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  • Why is my concurrency capacity so low for my web app on a LAMP EC2 instance?

    - by AMF
    I come from a web developer background and have been humming along building my PHP app, using the CakePHP framework. The problem arose when I began the ab (Apache Bench) testing on the Amazon EC2 instance in which the app resides. I'm getting pretty horrendous average page load times, even though I'm running a c1.medium instance (2 cores, 2GB RAM), and I think I'm doing everything right. I would run: ab -n 200 -c 20 http://localhost/heavy-but-view-cached-page.php Here are the results: Concurrency Level: 20 Time taken for tests: 48.197 seconds Complete requests: 200 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 392111200 bytes HTML transferred: 392047600 bytes Requests per second: 4.15 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 4819.723 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 240.986 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 7944.88 [Kbytes/sec] received While the ab test is running, I run VMStat, which shows that Swap stays at 0, CPU is constantly at 80-100% (although I'm not sure I can trust this on a VM), RAM utilization ramps up to about 1.6G (leaving 400M free). Load goes up to about 8 and site slows to a crawl. Here's what I think I'm doing right on the code side: In Chrome browser uncached pages typically load in 800-1000ms, and cached pages load in 300-500ms. Not stunning, but not terrible either. Thanks to view caching, there might be at most one DB query per page-load to write session data. So we can rule out a DB bottleneck. I have APC on. I am using Memcached to serve the view cache and other site caches. xhprof code profiler shows that cached pages take up 10MB-40MB in memory and 100ms - 1000ms in wall time. Pages that would be the worst offenders would look something like this in xhprof: Total Incl. Wall Time (microsec): 330,143 microsecs Total Incl. CPU (microsecs): 320,019 microsecs Total Incl. MemUse (bytes): 36,786,192 bytes Total Incl. PeakMemUse (bytes): 46,667,008 bytes Number of Function Calls: 5,195 My Apache config: KeepAlive On MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAliveTimeout 3 <IfModule mpm_prefork_module> StartServers 5 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 10 MaxClients 120 MaxRequestsPerChild 1000 </IfModule> Is there something wrong with the server? Some gotcha with the EC2? Or is it my code? Some obvious setting I should look into? Too many DNS lookups? What am I missing? I really want to get to 1,000 concurrency capacity, but at this rate, it ain't gonna happen.

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  • Concerning persistence size in the Linux Live Creator

    - by user63085
    Message : Hello everyone! I have ,for the last several months, used the Linux Live USB Creator which it is a very useful app to make portable OS on to flash drives. I mostly use this application to test and try out new OS's as they are released, before I decide to make a hard disk installatio on to the computer. In many cases, the application developers will allow the “persistence” feature in the flash-drive-installed OS, which is just another way of saying that after multiple boot-ups and shutdowns, all the changes made to the OS will be saved in the flash-drive. But I have a question about the limit of the Persistence size in Linux Live USB Creator (currently version 2.6). I install Super OS 10 on to a partition on my external drive which has 30 GB. I wanted to reserve 10 GB for the persistence so that I can install more applications and space will not run out as I update the installed applications or when I do system updates. But why is it that only 3950 MB can be put for persistence? It would be great if, when desired, as much more persistence space could be set aside so that the space will not run out soon. Also, as I have installed the OS on a 30 GB drive, I tried to see how much space is left. But it seems only the remaining of the Persistence space is displayed when I click on the File System folder. For example, after I have just installed it now, there is 3.5 GB of free space. Where can I access the remaining 26 GB or so drive space which is in the same drive? How do I access it Sir?? It would be helpful if any one could explain and help me with this. Most importantly, it would be a big relief if the persistence can be somehow expanded by a work-around so that I can continue using my SuperOS 10.04 (now heavily customized) OS, which unfortunately has just over 576 MB of space left now, after I removed OpenOffice.org and installed the Libre Office earlier today. This is what remains from the maximum allowable 3950 MB of space for persistence at set-up. Thanks in advance!

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  • Galaxy Tab 3 producing continuous LightSensor error in LogCat

    - by Richard Tingle
    I am using a Galaxy Tab 3 as a test device for writing an android app. As such I'm interested in the output of the LogCat which is being filled with these error level messages. The device itself appears to work correctly, apps which rely on the light sensor correctly respond to it and the number in the error itself goes down if the light sensor is obscured. If I wasn't using it to develop apps I wouldn't even be aware of the issue but I believe it is an issue with the device itself not my app: simply plugging the tab 3 into the computer and using Eclipse - ADT to look at the LogCat without any app running leads to these errors being shown. I know I could filter the LogCat to ignore these errors but inconvenience aside; they concern me. A sample of the log cat is below (it generates errors continuously). This is on verbose so it includes some debug level (D/) messages as well as the error level messages (E/). How can I correct the device to no longer generate these errors. 06-11 10:08:45.789: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:45.992: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:46.195: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:46.398: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:46.601: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:46.804: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:47.007: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:47.210: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:47.414: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:47.617: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:47.820: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:48.023: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:48.039: D/dalvikvm(15201): GC_CONCURRENT freed 1947K, 17% free 16973K/20359K, paused 13ms+13ms, total 50ms 06-11 10:08:48.226: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:48.429: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 13 06-11 10:08:48.632: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 13 06-11 10:08:48.632: D/STATUSBAR-NetworkController(472): refreshSignalCluster: data=0 bt=false 06-11 10:08:48.835: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:49.039: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:49.242: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:49.445: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 13 06-11 10:08:49.632: D/STATUSBAR-NetworkController(472): refreshSignalCluster: data=0 bt=false 06-11 10:08:49.648: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 14 06-11 10:08:49.851: E/LightSensor(377): LightSensor::readEvents mPendingEvent.light = 13

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  • How to move partition with Users to a new SATA controller?

    - by Al Kepp
    Our current situation: X79 chipset. Windows 7 installed on SATA SSD running on Marvell controller. C:\Users contains just Public and computer-name folders, all the other users are created in E:\Users. That partition is on two HDD's running on an Intel RAID controller. (The motherboard has got two SATA/RAID onboard controllers.) The goal is: Without reinstallation, I want to move SSD to a standard SATA controller. Then I want to get rid of RAID1, and move one HDD to the same internal Intel SATA controller and the current E:\Users move to that new place. I want it to stay as E:\users, but I need to reinstall the HDD to let it work in SATA mode without RAID. So I face several problems. I am sure all are solvable with free software utilities, but I don't know how exactly to do it. I can see the particular problems: I have got all users at E:\Users. When I turn off that E:\ disk, I won't be able to login to Windows. I need at least one admin account to be placed back at C:\users. The current C: runs on standard 120 GB SSD, but it is connected to a Marvell SATA/RAID controller. I am affraid the Windows won't let me put it to Intel SATA controller due to hardware/licence check, and I won't be able to use standard W7 recovery disk either, because there probably isn't marvel SATA/RAID driver on it. I haven't tried anything yet, because I am affraid I can end up with computer not working at all. (I want to move it to a standard ICH10 Intel SATA controller to let us have no problems in future with it. I think it is not very safe when we use any nonstandard hardware to boot the computer.) I need to somehow backup current E:\ disk and restore it to a new E:. I hope this will be the easy part (as long as the admin account will reside on C:). The E: RAID array is very large, but it is almost empty (less than 100 GB of data.) So I can make the partition smaller so it can easily fit to a single SATA HDD.

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  • Can't recover hard drive

    - by BreezyChick89
    My drive got corrupt after a thunderstorm. It used to be 1 partition of 2.5tb but now it shows 2 partitions. It's weird because 300gig free space is about how much it had before corrupting, but it was part of the first partition. I tried $ sudo resize2fs -f /dev/sdb1 Resizing the filesystem on /dev/sdb1 to 536870911 (4k) blocks. resize2fs: Can't read an block bitmap while trying to resize /dev/sdb1 Please run 'e2fsck -fy /dev/sdb1' to fix the filesystem after the aborted resize operation. sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdb1 e2fsck 1.42 (29-Nov-2011) The filesystem size (according to the superblock) is 610471680 blocks The physical size of the device is 536870911 blocks Either the superblock or the partition table is likely to be corrupt! Abort? n .... Error reading block 537395215 (Invalid argument) while reading inode and block bitmaps. Ignore error<y>? yes Force rewrite<y>? yes Error writing block 537395215 (Invalid argument) while reading inode and block bitmaps. Ignore error<y>? yes ... A lot of these. I can't use e2fsck -y because the first question aborts if I say "y". If I put a weight on the 'y' key it fails because none of the errors were really fixed. I asked this question before and tried using gparted but gparted fails because the first thing it does is: e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sdb1 giving the same error. The disk status says healthy. There are no bad blocks. This is very frustrating because I can see the data in testdisk and it looks like it's all there. I already bought another 2.5tb drive and made a clone using dd. The next step if I can't fix this is to wipe that drive and just move the data with testdisk, but it seems certain folders will copy infinitely until the drive is full because of symlinks or errors so it's also a difficult option. sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sdb: 2500.5 GB, 2500495958016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 304001 cylinders, total 4883781168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0005da5e Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 4294969342 2147483647+ 83 Linux sudo badblocks -b 4096 -n -o badfile /dev/sdb 610471680 536870911 badfile is empty I also tried changing the superblock with "fsck -b" but all of them are the same.

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  • TrueCrypt partition will no longer mount

    - by sparkyuiop
    I am hoping for some advice to help me out of my situation, with luck. I have a computer running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with 3 hard disks installed. On my 2TB hard disk 2 (non-system disk) I have 4 partitions. One is for music, another for video, a downloads partition and a 500GB RAW Truecrypt encrypted partition / volume that I had setup to mount with 4 photographs used as keyfiles. The 4 photographs are located in my 'Documents' partition which is one of four partitions on my 1.5TB hard disk 1 (non-system disk) When I setup the disk encryption I did not (I'm 99% sure) create a password, I only used the 4 photograph keyfiles to mount the volume. Recently my 1TB hard disk 0 (system / boot) started to fail so I decided to replace it. I was going to clone the old disk to a new disk but decided that a fresh installation would be more beneficial. Once I had transferred all the required 'User Data' from my old hard disk 0 (C: disk) I discarded it. I reinstalled Truecrypt, pointed to the partition, selected my 4 keyfiles photographs and I mounted my encrypted volume with no issues. In fact I mounted it several times after re-installing Windows and after reboots. Now all of a sudden when I try and mount it I get the message "incorrect keyfile(s) and/or password or not a Truecrypt volume". Now I am not sure why this happened as I do not recall exactly what I did between last mounting the volume successfully and it not mounting. Here are some of the possible things I may have done to cause it to stop working but I am at a loss as to where to start to try and resolve the problem. 1. I had swapped the drive letters to a preferred order. 2. I possibly swapped the physical SATA connectors on the mainboard. 3. I enabled 'Hot Plugging' for the two non-system hard disk SATA ports and the DVD SATA port in the BIOS. I have tried changing the encrypted partition drive letter as suggested in another post but this does not help. On my old system the encrypted drive was drive "X". I have about tried it with all the other free drive letters but alas nothing changes. I do not recall what drive letter was allocated to the encrypted partition before I changed them all. I have not tried to change the letter back to what it possibly was to start with as I am happy with the current layout. I will try this is anyone thinks it would be worthwhile though. I do hope I have managed to convey my situation in an understandable manner and live in hope someone could help me recover years of personal files. Thank you very much for taking the time to read my post and for any suggestions you may offer. Regards Phillip Thorne (UK) Anyone???

