Fingers Page Language module for DotNetNuke: DotNetNuke module that allows you to overrule the language a specific page, without using any other localization solutions. Brought to you by 40FINGERSAnonymous Interfaces (by Stephen Cleary): A fluent API for dynamically creating an anonymous type implementing a specific interface.Asynk: Asynk is a framework/application that allows existing applications to easily be extended with an offloaded asynchronous worker layer. Asynk is developed using C#.BizTalkWCFOperationPromoteEncoder: If you seen the BizTalk error: " An action mapping was defined but BTS.Operation was not found in the Message context ", When you use the BizTalk WCF-Customer, bLaugh Plugin for Windows Live Writer: The bLaugh Plugin for Windows Live Writer provides a quick and easy way to find and insert bLaugh (www.blaugh.com) comics into a blog post.CaptureWebPage: Code Between The Lines @ http://www.codebetweenthelines.com Capture an Entire Web Page in a C# Console Application Sample application that fixes most problems.CF-Soft: this is my workspace to study C# programming.Cloud Backup Scheduler: Desktop utility to auto schedule online backups with popular cloud services. Cloud Giraffe: Cloud Giraffe is a library which provides easy collection and analysis of Windows Azure Diagnostics data.dbscript: dbscript is a simple scripting language for DBAs, devs, and others who have need to routinely deliver the results of SQL queries in Excel spreadsheet form.Drill: Drill is the Dependency Resolution and Instance Location Layer, an abstraction to DI containers, service locators and the like facilitating loose coupling.Drzewa decyzyjne WPF: Praca inzE-Commerce Gado: E commerce voltado para o mercado bovinoELearningTutorial: A list of tutorialsElmas Kitap: Kitapliginizi düzenleyebileceginiz bir program.Epi Info iOS Companion: iPad and iPhone companion for Epi Info 7.FreeBlokus: A simple version of Blokus Duo.g1: test GGCStatus: Global Gift Card by We Solve IT. Server Status ApplicationGiveGraph: Social Managed Resources Distribution SystemGlobal String Formatter: The Global String Formatter library allows developers to deal with conditional string formatting in an elegant fashion. Developers specify a predicate and a corresponding string output function for each case of the formatting. The library plays well with DI frameworks.HTWKAidStation: The HTWKAidStation shows schedules and the menu of local mensae in Leipzig, Germany.JsViewEngine - a ASP.NET View Engine using JsRender on both client and server: An ASP.NET View Engine that specializes in sharing partial views between client and server.Kexp.ShoutcastRunner: ShoutcastRunner is a quick and simple Windows service that runs the SHOUTcast DNAS 1.x mp3 server and provides some extra features. MDrive - Controlling Precision Electric Motors: This project demonstrates how to control MDrive(r) precision electric motors from Schneider Electric.MyNet Project: MyNet is an undergraduate project developed in the context of the Cloud Data Management cours at Grenoble INP.Passwords Thief: Sometimes you need to see what is behind asteriks in password edit box. It will help you to resolve this problem. Pet Shop Web: Projeto para gerenciamento de Pet Shop Desenvolvido em ASP.NET com Framework 4.0primeiros passos: aRCVersion: A smart tool to modify version information in RC file.recycling20: Recycling 2.0replaceSID: replaceSID replaces an SID in a SDDL fileshmapcha: Cool toolSMC (Social Media Connector): Social Media APIs are developed to provide Join-In Game providers to access Social Media Portal. Textline Processor: Textline processor is a utility to execute C# codes dynamically on each line of texts, and get output to replace lines in the text. treadmill project: Treadmill ProjectTriathlon Checklist: Triathlon Checklist is a Windows Phone application for triathletes. Download it for free: http://bit.ly/TriathlonChecklistwarhamer40kListBuilder: projet personnel de geston de liste d'armée pour le jeux warhammer 40.000.Wonder: WonderWP7GBAEmulator: A C# GBA Emulator For Windows Phone 7WPF Message Box: WPF Message Box is a simple and free message box for WPF using MVVM pattern. Image, buttons, message, and caption can be set.????: ??????·???????????????

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Apache 2.2 and FastCGI stops responding, warnings, crashes

- by Brett

I've seen this question posted a few times using a Google search, with no real answers. I have a multi-threaded FastCGI application running with Apache 2.2 on FreeBSD 7.2. There are a few issues with it, and I am unable to really figure out the source of the problem even after poking through a bunch of the mod_fastcgi source code. My FastCGI application gets anywhere from 2 to 15 or so hits per second, and mostly services a back-end API (the majority of web server usage is for this, and not actually serving content). Everything seems to work ok under normal conditions, but recently this problem has been becoming worse. It starts out with the FastCGI process manager apparently trying to close unneeded processes, sending them a SIGTERM signal. I catch the signal, clean up some stuff, and exit (by calling exit()) with status code 0. This process seems to result in three log messages in my httpd error log: [Tue Jun 01 14:03:31 2010] [warn] FastCGI: (dynamic) server "/home/program/wwwroot/domains/www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/program.cgi" (pid 98182) termination signaled [Tue Jun 01 14:03:31 2010] [warn] FastCGI: (dynamic) server "/home/program/wwwroot/domains/www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/program.cgi" (pid 98182) terminated by calling exit with status '0' [Tue Jun 01 14:03:31 2010] [warn] FastCGI: (dynamic) server "/home/program/wwwroot/domains/www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/program.cgi" restarted (pid 98294) I am not sure why it says it is restarting the process, but in any case no core dump is ever generated so I do believe it is the FastCGI process manager doing it's thing. This makes sense because it begins to happen after the initial load increase from restarting Apache. Since it's down for a few seconds, it gets hit with a couple of hundred requests over the first few seconds it's running again (sometimes even hitting the upper limit of MAXCLIENTS in Apache), and this seems to be the process manager doing the work of spawning more processes to handle the increased load. So this all seems fine, but here is where things get weird. There are really two problems that I see. First, my multithreaded FastCGI process spawns 25 worker threads, and all seem to be used according to my internal log files (multiple processes are clearly using multiple threads to do work). However it seems that 3 or 4 FastCGI processes is not enough to handle the 5 to 15 hit per second load, even though the requests take about .02s or so to process internally. In order to be at all responsive, it seems I need 50 or more FastCGI processes, leading me to believe that FastCGI does not realize that my program is multithreaded. I've read the documentation at http://www.fastcgi.com/mod_fastcgi/docs/mod_fastcgi.html and do not see any option pertaining to multithreaded-ness, and my internal code is more or less set up just like the examples provided by the FastCGI library. The second problem I am having is that once process termination has happened a bunch of times as above (and seemingly at random), I begin getting a lot of these messages in my error log: [Tue Jun 01 14:06:22 2010] [warn] (32)Broken pipe: FastCGI: write() to PM failed (ignore if a restart or shutdown is pending) The messages occur for about half the hits I get to the server, and it completely kills the responsiveness of my application - it seems FastCGI will look for a working "pipe" until it finds one, and fail to realize that whatever application it is trying to contact is dead. It does still work though, it's just incredibly unresponsive - sometimes taking up to 40 or so seconds to process a request. I recompiled mod_fastcgi with some extra debugging around the point of the error message, and it appears that the error happens when it tries to write() to the application. The call to write() fails with a -1 return code, and sets errno to EPIPE. I am noticing that the issue happens mostly when either a crash occurs in one of the FastCGI processes, or a bunch of them are seemingly terminated by the process manager. I haven't had any core dumps though, except for one, where the backtrace outputted by gdb is just a single call to free() at address 0x0000000000000000 with nothing else in the stack trace, so I don't really know what to make of that. I'm thinking it happens sometime after the SIGTERM signal is caught, maybe some global variable not being cleaned up properly or something.

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PHP crashing (seg-fault) under mod_fcgi, apache

