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  • c# front-end GUI calling linux C++ functions

    - by queandans
    I am working on a project that the software is written in .NET C# and now new features require that we call third party's APIs that are built in C++ on Linux. We are given the .so files. What is the best way to achieve this? Is developing a JBoss application server and with JNI the best way? Thanks.

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  • High performance SSL client with connection pooling session caching etch on Windows

    - by Yucong Sun
    Hi there, I'm looking for a fast SSL socket client basically talks SSL with remote service and I need features like connection pooling/limiting so that my other client calling this ssl socket can basically issue as many as requests and it will handle it peacefully. I looked into openssl s_client, but it says it's only for testing purpose, is there a handy tool avaiable? STunnel seems to be okay, but don't have that connection limiting option I need. Cheers.

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  • Fullcalendar on IPhone

    - by Iphone novice
    Hello all, Is it possible to use fullcalendar on iphone native app reading events from servlet on a remote server? Features required are Month, Week and Day view. No need of adding, editing or deleting events. Clicking on event display the summary of the event. I would be very happy if fullcalendar is capable of the same, if no what are the other solutions. Expecting your guidance. Thanks in advance

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  • How do we do AJAX programming

    - by Sonali
    I have no idea about AJAX programming features. I just know that it is Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Please help me in knowing about this language. I have gone through many AJAX tutorials. But none of the programs are running. Why I don't know. Do we save the file with .HTML extension?

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  • Best resources to learn JavaScript

    - by Tarks
    The question says it all really, I'm looking for book recommendations, video tutorials etc. I've been programming since I was about six so I don't need a book that spends 4 pages on for loops (thought that might be a Bad example in terms of javascript). Also I'm learning ASP.net at the moment so anything on interoperability features/issues would be welcome, though I'm guessing I just showed my ignorance with that question.

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  • What gems/plugins can be used for Unsubscribe support in Rails?

    - by user550575
    What gems/plugins that make it easy to add a tamper-resistant unsubscribe link to the bottom of the email a user can click to prevent receiving email those types of emails? The only thing I could find was http://kevinlochner.com/handling-unsubscribe-requests-in-ruby-on-rail which works but is somewhat unsophisticated and lacks features such as which type of emails to unsubscribe from. It also doesnt include the mechanism for users to unsubscribe. We using ActionMailer.

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  • Eclipse Plug-in

    - by HT
    Want to build a plug-in for Eclipse that provides custom features, as required by our project and is able to persist the data (provide client server capabilities). Please suggest options.

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  • Dropdown menu not showing when using position: absolute;

    - by Xiy
    I've just turned my website into a responsive layout and along the way I've somehow managed to make my dropdown menus not work. When hovering over 'Drop-downs' they don't display unless I'm using position: relative. They worked before using position: absolute - but it seems they only work with position relative now. When using relative it uses the width which messes up the navigation bar. Using relative: http://d.pr/i/tp5R Using absolute: http://d.pr/i/j7r1 CSS for my sub-menu div.left_first_header ul.sub-menu { width: 125px; top: 14px; z-index: 2; height: 100%; position: absolute; -webkit-border-radius: 0px 0px 4px 4px; -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 4px 4px; background: url(images/drop_down_bg.jpg); padding-left: 15px; padding-right: 15px; background-repeat: repeat; } jQuery for the drop down functionality jQuery(document).ready(function ($) { jQuery("ul.dropdown li").hover(function() { $('ul:first',this).css('visibility', 'visible'); }, function() { jQuery(this).removeClass("hover"); jQuery('ul:first',this).css('visibility', 'hidden'); }); }); My website http://wpvault.com/kahlam/ Considering it's 4am I've probably made a really stupid simple mistake. I apologise if I've missed anything.

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  • What happens if we load already loaded class again?

    - by GK
    I mean we have a class which is already loaded in JVM. and in some other method we are unknowingly trying to load that same class, So in this situation what happens? ie will there be any error or exception saying its already loaded. If not, then is it possible that we can have modified class with some extra features and load it whenever it is required that is Hot Deployment.

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  • A question about c/c++ syntax

    - by user198729
    I don't have the c++ environment yet right now. It seems to me that a function must be declared/defined first to be called in c. I mean, the declared/defined part should be ahead of the calling part. Is it the same in c++? Finally, it seems c++ is adding new features to itself, what about c, has it stopped being developed?

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  • A free standing ASP.NET Pager Web Control