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  • Remote Debian System Preventing Logon

    - by choobablue
    I have a dozen or so single board computers on a network running Debian (squeeze) and access them via ssh (ssh server is dropbear). To give an idea of the hardware of these computers they're 1.2 GHz x86 processors, 1GB of RAM and 4GB flash drives formatted as ext2 (I avoided ext3 to prevent the added flash write stress from journaling), there is also a swap partition on the drive. Normally the setup I'm using works great and I can access all the computers. Every once in a while one will prevent access. What happens is I try to connect via ssh (putty) and it gives me the login prompt, I enter the username and password and it responds 'Access Denied' and it will also refuse any public key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. The credentials are correct as they worked previously. The computer responds to pings and putty recognizes the server public key, which implies to me the system is still running. Restarting the server fixes the problem and I can log in again. (I tried a temporary fix of putting shutdown -r now in the root crontab but this doesn't seem to reliably be run once the hang happens) Once I restart however there doesn't seem to be any information in any of the system logs to indicate what happened, the logs are simply empty for that time period, as if the system had crashed. There is some custom software running on the system which appears to stop working (which is why I wanted to ssh to begin with). I'm assuming that this program is the source of the problems but I'm unsure of how it would cause it and how to debug what is happening. The most likely explanation I can think of is that there is a memory leak in the other program that then prevents dropbear from spawning a new login shell (and crontab from executing shutdown) as there is not enough free memory. But looking at memory usage of the other (working) computers there doesn't seem to be any meaningful increase in memory to indicate a leak (unless it's a very big, fast acting and rare leak). I would think that when the OS ran out of memory it would restart the system or kill processes (the Linux kernel restarts right?). The other thing I wonder about is if the fact that they are running off a flash drive could have some effect, especially the swap partition (which I think I should remove to prevent wear of the flash), but the flash drives are young (~1 month) and I don't think that wear would be a factor yet. Does anybody have an idea of what could cause these symptoms, if it could be done by a memory leak, or something else I haven't thought of. And does anybody know of a method to try to debug the problem and find out more information about what's going wrong?

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  • How to make Nginx fire 504 immediately is server is not available?

    - by Georgiy Ivankin
    I have Nginx set up as a load balancer with cookie-based stickiness. The logic is: If the cookie is NOT there, use round-robbing to choose a server from cluster. If the cookie is there, go to the server that is associated with the cookie value. Server is then responsible for setting the cookie. What I want to add is this: If the cookie is there, but server is down, fallback to round-robbing step to choose next available server. So actually I have load balancing and want to add failover support on top of it. I have managed to do that with the help of error_page directive, but it doesn't work as I expected it to. The problem: 504 (and the fallback associated with it) fires only after 30s timeout even if the server is not physically available. So what I want Nginx to do is fire a 504 (or any other error, doesn't matter) immediately (I suppose this means: when TCP connection fails). This is the behavior we can see in browsers: if we go directly to server when it is down, browser immediately tells us that it can't connect. Moreover, Nginx seems to be doing this for 502 error: if I intentionally misconfigure my servers, Nginx fires 502 immediately. Configuration (stripped down to basics): http { upstream my_cluster { server 192.168.73.210:1337; server 192.168.73.210:1338; } map $cookie_myCookie $http_sticky_backend { default 0; value1 192.168.73.210:1337; value2 192.168.73.210:1338; } server { listen 8080; location @fallback { proxy_pass http://my_cluster; } location / { error_page 504 = @fallback; # Create a map of choices # see https://gist.github.com/jrom/1760790 set $test HTTP; if ($http_sticky_backend) { set $test "${test}-STICKY"; } if ($test = HTTP-STICKY) { proxy_pass http://$http_sticky_backend$uri?$args; break; } if ($test = HTTP) { proxy_pass http://my_cluster; break; } return 500 "Misconfiguration"; } } } Disclaimer: I am pretty far from systems administration of any kind, so there may be some basics that I miss here. EDIT: I'm interested in solution with standard free version of Nginx, not Nginx Plus. Thanks.

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  • Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