- by Andras Gyomrey

I've been programming a site using: Zend Framework 1.11.5 (complete MVC) PHP 5.3.6 Apache 2.2.19 CentOS 5.6 i686 virtuozzo on vps cPanel WHM 11.30.1 (build 4) Mysql 5.1.56-log Mysqli API 5.1.56 The issue started here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6769515/php-programming-seg-fault. In brief, php is giving me random segmentation-faults. [Wed Jul 20 17:45:34 2011] [error] mod_fcgid: process /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5(11562) exit(communication error), get unexpected signal 11 [Wed Jul 20 17:45:34 2011] [warn] [client 190.78.208.30] (104)Connection reset by peer: mod_fcgid: error reading data from FastCGI server [Wed Jul 20 17:45:34 2011] [error] [client 190.78.208.30] Premature end of script headers: index.php About extensions. When i compile php with "--enable-debug" flag, i have to disable this line: zend_extension="/usr/local/IonCube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.3.so" Otherwise, the server doesn't accept requests and i get a "The connection with the server was reset". It is possible that i have to disable eaccelerator too because of the same reason. I still don't get why apache gets running it some times and some others not: extension="eaccelerator.so" Anyway, after i get httpd running, seg-faults can occurr randomly. If i don't compile php with "--enable-debug" flag, i can get DETERMINISTICALLY a php crash: <?php class Admin_DbController extends Controller_BaseController { public function updateSqlDefinitionsAction() { $db = Zend_Registry::get('db'); $row = $db->fetchRow("SHOW CREATE TABLE 222AFI"); } } ?> BUT if i compile php with "--enable-debug" flag, it's really hard to get this error. I must add some complexity to make it crash. I have to be doing many paralell requests for a few seconds to get a crash: <?php class Admin_DbController extends Controller_BaseController { public function updateSqlDefinitionsAction() { $db = Zend_Registry::get('db'); $tableList = $db->listTables(); foreach ($tableList as $tableName){ $row = $db->fetchRow("SHOW CREATE TABLE " . $db->quoteIdentifier($tableName)); file_put_contents( DB_DEFINITIONS_PATH . '/' . $tableName . '.sql', $row['Create Table'] . ';' ); } } } ?> Please notice this is the same script, but creating DDL for all tables in database rather than for one. It seems that if php is heavy loaded (with extensions and me doing many paralell requests) it's when i get php to crash. About starting httpd with "-X": i've tried. The thing is, it is already hard to make php crash with --enable-debug. With "-X" option (which only enables one child process) i can't do parallel requests. So i haven't been able to create to proper debug backtrace: https://bugs.php.net/bugs-generating-backtrace.php My concrete question is, what do i do to get a coredump? root@GWT4 [~]# httpd -V Server version: Apache/2.2.19 (Unix) Server built: Jul 20 2011 19:18:58 Cpanel::Easy::Apache v3.4.2 rev9999 Server's Module Magic Number: 20051115:28 Server loaded: APR 1.4.5, APR-Util 1.3.12 Compiled using: APR 1.4.5, APR-Util 1.3.12 Architecture: 32-bit Server MPM: Prefork threaded: no forked: yes (variable process count) Server compiled with.... -D APACHE_MPM_DIR="server/mpm/prefork" -D APR_HAS_SENDFILE -D APR_HAS_MMAP -D APR_HAVE_IPV6 (IPv4-mapped addresses enabled) -D APR_USE_SYSVSEM_SERIALIZE -D APR_USE_PTHREAD_SERIALIZE -D SINGLE_LISTEN_UNSERIALIZED_ACCEPT -D APR_HAS_OTHER_CHILD -D AP_HAVE_RELIABLE_PIPED_LOGS -D DYNAMIC_MODULE_LIMIT=128 -D HTTPD_ROOT="/usr/local/apache" -D SUEXEC_BIN="/usr/local/apache/bin/suexec" -D DEFAULT_PIDLOG="logs/httpd.pid" -D DEFAULT_SCOREBOARD="logs/apache_runtime_status" -D DEFAULT_LOCKFILE="logs/accept.lock" -D DEFAULT_ERRORLOG="logs/error_log" -D AP_TYPES_CONFIG_FILE="conf/mime.types" -D SERVER_CONFIG_FILE="conf/httpd.conf"

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Connection Reset on MySQL query

- by sunwukung

OK, I'm flummoxed.(i've asked this question over on Stack too - but I need to get it fixed so I'm asking here too - any help is GREATLY appreciated) I'm trying to execute a query on a database (locally) and I keep getting a connection reset error. I've been using the method below in a generic DAO class to build a query string and pass to Zend_Db API. public function insert($params) { $loop = false; $keys = $values = ''; foreach($params as $k => $v){ if($loop == true){ $keys .= ','; $values .= ','; } $keys .= $this->db->quoteIdentifier($k); $values .= $this->db->quote($v); $loop = true; } $sql = "INSERT INTO " . $this->table_name . " ($keys) VALUES ($values)"; //formatResult returns an array of info regarding the status and any result sets of the query //I've commented that method call out anyway, so I don't think it's that try { $this->db->query($sql); return $this->formatResult(array( true, 'New record inserted into: '.$this->table_name )); }catch(PDOException $e) { return $this->formatResult($e); } } So far, this has worked fine - the errors have been occurring since we generated new tables to record user input. The insert string looks like this: INSERT INTO tablename(`id`,`title`,`summary`,`description`,`keywords`,`type_id`,`categories`) VALUES ('5539','Sample Title','Sample content',' \'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In et pellentesque mauris. Curabitur hendrerit, leo id ultrices pellentesque, est purus mattis ligula, vitae imperdiet neque ligula bibendum sapien. Curabitur aliquet nisi et odio pharetra tincidunt. Phasellus sed iaculis nisl. Fusce commodo mauris et purus vehicula dictum. Nulla feugiat molestie accumsan. Donec fermentum libero in risus tempus elementum aliquam et magna. Fusce vitae sem metus. Aenean commodo pharetra risus, nec pellentesque augue ullamcorper nec. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nullam vel elit libero. Vestibulum in turpis nunc.\'','this,is,a,sample,array',1,'category title') Here are the parameters it's getting before assembling the query (var_dump): array 'id' => string '1' (length=4) 'title' => string 'Sample Title' (length=12) 'summary' => string 'Sample content' (length=14) 'description' => string '<p>'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In et pellentesque mauris. Curabitur hendrerit, leo id ultrices pellentesque, est purus mattis ligula, vitae imperdiet neque ligula bibendum sapien. Curabitur aliquet nisi et odio pharetra tincidunt. Phasellus sed iaculis nisl. Fusce commodo mauris et purus vehicula dictum. Nulla feugiat molestie accumsan. Donec fermentum libero in risus tempus elementum aliquam et magna. Fusce vitae sem metus. Aenean commodo pharetra risus, nec pellentesque augue'... (length=677) 'keywords' => string 'this,is,a,sample,array' (length=22) 'type_id' => int 1 'categories' => string 'category title' (length=43) The next port of call was checking the limits on the table, since it seems to insert if the length of "description" is around the 300 mark (it varies between 310 - 330). The field limit is set to VARCHAR(1500) and the validation on this field won't allow anything past bigger than 1200 with HTML, 800 without. The real kicker is that if I take this sql string and execute it via the command line, it works fine - so I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong. I've tried extending the server parameters i.e. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1964554/unexpected-connection-reset-a-php-or-an-apache-issue So, in a nutshell, I'm stumped. Any ideas?

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Nagios notifications definitions

- by Colin

I am trying to monitor a web server in such a way that I want to search for a particular string on a page via http. The command is defined in command.cfg as follows # 'check_http-mysite command definition' define command { command_name check_http-mysite command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http -H mysite.example.com -s "Some text" } # 'notify-host-by-sms' command definition define command { command_name notify-host-by-sms command_line /usr/bin/send_sms $CONTACTPAGER$ "Nagios - $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ :Host$HOSTALIAS$ is $HOSTSTATE$ ($OUTPUT$)" } # 'notify-service-by-sms' command definition define command { command_name notify-service-by-sms command_line /usr/bin/send_sms $CONTACTPAGER$ "Nagios - $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$: $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$ ($OUTPUT$)" } Now if nagios doesn't find "Some text" on the home page mysite.example.com, nagios should notify a contact via sms through the Clickatell http API which I have a script for that that I have tested and found that it works fine. Whenever I change the command definition to search for a string which is not on the page, and restart nagios, I can see on the web interface that the string was not found. What I don't understand is why isn't the notification sent though I have defined the host, hostgroup, contact, contactgroup and service and so forth. What I'm I missing, these are my definitions, In my web access through the cgi I can see that I have notifications have been defined and enabled though I don't get both email and sms notifications during hard status changes. host.cfg define host { use generic-host host_name HAL alias IBM-1 address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx check_command check_http-mysite } *hostgroups_nagios2.cfg* # my website define hostgroup{ hostgroup_name my-servers alias All My Servers members HAL } *contacts_nagios2.cfg* define contact { contact_name colin alias Colin Y service_notification_period 24x7 host_notification_period 24x7 service_notification_options w,u,c,r,f,s host_notification_options d,u,r,f,s service_notification_commands notify-service-by-email,notify-service-by-sms host_notification_commands notify-host-by-email,notify-host-by-sms email [email protected] pager +254xxxxxxxxx } define contactgroup{ contactgroup_name site_admin alias Site Administrator members colin } *services_nagios2.cfg* # check for particular string in page via http define service { hostgroup_name my-servers service_description STRING CHECK check_command check_http-mysite use generic-service notification_interval 0 ; set > 0 if you want to be renotified contacts colin contact_groups site_admin } Could someone please tell me where I'm going wrong. Here are the generic-host and generic-service definitions *generic-service_nagios2.cfg* # generic service template definition define service{ name generic-service ; The 'name' of this service template active_checks_enabled 1 ; Active service checks are enabled passive_checks_enabled 1 ; Passive service checks are enabled/accepted parallelize_check 1 ; Active service checks should be parallelized (disabling this can lead to major performance problems) obsess_over_service 1 ; We should obsess over this service (if necessary) check_freshness 0 ; Default is to NOT check service 'freshness' notifications_enabled 1 ; Service notifications are enabled event_handler_enabled 1 ; Service event handler is enabled flap_detection_enabled 1 ; Flap detection is enabled failure_prediction_enabled 1 ; Failure prediction is enabled process_perf_data 1 ; Process performance data retain_status_information 1 ; Retain status information across program restarts retain_nonstatus_information 1 ; Retain non-status information across program restarts notification_interval 0 ; Only send notifications on status change by default. is_volatile 0 check_period 24x7 normal_check_interval 5 retry_check_interval 1 max_check_attempts 4 notification_period 24x7 notification_options w,u,c,r contact_groups site_admin register 0 ; DONT REGISTER THIS DEFINITION - ITS NOT A REAL SERVICE, JUST A TEMPLATE! } *generic-host_nagios2.cfg* define host{ name generic-host ; The name of this host template notifications_enabled 1 ; Host notifications are enabled event_handler_enabled 1 ; Host event handler is enabled flap_detection_enabled 1 ; Flap detection is enabled failure_prediction_enabled 1 ; Failure prediction is enabled process_perf_data 1 ; Process performance data retain_status_information 1 ; Retain status information across program restarts retain_nonstatus_information 1 ; Retain non-status information across program restarts max_check_attempts 10 notification_interval 0 notification_period 24x7 notification_options d,u,r contact_groups site_admin register 1 ; DONT REGISTER THIS DEFINITION - ITS NOT A REAL HOST, JUST A TEMPLATE! }