    - by Rick Strahl
    Paging in ASP.NET has been relatively easy with stock controls supporting basic paging functionality. However, recently I built an MVC application and one of the things I ran into was that I HAD TO build manual paging support into a few of my pages. Dealing with list controls and rendering markup is easy enough, but doing paging is a little more involved. I ended up with a small but flexible component that can be dropped anywhere. As it turns out the task of creating a semi-generic Pager control for MVC was fairly easily. Now I’m back to working in Web Forms and thought to myself that the way I created the pager in MVC actually would also work in ASP.NET – in fact quite a bit easier since the whole thing can be conveniently wrapped up into an easily reusable control. A standalone pager would provider easier reuse in various pages and a more consistent pager display regardless of what kind of 'control’ the pager is associated with. Why a Pager Control? At first blush it might sound silly to create a new pager control – after all Web Forms has pretty decent paging support, doesn’t it? Well, sort of. Yes the GridView control has automatic paging built in and the ListView control has the related DataPager control. The built in ASP.NET paging has several issues though: Postback and JavaScript requirements If you look at paging links in ASP.NET they are always postback links with javascript:__doPostback() calls that go back to the server. While that works fine and actually has some benefit like the fact that paging saves changes to the page and post them back, it’s not very SEO friendly. Basically if you use javascript based navigation nosearch engine will follow the paging links which effectively cuts off list content on the first page. The DataPager control does support GET based links via the QueryStringParameter property, but the control is effectively tied to the ListView control (which is the only control that implements IPageableItemContainer). DataSource Controls required for Efficient Data Paging Retrieval The only way you can get paging to work efficiently where only the few records you display on the page are queried for and retrieved from the database you have to use a DataSource control - only the Linq and Entity DataSource controls  support this natively. While you can retrieve this data yourself manually, there’s no way to just assign the page number and render the pager based on this custom subset. Other than that default paging requires a full resultset for ASP.NET to filter the data and display only a subset which can be very resource intensive and wasteful if you’re dealing with largish resultsets (although I’m a firm believer in returning actually usable sets :-}). If you use your own business layer that doesn’t fit an ObjectDataSource you’re SOL. That’s a real shame too because with LINQ based querying it’s real easy to retrieve a subset of data that is just the data you want to display but the native Pager functionality doesn’t support just setting properties to display just the subset AFAIK. DataPager is not Free Standing The DataPager control is the closest thing to a decent Pager implementation that ASP.NET has, but alas it’s not a free standing component – it works off a related control and the only one that it effectively supports from the stock ASP.NET controls is the ListView control. This means you can’t use the same data pager formatting for a grid and a list view or vice versa and you’re always tied to the control. Paging Events In order to handle paging you have to deal with paging events. The events fire at specific time instances in the page pipeline and because of this you often have to handle data binding in a way to work around the paging events or else end up double binding your data sources based on paging. Yuk. Styling The GridView pager is a royal pain to beat into submission for styled rendering. The DataPager control has many more options and template layout and it renders somewhat cleaner, but it too is not exactly easy to get a decent display for. Not a Generic Solution The problem with the ASP.NET controls too is that it’s not generic. GridView, DataGrid use their own internal paging, ListView can use a DataPager and if you want to manually create data layout – well you’re on your own. IOW, depending on what you use you likely have very different looking Paging experiences. So, I figured I’ve struggled with this once too many and finally sat down and built a Pager control. The Pager Control My goal was to create a totally free standing control that has no dependencies on other controls and certainly no requirements for using DataSource controls. The idea is that you should be able to use this pager control without any sort of data requirements at all – you should just be able to set properties and be able to display a pager. The Pager control I ended up with has the following features: Completely free standing Pager control – no control or data dependencies Complete manual control – Pager can render without any data dependency Easy to use: Only need to set PageSize, ActivePage and TotalItems Supports optional filtering of IQueryable for efficient queries and Pager rendering Supports optional full set filtering of IEnumerable<T> and DataTable Page links are plain HTTP GET href Links Control automatically picks up Page links on the URL and assigns them (automatic page detection no page index changing events to hookup) Full CSS Styling support On the downside there’s no templating support for the control so the layout of the pager is relatively fixed. All elements however are stylable and there are options to control the text, and layout options such as whether to display first and last pages and the previous/next buttons and so on. To give you an idea what the pager looks like, here are two differently styled examples (all via CSS):   The markup for these two pagers looks like this: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager" PageSize="5" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PagesTextCssClass="gridpagertext" CssClass="gridpager" RenderContainerDiv="true" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" PagesText="Item Pages:" NextText="next" PreviousText="previous" /> <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager2" PageSize="5" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> The latter example uses default style settings so it there’s not much to set. The first example on the other hand explicitly assigns custom styles and overrides a few of the formatting options. Styling The styling is based on a number of CSS classes of which the the main pager, pagerbutton and pagerbutton-selected classes are the important ones. Other styles like pagerbutton-next/prev/first/last are based on the pagerbutton style. The default styling shown for the red outlined pager looks like this: .pagercontainer { margin: 20px 0; background: whitesmoke; padding: 5px; } .pager { float: right; font-size: 10pt; text-align: left; } .pagerbutton,.pagerbutton-selected,.pagertext { display: block; float: left; text-align: center; border: solid 2px maroon; min-width: 18px; margin-left: 3px; text-decoration: none; padding: 4px; } .pagerbutton-selected { font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold; color: maroon; border-width: 0px; background: khaki; } .pagerbutton-first { margin-right: 12px; } .pagerbutton-last,.pagerbutton-prev { margin-left: 12px; } .pagertext { border: none; margin-left: 30px; font-weight: bold; } .pagerbutton a { text-decoration: none; } .pagerbutton:hover { background-color: maroon; color: cornsilk; } .pagerbutton-prev { background-image: url(images/prev.png); background-position: 2px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-left: 20px; } .pagerbutton-next { background-image: url(images/next.png); background-position: 40px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-right: 20px; margin-right: 0px; } Yup that’s a lot of styling settings although not all of them are required. The key ones are pagerbutton, pager and pager selection. The others (which are implicitly created by the control based on the pagerbutton style) are for custom markup of the ‘special’ buttons. In my apps I tend to have two kinds of pages: Those that are associated with typical ‘grid’ displays that display purely tabular data and those that have a more looser list like layout. The two pagers shown above represent these two views and the pager and gridpager styles in my standard style sheet reflect these two styles. Configuring the Pager with Code Finally lets look at what it takes to hook up the pager. As mentioned in the highlights the Pager control is completely independent of other controls so if you just want to display a pager on its own it’s as simple as dropping the control and assigning the PageSize, ActivePage and either TotalPages or TotalItems. So for this markup: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPagerManual" PageSize="5" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> I can use code as simple as: ItemPagerManual.PageSize = 3; ItemPagerManual.ActivePage = 4;ItemPagerManual.TotalItems = 20; Note that ActivePage is not required - it will automatically use any Page=x query string value and assign it, although you can override it as I did above. TotalItems can be any value that you retrieve from a result set or manually assign as I did above. A more realistic scenario based on a LINQ to SQL IQueryable result is even easier. In this example, I have a UserControl that contains a ListView control that renders IQueryable data. I use a User Control here because there are different views the user can choose from with each view being a different user control. This incidentally also highlights one of the nice features of the pager: Because the pager is independent of the control I can put the pager on the host page instead of into each of the user controls. IOW, there’s only one Pager control, but there are potentially many user controls/listviews that hold the actual display data. The following code demonstrates how to use the Pager with an IQueryable that loads only the records it displays: protected voidPage_Load(objectsender, EventArgs e) {     Category = Request.Params["Category"] ?? string.Empty;     IQueryable<wws_Item> ItemList = ItemRepository.GetItemsByCategory(Category);     // Update the page and filter the list down     ItemList = ItemPager.FilterIQueryable<wws_Item>(ItemList); // Render user control with a list view Control ulItemList = LoadControl("~/usercontrols/" + App.Configuration.ItemListType + ".ascx"); ((IInventoryItemListControl)ulItemList).InventoryItemList = ItemList; phItemList.Controls.Add(ulItemList); // placeholder } The code uses a business object to retrieve Items by category as an IQueryable which means that the result is only an expression tree that hasn’t execute SQL yet and can be further filtered. I then pass this IQueryable to the FilterIQueryable() helper method of the control which does two main things: Filters the IQueryable to retrieve only the data displayed on the active page Sets the Totaltems property and calculates TotalPages on the Pager and that’s it! When the Pager renders it uses those values, plus the PageSize and ActivePage properties to render the Pager. In addition to IQueryable there are also filter methods for IEnumerable<T> and DataTable, but these versions just filter the data by removing rows/items from the entire already retrieved data. Output Generated and Paging Links The output generated creates pager links as plain href links. Here’s what the output looks like: <div id="ItemPager" class="pagercontainer"> <div class="pager"> <span class="pagertext">Pages: </span><a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=1" class="pagerbutton" />1</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=2" class="pagerbutton" />2</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton" />3</a> <span class="pagerbutton-selected">4</span> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton" />5</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=6" class="pagerbutton" />6</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=20" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-last" />20</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-prev" />Prev</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-next" />Next</a></div> <br clear="all" /> </div> </div> The links point back to the current page and simply append a Page= page link into the page. When the page gets reloaded with the new page number the pager automatically detects the page number and automatically assigns the ActivePage property which results in the appropriate page to be displayed. The code shown in the previous section is all that’s needed to handle paging. Note that HTTP GET based paging is different than the Postback paging ASP.NET uses by default. Postback paging preserves modified page content when clicking on pager buttons, but this control will simply load a new page – no page preservation at this time. The advantage of not using Postback paging is that the URLs generated are plain HTML links that a search engine can follow where __doPostback() links are not. Pager with a Grid The pager also works in combination with grid controls so it’s easy to bypass the grid control’s paging features if desired. In the following example I use a gridView control and binds it to a DataTable result which is also filterable by the Pager control. The very basic plain vanilla ASP.NET grid markup looks like this: <div style="width: 600px; margin: 0 auto;padding: 20px; "> <asp:DataGrid runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="True" ID="gdItems" CssClass="blackborder" style="width: 600px;"> <AlternatingItemStyle CssClass="gridalternate" /> <HeaderStyle CssClass="gridheader" /> </asp:DataGrid> <ww:Pager runat="server" ID="Pager" CssClass="gridpager" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PageSize="8" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> </div> and looks like this when rendered: using custom set of CSS styles. The code behind for this code is also very simple: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string category = Request.Params["category"] ?? ""; busItem itemRep = WebStoreFactory.GetItem(); var items = itemRep.GetItemsByCategory(category) .Select(itm => new {Sku = itm.Sku, Description = itm.Description}); // run query into a DataTable for demonstration DataTable dt = itemRep.Converter.ToDataTable(items,"TItems"); // Remove all items not on the current page dt = Pager.FilterDataTable(dt,0); // bind and display gdItems.DataSource = dt; gdItems.DataBind(); } A little contrived I suppose since the list could already be bound from the list of elements, but this is to demonstrate that you can also bind against a DataTable if your business layer returns those. Unfortunately there’s no way to filter a DataReader as it’s a one way forward only reader and the reader is required by the DataSource to perform the bindings.  However, you can still use a DataReader as long as your business logic filters the data prior to rendering and provides a total item count (most likely as a second query). Control Creation The control itself is a pretty brute force ASP.NET control. Nothing clever about this other than some basic rendering logic and some simple calculations and update routines to determine which buttons need to be shown. You can take a look at the full code from the West Wind Web Toolkit’s Repository (note there are a few dependencies). To give you an idea how the control works here is the Render() method: /// <summary> /// overridden to handle custom pager rendering for runtime and design time /// </summary> /// <param name="writer"></param> protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) { base.Render(writer); if (TotalPages == 0 && TotalItems > 0) TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); if (DesignMode) TotalPages = 10; // don't render pager if there's only one page if (TotalPages < 2) return; if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ContainerDivCssClass)) writer.AddAttribute("class", ContainerDivCssClass); writer.RenderBeginTag("div"); } // main pager wrapper writer.WriteBeginTag("div"); writer.AddAttribute("id", this.ClientID); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", this.CssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar + "\r\n"); // Pages Text writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PagesTextCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PagesTextCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(this.PagesText); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); // if the base url is empty use the current URL FixupBaseUrl(); // set _startPage and _endPage ConfigurePagesToRender(); // write out first page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _startPage != 1) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-first"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write("1"); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); writer.Write("&nbsp;"); } // write out all the page links for (int i = _startPage; i < _endPage + 1; i++) { if (i == ActivePage) { writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(SelectedPageCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", SelectedPageCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); } else { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, i.ToString()).TrimEnd('&'); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.Write("\r\n"); } // write out last page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _endPage < TotalPages) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-last"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Previous link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(PreviousText) && ActivePage > 1) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage - 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-prev"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(PreviousText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Next link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(NextText) && ActivePage < TotalPages) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage + 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-next"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(NextText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.WriteEndTag("div"); if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (RenderContainerDivBreak) writer.Write("<br clear=\"all\" />\r\n"); writer.WriteEndTag("div"); } } As I said pretty much brute force rendering based on the control’s property settings of which there are quite a few: You can also see the pager in the designer above. unfortunately the VS designer (both 2010 and 2008) fails to render the float: left CSS styles properly and starts wrapping after margins are applied in the special buttons. Not a big deal since VS does at least respect the spacing (the floated elements overlay). Then again I’m not using the designer anyway :-}. Filtering Data What makes the Pager easy to use is the filter methods built into the control. While this functionality is clearly not the most politically correct design choice as it violates separation of concerns, it’s very useful for typical pager operation. While I actually have filter methods that do something similar in my business layer, having it exposed on the control makes the control a lot more useful for typical databinding scenarios. Of course these methods are optional – if you have a business layer that can provide filtered page queries for you can use that instead and assign the TotalItems property manually. There are three filter method types available for IQueryable, IEnumerable and for DataTable which tend to be the most common use cases in my apps old and new. The IQueryable version is pretty simple as it can simply rely on on .Skip() and .Take() with LINQ: /// <summary> /// <summary> /// Queries the database for the ActivePage applied manually /// or from the Request["page"] variable. This routine /// figures out and sets TotalPages, ActivePage and /// returns a filtered subset IQueryable that contains /// only the items from the ActivePage. /// </summary> /// <param name="query"></param> /// <param name="activePage"> /// The page you want to display. Sets the ActivePage property when passed. /// Pass 0 or smaller to use ActivePage setting. /// </param> /// <returns></returns> public IQueryable<T> FilterIQueryable<T>(IQueryable<T> query, int activePage) where T : class, new() { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = query.Count(); if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return query; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) query = query.Skip(skip * PageSize); _TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); return query.Take(PageSize); } The IEnumerable<T> version simply  converts the IEnumerable to an IQuerable and calls back into this method for filtering. The DataTable version requires a little more work to manually parse and filter records (I didn’t want to add the Linq DataSetExtensions assembly just for this): /// <summary> /// Filters a data table for an ActivePage. /// /// Note: Modifies the data set permanently by remove DataRows /// </summary> /// <param name="dt">Full result DataTable</param> /// <param name="activePage">Page to display. 0 to use ActivePage property </param> /// <returns></returns> public DataTable FilterDataTable(DataTable dt, int activePage) { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = dt.Rows.Count; if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return dt; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) { for (int i = 0; i < skip * PageSize; i++ ) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(0); } while(dt.Rows.Count > PageSize) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(PageSize); return dt; } Using the Pager Control The pager as it is is a first cut I built a couple of weeks ago and since then have been tweaking a little as part of an internal project I’m working on. I’ve replaced a bunch of pagers on various older pages with this pager without any issues and have what now feels like a more consistent user interface where paging looks and feels the same across different controls. As a bonus I’m only loading the data from the database that I need to display a single page. With the preset class tags applied too adding a pager is now as easy as dropping the control and adding the style sheet for styling to be consistent – no fuss, no muss. Schweet. Hopefully some of you may find this as useful as I have or at least as a baseline to build ontop of… Resources The Pager is part of the West Wind Web & Ajax Toolkit Pager.cs Source Code (some toolkit dependencies) Westwind.css base stylesheet with .pager and .gridpager styles Pager Example Page © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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  • Edit Text in a Webpage with Internet Explorer 8