    - by Rick Strahl
    Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Web load testing utility West Wind WebSurge. One of the key components of a load testing tool is the ability to capture URLs effectively so that you can play them back later under load. One of the options in WebSurge for capturing URLs is to use its built-in capture tool which acts as an HTTP proxy to capture any HTTP and HTTPS traffic from most Windows HTTP clients, including Web Browsers as well as standalone Windows applications and services. To make this happen, I used Eric Lawrence’s awesome FiddlerCore library, which provides most of the functionality of his desktop Fiddler application, all rolled into an easy to use library that you can plug into your own applications. FiddlerCore makes it almost too easy to capture HTTP content! For WebSurge I needed to capture all HTTP traffic in order to capture the full HTTP request – URL, headers and any content posted by the client. The result of what I ended up creating is this semi-generic capture form: In this post I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to build this HTTP Capture Form.  If you want to jump right in here are the links to get Telerik’s Fiddler Core and the code for the demo provided here. FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore on NuGet Show me the Code (WebSurge Integration code from GitHub) Download the WinForms Sample Form West Wind Web Surge (example implementation in live app) Note that FiddlerCore is bound by a license for commercial usage – see license.txt in the FiddlerCore distribution for details. Integrating FiddlerCore FiddlerCore is a library that simply plugs into your application. You can download it from the Telerik site and manually add the assemblies to your project, or you can simply install the NuGet package via:       PM> Install-Package FiddlerCore The library consists of the FiddlerCore.dll as well as a couple of support libraries (CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll) that are used for installing SSL certificates. I’ll have more on SSL captures and certificate installation later in this post. But first let’s see how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to capture HTTP content by looking at how to build the above capture form. Capturing HTTP Content Once the library is installed it’s super easy to hook up Fiddler functionality. Fiddler includes a number of static class methods on the FiddlerApplication object that can be called to hook up callback events as well as actual start monitoring HTTP URLs. In the following code directly lifted from WebSurge, I configure a few filter options on Form level object, from the user inputs shown on the form by assigning it to a capture options object. In the live application these settings are persisted configuration values, but in the demo they are one time values initialized and set on the form. Once these options are set, I hook up the AfterSessionComplete event to capture every URL that passes through the proxy after the request is completed and start up the Proxy service:void Start() { if (tbIgnoreResources.Checked) CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = true; else CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = false; string strProcId = txtProcessId.Text; if (strProcId.Contains('-')) strProcId = strProcId.Substring(strProcId.IndexOf('-') + 1).Trim(); strProcId = strProcId.Trim(); int procId = 0; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strProcId)) { if (!int.TryParse(strProcId, out procId)) procId = 0; } CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId = procId; CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain = txtCaptureDomain.Text; FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; FiddlerApplication.Startup(8888, true, true, true); } The key lines for FiddlerCore are just the last two lines of code that include the event hookup code as well as the Startup() method call. Here I only hook up to the AfterSessionComplete event but there are a number of other events that hook various stages of the HTTP request cycle you can also hook into. Other events include BeforeRequest, BeforeResponse, RequestHeadersAvailable, ResponseHeadersAvailable and so on. In my case I want to capture the request data and I actually have several options to capture this data. AfterSessionComplete is the last event that fires in the request sequence and it’s the most common choice to capture all request and response data. I could have used several other events, but AfterSessionComplete is one place where you can look both at the request and response data, so this will be the most common place to hook into if you’re capturing content. The implementation of AfterSessionComplete is responsible for capturing all HTTP request headers and it looks something like this:private void FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete(Session sess) { // Ignore HTTPS connect requests if (sess.RequestMethod == "CONNECT") return; if (CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId > 0) { if (sess.LocalProcessID != 0 && sess.LocalProcessID != CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId) return; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain)) { if (sess.hostname.ToLower() != CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain.Trim().ToLower()) return; } if (CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources) { string url = sess.fullUrl.ToLower(); var extensions = CaptureConfiguration.ExtensionFilterExclusions; foreach (var ext in extensions) { if (url.Contains(ext)) return; } var filters = CaptureConfiguration.UrlFilterExclusions; foreach (var urlFilter in filters) { if (url.Contains(urlFilter)) return; } } if (sess == null || sess.oRequest == null || sess.oRequest.headers == null) return; string headers = sess.oRequest.headers.ToString(); var reqBody = sess.GetRequestBodyAsString(); // if you wanted to capture the response //string respHeaders = session.oResponse.headers.ToString(); //var respBody = session.GetResponseBodyAsString(); // replace the HTTP line to inject full URL string firstLine = sess.RequestMethod + " " + sess.fullUrl + " " + sess.oRequest.headers.HTTPVersion; int at = headers.IndexOf("\r\n"); if (at < 0) return; headers = firstLine + "\r\n" + headers.Substring(at + 1); string output = headers + "\r\n" + (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(reqBody) ? reqBody + "\r\n" : string.Empty) + Separator + "\r\n\r\n"; BeginInvoke(new Action<string>((text) => { txtCapture.AppendText(text); UpdateButtonStatus(); }), output); } The code starts by filtering out some requests based on the CaptureOptions I set before the capture is started. These options/filters are applied when requests actually come in. This is very useful to help narrow down the requests that are captured for playback based on options the user picked. I find it useful to limit requests to a certain domain for captures, as well as filtering out some request types like static resources – images, css, scripts etc. This is of course optional, but I think it’s a common scenario and WebSurge makes good use of this feature. AfterSessionComplete like other FiddlerCore events, provides a Session object parameter which contains all the request and response details. There are oRequest and oResponse objects to hold their respective data. In my case I’m interested in the raw request headers and body only, as you can see in the commented code you can also retrieve the response headers and body. Here the code captures the request headers and body and simply appends the output to the textbox on the screen. Note that the Fiddler events are asynchronous, so in order to display the content in the UI they have to be marshaled back the UI thread with BeginInvoke, which here simply takes the generated headers and appends it to the existing textbox test on the form. As each request is processed, the headers are captured and appended to the bottom of the textbox resulting in a Session HTTP capture in the format that Web Surge internally supports, which is basically raw request headers with a customized 1st HTTP Header line that includes the full URL rather than a server relative URL. When the capture is done the user can either copy the raw HTTP session to the clipboard, or directly save it to file. This raw capture format is the same format WebSurge and also Fiddler use to import/export request data. While this code is application specific, it demonstrates the kind of logic that you can easily apply to the request capture process, which is one of the reasonsof why FiddlerCore is so powerful. You get to choose what content you want to look up as part of your own application logic and you can then decide how to capture or use that data as part of your application. The actual captured data in this case is only a string. The user can edit the data by hand or in the the case of WebSurge, save it to disk and automatically open the captured session as a new load test. Stopping the FiddlerCore Proxy Finally to stop capturing requests you simply disconnect the event handler and call the FiddlerApplication.ShutDown() method:void Stop() { FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete -= FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; if (FiddlerApplication.IsStarted()) FiddlerApplication.Shutdown(); } As you can see, adding HTTP capture functionality to an application is very straight forward. FiddlerCore offers tons of features I’m not even touching on here – I suspect basic captures are the most common scenario, but a lot of different things can be done with FiddlerCore’s simple API interface. Sky’s the limit! The source code for this sample capture form (WinForms) is provided as part of this article. Adding Fiddler Certificates with FiddlerCore One of the sticking points in West Wind WebSurge has been that if you wanted to capture HTTPS/SSL traffic, you needed to have the full version of Fiddler and have HTTPS decryption enabled. Essentially you had to use Fiddler to configure HTTPS decryption and the associated installation of the Fiddler local client certificate that is used for local decryption of incoming SSL traffic. While this works just fine, requiring to have Fiddler installed and then using a separate application to configure the SSL functionality isn’t ideal. Fortunately FiddlerCore actually includes the tools to register the Fiddler Certificate directly using FiddlerCore. Why does Fiddler need a Certificate in the first Place? Fiddler and FiddlerCore are essentially HTTP proxies which means they inject themselves into the HTTP conversation by re-routing HTTP traffic to a special HTTP port (8888 by default for Fiddler) and then forward the HTTP data to the original client. Fiddler injects itself as the system proxy in using the WinInet Windows settings  which are the same settings that Internet Explorer uses and that are configured in the Windows and Internet Explorer Internet Settings dialog. Most HTTP clients running on Windows pick up and apply these system level Proxy settings before establishing new HTTP connections and that’s why most clients automatically work once Fiddler – or FiddlerCore/WebSurge are running. For plain HTTP requests this just works – Fiddler intercepts the HTTP requests on the proxy port and then forwards them to the original port (80 for HTTP and 443 for SSL typically but it could be any port). For SSL however, this is not quite as simple – Fiddler can easily act as an HTTPS/SSL client to capture inbound requests from the server, but when it forwards the request to the client it has to also act as an SSL server and provide a certificate that the client trusts. This won’t be the original certificate from the remote site, but rather a custom local certificate that effectively simulates an SSL connection between the proxy and the client. If there is no custom certificate configured for Fiddler the SSL request fails with a certificate validation error. The key for this to work is that a custom certificate has to be installed that the HTTPS client trusts on the local machine. For a much more detailed description of the process you can check out Eric Lawrence’s blog post on Certificates. If you’re using the desktop version of Fiddler you can install a local certificate into the Windows certificate store. Fiddler proper does this from the Options menu: This operation does several things: It installs the Fiddler Root Certificate It sets trust to this Root Certificate A new client certificate is generated for each HTTPS site monitored Certificate Installation with FiddlerCore You can also provide this same functionality using FiddlerCore which includes a CertMaker class. Using CertMaker is straight forward to use and it provides an easy way to create some simple helpers that can install and uninstall a Fiddler Root certificate:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } return true; } InstallCertificate() works by first checking whether the root certificate is already installed and if it isn’t goes ahead and creates a new one. The process of creating the certificate is a two step process – first the actual certificate is created and then it’s moved into the certificate store to become trusted. I’m not sure why you’d ever split these operations up since a cert created without trust isn’t going to be of much value, but there are two distinct steps. When you trigger the trustRootCert() method, a message box will pop up on the desktop that lets you know that you’re about to trust a local private certificate. This is a security feature to ensure that you really want to trust the Fiddler root since you are essentially installing a man in the middle certificate. It’s quite safe to use this generated root certificate, because it’s been specifically generated for your machine and thus is not usable from external sources, the only way to use this certificate in a trusted way is from the local machine. IOW, unless somebody has physical access to your machine, there’s no useful way to hijack this certificate and use it for nefarious purposes (see Eric’s post for more details). Once the Root certificate has been installed, FiddlerCore/Fiddler create new certificates for each site that is connected to with HTTPS. You can end up with quite a few temporary certificates in your certificate store. To uninstall you can either use Fiddler and simply uncheck the Decrypt HTTPS traffic option followed by the remove Fiddler certificates button, or you can use FiddlerCore’s CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts() which removes the root cert and any of the intermediary certificates Fiddler created. Keep in mind that when you uninstall you uninstall the certificate for both FiddlerCore and Fiddler, so use UninstallCertificate() with care and realize that you might affect the Fiddler application’s operation by doing so as well. When to check for an installed Certificate Note that the check to see if the root certificate exists is pretty fast, while the actual process of installing the certificate is a relatively slow operation that even on a fast machine takes a few seconds. Further the trust operation pops up a message box so you probably don’t want to install the certificate repeatedly. Since the check for the root certificate is fast, you can easily put a call to InstallCertificate() in any capture startup code – in which case the certificate installation only triggers when a certificate is in fact not installed. Personally I like to make certificate installation explicit – just like Fiddler does, so in WebSurge I use a small drop down option on the menu to install or uninstall the SSL certificate:   This code calls the InstallCertificate and UnInstallCertificate functions respectively – the experience with this is similar to what you get in Fiddler with the extra dialog box popping up to prompt confirmation for installation of the root certificate. Once the cert is installed you can then capture SSL requests. There’s a gotcha however… Gotcha: FiddlerCore Certificates don’t stick by Default When I originally tried to use the Fiddler certificate installation I ran into an odd problem. I was able to install the certificate and immediately after installation was able to capture HTTPS requests. Then I would exit the application and come back in and try the same HTTPS capture again and it would fail due to a missing certificate. CertMaker.rootCertExists() would return false after every restart and if re-installed the certificate a new certificate would get added to the certificate store resulting in a bunch of duplicated root certificates with different keys. What the heck? CertMaker and BcMakeCert create non-sticky CertificatesI turns out that FiddlerCore by default uses different components from what the full version of Fiddler uses. Fiddler uses a Windows utility called MakeCert.exe to create the Fiddler Root certificate. FiddlerCore however installs the CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll assemblies, which use a different crypto library (Bouncy Castle) for certificate creation than MakeCert.exe which uses the Windows Crypto API. The assemblies provide support for non-windows operation for Fiddler under Mono, as well as support for some non-Windows certificate platforms like iOS and Android for decryption. The bottom line is that the FiddlerCore provided bouncy castle assemblies are not sticky by default as the certificates created with them are not cached as they are in Fiddler proper. To get certificates to ‘stick’ you have to explicitly cache the certificates in Fiddler’s internal preferences. A cache aware version of InstallCertificate looks something like this:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", null); App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", null); } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = null; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = null; return true; } In this code I store the Fiddler cert and private key in an application configuration settings that’s stored with the application settings (App.Configuration.UrlCapture object). These settings automatically persist when WebSurge is shut down. The values are read out of Fiddler’s internal preferences store which is set after a new certificate has been created. Likewise I clear out the configuration settings when the certificate is uninstalled. In order for these setting to be used you have to also load the configuration settings into the Fiddler preferences *before* a call to rootCertExists() is made. I do this in the capture form’s constructor:public FiddlerCapture(StressTestForm form) { InitializeComponent(); CaptureConfiguration = App.Configuration.UrlCapture; MainForm = form; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert)) { FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key); FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert); }} This is kind of a drag to do and not documented anywhere that I could find, so hopefully this will save you some grief if you want to work with the stock certificate logic that installs with FiddlerCore. MakeCert provides sticky Certificates and the same functionality as Fiddler But there’s actually an easier way. If you want to skip the above Fiddler preference configuration code in your application you can choose to distribute MakeCert.exe instead of certmaker.dll and bcmakecert.dll. When you use MakeCert.exe, the certificates settings are stored in Windows so they are available without any custom configuration inside of your application. It’s easier to integrate and as long as you run on Windows and you don’t need to support iOS or Android devices is simply easier to deal with. To integrate into your project, you can remove the reference to CertMaker.dll (and the BcMakeCert.dll assembly) from your project. Instead copy MakeCert.exe into your output folder. To make sure MakeCert.exe gets pushed out, include MakeCert.exe in your project and set the Build Action to None, and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer. Note that the CertMaker.dll reference in the project has been removed and on disk the files for Certmaker.dll, as well as the BCMakeCert.dll files on disk. Keep in mind that these DLLs are resources of the FiddlerCore NuGet package, so updating the package may end up pushing those files back into your project. Once MakeCert.exe is distributed FiddlerCore checks for it first before using the assemblies so as long as MakeCert.exe exists it’ll be used for certificate creation (at least on Windows). Summary FiddlerCore is a pretty sweet tool, and it’s absolutely awesome that we get to plug in most of the functionality of Fiddler right into our own applications. A few years back I tried to build this sort of functionality myself for an app and ended up giving up because it’s a big job to get HTTP right – especially if you need to support SSL. FiddlerCore now provides that functionality as a turnkey solution that can be plugged into your own apps easily. The only downside is FiddlerCore’s documentation for more advanced features like certificate installation which is pretty sketchy. While for the most part FiddlerCore’s feature set is easy to work with without any documentation, advanced features are often not intuitive to gleam by just using Intellisense or the FiddlerCore help file reference (which is not terribly useful). While Eric Lawrence is very responsive on his forum and on Twitter, there simply isn’t much useful documentation on Fiddler/FiddlerCore available online. If you run into trouble the forum is probably the first place to look and then ask a question if you can’t find the answer. The best documentation you can find is Eric’s Fiddler Book which covers a ton of functionality of Fiddler and FiddlerCore. The book is a great reference to Fiddler’s feature set as well as providing great insights into the HTTP protocol. The second half of the book that gets into the innards of HTTP is an excellent read for anybody who wants to know more about some of the more arcane aspects and special behaviors of HTTP – it’s well worth the read. While the book has tons of information in a very readable format, it’s unfortunately not a great reference as it’s hard to find things in the book and because it’s not available online you can’t electronically search for the great content in it. But it’s hard to complain about any of this given the obvious effort and love that’s gone into this awesome product for all of these years. A mighty big thanks to Eric Lawrence  for having created this useful tool that so many of us use all the time, and also to Telerik for picking up Fiddler/FiddlerCore and providing Eric the resources to support and improve this wonderful tool full time and keeping it free for all. Kudos! Resources FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore NuGet Fiddler Capture Sample Form Fiddler Capture Form in West Wind WebSurge (GitHub) Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler Book© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in .NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • How To Switch Back to Outlook 2007 After the 2010 Beta Ends

    - by Matthew Guay
    Are you switching back to Outlook 2007 after trying out Office 2010 beta?  Here’s how you can restore your Outlook data and keep everything working fine after the switch. Whenever you install a newer version of Outlook, it will convert your profile and data files to the latest format.  This makes them work the best in the newer version of Outlook, but may cause problems if you decide to revert to an older version.  If you installed Outlook 2010 beta, it automatically imported and converted your profile from Outlook 2007.  When the beta expires, you will either have to reinstall Office 2007 or purchase a copy of Office 2010. If you choose to reinstall Office 2007, you may notice an error message each time you open Outlook. Outlook will still work fine and all of your data will be saved, but this error message can get annoying.  Here’s how you can create a new profile, import all of your old data, and get rid of this error message. Banish the Error Message with a New Profile To get rid of this error message, we need to create a new Outlook profile.  First, make sure your Outlook data files are backed up.  Your messages, contacts, calendar, and more are stored in a .pst file in your appdata folder.  Enter the following in the address bar of an Explorer window to open your Outlook data folder, and replace username with your user name: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook Copy the Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) files that contain your data. Its name is usually your email address, though it may have a different name.  If in doubt, select all of the Outlook Personal Folders files, copy them, and save them in another safe place (such as your Documents folder). Now, let’s remove your old profile.  Open Control Panel, and select Mail.  In Windows Vista or 7, simply enter “Mail” in the search box and select the first entry. Click the “Show Profiles…” button. Now, select your Outlook profile, and click Remove.  This will not delete your data files, but will remove them from Outlook. Press Yes to confirm that you wish to remove this profile. Open Outlook, and you will be asked to create a new profile.  Enter a name for your new profile, and press Ok. Now enter your email account information to setup Outlook as normal. Outlook will attempt to automatically configure your account settings.  This usually works for accounts with popular email systems, but if it fails to find your information you can enter it manually.  Press finish when everything’s done. Outlook will now go ahead and download messages from your email account.  In our test, we used a Gmail account that still had all of our old messages online.  Those files are backed up in our old Outlook data files, so we can save time and not download them.  Click the Send/Receive button on the bottom of the window, and select “Cancel Send/Receive”. Restore Your Old Outlook Data Let’s add our old Outlook file back to Outlook 2007.  Exit Outlook, and then go back to Control Panel, and select Mail as above.  This time, click the Data Files button. Click the Add button on the top left. Select “Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst)”, and click Ok. Now, select your old Outlook data file.  It should be in the folder that opens by default; if not, browse to the backup copy we saved earlier, and select it. Press Ok at the next dialog to accept the default settings. Now, select the data file we just imported, and click “Set as Default”. Now, all of your old messages, appointments, contacts, and everything else will be right in Outlook ready for you.  Click Ok, and then open Outlook to see the change. All of the data that was in Outlook 2010 is now ready to use in Outlook 2007.  You won’t have to wait to re-download all of your emails from the server since everything’s still here ready to be used.  And when you open Outlook, you won’t see any error messages, either! Conclusion Migrating your Outlook profile back to Outlook 2007 is fairly easy, and with these steps, you can avoid seeing an error message every time you open Outlook.  With all your data in tact, you’re ready to get back to work instead of getting frustrated with Outlook.  Many of us use webmail and keep all of our messages in the cloud, but even on broadband connections it can take a long time to download several gigabytes of emails. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Opening Attachments in Outlook 2007 by KeyboardQuickly Create Appointments from Tasks with Outlook 2007’s To-Do BarFix For Outlook 2007 Constantly Asking for Password on VistaPin Microsoft Outlook to the Desktop BackgroundOur Look at the LinkedIn Social Connector for Outlook TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook

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  • SQL SERVER – Retrieve and Explore Database Backup without Restoring Database – Idera virtual databas

    - by pinaldave
    I recently downloaded Idera’s SQL virtual database, and tested it. There are a few things about this tool which caught my attention. My Scenario It is quite common in real life that sometimes observing or retrieving older data is necessary; however, it had changed as time passed by. The full database backup was 40 GB in size, and, to restore it on our production server, it usually takes around 16 to 22 minutes, depending on the load server that is usually present. This range in time varies from one server to another as per the configuration of the computer. Some other issues we used to have are the following: When we try to restore a large 40-GB database, we needed at least that much space on our production server. Once in a while, we even had to make changes in the restored database, and use the said changed and restored database for our purpose, making it more time-consuming. My Solution I have heard a lot about the Idera’s SQL virtual database tool.. Well, right after we started to test this tool, we found out that it really delivers what it promises. Using this software was very easy and we were able to restore our database from backup in less than 2 minutes, sparing us from the usual longer time of 16–22 minutes. The needful was finished in a total of 10 minutes. Another interesting observation is that there is no need to have an additional space for restoring the database. For complete database restoration, the single additional MB on the drive is not required anymore. We can use the database in the same way as our regular database, and there is no need for any additional configuration and setup. Let us look at the most relevant points of this product based on my initial experience: Quick restoration of the database backup No additional space required for database restoration virtual database has no physical .MDF or .LDF The database which is restored is, in fact, the backup file converted in the virtual database. DDL and DML queries can be executed against this virtually restored database. Regular backup operation can be implemented against virtual database, creating a physical .bak file that can be used for future use. There was no observed degradation in performance on the original database as well the restored virtual database. Additional T-SQL queries can be let off on the virtual database. Well, this summarizes my quick review. And, as I was saying, I am very impressed with the product and I plan to explore it more. There are many features that I have noticed in this tool, which I think can be very useful if properly understood. I had taken a few screenshots using my demo database afterwards. Let us see what other things this tool can do besides the mentioned activities. I am surprised with its performance so I want to know how exactly this feature works, specifically in the matter of why it does not create any additional files and yet, it still allows update on the virtually restored database. I guess I will have to send an e-mail to the developers of Idera and try to figure this out from them. I think this tool is very useful, and it delivers a high level of performance way more than what I expected. Soon, I will write a review for additional uses of SQL virtual database.. If you are using SQL virtual database in your production environment, I am eager to learn more about it and your experience while using it. The ‘Virtual’ Part of virtual database When I set out to test this software, I thought virtual database had something to do with Hyper-V or visualization. In fact, the virtual database is a kind of database which shows up in your SQL Server Management Studio without actually restoring or even creating it. This tool creates a database in SSMS from the backup of the same database. The backup, however, works virtually the same way as original database. Potential Usage of virtual database: As soon as I described this tool to my teammate, I think his very first reaction was, “hey, if we have this then there is no need for log shipping.” I find his comment very interesting as log shipping is something where logs are moved to another server. In fact, there are no updates on the database from log; I would rather compare it with Snapshot Replication. In fact, whatever we use, snapshot replicated database can be similarly used and configured with virtual database. I totally believe that we can use it for reporting purpose. In fact, after this database was configured, I think the uses of this tool are unlimited. I will have to spend some more time studying it and will get back to you. Click on images to see larger images. virtual database Console Harddrive Space before virtual database Setup Attach Full Backup Screen Backup on Harddrive Attach Full Backup Screen with Settings virtual database Setup – less than 60 sec virtual database Setup – Online Harddrive Space after virtual database Setup Point in Time Recovery Option – Timeline View virtual database Summary No Performance Difference between Regular DB vs Virtual DB Please note that all SQL Server MVP gets free license of this software. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com), Idera (virtual database) Filed under: Database, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Add-On, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Data Storage, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Idera

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  • May 20th Links: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, .NET 4, VS 2010, Silverlight

    - by ScottGu
    Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series and ASP.NET MVC 2 series for other on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET MVC How to Localize an ASP.NET MVC Application: Michael Ceranski has a good blog post that describes how to localize ASP.NET MVC 2 applications. ASP.NET MVC with jTemplates Part 1 and Part 2: Steve Gentile has a nice two-part set of blog posts that demonstrate how to use the jTemplate and DataTable jQuery libraries to implement client-side data binding with ASP.NET MVC. CascadingDropDown jQuery Plugin for ASP.NET MVC: Raj Kaimal has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to implement a dynamically constructed cascading dropdownlist on the client using jQuery and ASP.NET MVC. How to Configure VS 2010 Code Coverage for ASP.NET MVC Unit Tests: Visual Studio enables you to calculate the “code coverage” of your unit tests.  This measures the percentage of code within your application that is exercised by your tests – and can give you a sense of how much test coverage you have.  Gunnar Peipman demonstrates how to configure this for ASP.NET MVC projects. Shrinkr URL Shortening Service Sample: A nice open source application and code sample built by Kazi Manzur that demonstrates how to implement a URL Shortening Services (like bit.ly) using ASP.NET MVC 2 and EF4.  More details here. Creating RSS Feeds in ASP.NET MVC: Damien Guard has a nice post that describes a cool new “FeedResult” class he created that makes it easy to publish and expose RSS feeds from within ASP.NET MVC sites. NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC Part 1 and Part 2: Nice two-part blog series by Shiju Varghese on how to use MongoDB (a document database) with ASP.NET MVC.  If you are interested in document databases also make sure to check out the Raven DB project from Ayende. Using the FCKEditor with ASP.NET MVC: Quick blog post that describes how to use FCKEditor – an open source HTML Text Editor – with ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET Replace Html.Encode Calls with the New HTML Encoding Syntax: Phil Haack has a good blog post that describes a useful way to quickly update your ASP.NET pages and ASP.NET MVC views to use the new <%: %> encoding syntax in ASP.NET 4.  I blogged about the new <%: %> syntax – it provides an easy and concise way to HTML encode content. Integrating Twitter into an ASP.NET Website using OAuth: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to take advantage of Twiter within an ASP.NET Website using the OAuth protocol – which is a simple, secure protocol for granting API access. Creating an ASP.NET report using VS 2010 Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3: Raj Kaimal has a nice three part set of blog posts that detail how to use SQL Server Reporting Services, ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 to create a dynamic reporting solution. Three Hidden Extensibility Gems in ASP.NET 4: Phil Haack blogs about three obscure but useful extensibility points enabled with ASP.NET 4. .NET 4 Entity Framework 4 Video Series: Julie Lerman has a nice, free, 7-part video series on MSDN that walks through how to use the new EF4 capabilities with VS 2010 and .NET 4.  I’ll be covering EF4 in a blog series that I’m going to start shortly as well. Getting Lazy with System.Lazy: System.Lazy and System.Lazy<T> are new features in .NET 4 that provide a way to create objects that may need to perform time consuming operations and defer the execution of the operation until it is needed.  Derik Whittaker has a nice write-up that describes how to use it. LINQ to Twitter: Nifty open source library on Codeplex that enables you to use LINQ syntax to query Twitter. Visual Studio 2010 Using Intellitrace in VS 2010: Chris Koenig has a nice 10 minute video that demonstrates how to use the new Intellitrace features of VS 2010 to enable DVR playback of your debug sessions. Make the VS 2010 IDE Colors look like VS 2008: Scott Hanselman has a nice blog post that covers the Visual Studio Color Theme Editor extension – which allows you to customize the VS 2010 IDE however you want. How to understand your code using Dependency Graphs, Sequence Diagrams, and the Architecture Explorer: Jennifer Marsman has a nice blog post describes how to take advantage of some of the new architecture features within VS 2010 to quickly analyze applications and legacy code-bases. How to maintain control of your code using Layer Diagrams: Another great blog post by Jennifer Marsman that demonstrates how to setup a “layer diagram” within VS 2010 to enforce clean layering within your applications.  This enables you to enforce a compiler error if someone inadvertently violates a layer design rule. Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer Extension: Useful VS 2010 extension that enables you to quickly collapse “child nodes” within the Visual Studio Solution Explorer.  If you have deeply nested project structures this extension is useful. Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Building a Simple Windows Phone 7 Application: A nice tutorial blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of Expression Blend to create an animated Windows Phone 7 application. If you haven’t checked out my Windows Phone 7 Twitter Tutorial I also recommend reading that. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s "Find a Hoster” page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers.

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  • How To Configure Remote Desktop To Hyper-V Guest Virtual Machines

    - by Brian Jackett
    Configuring Remote Desktop (RDP) from a host Hyper-V machine to a guest virtual machine can be tricky, so this post is dedicated to the issues and resolution steps I went through to allow RDP.  Cutting to the point, below are the things to look for followed by some explanation about my scenario if you care to read.  This is not an exhaustive list of what is required, just the items that were causing problems for my particular scenario. Requirements Allow Remote Desktop Connections in guest OS. The network adapter type must allow communication with host machine (e.g. use an “Internal” virtual adapter.) If running Server 2008 R2 on guest, network discovery mode must be turned on. If running Server 2008 R2 on guest, the services supporting network discovery mode must be running: - DNS Client - Function Discovery Resource Publication - SSDP Discovery - UPnP Device Host My Environment     A quick word about my environment.  I am running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper V on my laptop and numerous guest VMs running Windows Server 2003 R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  I run a domain controller VM and then 1 or 2 SharePoint servers depending on my work needs.  I’ve found this setup to work well except when it comes to the display window for my VMs. The Issue     Ever since I began running Hyper-V I haven’t been able to RDP to my guest VMs which means the resolution for my connection windows ha been limited to what the native Hyper-V connections allow.  During personal use I can put the resolution up to 1152 x 864, but during presentations I am usually limited to a measly 800 x 600.  That is until today when I decided to fully investigate why I couldn’t connect via RDP.     First a thank you to John Ross (@johnrossjr), Christina Wheeler (@cwheeler76) and Clayton Cobb (@warrtalon) for various suggestions while I was researching tonight.  As it turns out I had not 1, not 2, but 3 items preventing me from using RDP.  Let’s dig into the requirements above. Allow RDP Connection     This item I had previously taken care of, but it bears repeating because by default Windows Server 2008 R2 does not allow RDP connections.  Change the setting from “Don’t allow…” to whichever “Allow connections…” setting suits your needs.  I chose the less secure option as this is just my dev laptop. Network Adapter Type     When I originally configured my VMs I configured each to use 2 network adapters: one using the physical ethernet adapter for internet use and a virtual private adapter for communication between the VMs.  The connection for the ethernet adapter is an "”External” adapter and thus doesn’t connect between the host and guest.  The virtual private adapter allowed communication ONLY between the VMs and not to my host.  There is a third option “Internal” which allows communication between VMs as well as to the host.  After finding out this distinction I promptly created an Internal network adapter and assigned that to my VMs. Turn On Network Discovery     Seems like a pretty common sense thing, but in order to allow remote desktop connections the target computer must able to be found by the source computer (explained here.)  One of the settings that controls if a computer can be found on the network is aptly named Network Discovery.  By default Windows Server 2008 R2 turns Network Discovery off for security purposes.  To enable it open up the Network and Sharing Center.  Click “Change Advanced Sharing Settings” on the left.  On the following screen select “Turn on network discovery” for the currently used profile and click Save Settings.  You may notice though that your selection to turn on network discovery doesn’t save.  If this is the case then you most likely don’t have the supporting services running (as was my case.) Network Discovery Supporting Services     There are a total of 4 services (listed again below) that need to be running before you can turn on network discovery (explained here.)  The below images highlight these services.  In my guest VM I found that I had DNS Client already running while the other 3 were disabled.  I set them all to enabled and started the ones that were stopped.  After this change I returned to the Sharing settings screen and found that Network Discovery was turned on.  I’m not sure whether this was picking up my attempt to turn it on previously or if starting those services turned it on.  Either way the end result was a success. - DNS Client - Function Discovery Resource Publication - SSDP Discovery - UPnP Device Host Before and After Results     The first image is the smaller square shaped viewing window used by the Hyper-V native connection.  The second is the full-screen RDP connection in all its widescreen glory. Conclusion     Over the past few months I’ve found Hyper-V to be very useful for virtualizing my development environments, but I’ve also had a steep learning curve to get various items configured just right.  Allowing RDP connections to guest VMs was one area that I hadn’t been able to get right for the longest time.  Now that I resolved these issues I hope that others can avoid the pitfalls that I ran into.  If you know of any other items I left off feel free to let me know.        -Frog Out   Links Turning on Network Discovery http://sqlblog.com/blogs/john_paul_cook/archive/2009/08/15/remote-desktop-connection-on-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx Services required for Network Discovery http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/2e1fea01-3f2b-4c46-a631-a8db34ed4f84