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Configuring dhcp module in FreeRadius (3.0.2 - Centos 6.5)

- by mixja

I am using the REST module to authorise a DHCP request. I would like to send an explicit DHCP NAK if the authorisation fails, however the DHCP module seems to return immediately if there is a failure and just ignores the DHCP request without any response. Here is my DHCP module configuration - if rest.authorize is successful, the if (ok) control block is hit, but if rest.authorize fails the if (fail) is never hit. dhcp DHCP-Discover { rest.authorize if (fail) { update reply { DHCP-Message-Type = DHCP-Nak } } if (ok) { update reply { DHCP-Message-Type = DHCP-Offer } update reply { DHCP-Domain-Name-Server = x.x.x.x DHCP-Domain-Name-Server = x.x.x.x DHCP-Subnet-Mask = 255.255.255.0 DHCP-Router-Address = x.x.x.x DHCP-IP-Address-Lease-Time = 3600 DHCP-DHCP-Server-Identifier = x.x.x.x } mac2ip } } Below is the output after a 401 Unauthorized is received. I am wanting to achieve a temporary block on DHCP for a specified (small) period of time. However the FreeRADIUS behaviour is to ignore duplicate requests for same DHCP transaction, meaning DHCP on client is blocked until it begins a new transaction. If a DHCP NAK can be sent, the DHCP client will initiate a new transaction after each NAK (i.e. DHCP Discover), meaning FreeRADIUS will process each DHCP Discover from the client, and the block will be removed much closer to the desired block time. Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: (3) rest : Sending HTTP GET to "http://xxxxxx//api/v1/dhcp/80%3Aea%3A96%3A2a%3Ab6%3Aaa" Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: (3) rest : Processing response header Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: (3) rest : Status : 401 (Unauthorized) Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: (3) rest : Skipping attribute processing, no body data received Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: rlm_rest (rest): Released connection (4) Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: (3) modsingle[authorize]: returned from rest (rlm_rest) for request 3 Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: (3) [rest.authorize] = fail Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: (3) } # dhcp DHCP-Discover = fail Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: (3) Finished request 3. Tue Jun 3 03:00:57 2014 : Debug: Waking up in 0.2 seconds. Tue Jun 3 03:00:58 2014 : Debug: Waking up in 4.6 seconds. Received DHCP-Discover of id 7b0fb2de from 172.19.0.9:67 to 172.19.0.12:67 Tue Jun 3 03:00:59 2014 : Debug: (3) No reply. Ignoring retransmit. Tue Jun 3 03:00:59 2014 : Debug: Waking up in 2.9 seconds. Received DHCP-Discover of id 7b0fb2de from 172.19.0.9:67 to 172.19.0.12:67 Tue Jun 3 03:01:02 2014 : Debug: (3) No reply. Ignoring retransmit. Tue Jun 3 03:01:02 2014 : Debug: Waking up in 0.4 seconds. Tue Jun 3 03:01:02 2014 : Debug: (2) Cleaning up request packet ID 2064626397 with timestamp +56 Tue Jun 3 03:01:02 2014 : Debug: Waking up in 1999991.0 seconds. Received DHCP-Discover of id 7b0fb2de from 172.19.0.9:67 to 172.19.0.12:67 Tue Jun 3 03:01:06 2014 : Debug: (3) No reply. Ignoring retransmit. Tue Jun 3 03:01:06 2014 : Debug: Waking up in 3999983.1 seconds. Received DHCP-Discover of id 7b0fb2de from 172.19.0.9:67 to 172.19.0.12:67 Tue Jun 3 03:01:15 2014 : Debug: (3) No reply. Ignoring retransmit. Tue Jun 3 03:01:15 2014 : Debug: Waking up in 7999966.3 seconds. Received DHCP-Discover of id 7b0fb2de from 172.19.0.9:67 to 172.19.0.12:67 Tue Jun 3 03:01:23 2014 : Debug: (3) No reply. Ignoring retransmit. Tue Jun 3 03:01:23 2014 : Debug: Waking up in 15999942.1 seconds.

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Pushing DNSSEC updates with offline keys

- by eggyal

In a non-professional capacity, I look after the DNS of some 18 domains: mostly personal/vanity domains for immediate family. I outsource the whole shebang to an inexpensive managed hosting provider with a web interface through which I manage the zones; since the provider also offers DNSSEC, I have successfully deployed that too. These domains are so unimportant that an attack targetted against them seems much less likely than a general compromise of my provider's systems, at which point the records of all their customers might be changed to misdirect traffic (perhaps with extremely long TTLs). DNSSEC could protect against such an attack, but only if the zone's private keys are not held by the hosting provider. So, I wonder: how can one keep DNSSEC private keys offline yet still transfer signed zones to an outsourced DNS host? The most obvious answer (to me, at least) is to run one's own shadow/hidden master (from which the provider can slave) and then copy offline-signed zonefiles to the master as required. The problem is that the only machine I (want to*) control is my personal laptop, which usually connects from a typical home ADSL (behind NAT over a dynamically-assigned IP address). Having them slave from that (e.g. with a very long Expiry time on the zone for periods when my laptop is offline/unavailable) would not only require a Dynamic DNS record from which they can slave (if indeed they can slave from a named host rather than a static IP address), but would also involve me running a DNS server on my laptop and opening both it and my home network up to the incoming zone transfer requests: not ideal. I would prefer a much more push-oriented design, whereby my laptop initiates transfer of offline-signed zonefiles/updates to the provider's servers. I looked into whether nsupdate could fit the bill: documentation is a little sketchy, but my testing (with BIND 9.7) suggests it can indeed update DNSSEC zones, but only where the server holds the keys to perform the zone signing; I have not found a way to have it take an update including the relevant RRSIG/NSEC/etc. records and have the server accept them. Is this a supported use-case? If not, I suspect the only solutions which could fit the bill will involve non-DNS-based transfer of the zone updates and would welcome recommendations that are supported by (hopefully inexpensive) hosting providers: SFTP/SCP? rsync? RDBMS replication? Proprietary API? Finally, what would be the practical implications of such a setup? Key rotation is jumping out at me as being an obvious difficulty, especially if my laptop is offline for extended periods. But the zones are extremely stable, so perhaps I could get away with long-lived ZSKs**...? * Whilst I could run a shadow/hidden master on e.g. an outsourced VPS, I dislike the overhead of having to secure / manage / monitor / maintain yet another system; not to mention the additional financial costs of so doing. ** Okay, this would enable a concerted attacker to replay outdated records—but the risk and impact of such are both tolerable in the case of these domains.

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mySQL Optimization Suggestions

- by Brian Schroeter

I'm trying to optimize our mySQL configuration for our large Magento website. The reason I believe that mySQL needs to be configured further is because New Relic has shown that our SELECT queries are taking a long time (20,000+ ms) in some categories. I ran MySQLTuner 1.3.0 and got the following results... (Disclaimer: I restarted mySQL earlier after tweaking some settings, and so the results here may not be 100% accurate): >> MySQLTuner 1.3.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.5.37-35.0 [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: +ARCHIVE +BLACKHOLE +CSV -FEDERATED +InnoDB +MRG_MYISAM [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 7G (Tables: 332) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 213G (Tables: 8714) [--] Data in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables: 0B (Tables: 17) [--] Data in MEMORY tables: 0B (Tables: 353) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 5492 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '@host5.server1.autopartsnetwork.com' has no password set. [!!] User '@localhost' has no password set. [!!] User 'root@%' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 5h 3m 4s (5M q [317.443 qps], 42K conn, TX: 18B, RX: 2B) [--] Reads / Writes: 95% / 5% [--] Total buffers: 35.5G global + 184.5M per thread (1024 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 220.0G (174% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (6K/5M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 5% (61/1024) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 512.0M/3.1G [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (102M cached / 45K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 66.9% (3M cached / 5M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 3486361 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (0 temp sorts / 812K sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 1328 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 11% (126K on disk / 1M total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (61 created / 42K connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 19% (9K open / 49K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 2% (712/25K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (5M immediate / 5M locks) [!!] InnoDB buffer pool / data size: 32.0G/213.4G [OK] InnoDB log waits: 0 -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Read this before increasing table_cache over 64: http://bit.ly/1mi7c4C Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 512M) [see warning above] join_buffer_size (> 128.0M, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache (> 12288) innodb_buffer_pool_size (>= 213G) My my.cnf configuration is as follows... [client] port = 3306 [mysqld_safe] nice = 0 [mysqld] tmpdir = /var/lib/mysql/tmp user = mysql port = 3306 skip-external-locking character-set-server = utf8 collation-server = utf8_general_ci event_scheduler = 0 key_buffer = 512M max_allowed_packet = 64M thread_stack = 512K thread_cache_size = 512 sort_buffer_size = 24M read_buffer_size = 8M read_rnd_buffer_size = 24M join_buffer_size = 128M # for some nightly processes client sessions set the join buffer to 8 GB auto-increment-increment = 1 auto-increment-offset = 1 myisam-recover = BACKUP max_connections = 1024 # max connect errors artificially high to support behaviors of NetScaler monitors max_connect_errors = 999999 concurrent_insert = 2 connect_timeout = 5 wait_timeout = 180 net_read_timeout = 120 net_write_timeout = 120 back_log = 128 # this table_open_cache might be too low because of MySQL bugs #16244691 and #65384) table_open_cache = 12288 tmp_table_size = 512M max_heap_table_size = 512M bulk_insert_buffer_size = 512M open-files-limit = 8192 open-files = 1024 query_cache_type = 1 # large query limit supports SOAP and REST API integrations query_cache_limit = 4M # larger than 512 MB query cache size is problematic; this is typically ~60% full query_cache_size = 512M # set to true on read slaves read_only = false slow_query_log_file = /var/log/mysql/slow.log slow_query_log = 0 long_query_time = 0.2 expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 1024M binlog_cache_size = 32K sync_binlog = 0 # SSD RAID10 technically has a write capacity of 10000 IOPS innodb_io_capacity = 400 innodb_file_per_table innodb_table_locks = true innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 30 # These servers have 80 CPU threads; match 1:1 innodb_thread_concurrency = 48 innodb_commit_concurrency = 2 innodb_support_xa = true innodb_buffer_pool_size = 32G innodb_file_per_table innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_log_buffer_size = 2G skip-federated [mysqldump] quick quote-names single-transaction max_allowed_packet = 64M I have a monster of a server here to power our site because our catalog is very large (300,000 simple SKUs), and I'm just wondering if I'm missing anything that I can configure further. :-) Thanks!