    - by Matthew Guay
    Internet Explorer is often decried as the worst browser for web developers, but IE8 actually offers a very nice set of developer tools.  Here we’ll look at a unique way to use them to edit the text on any webpage. How to edit text in a webpage IE8’s developer tools make it easy to make changes to a webpage and view them directly.  Simply browse to the webpage of your choice, and press the F12 key on your keyboard.  Alternately, you can click the Tools button, and select Developer tools from the list. This opens the developer tools.  To do our editing, we want to select the mouse button on the toolbar “Select Element by Click” tool. Now, click on any spot of the webpage in IE8 that you want to edit.  Here, let’s edit the footer of Google.com.  Notice it places a blue box around any element you hover over to make it easy to choose exactly what you want to edit. In the developer tools window, the element you selected before is now highlighted.  Click the plus button beside that entry if the text you want to edit is not visible.   Now, click the text you wish to change, and enter what you wish in the box.  For fun, we changed the copyright to say “©2010 Microsoft”. Go back to IE to see the changes on the page! You can also change a link on a page this way: Or you can even change the text on a button: Here’s our edited Google.com: This may be fun for playing a trick on someone or simply for a funny screenshot, but it can be very useful, too.  You could test how changes in fontsize would change how a website looks, or see how a button would look with a different label.  It can also be useful when taking screenshots.  For instance, if I want to show a friend how to do something in Gmail but don’t want to reveal my email address, I could edit the text on the top right before I took the screenshot.  Here I changed my Gmail address to [email protected]. Please note that the changes will disappear when you reload the page.  You can save your changes from the developer tools window, though, and reopen the page from your computer if you wish. We have found this trick very helpful at times, and it can be very fun too!  Enjoy it, and let us know how you used it to help you! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit Webpage Text Areas in Your Favorite Text EditorRemove Webpage Formatting or View the HTML Code When Copying in FirefoxChange the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxShare Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.itEditPad Lite – All Purpose Tabbed Text Editor TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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  • Edit Text in a Webpage with Internet Explorer 8