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  • XNA Notes 009

    - by George Clingerman
    This past week the MVPs (myself included) were on Microsoft campus for the MVP summit. So I apologize in advance if you did something cool or heard of something cool happening with XNA and XBLIGs and it’s not in my notes. I did my best to stay on top of things, but honestly this community is fast and furious with what it’s doing and creating. I really can’t keep up and that’s fantastic! But here’s what I *did* notice while I was there on Microsoft Campus (and I did make sure to point out to the XNA team several of these very cool happenings while I had their ears). Time Critical XNA News: The XNA team wants you to know that Dream Build Play registration is now open! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/28/registration-now-open-for-dream-build-play-2011-challenge.aspx Join the XNA-UK create on March 24, 2011 at the Microsoft Tech Days Conference http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/27/join-the-xna-uk-crew-at-the-microsoft-tech-days-conference-on-24th-march-2011.aspx XNA Team: Shawn Hargreaves shares one of the coolest things that’s happened in the XNA community http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/03/02/xbox-indies-pivot-view.aspx Nick Gravelyn continues his unique marketing/work prioritization strategy as he tries to get to 5,000 Pixel Man users before he makes Pixel Man 2 (and he’s almost there!) http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: A lot of the XNA MVPs were at the Microsoft MVP Summit 2011. Due to NDAs, most things can’t be shared, but I’m sure if you’re curious you could ask them about the general vibe and feeling they got from the team and the future of XNA/XBLIG and more. Catalin Zima and team release the free WP7 game Chickens Can Dream http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/41174062923390976 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/chickens-can-dream-is-live/ Charles Humphrey (NemoKrad) posts his March talk source and PowerPoint http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/03/04/march-2011-talk-post-processing-framework.aspx XNA Developers: Michael B. McLaughlin posts about ANTS Memory Profile and creates a CheckMemoryAllocationGame sample (extremely useful if you’re looking to see how much memory some operation allocates!) http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/28/ants-memory-profiler-7.0-review.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/01/checkmemoryallocationgame-sample.aspx Andy Schatz (2009 IGF winner for Monaco) talking XNA at GDC 2011 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33313/GDC_2011_Andy_Schatz_Ill_Make_My_Last_Game_When_I_Die.php Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Clover: A Curious Tale by BinaryTweed is coming as a Deal of the Week during St. Patricks Day http://majornelson.com/archive/2011/03/03/comingsoontothexboxlivemarketplacemarchthird.aspx Ska Studios away at GDC but still very post happy as always http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/02/swamped-picture-pack/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/28/the-february-showcase/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/25/good-morning-gato-51-smelling-the-roses/ Just Press Start interviews Matthew Mikuszewski of Darkwind Media about Blocks Indie http://justpressstart.net/?p=516 Gamergeddon Xbox Indie Game Round Up - February 27th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/27/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-27th/ http://www.gamergeddon.com/category/xbox-360/indie-games/ GameMarx does a round up of all the Xbox Live Indie Game podcasts that are currently available http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/27/xbox-live-indie-game-podcasts.aspx GameMarx episode 11 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/26/ep-11-february-25-2011.aspx In perhaps what I feel is the most exciting news I’ve heard all week, Michael C. Neel (ViNull of GameMarx fame) re-launch XboxIndies.com! http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/03/01/the-relaunch-of-xboxindies-com.aspx http://xboxindies.com/ Armless Octopus shares a little of what they heard from Luke Schneider of Radiangames during his GDC 2011 talk http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/02/gdc-2011-luke-schneider-offers-insight-into-radiangames-success/ VVGindiecast Episode 1 with guests Derek Strickland(Mr_Deeke), Kris Steele(Kriswd40 from FunInfused Games) and Dave Voyles(From armlessoctopus.com) http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/25/vvgindiecast-xblig-podcast/ If you’re doing Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews get in touch with XboxIndies.com to get into their aggregated feed http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76931/467189.aspx#467189 B.U.T.T.O.N and Flotilla represented XNA very well at the Independent Games Festival (are there any more games entered that were created using XNA? Stand up and be heard!) http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2011.php?id=374 Armless Ocotopus interview at GDC 2011 with Soulcaster creator Ian Stocker http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/04/gdc-2011-interview-with-soulcaster-creator-ian-stocker/ MommysBestGames gets a nod in the DarkBasic newsletter where it features the Explosionade Editor (just do a search for Explosionade to get to the interesting bits!) http://www.thegamecreators.com/pages/newsletters/newsletter_issue_98.html You may be hearing the cries of FortressCraft (coming soon to XBLIG) being so wrong for stealing the idea from MineCraft. But did you know the the game MineCraft started from was an XNA game called Infiniminer? XNA is getting it’s fingers into EVERYTHING! http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Infiniminer XNA Development: TorqueX is NOT dead thanks to the tremendous efforts of the XNA Community working on the CEV (special thanks to @PinoEire for all his hard work on making that happen!) http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20878 http://torquecev.com/ Dave Henry has posted XNA 3.x adding platformer start kit to the network game state management on his new site http://twitter.com/#!/mort8088/status/43407715908853760 http://mort8088.com/2011/03/03/xna-3-x-adding-platformer-starter-kit-to-network-game-state-management/ Mark Bamford releases XNAViewer 4.0, great for running XNA games inside of a Windows Form (for building level editors, etc.) http://twitter.com/#!/xzodia04/status/43466830412660736 http://xnaviewer.codeplex.com/ Unit testing an XNA game with Resharper and NUnit http://smnbss.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/planetx-unit-testing-an-xna-game-with-resharper-and-nunit-wp7-xbox-xna/ XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 5 - Input (touch + gestures) http://ht.ly/1bxwUE Mike McLaughlin shares a link he stumbled across for those looking to understand vector and matrix math http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/42587074725036032 http://chortle.ccsu.edu/VectorLessons/vectorIndex.html DigitalRune Resources Pooling in XNA (Part 1) http://www.digitalrune.com/Support/Blog/tabid/719/EntryId/84/DigitalRune-Helper-Library-Resource-Pooling-in-XNA-Part-1.aspx JohnK “bobthecbuilder” released a new SunBurn Update that lowers the requirements for Windows Games http://twitter.com/#!/bobthecbuilder/status/43457306578522112 http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/johnk/archive/2011/03/03/sunburn-update-windows-redistributable.aspx Quick update on the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.4 development status http://indiefreaks.com/2011/03/04/quick-update-on-igf-v0-4-development/

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  • WCF REST on .Net 4.0

    - by AngelEyes
    A simple and straight forward article taken from: http://christopherdeweese.com/blog2/post/drop-the-soap-wcf-rest-and-pretty-uris-in-net-4 Drop the Soap: WCF, REST, and Pretty URIs in .NET 4 Years ago I was working in libraries when the Web 2.0 revolution began.  One of the things that caught my attention about early start-ups using the AJAX/REST/Web 2.0 model was how nice the URIs were for their applications.  Those were my first impressions of REST; pretty URIs.  Turns out there is a little more to it than that. REST is an architectural style that focuses on resources and structured ways to access those resources via the web.  REST evolved as an “anti-SOAP” movement, driven by developers who did not want to deal with all the complexity SOAP introduces (which is al lot when you don’t have frameworks hiding it all).  One of the biggest benefits to REST is that browsers can talk to rest services directly because REST works using URIs, QueryStrings, Cookies, SSL, and all those HTTP verbs that we don’t have to think about anymore. If you are familiar with ASP.NET MVC then you have been exposed to rest at some level.  MVC is relies heavily on routing to generate consistent and clean URIs.  REST for WCF gives you the same type of feel for your services.  Let’s dive in. WCF REST in .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4 This post will cover WCF REST in .NET 4 which drew heavily from the REST Starter Kit and community feedback.  There is basic REST support in .NET 3.5 SP1 and you can also grab the REST Starter Kit to enable some of the features you’ll find in .NET 4. This post will cover REST in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Getting Started To get started we’ll create a basic WCF Rest Service Application using the new on-line templates option in VS 2010: When you first install a template you are prompted with this dialog: Dude Where’s my .Svc File? The WCF REST template shows us the new way we can simply build services.  Before we talk about what’s there, let’s look at what is not there: The .Svc File An Interface Contract Dozens of lines of configuration that you have to change to make your service work REST in .NET 4 is greatly simplified and leverages the Web Routing capabilities used in ASP.NET MVC and other parts of the web frameworks.  With REST in .NET 4 you use a global.asax to set the route to your service using the new ServiceRoute class.  From there, the WCF runtime handles dispatching service calls to the methods based on the Uri Templates. global.asax using System; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.Web; using System.Web.Routing; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService {     public class Global : HttpApplication     {         void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             RegisterRoutes();         }         private static void RegisterRoutes()         {             RouteTable.Routes.Add(new ServiceRoute("TimeService",                 new WebServiceHostFactory(), typeof(TimeService)));         }     } } The web.config contains some new structures to support a configuration free deployment.  Note that this is the default config generated with the template.  I did not make any changes to web.config. web.config <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration>   <system.web>     <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" />   </system.web>   <system.webServer>     <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">       <add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule,            System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />     </modules>   </system.webServer>   <system.serviceModel>     <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true"/>     <standardEndpoints>       <webHttpEndpoint>         <!--             Configure the WCF REST service base address via the global.asax.cs file and the default endpoint             via the attributes on the <standardEndpoint> element below         -->         <standardEndpoint name="" helpEnabled="true" automaticFormatSelectionEnabled="true"/>       </webHttpEndpoint>     </standardEndpoints>   </system.serviceModel> </configuration> Building the Time Service We’ll create a simple “TimeService” that will return the current time.  Let’s start with the following code: using System; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.ServiceModel.Web; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService {     [ServiceContract]     [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]     [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.PerCall)]     public class TimeService     {         [WebGet(UriTemplate = "CurrentTime")]         public string CurrentTime()         {             return DateTime.Now.ToString();         }     } } The endpoint for this service will be http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService.  To get the current time http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService/CurrentTime will do the trick. The Results Are In Remember That Route In global.asax? Turns out it is pretty important.  When you set the route name, that defines the resource name starting after the host portion of the Uri. Help Pages in WCF 4 Another feature that came from the starter kit are the help pages.  To access the help pages simply append Help to the end of the service’s base Uri. Dropping the Soap Having dabbled with REST in the past and after using Soap for the last few years, the WCF 4 REST support is certainly refreshing.  I’m currently working on some REST implementations in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 and am looking forward to working on REST in .NET 4 and VS 2010.