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How does the Cloud compare to Colocation? And development too

- by David

Currently I/we run a SaaS web application where each subscriber has their own physical instance of the application in addition to their own database. The setup has each web application instance deployed on two different IIS boxes both for load-balancing and redundancy (the machines have their Windows Update install times 12 hours apart, for example). Databases are mirrored on two different SQL Server 2012 machines with AlwaysOn for uptime. I don't make use of SQL Server clustering (as it doesn't provide storage-level failover: we don't have a shared storage box). Because it's a Windows setup it means there are two Domain Controllers (we cheat: they're both Mac Minis, 17W each, which keeps our colo power costs low). Finally there's also an Exchange server (Mailbox, Hub Transport and Client Access). One of the SQL Servers also doubles-up as an Exchange Hub Transport. Running costs are about $700 a month for our quarter-rack colocation (which includes power and peering/transfer), then there's about $150 a month for SPLA licensing, so $850 a month in total. Then there's the hard-to-quantify cost of administration, but I reckon I spend a couple of hours a week checking-in on the servers: reviewing event logs, etc. I keep getting bombarded by ads and manufactured news stories about how great "the cloud" is. Back in 2008 when the cloud was taking off I was reading up about the proper "cloud" services like Google AppEngine, where you write in Python against Google's API and that's how they scale your application across servers and also use their database provider for scaling storage. Simple enough to understand. Then came along Amazon, and I understand how Amazon Storage works, but I'm not sure how Amazon Compute works: web application pages don't take much CPU time to compute, how do you even quantify usage anyway? Finally, RackSpace gets in the act and now I'm really confused. RackSpace advertise "Cloud" SQL Server 2012 available for about "$0.70 per hour", going by how they advertise it I thought the "hour" meant the sum of CPU time, IO blocking time, maybe time spent transferring data, so for a low-intensity application that works out pretty cheap then? Nope. I went on to a Sales Chat window and spoke to one of their advisors. They told me the $0.70/hour was actually for every hour the SQL Server is running... but who wants a SQL Server for only a few hours? You're going to need it available 24 hours a day for months on end. $0.70 * 24 * 31 works out at $520 a month, which is rediculously expensive for SQL Server. An SPLA license for SQL Server is only $50 a month or so. That $520 a month does not include "fanatical support", and you also need to stack on top the costs of the host Windows server instance too. From what I can tell, Rackspace's "Cloud" products seem like like an cynical rebranding of an overpriced VPS service, but priced by the hour. I have the same confusion about Windows Azure which uses similar terms to describe the products available, but I think that's because Azure offers both traditional shared webhosting in addition to their own APIs you can target for scalable applications.

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The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

- by Rick Strahl

I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot easier with the introduction of dynamic type support in .NET. One of the biggest problems with COM interop has been that it’s been really difficult to pass dynamic objects from FoxPro to .NET and get them properly typed. The only way that any strong typing can occur in .NET for FoxPro components is via COM type library exports of Visual FoxPro components. Due to limitations in Visual FoxPro’s type library support as well as the dynamic nature of the Visual FoxPro language where few things are or can be described in the form of a COM type library, a lot of useful interaction between FoxPro and .NET required the use of messy Reflection code in .NET. Reflection is .NET’s base interface to runtime type discovery and dynamic execution of code without requiring strong typing. In FoxPro terms it’s similar to EVALUATE() functionality albeit with a much more complex API and corresponiding syntax. The Reflection APIs are fairly powerful, but they are rather awkward to use and require a lot of code. Even with the creation of wrapper utility classes for common EVAL() style Reflection functionality dynamically access COM objects passed to .NET often is pretty tedious and ugly. Let’s look at a simple example. In the following code I use some FoxPro code to dynamically create an object in code and then pass this object to .NET. An alternative to this might also be to create a new object on the fly by using SCATTER NAME on a database record. How the object is created is inconsequential, other than the fact that it’s not defined as a COM object – it’s a pure FoxPro object that is passed to .NET. Here’s the code: *** Create .NET COM InstanceloNet = CREATEOBJECT('DotNetCom.DotNetComPublisher') *** Create a Customer Object Instance (factory method) loCustomer = GetCustomer() loCustomer.Name = "Rick Strahl" loCustomer.Company = "West Wind Technologies" loCustomer.creditLimit = 9999999999.99 loCustomer.Address.StreetAddress = "32 Kaiea Place" loCustomer.Address.Phone = "808 579-8342" loCustomer.Address.Email = "[email protected]" *** Pass Fox Object and echo back values ? loNet.PassRecordObject(loObject) RETURN FUNCTION GetCustomer LOCAL loCustomer, loAddress loCustomer = CREATEOBJECT("EMPTY") ADDPROPERTY(loCustomer,"Name","") ADDPROPERTY(loCustomer,"Company","") ADDPROPERTY(loCUstomer,"CreditLimit",0.00) ADDPROPERTY(loCustomer,"Entered",DATETIME()) loAddress = CREATEOBJECT("Empty") ADDPROPERTY(loAddress,"StreetAddress","") ADDPROPERTY(loAddress,"Phone","") ADDPROPERTY(loAddress,"Email","") ADDPROPERTY(loCustomer,"Address",loAddress) RETURN loCustomer ENDFUNC Now prior to .NET 4.0 you’d have to access this object passed to .NET via Reflection and the method code to do this would looks something like this in the .NET component: public string PassRecordObject(object FoxObject) { // *** using raw Reflection string Company = (string) FoxObject.GetType().InvokeMember( "Company", BindingFlags.GetProperty,null, FoxObject,null); // using the easier ComUtils wrappers string Name = (string) ComUtils.GetProperty(FoxObject,"Name"); // Getting Address object – then getting child properties object Address = ComUtils.GetProperty(FoxObject,"Address"); string Street = (string) ComUtils.GetProperty(FoxObject,"StreetAddress"); // using ComUtils 'Ex' functions you can use . Syntax string StreetAddress = (string) ComUtils.GetPropertyEx(FoxObject,"AddressStreetAddress"); return Name + Environment.NewLine + Company + Environment.NewLine + StreetAddress + Environment.NewLine + " FOX"; } Note that the FoxObject is passed in as type object which has no specific type. Since the object doesn’t exist in .NET as a type signature the object is passed without any specific type information as plain non-descript object. To retrieve a property the Reflection APIs like Type.InvokeMember or Type.GetProperty().GetValue() etc. need to be used. I made this code a little simpler by using the Reflection Wrappers I mentioned earlier but even with those ComUtils calls the code is pretty ugly requiring passing the objects for each call and casting each element. Using .NET 4.0 Dynamic Typing makes this Code a lot cleaner Enter .NET 4.0 and the dynamic type. Replacing the input parameter to the .NET method from type object to dynamic makes the code to access the FoxPro component inside of .NET much more natural: public string PassRecordObjectDynamic(dynamic FoxObject) { // *** using raw Reflection string Company = FoxObject.Company; // *** using the easier ComUtils class string Name = FoxObject.Name; // *** using ComUtils 'ex' functions to use . Syntax string Address = FoxObject.Address.StreetAddress; return Name + Environment.NewLine + Company + Environment.NewLine + Address + Environment.NewLine + " FOX"; } As you can see the parameter is of type dynamic which as the name implies performs Reflection lookups and evaluation on the fly so all the Reflection code in the last example goes away. The code can use regular object ‘.’ syntax to reference each of the members of the object. You can access properties and call methods this way using natural object language. Also note that all the type casts that were required in the Reflection code go away – dynamic types like var can infer the type to cast to based on the target assignment. As long as the type can be inferred by the compiler at compile time (ie. the left side of the expression is strongly typed) no explicit casts are required. Note that although you get to use plain object syntax in the code above you don’t get Intellisense in Visual Studio because the type is dynamic and thus has no hard type definition in .NET . The above example calls a .NET Component from VFP, but it also works the other way around. Another frequent scenario is an .NET code calling into a FoxPro COM object that returns a dynamic result. Assume you have a FoxPro COM object returns a FoxPro Cursor Record as an object: DEFINE CLASS FoxData AS SESSION OlePublic cAppStartPath = "" FUNCTION INIT THIS.cAppStartPath = ADDBS( JustPath(Application.ServerName) ) SET PATH TO ( THIS.cAppStartpath ) ENDFUNC FUNCTION GetRecord(lnPk) LOCAL loCustomer SELECT * FROM tt_Cust WHERE pk = lnPk ; INTO CURSOR TCustomer IF _TALLY < 1 RETURN NULL ENDIF SCATTER NAME loCustomer MEMO RETURN loCustomer ENDFUNC ENDDEFINE If you call this from a .NET application you can now retrieve this data via COM Interop and cast the result as dynamic to simplify the data access of the dynamic FoxPro type that was created on the fly: int pk = 0; int.TryParse(Request.QueryString["id"],out pk); // Create Fox COM Object with Com Callable Wrapper FoxData foxData = new FoxData(); dynamic foxRecord = foxData.GetRecord(pk); string company = foxRecord.Company; DateTime entered = foxRecord.Entered; This code looks simple and natural as it should be – heck you could write code like this in days long gone by in scripting languages like ASP classic for example. Compared to the Reflection code that previously was necessary to run similar code this is much easier to write, understand and maintain. For COM interop and Visual FoxPro operation dynamic type support in .NET 4.0 is a huge improvement and certainly makes it much easier to deal with FoxPro code that calls into .NET. Regardless of whether you’re using COM for calling Visual FoxPro objects from .NET (ASP.NET calling a COM component and getting a dynamic result returned) or whether FoxPro code is calling into a .NET COM component from a FoxPro desktop application. At one point or another FoxPro likely ends up passing complex dynamic data to .NET and for this the dynamic typing makes coding much cleaner and more readable without having to create custom Reflection wrappers. As a bonus the dynamic runtime that underlies the dynamic type is fairly efficient in terms of making Reflection calls especially if members are repeatedly accessed. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in COM FoxPro .NET CSharp