    - by Matthew Guay
    Internet Explorer is often decried as the worst browser for web developers, but IE8 actually offers a very nice set of developer tools.  Here we’ll look at a unique way to use them to edit the text on any webpage. How to edit text in a webpage IE8’s developer tools make it easy to make changes to a webpage and view them directly.  Simply browse to the webpage of your choice, and press the F12 key on your keyboard.  Alternately, you can click the Tools button, and select Developer tools from the list. This opens the developer tools.  To do our editing, we want to select the mouse button on the toolbar “Select Element by Click” tool. Now, click on any spot of the webpage in IE8 that you want to edit.  Here, let’s edit the footer of Google.com.  Notice it places a blue box around any element you hover over to make it easy to choose exactly what you want to edit. In the developer tools window, the element you selected before is now highlighted.  Click the plus button beside that entry if the text you want to edit is not visible.   Now, click the text you wish to change, and enter what you wish in the box.  For fun, we changed the copyright to say “©2010 Microsoft”. Go back to IE to see the changes on the page! You can also change a link on a page this way: Or you can even change the text on a button: Here’s our edited Google.com: This may be fun for playing a trick on someone or simply for a funny screenshot, but it can be very useful, too.  You could test how changes in fontsize would change how a website looks, or see how a button would look with a different label.  It can also be useful when taking screenshots.  For instance, if I want to show a friend how to do something in Gmail but don’t want to reveal my email address, I could edit the text on the top right before I took the screenshot.  Here I changed my Gmail address to [email protected]. Please note that the changes will disappear when you reload the page.  You can save your changes from the developer tools window, though, and reopen the page from your computer if you wish. We have found this trick very helpful at times, and it can be very fun too!  Enjoy it, and let us know how you used it to help you! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Edit Webpage Text Areas in Your Favorite Text EditorRemove Webpage Formatting or View the HTML Code When Copying in FirefoxChange the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxShare Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.itEditPad Lite – All Purpose Tabbed Text Editor TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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  • Sun Fire X4270 M3 SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) Two-Tier Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark

    - by Brian
    Oracle's Sun Fire X4270 M3 server achieved 8,320 SAP SD Benchmark users running SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 with unicode software using Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Solaris 10. The Sun Fire X4270 M3 server using Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Solaris 10 beat both IBM Flex System x240 and IBM System x3650 M4 server running DB2 9.7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition. The Sun Fire X4270 M3 server running Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Solaris 10 beat the HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 server using SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition by 6%. The Sun Fire X4270 M3 server using Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Solaris 10 beat Cisco UCS C240 M3 server running SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition by 9%. The Sun Fire X4270 M3 server running Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Solaris 10 beat the Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300 S7 server using SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition by 10%. Performance Landscape SAP-SD 2-Tier Performance Table (in decreasing performance order). SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) Results (benchmark version from January 2009 to April 2012) System OS Database Users SAPERP/ECCRelease SAPS SAPS/Proc Date Sun Fire X4270 M3 2xIntel Xeon E5-2690 @2.90GHz 128 GB Oracle Solaris 10 Oracle Database 11g 8,320 20096.0 EP4(Unicode) 45,570 22,785 10-Apr-12 IBM Flex System x240 2xIntel Xeon E5-2690 @2.90GHz 128 GB Windows Server 2008 R2 EE DB2 9.7 7,960 20096.0 EP4(Unicode) 43,520 21,760 11-Apr-12 HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 2xIntel Xeon E5-2690 @2.90GHz 128 GB Windows Server 2008 R2 EE SQL Server 2008 7,865 20096.0 EP4(Unicode) 42,920 21,460 29-Mar-12 IBM System x3650 M4 2xIntel Xeon E5-2690 @2.90GHz 128 GB Windows Server 2008 R2 EE DB2 9.7 7,855 20096.0 EP4(Unicode) 42,880 21,440 06-Mar-12 Cisco UCS C240 M3 2xIntel Xeon E5-2690 @2.90GHz 128 GB Windows Server 2008 R2 DE SQL Server 2008 7,635 20096.0 EP4(Unicode) 41,800 20,900 06-Mar-12 Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300 S7 2xIntel Xeon E5-2690 @2.90GHz 128 GB Windows Server 2008 R2 EE SQL Server 2008 7,570 20096.0 EP4(Unicode) 41,320 20,660 06-Mar-12 Complete benchmark results may be found at the SAP benchmark website http://www.sap.com/benchmark. Configuration and Results Summary Hardware Configuration: Sun Fire X4270 M3 2 x 2.90 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors 128 GB memory Sun StorageTek 6540 with 4 * 16 * 300GB 15Krpm 4Gb FC-AL Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 10 Oracle Database 11g SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) Certified Results (published by SAP): Number of benchmark users: 8,320 Average dialog response time: 0.95 seconds Throughput: Fully processed order line: 911,330 Dialog steps/hour: 2,734,000 SAPS: 45,570 SAP Certification: 2012014 Benchmark Description The SAP Standard Application SD (Sales and Distribution) Benchmark is a two-tier ERP business test that is indicative of full business workloads of complete order processing and invoice processing, and demonstrates the ability to run both the application and database software on a single system. The SAP Standard Application SD Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments. SAP is one of the premier world-wide ERP application providers, and maintains a suite of benchmark tests to demonstrate the performance of competitive systems on the various SAP products. See Also SAP Benchmark Website Sun Fire X4270 M3 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard SAP SD benchmark based on SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) application benchmark as of 04/11/12: Sun Fire X4270 M3 (2 processors, 16 cores, 32 threads) 8,320 SAP SD Users, 2 x 2.90 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690, 128 GB memory, Oracle 11g, Solaris 10, Cert# 2012014. IBM Flex System x240 (2 processors, 16 cores, 32 threads) 7,960 SAP SD Users, 2 x 2.90 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690, 128 GB memory, DB2 9.7, Windows Server 2008 R2 EE, Cert# 2012016. IBM System x3650 M4 (2 processors, 16 cores, 32 threads) 7,855 SAP SD Users, 2 x 2.90 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690, 128 GB memory, DB2 9.7, Windows Server 2008 R2 EE, Cert# 2012010. Cisco UCS C240 M3 (2 processors, 16 cores, 32 threads) 7,635 SAP SD Users, 2 x 2.90 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690, 128 GB memory, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 DE, Cert# 2012011. Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300 S7 (2 processors, 16 cores, 32 threads) 7,570 SAP SD Users, 2 x 2.90 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690, 128 GB memory, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 EE, Cert# 2012008. HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 (2 processors, 16 cores, 32 threads) 7,865 SAP SD Users, 2 x 2.90 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690, 128 GB memory, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 EE, Cert# 2012012. SAP, R/3, reg TM of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. More info www.sap.com/benchmark