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  • Oracle ADF Coverage at OOW

    - by Frank Nimphius
    Below is the schedule for all ADF related sessions at a glance. Note the Meet and greet session added for Wednesday Octiber 3rd from 4.30 pm to 5:30. Oracle ADF and Fusion Development General Session Mon 1 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM General Session: The Future of Development for Oracle Fusion—From Desktop to Mobile to Cloud Marriott Marquis - Salon 8 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM General Session: Extend Oracle Fusion Apps to Tablets/Smartphones with Oracle Mobile Technology Moscone West - 3014 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM General Session: Extend Oracle Applications to Mobile Devices with Oracle’s Mobile Technologies Moscone West - 3002/3004 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud Moscone West - 2002/2004 Conference Session Mon 1 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM Understanding Oracle ADF and Its Role in Oracle Fusion Moscone South - 306 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM Building Performant Oracle ADF Business Components to Meet Tomorrow’s Needs Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM End-to-End Oracle ADF Development in Eclipse Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM Classic Mistakes with Oracle Application Development Framework Marriott Marquis - Salon 7 Tues 2 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Oracle ADF Architecture Fundamentals Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Mobile-Enable Oracle Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Applications with Oracle ADF Moscone South - 306 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Secrets of Successful Projects with Oracle Application Development Framework Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Develop On-Device iPhone and iPad Apps Without Writing Any Objective-C Code Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM BPM, SOA, and Oracle ADF Combined: Patterns Learned from Oracle Fusion Applications Moscone West - 3003 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM The Future of Forms Is … Oracle Forms (and Friends) Moscone South - 306 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Best Practices for Integrating SOAP and REST Service into Oracle ADF Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 Wed 3 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Mobile Apps for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA Suite Moscone West - 3001 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Visualize This! Best Practices for Data Visualization in Desktop and Mobile Apps Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Set Up Your Oracle ADF Project and Development Team for Productivity: Seven Essential Tips Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM How to Migrate an Oracle Forms Application to Oracle ADF Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Oracle ADF: Lessons Learned in Real-World Implementations Moscone South - 309 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM Oracle ADF Implementations Around the Globe: Best Practices Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM Oracle Developer Cloud Services Marriott Marquis - Salon 7 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF: What’s New Hilton San Francisco - Continental Ballroom 5 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Mobile Solutions for Oracle E-Business Suite Applications: Technical Insight Moscone West - 2020 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM The Tie That Binds: An Introduction to Oracle ADF Bindings Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 Thur 4 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM Using Oracle ADF with Oracle E-Business Suite: The Full Integration View Moscone West - 3003 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM Deep Dive into Oracle ADF: Advanced Techniques Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM Monitor, Analyze, and Troubleshoot Your Oracle ADF Application Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 HOL (Hands-on Lab) Mon 1 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM Build Mobile Applications for Oracle E-Business Suite Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM Introduction to Oracle ADF: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 3/4 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM Application Lifecycle Management with Oracle JDeveloper: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 3/4 Tues 2 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A Wed 3 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Introduction to Oracle ADF: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 3/4 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Build Mobile Applications for Oracle E-Business Suite Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A Thur 4 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 10A 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM Introduction to Oracle ADF: Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 3/4 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM Oracle ADF for Java EE Developers with Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse Marriott Marquis - Salon 3/4 BOF (Birds-of-a-Feather) Mon 1 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 6:15 PM - 7:00 PM How to Get Started with Oracle ADF Marriott Marquis - Club Room 7:15 PM - 8:00 PM Building Next-Generation Applications with Oracle ADF and Oracle BPM Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3 7:15 PM - 8:00 PM The Future of Oracle Forms: Upgrade, Modernize, or Migrate? Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C2 7:15 PM - 8:00 PM Oracle ADF Faces: One Site for Many Devices Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C1 - User Group Forum (Sunday Only) Sun 30 Sept, 2012 Time Title Location 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Oracle ADF Immersion: How an Oracle Forms Developer Immersed Himself in the Oracle ADF World Moscone South - 305 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Deploy with Joy: Using Hudson to Build and Deploy Your Oracle ADF Applications Moscone South - 305 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM ADF EMG User Group: A Peek into the Oracle ADF Architecture of Oracle Fusion Applications Moscone South - 305 12:45 PM - 3:45 PM ADF EMG User Group: Oracle Fusion Middleware Live Application Development Demo Moscone South - 305 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM Mobile Development with Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF Moscone West - 2010 Demos Demo Location Developer Moscone North, Upper Lobby - N-002 Oracle ADF Mobile Development Moscone North, Upper Lobby - N-001 Oracle Eclipse Projects Hilton San Francisco, Grand Ballroom - HHJ-008 Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse Moscone South, Right - S-208 Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF Moscone South, Right - S-207 Exhibits 0 Exhibitor Location Accenture Moscone South - 1813 Moscone South - 2221 Infosys Moscone South - 1701 Moscone South - SMR-005 Innowave Technology Moscone South - 2309 ODTUG Moscone West, Level 2 Lobby - Kiosk in the User Groups Pavilion Oracle ADF Developers Meet Up Wednesday, Oct 03 Time Activity Location 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM Stop by the OTN Lounge and meet other Oracle ADF & Fusion developers as well as product managers and engineers who work on Oracle ADF, ADF Mobile and ADF Essentials. Feedback and questions welcome, or simply stop by and say ‘hi!’ and enjoy free beer. OTN Lounge

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  • Ask How-To Geek: Learning the Office Ribbon, Booting to USB with an Old BIOS, and Snapping Windows

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    You’ve got questions and we’ve got answers. Today we highlight how to master the new Office interface, USB boot a computer with outdated BIOS, and snap windows to preset locations. Learning the New Office Ribbon Dear How-To Geek, I feel silly asking this (in light of how long the new Office interface has been out) but my company finally got around to upgrading from Windows XP and Office 2000 so the new interface it totally new to me. Can you recommend any resources for quickly learning the Office ribbon and the new changes? I feel completely lost after two decades of the old Office interface. Help! Sincerely, Where the Hell is Everything? Dear Where the Hell, We think most people were with you at some point in the last few years. “Where the hell is…” could possibly be the slogan for the new ribbon interface. You could browse through some of the dry tutorials online or even get a weighty book on the topic but the best way to learn something new is to get hands on. Ribbon Hero turns learning the new Office features and ribbon layout into a game. It’s no vigorous round of Team Fortress mind you, but it’s significantly more fun than reading a training document. Check out how to install and configure Ribbon Hero here. You’ll be teaching your coworkers new tricks in no time. Boot via USB with an Old BIOS Dear How-To Geek, I’m trying to repurpose some old computers by updating them with lightweight Linux distros but the BIOS on most of the machines is ancient and creaky. How ancient? It doesn’t even support booting from a USB device! I have a large flash drive that I’ve turned into a master installation tool for jobs like this but I can’t use it. The computers in question have USB ports; they just aren’t recognized during the boot process. What can I do? USB Bootin’ in Boise Dear USB Bootin’, It’s great you’re working to breathe life into old hardware! You’ve run into one of the limitations of older BIOSes, USB was around but nobody was thinking about booting off of it. Fortunately if you have a computer old enough to have that kind of BIOS it’s likely to also has a floppy drive or a CDROM drive. While you could make a bootable CDROM for your application we understand that you want to keep using the master USB installer you’ve made. In light of that we recommend PLoP Boot Manager. Think of it like a boot manager for your boot manager. Using it you can create a bootable floppy or CDROM that will enable USB booting of your master USB drive. Make a CD and a floppy version and you’ll have everything in your toolkit you need for future computer refurbishing projects. Read up on creating bootable media with PLoP Boot Manager here. Snapping Windows to Preset Coordinates Dear How-To Geek, Once upon a time I had a company laptop that came with a little utility that snapped windows to preset areas of the screen. This was long before the snap-to-side features in Windows 7. You could essentially configure your screen into a grid pattern of your choosing and then windows would neatly snap into those grids. I have no idea what it was called or if was anymore than a gimmick from the computer manufacturer, but I’d really like to have it on my new computer! Bend and Snap in San Francisco, Dear Bend and Snap, If we had to guess, we’d guess your company must have had a set of laptops from Acer as the program you’re describing sounds exactly like Acer GridVista. Fortunately for you the application was extremely popular and Acer released it independently of their hardware. If, by chance, you’ve since upgraded to a multiple monitor setup the app even supports multiple monitors—many of the configurations are handy for arranging IM windows and other auxiliary communication tools. Check out our guide to installing and configuring Acer GridVista here for more information. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Download the New Year in Japan Windows 7 Theme from Microsoft Once More Unto the Breach – Facebook Apps Can Now Access Your Address and Phone Number Dial Zero Speeds You Through Annoying Customer Service Menus Complete Dropquest 2011 and Receive Free Dropbox Storage Desktop Computer versus Laptop Wallpaper The Kids Have No Idea What Old Tech Is [Video]

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  • OBIEE 11.1.1 - OBIEE 11g Full Sample App on VMware Player 4

    - by user809526
    The Full Sample App is designed to run on Virtual Box. Let's describe how to run it on VMware Player 4. Open Virtualization Format Tool http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/automationtools/ovf VMware Player Documentation https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/player_pubs.html Full Sample App Deployment Guide sampleapp107-vbimage-deployguide-453583.pdf INSTALL VMplayer 4.0.0 as root LINUX # sh VMware-Player-4.0.0-471780.x86_64.bundle (A new VM is not needed and can be deleted later after that installation is completed. "I will install OS later" - blank hard disk Guest: linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5-64bits => rename to RHEL target: eg /a/root/vmware/ Max disk size: 5 GB (will be deleted) Disk: Single file Dummy RHEL.vmk, RHEL.vmdk is generated. "Delete VM from Disk" in VM Player.) Copy Full Sample App files to target /a/root/vmware/ WARNING: Select a target eg /a/root/vmware/ with lots of free space, 95 GB. Check checksums (md5sum). Please do it! ff85c7eacf7fb8c382e98da875e879e1  Sampleapp_v107_GA-disk1.vmdk 973258cb3c7d64ab03ae853278cf2233  Sampleapp_v107_GA-disk2.vmdk e576be16e36d810479736bfb15d050f5  Sampleapp_v107_GA-disk3.vmdk 3455df77279e53e07d5fee6712f1597d  Sampleapp_v107_GA-disk4.vmdk OVF FILE   Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf CONVERSION $ cd /a/root/vmware/ LINUX $ /usr/bin/ovftool -tt=ovf --compress=1 -dm=monolithicSparse Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf .  [dot] Opening OVF source: Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf Warning: No manifest file Opening OVF target: . Writing OVF package: Sampleapp_v107_GA/Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf Disk Transfer Completed                   Completed successfully WINDOWS CYGWIN $ /cygdrive/c/VMwarePlayer/OVFTool/ovftool.exe -tt=ovf --compress=1 -dm=monolithicSparse Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf .  [dot] Opening OVF source: Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf Warning: No manifest file Opening OVF target: . Writing OVF package: Sampleapp_v107_GA\Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf Disk Transfer Completed Completed successfully /a/root/vmware$ du -sk 49095328    .   [50 GB already occupied] IMPORT - First start of VM Player 4: /usr/bin/vmplayer "Open a Virtual Machine" Browse to /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf [the new generated .ovf] "Import Virtual Machine" dialog Name: Sampleapp_v107_GA Location: /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/storage [was /home/tdubois/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA] "Import" "The import failed because /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf did not pass OVF specification conformance or virtual hardware compliance checks. Click Retry to relax OVF specification..." "Retry" ; Long import /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/storage/Sampleapp_v107_GA.vmx and new .vmdk files are created. /a/root/vmware$ du -sk 95551384    .   [95 GB occupied] Full Sample App GUEST SETUP "Edit VM settings" min 3GB, 2+ processors, network bridged. For OBIEE + Essbase testing use 8 GB RAM hardware. At first time lauch of Full Sample App, leave OEL booting for several minutes undisturbed. Problem with X display server may occur [/usr/bin/Xorg ; man Xorg]. "Failed to start the X server.... Would you like to view the X server output to diagnose the problem?" "No" [tab key] "Would you like to try to configure the X server? Note that you will need the root password for this." "Yes" [oracle] X Display Settings 800x600 saved in /etc/X11/xorg.conf "Trying to restart the X server" Login as root/oracle in guest OEL. In guest OEL, Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools... Extract archive VMwareTools-8.8.0-471268.tar.gz all files in writable local directory eg /root In Terminal run Perl script # cd /root/vmware-tools-distrib ; ./vmware-install.pl [keep all default answers] Set keyboard layout System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts Restart X server eg System > Log Out root... , relogin Modify X resolution System > Preferences > Screen Resolution Full Sample App OEL login: oracle/oracle ; root/oracle [default US keyboard layout] Credentials are described in the 'sampleapp107-vbimage-deployguide-453583.pdf' The large files in /a/root/vmware/ /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/ may be removed. FAILURE REMARK: Adding the 4 original Sampleapp_v107_GA-disks[1234].vmdk to VM Player does NOT work as described below. "Edit VM settings" "Remove" "Hard Disk" "Edit VM settings" "Add" "Hard Disk" "Next" "Use an existing virtual disk" "Browse" "Finish" "Keep existing format" "Ok" for each 4 disks settings one by one. Start VM Player 4. "You do not have write access to a partition" Allow all Sampleapp_v107 OEL linux launches. OEL stalls silently after 'Checking filesystems'.