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Integrate SharePoint 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Our client is using a brand new shiny installation of SharePoint 2010, so we need to integrate our upgraded Team Foundation Server 2010 instance into it. In order to do that you need to run the Team Foundation Server 2010 install on the SharePoint 2010 server and choose to install only the “Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies”. We want out upgraded Team Project Collection to create any new portal in this SharePoint 2010 server farm. There a number of goodies above and beyond a solution file that requires the install, with the main one being the TFS2010 client API. These goodies allow proper integration with the creation and viewing of Work Items from SharePoint a new feature with TFS 2010. This works in both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 with the level of integration dependant on the version of SharePoint that you are running. There are three levels of integration with “SharePoint Services 3.0” or “SharePoint Foundation 2010” being the lowest. This level only offers reporting services framed integration for reporting along with Work Item Integration and document management. The highest is Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) Enterprise with Excel Services integration providing some lovely dashboards. Figure: Dashboards take the guessing out of Project Planning and estimation. Plus writing these reports would be boring! The Extensions that you need are on the same installation media as the main TFS install and the only difference is the options you pick during the install. Figure: Installing the TFS 2010 Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies onto SharePoint 2010 Annoyingly you may need to reboot a couple of times, but on this server the process was MUCH smother than on our internal server. I think this was mostly to do with this being a clean install. Once it is installed you need to run the configuration. This will add all of the Solution and Templates that are needed for SharePoint to work properly with TFS. Figure: This is where all the TFS 2010 goodies are added to your SharePoint 2010 server and the TFS 2010 object model is installed. Figure: All done, you have everything installed, but you still need to configure it Now that we have the TFS 2010 SharePoint Extensions installed on our SharePoint 2010 server we need to configure them both so that they will talk happily to each other. Configuring the SharePoint 2010 Managed path for Team Foundation Server 2010 In order for TFS to automatically create your project portals you need a wildcard managed path setup. This is where TFS will create the portal during the creation of a new Team project. To find the managed paths page for any application you need to first select the “Managed web applications” link from the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration screen. Figure: Find the “Manage web applications” link under the “Application Management” section. On you are there you will see that the “Managed Paths” are there, they are just greyed out and selecting one of the applications will enable it to be clicked. Figure: You need to select an application for the SharePoint 2010 ribbon to activate. Figure: You need to select an application before you can get to the Managed Paths for that application. Now we need to add a managed path for TFS 2010 to create its portals under. I have gone for the obvious option of just calling the managed path “TFS02” as the TFS 2010 server is the second TFS server that the client has installed, TFS 2008 being the first. This links the location to the server name, and as you can’t have two projects of the same name in two separate project collections there is unlikely to be any conflicts. Figure: Add a “tfs02” wildcard inclusion path to your SharePoint site. Configure the Team Foundation Server 2010 connection to SharePoint 2010 In order to have you new TFS 2010 Server talk to and create sites in SharePoint 2010 you need to tell the TFS server where to put them. As this TFS 2010 server was installed in out-of-the-box mode it has a SharePoint Services 3.0 (the free one) server running on the same box. But we want to change that so we can use the external SharePoint 2010 instance. Just open the “Team Foundation Server Administration Console” and navigate to the “SharePoint Web Applications” section. Here you click “Add” and enter the details for the Managed path we just created. Figure: If you have special permissions on your SharePoint you may need to add accounts to the “Service Accounts” section. Before we can se this new SharePoint 2010 instance to be the default for our upgraded Team Project Collection we need to configure SharePoint to take instructions from our TFS server. Configure SharePoint 2010 to connect to Team Foundation Server 2010 On your SharePoint 2010 server open the Team Foundation Server Administration Console and select the “Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies” node. Here we need to “grant access” for our TFS 2010 server to create sites. Click the “Grant access” link and fill out the full URL to the TFS server, for example http://servername.domain.com:8080/tfs, and if need be restrict the path that TFS sites can be created on. Remember that when the users create a new team project they can change the default and point it anywhere they like as long as it is an authorised SharePoint location. Figure: Grant access for your TFS 2010 server to create sites in SharePoint 2010 Now that we have an authorised location for our team project portals to be created we need to tell our Team Project Collection that this is where it should stick sites by default for any new Team Projects created. Configure the Team Foundation Server 2010 Team Project Collection to create new sites in SharePoint 2010 Back on out TFS 2010 server we need to setup the defaults for our upgraded Team Project Collection to the new SharePoint 2010 integration we have just set up. On the TFS 2010 server open up the “Team Foundation Server Administration Console” again and navigate to the “Team Project Collections” node. Once you are there you will see a list of all of your TPC’s and in our case we have a DefaultCollection as well as out named and Upgraded collection for TFS 2008. If you select the “SharePoint Site” tab we can see that it is not currently configured. Figure: Our new Upgrade TFS2008 Team Project Collection does not have SharePoint configured Select to “Edit Default Site Location” and select the new integration point that we just set up for SharePoint 2010. Once you have selected the “SharePoint Web Application” (the thing we just configured) then it will give you an example based on that configuration point and the name of the Team Project Collection that we are configuring. Figure: Set the default location for new Team Project Portals to be created for this Team Project Collection This is where the reason for configuring the Extensions on the SharePoint 2010 server before doing this last bit becomes apparent. TFS 2010 is going to create a site at our http://sharepointserver/tfs02/ location called http://sharepointserver/tfs02/[TeamProjectCollection], or whatever we had specified, and it would have had difficulty doing this if we had not given it permission first. Figure: If there is no Team Project Collection site at this location the TFS 2010 server is going to create one This will create a nice Team Project Collection parent site to contain the Portals for any new Team Projects that are created. It is with noting that it will not create portals for existing Team Projects as this process is run during the Team Project Creation wizard. Figure: Just a basic parent site to host all of your new Team Project Portals as sub sites You will need to add all of the users that will be creating Team Projects to be Administrators of this site so that they will not get an error during the Project Creation Wizard. You may also want to customise this as a proper portal to your projects if you are going to be having lots of them, but it is really just a default placeholder so you have a top level site that you can backup and point at. You have now integrated SharePoint 2010 and team Foundation Server 2010! You can now go forth and multiple your Team Projects for this Team Project Collection or you can continue to add portals to your other Collections. Technorati Tags: TFS 2010,Sharepoint 2010,VS ALM

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VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE

- by ScottGu

Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it. You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here. Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling support for SQL CE, and walkthrough some of the cool scenarios it enables. SQL CE – What is it and why should you care? SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it. You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine. No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded. SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax. This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE. This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios. With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET). This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments. Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE. It is also totally free. Easy Migration to SQL Server SQL CE is an embedded database – which makes it ideal for development, testing, and light-usage scenarios. For high-volume sites and applications you’ll probably want to migrate your database to use SQL Server Express (which is free), SQL Server or SQL Azure. These servers enable much better scalability, more development features (including features like Stored Procedures – which aren’t supported with SQL CE), as well as more advanced data management capabilities. We’ll ship migration tools that enable you to optionally take SQL CE databases and easily upgrade them to use SQL Server Express, SQL Server, or SQL Azure. You will not need to change your code when upgrading a SQL CE database to SQL Server or SQL Azure. Our goal is to enable you to be able to simply change the database connection string in your web.config file and have your application just work. New Tooling Support for SQL CE in VS 2010 SP1 VS 2010 SP1 includes much improved tooling support for SQL CE, and adds support for using SQL CE within ASP.NET projects for the first time. With VS 2010 SP1 you can now: Create new SQL CE Databases Edit and Modify SQL CE Database Schema and Indexes Populate SQL CE Databases within Data Use the Entity Framework (EF) designer to create model layers against SQL CE databases Use EF Code First to define model layers in code, then create a SQL CE database from them, and optionally edit the DB with VS Deploy SQL CE databases to remote servers using Web Deploy and optionally convert them to full SQL Server databases You can take advantage of all of the above features from within both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based projects. Download You can enable SQL CE tooling support within VS 2010 by first installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta). Once SP1 is installed, you’ll also then need to install the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download. This is a separate download that enables the SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1. Walkthrough of Two Scenarios In this blog post I’m going to walkthrough how you can take advantage of SQL CE and VS 2010 SP1 using both an ASP.NET Web Forms and an ASP.NET MVC based application. Specifically, we’ll walkthrough: How to create a SQL CE database using VS 2010 SP1, then use the EF4 visual designers in Visual Studio to construct a model layer from it, and then display and edit the data using an ASP.NET GridView control. How to use an EF Code First approach to define a model layer using POCO classes and then have EF Code-First “auto-create” a SQL CE database for us based on our model classes. We’ll then look at how we can use the new VS 2010 SP1 support for SQL CE to inspect the database that was created, populate it with data, and later make schema changes to it. We’ll do all this within the context of an ASP.NET MVC based application. You can follow the two walkthroughs below on your own machine by installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta) and then installing the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download (which is a separate download that enables SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1). Walkthrough 1: Create a SQL CE Database, Create EF Model Classes, Edit the Data with a GridView This first walkthrough will demonstrate how to create and define a SQL CE database within an ASP.NET Web Form application. We’ll then build an EF model layer for it and use that model layer to enable data editing scenarios with an <asp:GridView> control. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET Web Forms Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET Web Forms project. We’ll use the “ASP.NET Web Application” project template option so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Create a SQL CE Database Right click on the “App_Data” folder within the created project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command: This will bring up the “Add Item” dialog box. Select the “SQL Server Compact 4.0 Local Database” item (new in VS 2010 SP1) and name the database file to create “Store.sdf”: Note that SQL CE database files have a .sdf filename extension. Place them within the /App_Data folder of your ASP.NET application to enable easy deployment. When we clicked the “Add” button above a Store.sdf file was added to our project: Step 3: Adding a “Products” Table Double-clicking the “Store.sdf” database file will open it up within the Server Explorer tab. Since it is a new database there are no tables within it: Right click on the “Tables” icon and choose the “Create Table” menu command to create a new database table. We’ll name the new table “Products” and add 4 columns to it. We’ll mark the first column as a primary key (and make it an identify column so that its value will automatically increment with each new row): When we click “ok” our new Products table will be created in the SQL CE database. Step 4: Populate with Data Once our Products table is created it will show up within the Server Explorer. We can right-click it and choose the “Show Table Data” menu command to edit its data: Let’s add a few sample rows of data to it: Step 5: Create an EF Model Layer We have a SQL CE database with some data in it – let’s now create an EF Model Layer that will provide a way for us to easily query and update data within it. Let’s right-click on our project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command. This will bring up the “Add New Item” dialog – select the “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” item within it and name it “Store.edmx” This will add a new Store.edmx item to our solution explorer and launch a wizard that allows us to quickly create an EF model: Select the “Generate From Database” option above and click next. Choose to use the Store.sdf SQL CE database we just created and then click next again. The wizard will then ask you what database objects you want to import into your model. Let’s choose to import the “Products” table we created earlier: When we click the “Finish” button Visual Studio will open up the EF designer. It will have a Product entity already on it that maps to the “Products” table within our SQL CE database: The VS 2010 SP1 EF designer works exactly the same with SQL CE as it does already with SQL Server and SQL Express. The Product entity above will be persisted as a class (called “Product”) that we can programmatically work against within our ASP.NET application. Step 6: Compile the Project Before using your model layer you’ll need to build your project. Do a Ctrl+Shift+B to compile the project, or use the Build->Build Solution menu command. Step 7: Create a Page that Uses our EF Model Layer Let’s now create a simple ASP.NET Web Form that contains a GridView control that we can use to display and edit the our Products data (via the EF Model Layer we just created). Right-click on the project and choose the Add->New Item command. Select the “Web Form from Master Page” item template, and name the page you create “Products.aspx”. Base the master page on the “Site.Master” template that is in the root of the project. Add an <h2>Products</h2> heading the new Page, and add an <asp:gridview> control within it: Then click the “Design” tab to switch into design-view. Select the GridView control, and then click the top-right corner to display the GridView’s “Smart Tasks” UI: Choose the “New data source…” drop down option above. This will bring up the below dialog which allows you to pick your Data Source type: Select the “Entity” data source option – which will allow us to easily connect our GridView to the EF model layer we created earlier. This will bring up another dialog that allows us to pick our model layer: Select the “StoreEntities” option in the dropdown – which is the EF model layer we created earlier. Then click next – which will allow us to pick which entity within it we want to bind to: Select the “Products” entity in the above dialog – which indicates that we want to bind against the “Product” entity class we defined earlier. Then click the “Enable automatic updates” checkbox to ensure that we can both query and update Products. When you click “Finish” VS will wire-up an <asp:EntityDataSource> to your <asp:GridView> control: The last two steps we’ll do will be to click the “Enable Editing” checkbox on the Grid (which will cause the Grid to display an “Edit” link on each row) and (optionally) use the Auto Format dialog to pick a UI template for the Grid. Step 8: Run the Application Let’s now run our application and browse to the /Products.aspx page that contains our GridView. When we do so we’ll see a Grid UI of the Products within our SQL CE database. Clicking the “Edit” link for any of the rows will allow us to edit their values: When we click “Update” the GridView will post back the values, persist them through our EF Model Layer, and ultimately save them within our SQL CE database. Learn More about using EF with ASP.NET Web Forms Read this tutorial series on the http://asp.net site to learn more about how to use EF with ASP.NET Web Forms. The tutorial series uses SQL Express as the database – but the nice thing is that all of the same steps/concepts can also now also be done with SQL CE. Walkthrough 2: Using EF Code-First with SQL CE and ASP.NET MVC 3 We used a database-first approach with the sample above – where we first created the database, and then used the EF designer to create model classes from the database. In addition to supporting a designer-based development workflow, EF also enables a more code-centric option which we call “code first development”. Code-First Development enables a pretty sweet development workflow. It enables you to: Define your model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes or visual designer required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping Optionally auto-create a database based on the model classes you define – allowing you to start from code first I’ve done several blog posts about EF Code First in the past – I really think it is great. The good news is that it also works very well with SQL CE. The combination of SQL CE, EF Code First, and the new VS tooling support for SQL CE, enables a pretty nice workflow. Below is a simple example of how you can use them to build a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 application. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 project. We’ll use the “Internet Project” template so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Use NuGet to Install EFCodeFirst Next we’ll use the NuGet package manager (automatically installed by ASP.NET MVC 3) to add the EFCodeFirst library to our project. We’ll use the Package Manager command shell to do this. Bring up the package manager console within Visual Studio by selecting the View->Other Windows->Package Manager Console menu command. Then type: install-package EFCodeFirst within the package manager console to download the EFCodeFirst library and have it be added to our project: When we enter the above command, the EFCodeFirst library will be downloaded and added to our application: Step 3: Build Some Model Classes Using a “code first” based development workflow, we will create our model classes first (even before we have a database). We create these model classes by writing code. For this sample, we will right click on the “Models” folder of our project and add the below three classes to our project: The “Dinner” and “RSVP” model classes above are “plain old CLR objects” (aka POCO). They do not need to derive from any base classes or implement any interfaces, and the properties they expose are standard .NET data-types. No data persistence attributes or data code has been added to them. The “NerdDinners” class derives from the DbContext class (which is supplied by EFCodeFirst) and handles the retrieval/persistence of our Dinner and RSVP instances from a database. Step 4: Listing Dinners We’ve written all of the code necessary to implement our model layer for this simple project. Let’s now expose and implement the URL: /Dinners/Upcoming within our project. We’ll use it to list upcoming dinners that happen in the future. We’ll do this by right-clicking on our “Controllers” folder and select the “Add->Controller” menu command. We’ll name the Controller we want to create “DinnersController”. We’ll then implement an “Upcoming” action method within it that lists upcoming dinners using our model layer above. We will use a LINQ query to retrieve the data and pass it to a View to render with the code below: We’ll then right-click within our Upcoming method and choose the “Add-View” menu command to create an “Upcoming” view template that displays our dinners. We’ll use the “empty” template option within the “Add View” dialog and write the below view template using Razor: Step 4: Configure our Project to use a SQL CE Database We have finished writing all of our code – our last step will be to configure a database connection-string to use. We will point our NerdDinners model class to a SQL CE database by adding the below <connectionString> to the web.config file at the top of our project: EF Code First uses a default convention where context classes will look for a connection-string that matches the DbContext class name. Because we created a “NerdDinners” class earlier, we’ve also named our connectionstring “NerdDinners”. Above we are configuring our connection-string to use SQL CE as the database, and telling it that our SQL CE database file will live within the \App_Data directory of our ASP.NET project. Step 5: Running our Application Now that we’ve built our application, let’s run it! We’ll browse to the /Dinners/Upcoming URL – doing so will display an empty list of upcoming dinners: You might ask – but where did it query to get the dinners from? We didn’t explicitly create a database?!? One of the cool features that EF Code-First supports is the ability to automatically create a database (based on the schema of our model classes) when the database we point it at doesn’t exist. Above we configured EF Code-First to point at a SQL CE database in the \App_Data\ directory of our project. When we ran our application, EF Code-First saw that the SQL CE database didn’t exist and automatically created it for us. Step 6: Using VS 2010 SP1 to Explore our newly created SQL CE Database Click the “Show all Files” icon within the Solution Explorer and you’ll see the “NerdDinners.sdf” SQL CE database file that was automatically created for us by EF code-first within the \App_Data\ folder: We can optionally right-click on the file and “Include in Project" to add it to our solution: We can also double-click the file (regardless of whether it is added to the project) and VS 2010 SP1 will open it as a database we can edit within the “Server Explorer” tab of the IDE. Below is the view we get when we double-click our NerdDinners.sdf SQL CE file. We can drill in to see the schema of the Dinners and RSVPs tables in the tree explorer. Notice how two tables - Dinners and RSVPs – were automatically created for us within our SQL CE database. This was done by EF Code First when we accessed the NerdDinners class by running our application above: We can right-click on a Table and use the “Show Table Data” command to enter some upcoming dinners in our database: We’ll use the built-in editor that VS 2010 SP1 supports to populate our table data below: And now when we hit “refresh” on the /Dinners/Upcoming URL within our browser we’ll see some upcoming dinners show up: Step 7: Changing our Model and Database Schema Let’s now modify the schema of our model layer and database, and walkthrough one way that the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE can make this easier. With EF Code-First you typically start making database changes by modifying the model classes. For example, let’s add an additional string property called “UrlLink” to our “Dinner” class. We’ll use this to point to a link for more information about the event: Now when we re-run our project, and visit the /Dinners/Upcoming URL we’ll see an error thrown: We are seeing this error because EF Code-First automatically created our database, and by default when it does this it adds a table that helps tracks whether the schema of our database is in sync with our model classes. EF Code-First helpfully throws an error when they become out of sync – making it easier to track down issues at development time that you might otherwise only find (via obscure errors) at runtime. Note that if you do not want this feature you can turn it off by changing the default conventions of your DbContext class (in this case our NerdDinners class) to not track the schema version. Our model classes and database schema are out of sync in the above example – so how do we fix this? There are two approaches you can use today: Delete the database and have EF Code First automatically re-create the database based on the new model class schema (losing the data within the existing DB) Modify the schema of the existing database to make it in sync with the model classes (keeping/migrating the data within the existing DB) There are a couple of ways you can do the second approach above. Below I’m going to show how you can take advantage of the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE to use a database schema tool to modify our database structure. We are also going to be supporting a “migrations” feature with EF in the future that will allow you to automate/script database schema migrations programmatically. Step 8: Modify our SQL CE Database Schema using VS 2010 SP1 The new SQL CE Tooling support within VS 2010 SP1 makes it easy to modify the schema of our existing SQL CE database. To do this we’ll right-click on our “Dinners” table and choose the “Edit Table Schema” command: This will bring up the below “Edit Table” dialog. We can rename, change or delete any of the existing columns in our table, or click at the bottom of the column listing and type to add a new column. Below I’ve added a new “UrlLink” column of type “nvarchar” (since our property is a string): When we click ok our database will be updated to have the new column and our schema will now match our model classes. Because we are manually modifying our database schema, there is one additional step we need to take to let EF Code-First know that the database schema is in sync with our model classes. As i mentioned earlier, when a database is automatically created by EF Code-First it adds a “EdmMetadata” table to the database to track schema versions (and hash our model classes against them to detect mismatches between our model classes and the database schema): Since we are manually updating and maintaining our database schema, we don’t need this table – and can just delete it: This will leave us with just the two tables that correspond to our model classes: And now when we re-run our /Dinners/Upcoming URL it will display the dinners correctly: One last touch we could do would be to update our view to check for the new UrlLink property and render a <a> link to it if an event has one: And now when we refresh our /Dinners/Upcoming we will see hyperlinks for the events that have a UrlLink stored in the database: Summary SQL CE provides a free, embedded, database engine that you can use to easily enable database storage. With SQL CE 4 you can now take advantage of it within ASP.NET projects and applications (both Web Forms and MVC). VS 2010 SP1 provides tooling support that enables you to easily create, edit and modify SQL CE databases – as well as use the standard EF designer against them. This allows you to re-use your existing skills and data knowledge while taking advantage of an embedded database option. This is useful both for small applications (where you don’t need the scalability of a full SQL Server), as well as for development and testing scenarios – where you want to be able to rapidly develop/test your application without having a full database instance. SQL CE makes it easy to later migrate your data to a full SQL Server or SQL Azure instance if you want to – without having to change any code in your application. All we would need to change in the above two scenarios is the <connectionString> value within the web.config file in order to have our code run against a full SQL Server. This provides the flexibility to scale up your application starting from a small embedded database solution as needed. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Rendering ASP.NET MVC Views to String