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  • Silverlight Cream for December 11, 2010 -- #1007

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Mike Wolf, Colin Eberhardt, Mike Snow(-2-, -3-), David Kelley(-2-, -3-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), Erik Mork, Jeff Blankenburg, Laurent Duveau, and Jeremy Likness(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "The definitive guide to Notification Window in Silverlight 4" Laurent Duveau WP7: "Making the MS Adcontrol REALLY work on phone 7" David Kelley Silverlight 5: "Silverlight 5: In the Trenches" Mike Wolf From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 5: In the Trenches How many people can discuss Silverlight 5 'In the Trenches' ... apparently Mike Wolf can, and that's just what he's done in the post to whet your whistle (do people say that any more?) for when we can all get our hands on the bits. Visiblox, Visifire, DynamicDataDisplay – Charting Performance Comparison Colin Eberhardt responds to reader requests, and revisits his Charting Performance after also some discussion with David Anson about the Silverlight Toolkit. This time including Dynamic Data Display which is quite impressive in the ratings... check out the post and the code. Win7 Mobile Back Arrow Key Interception The simple fact is heavy bloggers rise, like Cream, to the top of my list, and I've been missing some goodness from Mike Snow... he's blogging WP7 stuff now... first up of the 'missed' ones is this one on intercepting the Back Arrow Key. Animating the Color of an Object Switching back to Silverlight in general, Mike Snow's next post is on Animating color of an object, such as text foreground. Tombstoning on the Win7 Mobile Platform And now back to WP7, Mike Snow is discussing Tombstoning... discussing the various aspects of it, and some code to use, if you haven't gotten your head around this one yet. What I tell Designers to give me... Integrating and Digital Zen David Kelley has a post up describing what he needs from designers to get his job done... I heard him discussing this at the Firestarter, and didn't realize he had written it up... these 8 items are things learned by doing, and should be discussed with your designers. Making the MS Adcontrol REALLY work on phone 7 David Kelley also has a post up discussing how to really get the Ad control working on WP7 apps... since I've seen lots of posts about this, having a definitive explanation from someone that's doing it is a good thing. Performance Optimization on Phone 7 In a break from his norm of discussing UX, David Kelley is talking about performance on WP7 devices in this post. Windows Phone From Scratch #10 – Visual State Part 2 When I saw Jesse Liberty's latest post, I realized I had missed his Part 2 of VSM for WP7 ... don't you miss it... this completes the good stuff from number 9 :) Windows Phone From Scratch #11 – Behaviors Jesse Liberty's latest Windows Phone from Scratch is up... and he's talking about Behaviors this time out... more of an overview or introduction to behaviors, but all good Show 112: Scott Guthrie on Silverlight 5 Erik Mork's latest Sparkling Client podcast is up and he was able to get some time with Scott Guthrie at the Firestarter. What I Learned in WP7 – Issue #1 Jeff Blankenburg decided to do another series, only this one isn't promised as every day... it's "What I Learned in WP7" ... and the first is up... good interesting bits found surrounding the WP7 device. The definitive guide to Notification Window in Silverlight 4 Laurent Duveau has a great post up that will have you doing Silverlight 'toast' notifications in no time... good descriptions and source. Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 1: Dynamic XAML Jeremy Likness has rebuilt his personal website in Silverlight and is sharing some of that experience on his blog. This first post discusses the dynamic content. He used Jounce, of course, and included the Silverlight Navigation Framework, and... you can download all the source Lessons Learned in Personal Web Page Part 2: Enter the Matrix Jeremy Likness's second post about building his website is all about the 'Matrix' page ... pretty cool stuff... check it out... I think it looks great Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • GPGPU

    WhatGPU obviously stands for Graphics Processing Unit (the silicon powering the display you are using to read this blog post). The extra GP in front of that stands for General Purpose computing.So, altogether GPGPU refers to computing we can perform on GPU for purposes beyond just drawing on the screen. In effect, we can use a GPGPU a bit like we already use a CPU: to perform some calculation (that doesn’t have to have any visual element to it). The attraction is that a GPGPU can be orders of magnitude faster than a CPU.WhyWhen I was at the SuperComputing conference in Portland last November, GPGPUs were all the rage. A quick online search reveals many articles introducing the GPGPU topic. I'll just share 3 here: pcper (ignoring all pages except the first, it is a good consumer perspective), gizmodo (nice take using mostly layman terms) and vizworld (answering the question on "what's the big deal").The GPGPU programming paradigm (from a high level) is simple: in your CPU program you define functions (aka kernels) that take some input, can perform the costly operation and return the output. The kernels are the things that execute on the GPGPU leveraging its power (and hence execute faster than what they could on the CPU) while the host CPU program waits for the results or asynchronously performs other tasks.However, GPGPUs have different characteristics to CPUs which means they are suitable only for certain classes of problem (i.e. data parallel algorithms) and not for others (e.g. algorithms with branching or recursion or other complex flow control). You also pay a high cost for transferring the input data from the CPU to the GPU (and vice versa the results back to the CPU), so the computation itself has to be long enough to justify the overhead transfer costs. If your problem space fits the criteria then you probably want to check out this technology.HowSo where can you get a graphics card to start playing with all this? At the time of writing, the two main vendors ATI (owned by AMD) and NVIDIA are the obvious players in this industry. You can read about GPGPU on this AMD page and also on this NVIDIA page. NVIDIA's website also has a free chapter on the topic from the "GPU Gems" book: A Toolkit for Computation on GPUs.If you followed the links above, then you've already come across some of the choices of programming models that are available today. Essentially, AMD is offering their ATI Stream technology accessible via a language they call Brook+; NVIDIA offers their CUDA platform which is accessible from CUDA C. Choosing either of those locks you into the GPU vendor and hence your code cannot run on systems with cards from the other vendor (e.g. imagine if your CPU code would run on Intel chips but not AMD chips). Having said that, both vendors plan to support a new emerging standard called OpenCL, which theoretically means your kernels can execute on any GPU that supports it. To learn more about all of these there is a website: gpgpu.org. The caveat about that site is that (currently) it completely ignores the Microsoft approach, which I touch on next.On Windows, there is already a cross-GPU-vendor way of programming GPUs and that is the DirectX API. Specifically, on Windows Vista and Windows 7, the DirectX 11 API offers a dedicated subset of the API for GPGPU programming: DirectCompute. You use this API on the CPU side, to set up and execute the kernels that run on the GPU. The kernels are written in a language called HLSL (High Level Shader Language). You can use DirectCompute with HLSL to write a "compute shader", which is the term DirectX uses for what I've been referring to in this post as a "kernel". For a comprehensive collection of links about this (including tutorials, videos and samples) please see my blog post: DirectCompute.Note that there are many efforts to build even higher level languages on top of DirectX that aim to expose GPGPU programming to a wider audience by making it as easy as today's mainstream programming models. I'll mention here just two of those efforts: Accelerator from MSR and Brahma by Ananth. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • Apply Skins to Add Some Flair to Windows Media Player 12