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  • aptitude update gives 404's for intrepid

    - by dotjoe
    I'm having issues trying to update my packages. I haven't used this server since last September and now I'm getting 404 errors on all the intrepid repos. How do I fix this? Thanks aptitude update Err http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/main Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.166 80] Err http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/restricted Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.166 80] Err http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/main Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.166 80] Err http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/restricted Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.166 80] Err http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/universe Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.166 80] Err http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/universe Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.166 80] Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/multiverse Packages Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/multiverse Sources Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/restricted Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/multiverse Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.166 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/restricted Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/universe Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/universe Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/multiverse Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/multiverse Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/main Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://security.ubuntu.com intrepid-security/multiverse Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.166 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/restricted Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/main Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/restricted Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/universe Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/universe Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/multiverse Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Err http://us.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/multiverse Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.31 80] Reading package lists... sources.list # # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Server 8.10 _Intrepid Ibex_ - Release i386 (20081028.1)]/ intrepid main restricted # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Server 8.10 _Intrepid Ibex_ - Release i386 (20081028.1)]/ intrepid main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-updates main restricted deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid universe deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-updates universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid multiverse deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid multiverse deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-updates multiverse deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-updates multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'backports' ## repository. ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. # deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-backports main restricted universe multiverse # deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-backports main restricted universe multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is ## offered by Canonical and the respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu ## users. # deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-security main restricted deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-security main restricted deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-security universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-security universe deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-security multiverse deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-security multiverse

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  • XNA Notes 007

    - by George Clingerman
    Every week I keep wondering if there’s going to be enough activity in the community to keep doing these notes on a weekly basis and every week I’m reminded of just how awesome and active the XNA community is. There’s engines being made, tutorials being created, games being crafted. There’s information being shared, questions being answered and then there’s another whole community around the Xbox LIVE Indie Games themselves. It’s really incredibly to just watch all that’s going on and I’m glad I’m playing a small part in all of this. So here’s what I noticed happening in the XNA community last week. If there’s things I’m missing, always feel free to let me know. I love learning about new corners of the XNA community that I wasn’t aware of or just have been missing! XNA Developers: Uditha Bandara held an XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://uditha.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities-event-update/ Binary Tweed gives his talks about Indie City and gives his opinion on the false promise of digital distribution http://www.develop-online.net/news/37053/OPINION-The-false-promise-of-digital-distribution Kris Steele posts his Trivia or Die postmortem http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=246 @MadNinjaSkills (James Johnston) posts his feelings on testing for XBLIG http://www.ezmuze.co.uk/101 Simon (@DDReaper) posts hints and tips for XNA developers to help get the size of their projects down http://twitter.com/#!/DDReaper/status/38279440924545024 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/17/look-at-the-size-of-that-thing.aspx Michael B. McLaughlin proving why he should be an XNA MVP posts the list of commonly used value types in XNA games http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/17/list-of-commonly-used-value-types-in-xna-games.aspx http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/38166541354811392 Paul Powell (@ITSligoPaul) posts about a common sprite batch as a game service http://itspaulsblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-common-sprite-batch-as-game-service.html @SigilXNA (John Defenbaugh) posts his new level editor video for the sequel to Opac’s Journey http://twitter.com/SigilXNA/statuses/36548174373982209 http://twitter.com/#!/SigilXNA/status/36548174373982209 http://youtu.be/QHbmxB_2AW8 @jwatte updates kW Animation for XNA 4.0 http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-animation @DSebJ posts Blender to SunBurn http://twitter.com/#!/DSebJ/status/36564920224976896 http://dsebj.evolvingsoftware.com/?p=187 Ads and WP7 Games - @mechaghost shares his revenue data for his ad based games http://www.occasionalgamer.com/2011/02/09/ads-and-wp7-games/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Steven Hurdle posts day 100 of his quest to find a fantastic XBLIG purchase every day http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/02/17/day-100-radiangames-ballistic/ Xbox 360 Indie Game Buying Guide - 12 games for $60 including several Xbox LIVE Indie games! (although if the XNA community was asked we could have recommended 60 games for $60...) http://www.indiegamemag.com/xbox360-indie-games-buying-guide/ The best selling Xbox LIVE Indie games of 2010 http://www.1up.com/news/xbox-live-most-popular-games I’d buy that for a dollar! - the California Literary Review points out a few gems on the XBLIG marketplace (and other places) where you can game on the cheap. http://calitreview.com/14125 Armless Octopus Episode 39 - The Indie Gem Octocast http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/17/armless-octocast-episode-39-the-indie-gem-octocast/ Ska Studios posts a plethora of updates http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/11/good-morning-gato-49/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/14/vampire-smile-valentines/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/16/the-dishwasher-vs-finds-a-home/ Kotaku posts about the Xbox LIVE Indie Game that makes you go Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew http://kotaku.com/#!5760632/the-game-that-makes-you-go-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew GameMarx continues to be active and doing a ton for the XBLIG community reviews and Top 5 indie games of the week 2/4-2/10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/22/ep-9-february-11-2010.aspx a new podcast Xbox Indie New Releases http://twitter.com/#!/gamemarx/status/36888849107910656 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/13/a-new-podcast-xbox-indie-new-releases.aspx @MasterBlud uploads Indocalypse XBLIG Collections #2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzCZSv075mc&feature=youtu.be&a http://twitter.com/#!/MasterBlud/status/37100029697064960 Just Press Start interviews Michael Hicks from MichaelArts, 18 year old creator of Honor in Vengeance http://justpressstart.net/?p=465 Achievement Locked interviews Kris Steele of FunInfused Games http://xboxindies.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/interview-fun-infused-games/ XNA Game Development: XNA -UK launches their XAP test service to help the XNA community http://xna-uk.net/blogs/news/archive/2011/02/18/xna-uk-xap-test-service-now-live.aspx Transmute shows off a video of the standard character editor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqH6gErG948&feature=youtu.be Microsoft Tech Student introduces their first tech student of the month.  Meet Daniel Van Tassel from the University of Utah and learn how he created an Xbox LIVE Indie Game using XNA Studio http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techstudent/archive/2010/12/22/introducing-our-first-tech-student-of-the-month-daniel-van-tassel.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 3 - Animation (transforms) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 4 - Animation (frame based) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-4-Animation-frame-based.aspx @suhinini tweets about an XNA Sprite Font generation tool http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/36841370131890176 http://www.nubik.com/SpriteFont/ XNATouch 1.5 is out and in it’s words is faster, simpler, more reliable and has the XNA 4.0 API http://monogame.codeplex.com/releases/view/60815 IndieCity is hosting marketing workshops for Indie Developers (UK and US) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/75197/457654.aspx#457654 New York Students - Learn XNA and Silverlight for Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72753/456964.aspx#456964 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/learn-to-build-your-own-games-for-xbox-360-and-windows-phone-7.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/build-a-game-in-48-hours-win-a-kinect-or-windows-phone-7.aspx Extra Credits: Videogame Music http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2019-Videogame-Music Steve Pavlina posts an article with useful information for all XNA/XBLIG developers http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/02/completion-vs-perfection/

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  • Adobe Photoshop Vs Lightroom Vs Aperture

    - by Aditi
    Adobe Photoshop is the standard choice for photographers, graphic artists and Web designers. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom  & Apple’s Aperture are also in the same league but the usage is vastly different. Although Photoshop is most popular & widely used by photographers, but in many ways it’s less relevant to photographers than ever before. As Lightroom & Aperture is aimed squarely at photographers for photo-processing. With this write up we are going to help you choose what is right for you and why. Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is the most liked tool for the detailed photo editing & designing work. Photoshop provides great features for rollover and Image slicing. Adobe Photoshop includes comprehensive optimization features for producing the highest quality Web graphics with the smallest possible file sizes. You can also create startling animations with it. Designers & Editors know how important precise masking is, PhotoShop lets you do that with various detailing tools. Art history brush, contact sheets, and history palette are some of the smart features, which add to its viability. Download Whether you’re producing printed pages or moving images, you can work more efficiently and produce better results because of its smooth integration across other adobe applications. Buy supporting layer effects, it allows you to quickly add drop shadows, inner and outer glows, bevels, and embossing to layers. It also provides Seamless Web Graphics Workflow. Photoshop is hands-down the BEST for editing. Photoshop Cons: • Slower, less precise editing features in Bridge • Processing lots of images requires actions and can be slower than exporting images from Lightroom • Much slower with editing and processing a large number of images Aperture Apple Aperture is aimed at the professional photographer who shoots predominantly raw files. It helps them to manage their workflow and perform their initial Raw conversion in a better way. Aperture provides adjustment tools such as Histogram to modify color and white balance, but most of the editing of photos is left for Photoshop. It gives users the option of seeing their photographs laid out like slides or negatives on a light table. It boasts of – stars, color-coding and easy techniques for filtering and picking images. Aperture has moved forward few steps than Photoshop, but most of the editing work has been left for Photoshop as it features seamless Photoshop integration. Aperture Pros: Aperture is a step up from the iPhoto software that comes with every Mac, and fairly easy to learn. Adjustments are made in a logical order from top to bottom of the menu. You can store the images in a library or any folder you choose. Aperture also works really well with direct Canon files. It is just $79 if you buy it through Apple’s App Store Moving forward, it will run on the iPad, and possibly the iPhone – Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop may never offer these options It is much nicer and simpler user interface. Lightroom Lightroom does a smashing job of basic fixing and editing. It is more advanced tool for photographers. They can use it to have a startling photography effect. Light room has many advanced features, which makes it one of the best tools for photographers and far ahead of the other two. They are Nondestructive editing. Nothing is actually changed in an image until the photo is exported. Better controls over organizing your photos. Lightroom helps to gather a group of photos to use in a slideshow. Lightroom has larger Compare and Survey views of images. Quickly customizable interface. Simple keystrokes allow you to perform different All Lightroom controls are kept available in panels right next to the photos. Always-available History palette, it doesn’t go when you close lightroom. You gain more colors to work with compared to Photoshop and with more precise control. Local control, or adjusting small parts of a photo without affecting anything else, has long been an important part of photography. In Lightroom 2, you can darken, lighten, and affect color and change sharpness and other aspects of specific areas in the photo simply by brushing your cursor across the areas. Photoshop has far more power in its Cloning and Healing Brush tools than Lightroom, but Lightroom offers simple cloning and healing that’s nondestructive. Lightroom supports the RAW formats of more cameras than Aperture. Lightroom provides the option of storing images outside the application in the file system. It costs less than photoshop. Download Why PhotoShop is advanced than Lightroom? There are countless image processing plug-ins on the market for doing specialized processing in Photoshop. For example, if your image needs sophisticated noise reduction, you can use the Noiseware plug-in with Photoshop to do a much better job or noise removal than Lightroom can do. Lightroom’s advantages over Aperture 3 Will always have better integration with Photoshop. Lightroom is backed by bigger and more active user community (So abundant availability for tutorials, etc.) Better noise reduction tool. Especially for photographers the Lens-distortion correction tool  is perfect Lightroom Cons: • Have to Import images to work on them • Slows down with over 10,000 images in the catalog • For processing just one or two images this is a slower workflow Photoshop Pros: • ACR has the same RAW processing controls as Lightroom • ACR Histogram is specialized to the chosen color space (Lightroom is locked into ProPhoto RGB color space with an sRGB tone curve) • Don’t have to Import images to open in Bridge or ACR • Ability to customize processing of RAW images with Photoshop Actions Pricing and Availability Get LightRoomGet PhotoShop Latest version Of Photoshop can be purchased from Adobe store and Adobe authorized reseller and it costs US$999. Latest version of Aperture can be bought for US$199 from Apple Online store or Mac App Store. You can buy latest version of LightRoom from Adobe Store or Adobe Authorized reseller for US$299. Related posts:Adobe Photoshop CS5 vs Photoshop CS5 extended Web based Alternatives to Photoshop 10 Free Alternatives for Adobe Photoshop Software