- by Rick Strahl

It's not uncommon in my applications that I require longish text output that does not have to be rendered into the HTTP output stream. The most common scenario I have for 'template driven' non-Web text is for emails of all sorts. Logon confirmations and verifications, email confirmations for things like orders, status updates or scheduler notifications - all of which require merged text output both within and sometimes outside of Web applications. On other occasions I also need to capture the output from certain views for logging purposes. Rather than creating text output in code, it's much nicer to use the rendering mechanism that ASP.NET MVC already provides by way of it's ViewEngines - using Razor or WebForms views - to render output to a string. This is nice because it uses the same familiar rendering mechanism that I already use for my HTTP output and it also solves the problem of where to store the templates for rendering this content in nothing more than perhaps a separate view folder. The good news is that ASP.NET MVC's rendering engine is much more modular than the full ASP.NET runtime engine which was a real pain in the butt to coerce into rendering output to string. With MVC the rendering engine has been separated out from core ASP.NET runtime, so it's actually a lot easier to get View output into a string. Getting View Output from within an MVC Application If you need to generate string output from an MVC and pass some model data to it, the process to capture this output is fairly straight forward and involves only a handful of lines of code. The catch is that this particular approach requires that you have an active ControllerContext that can be passed to the view. This means that the following approach is limited to access from within Controller methods. Here's a class that wraps the process and provides both instance and static methods to handle the rendering:/// <summary> /// Class that renders MVC views to a string using the /// standard MVC View Engine to render the view. /// /// Note: This class can only be used within MVC /// applications that have an active ControllerContext. /// </summary> public class ViewRenderer { /// <summary> /// Required Controller Context /// </summary> protected ControllerContext Context { get; set; } public ViewRenderer(ControllerContext controllerContext) { Context = controllerContext; } /// <summary> /// Renders a full MVC view to a string. Will render with the full MVC /// View engine including running _ViewStart and merging into _Layout /// </summary> /// <param name="viewPath"> /// The path to the view to render. Either in same controller, shared by /// name or as fully qualified ~/ path including extension /// </param> /// <param name="model">The model to render the view with</param> /// <returns>String of the rendered view or null on error</returns> public string RenderView(string viewPath, object model) { return RenderViewToStringInternal(viewPath, model, false); } /// <summary> /// Renders a partial MVC view to string. Use this method to render /// a partial view that doesn't merge with _Layout and doesn't fire /// _ViewStart. /// </summary> /// <param name="viewPath"> /// The path to the view to render. Either in same controller, shared by /// name or as fully qualified ~/ path including extension /// </param> /// <param name="model">The model to pass to the viewRenderer</param> /// <returns>String of the rendered view or null on error</returns> public string RenderPartialView(string viewPath, object model) { return RenderViewToStringInternal(viewPath, model, true); } public static string RenderView(string viewPath, object model, ControllerContext controllerContext) { ViewRenderer renderer = new ViewRenderer(controllerContext); return renderer.RenderView(viewPath, model); } public static string RenderPartialView(string viewPath, object model, ControllerContext controllerContext) { ViewRenderer renderer = new ViewRenderer(controllerContext); return renderer.RenderPartialView(viewPath, model); } protected string RenderViewToStringInternal(string viewPath, object model, bool partial = false) { // first find the ViewEngine for this view ViewEngineResult viewEngineResult = null; if (partial) viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(Context, viewPath); else viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(Context, viewPath, null); if (viewEngineResult == null) throw new FileNotFoundException(Properties.Resources.ViewCouldNotBeFound); // get the view and attach the model to view data var view = viewEngineResult.View; Context.Controller.ViewData.Model = model; string result = null; using (var sw = new StringWriter()) { var ctx = new ViewContext(Context, view, Context.Controller.ViewData, Context.Controller.TempData, sw); view.Render(ctx, sw); result = sw.ToString(); } return result; } } The key is the RenderViewToStringInternal method. The method first tries to find the view to render based on its path which can either be in the current controller's view path or the shared view path using its simple name (PasswordRecovery) or alternately by its full virtual path (~/Views/Templates/PasswordRecovery.cshtml). This code should work both for Razor and WebForms views although I've only tried it with Razor Views. Note that WebForms Views might actually be better for plain text as Razor adds all sorts of white space into its output when there are code blocks in the template. The Web Forms engine provides more accurate rendering for raw text scenarios. Once a view engine is found the view to render can be retrieved. Views in MVC render based on data that comes off the controller like the ViewData which contains the model along with the actual ViewData and ViewBag. From the View and some of the Context data a ViewContext is created which is then used to render the view with. The View picks up the Model and other data from the ViewContext internally and processes the View the same it would be processed if it were to send its output into the HTTP output stream. The difference is that we can override the ViewContext's output stream which we provide and capture into a StringWriter(). After rendering completes the result holds the output string. If an error occurs the error behavior is similar what you see with regular MVC errors - you get a full yellow screen of death including the view error information with the line of error highlighted. It's your responsibility to handle the error - or let it bubble up to your regular Controller Error filter if you have one. To use the simple class you only need a single line of code if you call the static methods. Here's an example of some Controller code that is used to send a user notification to a customer via email in one of my applications:[HttpPost] public ActionResult ContactSeller(ContactSellerViewModel model) { InitializeViewModel(model); var entryBus = new busEntry(); var entry = entryBus.LoadByDisplayId(model.EntryId); if ( string.IsNullOrEmpty(model.Email) ) entryBus.ValidationErrors.Add("Email address can't be empty.","Email"); if ( string.IsNullOrEmpty(model.Message)) entryBus.ValidationErrors.Add("Message can't be empty.","Message"); model.EntryId = entry.DisplayId; model.EntryTitle = entry.Title; if (entryBus.ValidationErrors.Count > 0) { ErrorDisplay.AddMessages(entryBus.ValidationErrors); ErrorDisplay.ShowError("Please correct the following:"); } else { string message = ViewRenderer.RenderView("~/views/template/ContactSellerEmail.cshtml",model, ControllerContext); string title = entry.Title + " (" + entry.DisplayId + ") - " + App.Configuration.ApplicationName; AppUtils.SendEmail(title, message, model.Email, entry.User.Email, false, false)) } return View(model); } Simple! The view in this case is just a plain MVC view and in this case it's a very simple plain text email message (edited for brevity here) that is created and sent off:@model ContactSellerViewModel @{ Layout = null; }re: @Model.EntryTitle @Model.ListingUrl @Model.Message ** SECURITY ADVISORY - AVOID SCAMS ** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home ** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping ** More Info: @(App.Configuration.ApplicationBaseUrl)scams.html Obviously this is a very simple view (I edited out more from this page to keep it brief) - but other template views are much more complex HTML documents or long messages that are occasionally updated and they are a perfect fit for Razor rendering. It even works with nested partial views and _layout pages. Partial Rendering Notice that I'm rendering a full View here. In the view I explicitly set the Layout=null to avoid pulling in _layout.cshtml for this view. This can also be controlled externally by calling the RenderPartial method instead: string message = ViewRenderer.RenderPartialView("~/views/template/ContactSellerEmail.cshtml",model, ControllerContext); with this line of code no layout page (or _viewstart) will be loaded, so the output generated is just what's in the view. I find myself using Partials most of the time when rendering templates, since the target of templates usually tend to be emails or other HTML fragment like output, so the RenderPartialView() method is definitely useful to me. Rendering without a ControllerContext The preceding class is great when you're need template rendering from within MVC controller actions or anywhere where you have access to the request Controller. But if you don't have a controller context handy - maybe inside a utility function that is static, a non-Web application, or an operation that runs asynchronously in ASP.NET - which makes using the above code impossible. I haven't found a way to manually create a Controller context to provide the ViewContext() what it needs from outside of the MVC infrastructure. However, there are ways to accomplish this, but they are a bit more complex. It's possible to host the RazorEngine on your own, which side steps all of the MVC framework and HTTP and just deals with the raw rendering engine. I wrote about this process in Hosting the Razor Engine in Non-Web Applications a long while back. It's quite a process to create a custom Razor engine and runtime, but it allows for all sorts of flexibility. There's also a RazorEngine CodePlex project that does something similar. I've been meaning to check out the latter but haven't gotten around to it since I have my own code to do this. The trick to hosting the RazorEngine to have it behave properly inside of an ASP.NET application and properly cache content so templates aren't constantly rebuild and reparsed. Anyway, in the same app as above I have one scenario where no ControllerContext is available: I have a background scheduler running inside of the app that fires on timed intervals. This process could be external but because it's lightweight we decided to fire it right inside of the ASP.NET app on a separate thread. In my app the code that renders these templates does something like this:var model = new SearchNotificationViewModel() { Entries = entries, Notification = notification, User = user }; // TODO: Need logging for errors sending string razorError = null; var result = AppUtils.RenderRazorTemplate("~/views/template/SearchNotificationTemplate.cshtml", model, razorError); which references a couple of helper functions that set up my RazorFolderHostContainer class:public static string RenderRazorTemplate(string virtualPath, object model,string errorMessage = null) { var razor = AppUtils.CreateRazorHost(); var path = virtualPath.Replace("~/", "").Replace("~", "").Replace("/", "\\"); var merged = razor.RenderTemplateToString(path, model); if (merged == null) errorMessage = razor.ErrorMessage; return merged; } /// <summary> /// Creates a RazorStringHostContainer and starts it /// Call .Stop() when you're done with it. /// /// This is a static instance /// </summary> /// <param name="virtualPath"></param> /// <param name="binBasePath"></param> /// <param name="forceLoad"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static RazorFolderHostContainer CreateRazorHost(string binBasePath = null, bool forceLoad = false) { if (binBasePath == null) { if (HttpContext.Current != null) binBasePath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/"); else binBasePath = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory; } if (_RazorHost == null || forceLoad) { if (!binBasePath.EndsWith("\\")) binBasePath += "\\"; //var razor = new RazorStringHostContainer(); var razor = new RazorFolderHostContainer(); razor.TemplatePath = binBasePath; binBasePath += "bin\\"; razor.BaseBinaryFolder = binBasePath; razor.UseAppDomain = false; razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "ClassifiedsBusiness.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "ClassifiedsWeb.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "Westwind.Utilities.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "Westwind.Web.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "Westwind.Web.Mvc.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.Web.dll"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("System.Web"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("ClassifiedsBusiness"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("ClassifiedsWeb"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("Westwind.Web"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("Westwind.Utilities"); _RazorHost = razor; _RazorHost.Start(); //_RazorHost.Engine.Configuration.CompileToMemory = false; } return _RazorHost; } The RazorFolderHostContainer essentially is a full runtime that mimics a folder structure like a typical Web app does including caching semantics and compiling code only if code changes on disk. It maps a folder hierarchy to views using the ~/ path syntax. The host is then configured to add assemblies and namespaces. Unfortunately the engine is not exactly like MVC's Razor - the expression expansion and code execution are the same, but some of the support methods like sections, helpers etc. are not all there so templates have to be a bit simpler. There are other folder hosts provided as well to directly execute templates from strings (using RazorStringHostContainer). The following is an example of an HTML email template @inherits RazorHosting.RazorTemplateFolderHost <ClassifiedsWeb.SearchNotificationViewModel> <html> <head> <title>Search Notifications</title> <style> body { margin: 5px;font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 10pt;} h3 { color: SteelBlue; } .entry-item { border-bottom: 1px solid grey; padding: 8px; margin-bottom: 5px; } </style> </head> <body> Hello @Model.User.Name,<br /> <p>Below are your Search Results for the search phrase:</p> <h3>@Model.Notification.SearchPhrase</h3> <small>since @TimeUtils.ShortDateString(Model.Notification.LastSearch)</small> <hr /> You can see that the syntax is a little different. Instead of the familiar @model header the raw Razor @inherits tag is used to specify the template base class (which you can extend). I took a quick look through the feature set of RazorEngine on CodePlex (now Github I guess) and the template implementation they use is closer to MVC's razor but there are other differences. In the end don't expect exact behavior like MVC templates if you use an external Razor rendering engine. This is not what I would consider an ideal solution, but it works well enough for this project. My biggest concern is the overhead of hosting a second razor engine in a Web app and the fact that here the differences in template rendering between 'real' MVC Razor views and another RazorEngine really are noticeable. You win some, you lose some It's extremely nice to see that if you have a ControllerContext handy (which probably addresses 99% of Web app scenarios) rendering a view to string using the native MVC Razor engine is pretty simple. Kudos on making that happen - as it solves a problem I see in just about every Web application I work on. But it is a bummer that a ControllerContext is required to make this simple code work. It'd be really sweet if there was a way to render views without being so closely coupled to the ASP.NET or MVC infrastructure that requires a ControllerContext. Alternately it'd be nice to have a way for an MVC based application to create a minimal ControllerContext from scratch - maybe somebody's been down that path. I tried for a few hours to come up with a way to make that work but gave up in the soup of nested contexts (MVC/Controller/View/Http). I suspect going down this path would be similar to hosting the ASP.NET runtime requiring a WorkerRequest. Brrr…. The sad part is that it seems to me that a View should really not require much 'context' of any kind to render output to string. Yes there are a few things that clearly are required like paths to the virtual and possibly the disk paths to the root of the app, but beyond that view rendering should not require much. But, no such luck. For now custom RazorHosting seems to be the only way to make Razor rendering go outside of the MVC context… Resources Full ViewRenderer.cs source code from Westwind.Web.Mvc library Hosting the Razor Engine for Non-Web Applications RazorEngine on GitHub© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET ASP.NET MVC Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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