    - by DigitalGeekery
    Tired of the same look and feel of Windows Media Player in Windows 7? We’ll show you how to inject new life into your media experience by applying skins in WMP 12. Adding Skins In Library view, click on View from the Menu and select Skin Chooser. By default, WMP 12 comes with only a couple of modest skins. When you select a skin from the left pane, a preview will be displayed to the right. To apply one of the skins, simply select it from the pane on the left and click Apply Skin.   You can also switch to the currently selected skin in the Skin chooser by selecting Skin from the View menu, or by pressing Crtl + 2. Media Player will open in Now Playing mode. Click on the Switch to Library button at the top left to return to Library view.     Ok, so the included skins are a little boring. You can find additional skins by selecting Tools > Download > Skins.   Or, by clicking on More Skins from within the Skin chooser.   You will be taken the the Microsoft website where you can choose from dozens of skins to download and install. Select a skin you’d like to try and click the link to download.   If prompted with a warning message about files containing scripts that access your library, click Yes. Note: These warning boxes may look a bit different depending on your browser. We are using Chrome for this example.   Click on View Now.   Your new skin will be on display. To get back to the Library mode, find and click the Return to Full Mode button.    Some skins may launch video in a separate window.   If you want to delete one of the skins, select it from the list within the Skin chooser and click the red “X.” You can also press the delete key on your keyboard.   Then click Yes to confirm.   Conclusion Using skins is a quick and easy way to add some style to Windows Media Player and switching back and forth between skins is a breeze. Regardless of your interests, you are sure to find a skin that fits your tastes. You may find WMP skins on other sites, but sticking with Microsoft’s website will ensure maximum compatibility. Skins for Windows Media Player Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 10Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 11Make VLC Player Look like Winamp 5 (Kinda)Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesInstall and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu Linux TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative

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  • Web Browser Control &ndash; Specifying the IE Version

    - by Rick Strahl
    I use the Internet Explorer Web Browser Control in a lot of my applications to display document type layout. HTML happens to be one of the most common document formats and displaying data in this format – even in desktop applications, is often way easier than using normal desktop technologies. One issue the Web Browser Control has that it’s perpetually stuck in IE 7 rendering mode by default. Even though IE 8 and now 9 have significantly upgraded the IE rendering engine to be more CSS and HTML compliant by default the Web Browser control will have none of it. IE 9 in particular – with its much improved CSS support and basic HTML 5 support is a big improvement and even though the IE control uses some of IE’s internal rendering technology it’s still stuck in the old IE 7 rendering by default. This applies whether you’re using the Web Browser control in a WPF application, a WinForms app, a FoxPro or VB classic application using the ActiveX control. Behind the scenes all these UI platforms use the COM interfaces and so you’re stuck by those same rules. Rendering Challenged To see what I’m talking about here are two screen shots rendering an HTML 5 doctype page that includes some CSS 3 functionality – rounded corners and border shadows - from an earlier post. One uses IE 9 as a standalone browser, and one uses a simple WPF form that includes the Web Browser control. IE 9 Browser:   Web Browser control in a WPF form: The IE 9 page displays this HTML correctly – you see the rounded corners and shadow displayed. Obviously the latter rendering using the Web Browser control in a WPF application is a bit lacking. Not only are the new CSS features missing but the page also renders in Internet Explorer’s quirks mode so all the margins, padding etc. behave differently by default, even though there’s a CSS reset applied on this page. If you’re building an application that intends to use the Web Browser control for a live preview of some HTML this is clearly undesirable. Feature Delegation via Registry Hacks Fortunately starting with Internet Explore 8 and later there’s a fix for this problem via a registry setting. You can specify a registry key to specify which rendering mode and version of IE should be used by that application. These are not global mind you – they have to be enabled for each application individually. There are two different sets of keys for 32 bit and 64 bit applications. 32 bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: yourapplication.exe 64 bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: yourapplication.exe The value to set this key to is (taken from MSDN here) as decimal values: 9999 (0x270F) Internet Explorer 9. Webpages are displayed in IE9 Standards mode, regardless of the !DOCTYPE directive. 9000 (0x2328) Internet Explorer 9. Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE9 mode. 8888 (0x22B8) Webpages are displayed in IE8 Standards mode, regardless of the !DOCTYPE directive. 8000 (0x1F40) Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE8 mode. 7000 (0x1B58) Webpages containing standards-based !DOCTYPE directives are displayed in IE7 Standards mode.   The added key looks something like this in the Registry Editor: With this in place my Html Html Help Builder application which has wwhelp.exe as its main executable now works with HTML 5 and CSS 3 documents in the same way that Internet Explorer 9 does. Incidentally I accidentally added an ‘empty’ DWORD value of 0 to my EXE name and that worked as well giving me IE 9 rendering. Although not documented I suspect 0 (or an invalid value) will default to the installed browser. Don’t have a good way to test this but if somebody could try this with IE 8 installed that would be great: What happens when setting 9000 with IE 8 installed? What happens when setting 0 with IE 8 installed? Don’t forget to add Keys for Host Environments If you’re developing your application in Visual Studio and you run the debugger you may find that your application is still not rendering right, but if you run the actual generated EXE from Explorer or the OS command prompt it works. That’s because when you run the debugger in Visual Studio it wraps your application into a debugging host container. For this reason you might want to also add another registry key for yourapp.vshost.exe on your development machine. If you’re developing in Visual FoxPro make sure you add a key for vfp9.exe to see the rendering adjustments in the Visual FoxPro development environment. Cleaner HTML - no more HTML mangling! There are a number of additional benefits to setting up rendering of the Web Browser control to the IE 9 engine (or even the IE 8 engine) beyond the obvious rendering functionality. IE 9 actually returns your HTML in something that resembles the original HTML formatting, as opposed to the IE 7 default format which mangled the original HTML content. If you do the following in the WPF application: private void button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { dynamic doc = this.webBrowser.Document; MessageBox.Show(doc.body.outerHtml); } you get different output depending on the rendering mode active. With the default IE 7 rendering you get: <BODY><DIV> <H1>Rounded Corners and Shadows - Creating Dialogs in CSS</H1> <DIV class=toolbarcontainer><A class=hoverbutton href="./"><IMG src="../../css/images/home.gif"> Home</A> <A class=hoverbutton href="RoundedCornersAndShadows.htm"><IMG src="../../css/images/refresh.gif"> Refresh</A> </DIV> <DIV class=containercontent> <FIELDSET><LEGEND>Plain Box</LEGEND><!-- Simple Box with rounded corners and shadow --> <DIV style="BORDER-BOTTOM: steelblue 2px solid; BORDER-LEFT: steelblue 2px solid; WIDTH: 550px; BORDER-TOP: steelblue 2px solid; BORDER-RIGHT: steelblue 2px solid" class="roundbox boxshadow"> <DIV style="BACKGROUND: khaki" class="boxcontenttext roundbox">Simple Rounded Corner Box. </DIV></DIV></FIELDSET> <FIELDSET><LEGEND>Box with Header</LEGEND> <DIV style="BORDER-BOTTOM: steelblue 2px solid; BORDER-LEFT: steelblue 2px solid; WIDTH: 550px; BORDER-TOP: steelblue 2px solid; BORDER-RIGHT: steelblue 2px solid" class="roundbox boxshadow"> <DIV class="gridheaderleft roundbox-top">Box with a Header</DIV> <DIV style="BACKGROUND: khaki" class="boxcontenttext roundbox-bottom">Simple Rounded Corner Box. </DIV></DIV></FIELDSET> <FIELDSET><LEGEND>Dialog Style Window</LEGEND> <DIV style="POSITION: relative; WIDTH: 450px" id=divDialog class="dialog boxshadow" jQuery16107208195684204002="2"> <DIV style="POSITION: relative" class=dialog-header> <DIV class=closebox></DIV>User Sign-in <DIV class=closebox jQuery16107208195684204002="3"></DIV></DIV> <DIV class=descriptionheader>This dialog is draggable and closable</DIV> <DIV class=dialog-content><LABEL>Username:</LABEL> <INPUT name=txtUsername value=" "> <LABEL>Password</LABEL> <INPUT name=txtPassword value=" "> <HR> <INPUT id=btnLogin value=Login type=button> </DIV> <DIV class=dialog-statusbar>Ready</DIV></DIV></FIELDSET> </DIV> <SCRIPT type=text/javascript>     $(document).ready(function () {         $("#divDialog")             .draggable({ handle: ".dialog-header" })             .closable({ handle: ".dialog-header",                 closeHandler: function () {                     alert("Window about to be closed.");                     return true;  // true closes - false leaves open                 }             });     }); </SCRIPT> </DIV></BODY> Now lest you think I’m out of my mind and create complete whacky HTML rooted in the last century, here’s the IE 9 rendering mode output which looks a heck of a lot cleaner and a lot closer to my original HTML of the page I’m accessing: <body> <div>         <h1>Rounded Corners and Shadows - Creating Dialogs in CSS</h1>     <div class="toolbarcontainer">         <a class="hoverbutton" href="./"> <img src="../../css/images/home.gif"> Home</a>         <a class="hoverbutton" href="RoundedCornersAndShadows.htm"> <img src="../../css/images/refresh.gif"> Refresh</a>     </div>         <div class="containercontent">     <fieldset>         <legend>Plain Box</legend>                <!-- Simple Box with rounded corners and shadow -->             <div style="border: 2px solid steelblue; width: 550px;" class="roundbox boxshadow">                              <div style="background: khaki;" class="boxcontenttext roundbox">                     Simple Rounded Corner Box.                 </div>             </div>     </fieldset>     <fieldset>         <legend>Box with Header</legend>         <div style="border: 2px solid steelblue; width: 550px;" class="roundbox boxshadow">                          <div class="gridheaderleft roundbox-top">Box with a Header</div>             <div style="background: khaki;" class="boxcontenttext roundbox-bottom">                 Simple Rounded Corner Box.             </div>         </div>     </fieldset>       <fieldset>         <legend>Dialog Style Window</legend>         <div style="width: 450px; position: relative;" id="divDialog" class="dialog boxshadow">             <div style="position: relative;" class="dialog-header">                 <div class="closebox"></div>                 User Sign-in             <div class="closebox"></div></div>             <div class="descriptionheader">This dialog is draggable and closable</div>                    <div class="dialog-content">                             <label>Username:</label>                 <input name="txtUsername" value=" " type="text">                 <label>Password</label>                 <input name="txtPassword" value=" " type="text">                                 <hr/>                                 <input id="btnLogin" value="Login" type="button">                        </div>             <div class="dialog-statusbar">Ready</div>         </div>     </fieldset>     </div> <script type="text/javascript">     $(document).ready(function () {         $("#divDialog")             .draggable({ handle: ".dialog-header" })             .closable({ handle: ".dialog-header",                 closeHandler: function () {                     alert("Window about to be closed.");                     return true;  // true closes - false leaves open                 }             });     }); </script>        </div> </body> IOW, in IE9 rendering mode IE9 is much closer (but not identical) to the original HTML from the page on the Web that we’re reading from. As a side note: Unfortunately, the browser feature emulation can't be applied against the Html Help (CHM) Engine in Windows which uses the Web Browser control (or COM interfaces anyway) to render Html Help content. I tried setting up hh.exe which is the help viewer, to use IE 9 rendering but a help file generated with CSS3 features will simply show in IE 7 mode. Bummer - this would have been a nice quick fix to allow help content served from CHM files to look better. HTML Editing leaves HTML formatting intact In the same vane, if you do any inline HTML editing in the control by setting content to be editable, IE 9’s control does a much more reasonable job of creating usable and somewhat valid HTML. It also leaves the original content alone other than the text your are editing or adding. No longer is the HTML output stripped of excess spaces and reformatted in IEs format. So if I do: private void button3_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { dynamic doc = this.webBrowser.Document; doc.body.contentEditable = true; } and then make some changes to the document by typing into it using IE 9 mode, the document formatting stays intact and only the affected content is modified. The created HTML is reasonably clean (although it does lack proper XHTML formatting for things like <br/> <hr/>). This is very different from IE 7 mode which mangled the HTML as soon as the page was loaded into the control. Any editing you did stripped out all white space and lost all of your existing XHTML formatting. In IE 9 mode at least *most* of your original formatting stays intact. This is huge! In Html Help Builder I have supported HTML editing for a long time but the HTML mangling by the Web Browser control made it very difficult to edit the HTML later. Previously IE would mangle the HTML by stripping out spaces, upper casing all tags and converting many XHTML safe tags to its HTML 3 tags. Now IE leaves most of my document alone while editing, and creates cleaner and more compliant markup (with exception of self-closing elements like BR/HR). The end result is that I now have HTML editing in place that's much cleaner and actually capable of being manually edited. Caveats, Caveats, Caveats It wouldn't be Internet Explorer if there weren't some major compatibility issues involved in using this various browser version interaction. The biggest thing I ran into is that there are odd differences in some of the COM interfaces and what they return. I specifically ran into a problem with the document.selection.createRange() function which with IE 7 compatibility returns an expected text range object. When running in IE 8 or IE 9 mode however. I could not retrieve a valid text range with this code where loEdit is the WebBrowser control: loRange = loEdit.document.selection.CreateRange() The loRange object returned (here in FoxPro) had a length property of 0 but none of the other properties of the TextRange or TextRangeCollection objects were available. I figured this was due to some changed security settings but even after elevating the Intranet Security Zone and mucking with the other browser feature flags pertaining to security I had no luck. In the end I relented and used a JavaScript function in my editor document that returns a selection range object: function getselectionrange() { var range = document.selection.createRange(); return range; } and call that JavaScript function from my host applications code: *** Use a function in the document to get around HTML Editing issues loRange = loEdit.document.parentWindow.getselectionrange(.f.) and that does work correctly. This wasn't a big deal as I'm already loading a support script file into the editor page so all I had to do is add the function to this existing script file. You can find out more how to call script code in the Web Browser control from a host application in a previous post of mine. IE 8 and 9 also clamp down the security environment a little more than the default IE 7 control, so there may be other issues you run into. Other than the createRange() problem above I haven't seen anything else that is breaking in my code so far though and that's encouraging at least since it uses a lot of HTML document manipulation for the custom editor I've created (and would love to replace - any PROFESSIONAL alternatives anybody?) Registry Key Installation for your Application It’s important to remember that this registry setting is made per application, so most likely this is something you want to set up with your installer. Also remember that 32 and 64 bit settings require separate settings in the registry so if you’re creating your installer you most likely will want to set both keys in the registry preemptively for your application. I use Tarma Installer for all of my application installs and in Tarma I configure registry keys for both and set a flag to only install the latter key group in the 64 bit version: Because this setting is application specific you have to do this for every application you install unfortunately, but this also means that you can safely configure this setting in the registry because it is after only applied to your application. Another problem with install based installation is version detection. If IE 8 is installed I’d want 8000 for the value, if IE 9 is installed I want 9000. I can do this easily in code but in the installer this is much more difficult. I don’t have a good solution for this at the moment, but given that the app works with IE 7 mode now, IE 9 mode is just a bonus for the moment. If IE 9 is not installed and 9000 is used the default rendering will remain in use.   It sure would be nice if we could specify the IE rendering mode as a property, but I suspect the ActiveX container has to know before it loads what actual version to load up and once loaded can only load a single version of IE. This would account for this annoying application level configuration… Summary The registry feature emulation has been available for quite some time, but I just found out about it today and started experimenting around with it. I’m stoked to see that this is available as I’d pretty much given up in ever seeing any better rendering in the Web Browser control. Now at least my apps can take advantage of newer HTML features. Now if we could only get better HTML Editing support somehow <snicker>… ah can’t have everything.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in .NET  FoxPro  Windows  

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  • jQuery Templates on Microsoft Ajax CDN

    - by Stephen Walther
    The beta version of the jQuery Templates plugin is now hosted on the Microsoft Ajax CDN. You can start using the jQuery Templates plugin in your application by referencing both jQuery 1.4.2 and jQuery Templates from the CDN. Here are the two script tags that you will want to use when developing an application: <script type="text/javascript" src=”http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js”></script> <script type="text/javascript" src=”http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js”></script> In addition, minified versions of both files are available from the CDN: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.min.js"></script> Here’s a full code sample of using jQuery Templates from the CDN to display pictures of cats from Flickr: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Cats</title> <style type="text/css"> html { background-color:Orange; } #catBox div { width:250px; height:250px; border:solid 1px black; background-color:White; margin:5px; padding:5px; float:left; } #catBox img { width:200px; height: 200px; } </style> </head> <body> <h1>Cat Photos!</h1> <div id="catBox"></div> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.min.js"></script> <script id="catTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div> <b>${title}</b> <br /> <img src="${media.m}" /> </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> var url = "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne?id=44124373027@N01&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=?"; // Grab some flickr images of cats $.getJSON(url, function (data) { // Format the data using the catTemplate template $("#catTemplate").tmpl(data.items).appendTo("#catBox"); }); </script> </body> </html> This page displays a list of cats retrieved from Flickr: Notice that the cat pictures are retrieved and rendered with just a few lines of code: var url = "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne?id=44124373027@N01&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=?"; // Grab some flickr images of cats $.getJSON(url, function (data) { // Format the data using the catTemplate template $("#catTemplate").tmpl(data.items).appendTo("#catBox"); }); The final line of code, the one that calls the tmpl() method, uses the Templates plugin to render the cat photos in a template named catTemplate. The catTemplate template is contained within a SCRIPT element with type="text/x-jquery-tmpl". The jQuery Templates plugin is an “official” jQuery plugin which will be included in jQuery 1.5 (the next major release of jQuery). You can read the full documentation for the plugin at the jQuery website: http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/ The jQuery Templates plugin is still beta so we would really appreciate your feedback on the plugin. Let us know if you use the Templates plugin in your website.

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  • Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

    - by ScottGu
    Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. 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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  • What makes them click ?

    - by Piet
    The other day (well, actually some weeks ago while relaxing at the beach in Kos) I read ‘Neuro Web Design - What makes them click?’ by Susan Weinschenk. (http://neurowebbook.com) The book is a fast and easy read (no unnecessary filler) and a good introduction on how your site’s visitors can be steered in the direction you want them to go. The Obvious The book handles some of the more known/proven techniques, like for example that ratings/testimonials of other people can help sell your product or service. Another well known technique it talks about is inducing a sense of scarcity/urgency in the visitor. Only 2 seats left! Buy now and get 33% off! It’s not because these are known techniques that they stop working. Luckily 2/3rd of the book handles less obvious techniques, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth buying. The Not So Obvious A less known influencing technique is reciprocity. And then I’m not talking about swapping links with another website, but the fact that someone is more likely to do something for you after you did something for them first. The book cites some studies (I always love the facts and figures) and gives some actual examples of how to implement this in your site’s design, which is less obvious when you think about it. Want to know more ? Buy the book! Other interesting sources For a more general introduction to the same principles, I’d suggest ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’. ‘Yes!…’ cites some of the same studies (it seems there’s a rather limited pool of studies covering this subject), but of course doesn’t show how to implement these techniques in your site’s design. I read ‘Yes!…’ last year, making ‘Neuro Web Design’ just a little bit less interesting. !!!Always make sure you’re able to measure your changes. If you haven’t yet, check out the advanced segmentation in Google Analytics (don’t be afraid because it says ‘beta’, it works just fine) and Google Website Optimizer. Worth Buying? Can I recommend it ? Sure, why not. I think it can be useful for anyone who ever had to think about the design or content of a site. You don’t have to be a marketing guy to want a site you’re involved with to be successful. The content/filler ratio is excellent too: you don’t need to wade through dozens of pages to filter out the interesting bits. (unlike ‘The Design of Sites’, which contains too much useless info and because it’s in dead-tree format, you can’t google it) If you like it, you might also check out ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’. Tip for people living in Europe: check Amazon UK for your book buying needs. Because of the low UK Pound exchange rate, it’s usually considerably cheaper and faster to get a book delivered to your doorstep by Amazon UK compared to having to order it at the local book store or web-shop.

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