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  • How to Find Office 2003 Commands in Office 2010

    - by Matthew Guay
    Are you new to the ribbon interface in Office 2010?  Here’s how you can get up to speed and learn where everything is quickly and easily. Microsoft has made an interactive guide to Office 2010’s new interface to help users learn their way around the new version.  If you’ve already used Office 2007, then Office 2010 will be very easy to transition to, but if you’re still using Office 2003 you may find the learning curve more steep.  With this interactive guide, upgrading your Office skills doesn’t have to be hard. Learn Your Way Around the Office Ribbon Open the Office 2010 interactive guides site (link below) in your browser, and select the Office app you want to explore. The guides are powered by Silverlight, so if you don’t already have it installed you will be prompted to do so. Once the guide has loaded, click Start to begin. Select any menu or toolbar item in the Office 2003 mockup.  A tooltip will appear to show you how to find this option in Word 2010. If you click the item, the interface will switch to an Office 2010 mockup and will interactively show you how to access this feature.  The Thumbnails view isn’t available by default in Word 2010, so it shows us how to add it to the ribbon.  When you’ve figured this command out, click anywhere to go back to the Office 2003 mockup and find another item. Currently the guides are available for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but the site says that guides for the other Office apps will be available soon.  Here’s the PowerPoint guide showing where the Rehearse Timings option is in PowerPoint 2010. Install the Interactive Guides to Your Computer You can also install the guides to your computer so you can easily access them even if you’re not online.  Open the guide you want to install, and click the Install button in the top right corner of the guide. Choose where you want the shortcuts, and click Ok. Here’s the Interactive Word 2010 guide installed on our computer.  The downloaded version seemed to work faster in our tests, likely because all the content was already saved to the computer.  If you decide you don’t need it any more, click Uninstall in the top right corner. Download Office Cheat Sheets If you’d like a cheat-sheet of Office commands that have changed or are new in Office 2010, Microsoft’s got that for you, too.  You can download Office reference workbooks (link below) that show how to access each item that was in Office 2003’s menus.  Here’s the Word guide showing where each of Word 2003’s commands from the help menu are in Word 2010. Learn Your Way Around Office 2007, Too! Microsoft offers similar interactive guides for learning the ribbon in Office 2007, so if you’re still using Office 2007 but can’t find a command, feel free to check it out as well (link below).  Guides are available for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook 2007.  You can also download cheat sheets for Office 2007 at this site as well.  Here’s the tutorial showing us where the font options are in PowerPoint 2007. Conclusion We have found the ribbon interface to be a great addition to Office, but if you’ve got years of Office 2003 experience under your belt you may find it difficult to locate your favorite commands.  These tutorials can help you use your old Office knowledge to learn Office 2010 or 2007 in a quick and easy way! Links Office 2010 interactive guide Download Office 2010 reference workbooks Office 2007 interactive guide Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Find Commands and Functions in Office 2007 the Easy WayMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatMake Word 2007 Always Save in Word 2003 FormatAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteCreate a Customized Tab on the Office 2010 Ribbon TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird

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  • SQL SERVER – Database Dynamic Caching by Automatic SQL Server Performance Acceleration

    - by pinaldave
    My second look at SafePeak’s new version (2.1) revealed to me few additional interesting features. For those of you who hadn’t read my previous reviews SafePeak and not familiar with it, here is a quick brief: SafePeak is in business of accelerating performance of SQL Server applications, as well as their scalability, without making code changes to the applications or to the databases. SafePeak performs database dynamic caching, by caching in memory result sets of queries and stored procedures while keeping all those cache correct and up to date. Cached queries are retrieved from the SafePeak RAM in microsecond speed and not send to the SQL Server. The application gets much faster results (100-500 micro seconds), the load on the SQL Server is reduced (less CPU and IO) and the application or the infrastructure gets better scalability. SafePeak solution is hosted either within your cloud servers, hosted servers or your enterprise servers, as part of the application architecture. Connection of the application is done via change of connection strings or adding reroute line in the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file on all application servers. For those who would like to learn more on SafePeak architecture and how it works, I suggest to read this vendor’s webpage: SafePeak Architecture. More interesting new features in SafePeak 2.1 In my previous review of SafePeak new I covered the first 4 things I noticed in the new SafePeak (check out my article “SQLAuthority News – SafePeak Releases a Major Update: SafePeak version 2.1 for SQL Server Performance Acceleration”): Cache setup and fine-tuning – a critical part for getting good caching results Database templates Choosing which database to cache Monitoring and analysis options by SafePeak Since then I had a chance to play with SafePeak some more and here is what I found. 5. Analysis of SQL Performance (present and history): In SafePeak v.2.1 the tools for understanding of performance became more comprehensive. Every 15 minutes SafePeak creates and updates various performance statistics. Each query (or a procedure execute) that arrives to SafePeak gets a SQL pattern, and after it is used again there are statistics for such pattern. An important part of this product is that it understands the dependencies of every pattern (list of tables, views, user defined functions and procs). From this understanding SafePeak creates important analysis information on performance of every object: response time from the database, response time from SafePeak cache, average response time, percent of traffic and break down of behavior. One of the interesting things this behavior column shows is how often the object is actually pdated. The break down analysis allows knowing the above information for: queries and procedures, tables, views, databases and even instances level. The data is show now on all arriving queries, both read queries (that can be cached), but also any types of updates like DMLs, DDLs, DCLs, and even session settings queries. The stats are being updated every 15 minutes and SafePeak dashboard allows going back in time and investigating what happened within any time frame. 6. Logon trigger, for making sure nothing corrupts SafePeak cache data If you have an application with many parts, many servers many possible locations that can actually update the database, or the SQL Server is accessible to many DBAs or software engineers, each can access some database directly and do some changes without going thru SafePeak – this can create a potential corruption of the data stored in SafePeak cache. To make sure SafePeak cache is correct it needs to get all updates to arrive to SafePeak, and if a DBA will access the database directly and do some changes, for example, then SafePeak will simply not know about it and will not clean SafePeak cache. In the new version, SafePeak brought a new feature called “Logon Trigger” to solve the above challenge. By special click of a button SafePeak can deploy a special server logon trigger (with a CLR object) on your SQL Server that actually monitors all connections and informs SafePeak on any connection that is coming not from SafePeak. In SafePeak dashboard there is an interface that allows to control which logins can be ignored based on login names and IPs, while the rest will invoke cache cleanup of SafePeak and actually locks SafePeak cache until this connection will not be closed. Important to note, that this does not interrupt any logins, only informs SafePeak on such connection. On the Dashboard screen in SafePeak you will be able to see those connections and then decide what to do with them. Configuration of this feature in SafePeak dashboard can be done here: Settings -> SQL instances management -> click on instance -> Logon Trigger tab. Other features: 7. User management ability to grant permissions to someone without changing its configuration and only use SafePeak as performance analysis tool. 8. Better reports for analysis of performance using 15 minute resolution charts. 9. Caching of client cursors 10. Support for IPv6 Summary SafePeak is a great SQL Server performance acceleration solution for users who want immediate results for sites with performance, scalability and peak spikes challenges. Especially if your apps are packaged or 3rd party, since no code changes are done. SafePeak can significantly increase response times, by reducing network roundtrip to the database, decreasing CPU resource usage, eliminating I/O and storage access. SafePeak team provides a free fully functional trial www.safepeak.com/download and actually provides a one-on-one assistance during such trial. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

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  • Fix Windows Computer Problems with Microsoft Fix it Center

    - by Matthew Guay
    Fixing computer problems can often be difficult, but Microsoft is aiming to make it as simple as a couple clicks with.  Here’s how you can easily fix computer problems with Microsoft’s new Fix it Center Beta. Last year Microsoft began offering small Fix it scripts that you could download and run to help solve common computer problems automatically.  These were added to some of the most visited Windows help pages, and helped fix problems with things such as printing errors and Aero glass support.  Now, the Fix it scripts have been bundled together with the Fix it Center, making fixing your computer even easier.  This free tool works great on all editions of Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Note: The Fix it Center is currently in beta, so only run if you are comfortable running beta software. Getting Started Download the Fix it Center installer (link below), and install as normal. The installer will download the remaining components, and then finish the installation. In Windows XP, if you have not yet installed .NET 2.0, you may see the following prompt.  Click Yes to go to the download site, and once you’ve installed .NET 2.0, run the Fix it Center setup again. Also, the Fix it Center uses PowerShell to automate its fixes, but if it is not installed yet the installer will automatically download and install it. Find Fixes for Your PC Once Fix it Center is installed, you can personalize it for your computer.  Select Now, and the click Next. It will scan your computer for problems with known solutions, and will offer to go ahead and install these troubleshooters.  If you choose to not install them, you can always download them from within the Fix it Center at a later time. While those troubleshooters are downloading, you can create a Fix it account.  This will give you additional help and support, and let you review Fix it solutions for all your computers from an online dashboard.  You need a Windows Live ID to create an account. Also, choose whether or not to send information to Microsoft about your hardware and software problems. Get Problems Fixed Now that the Fix it Center is installed and has identified issues on your computer, it’s time to get the problems fixed.  Here’s the default front screen in Windows 7, showing all of the available fixes. And here’s the Fix it Center running in Windows XP. Select one of the Troubleshooters to see more information about it, and click Run to start it. You can choose to either detect problems and have them fixed automatically, or you can choose for the Fix it Center to show you the solutions and let you choose whether to apply them or not.  The defaults usually work good, and only take a couple minutes to apply the fixes, but you can select your own fixes if you’d rather be in control. It will scan your computer for known problems in this area, and then will show you the results.  Here, Fix it determined that startup programs may be causing performance issues.  Select Start System Configuration, and uncheck any of the programs you do not usually use. Once you’ve run a troubleshooter, you can see the issues it checked for and any problems it discovered. If you created the online account, you can also choose to view the details online.  This will show all of your computers with Fix it Center and the fixes you’ve run on them.   Conclusion Whether you’re a power user or new to computers, sometimes it’s best to just get your problems fixed and go on with life instead of digging through the registry, forums, and hacking your way to a solution.  Remember the service is still in beta and may not work perfectly or solve your issues every time. But it’s something cool and worth a look. Links Download Microsoft Fix it Center Beta Fix additional problems with Microsoft’s Fix it Center Online Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Disable Windows Mobility Center in Windows 7 or VistaMake Outlook Faster by Disabling Unnecessary Add-InsUsing Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Disable Security Center Popup Notifications in Windows VistaHow To Manage Action Center in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi

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  • Announcing SonicAgile – An Agile Project Management Solution

    - by Stephen.Walther
    I’m happy to announce the public release of SonicAgile – an online tool for managing software projects. You can register for SonicAgile at www.SonicAgile.com and start using it with your team today. SonicAgile is an agile project management solution which is designed to help teams of developers coordinate their work on software projects. SonicAgile supports creating backlogs, scrumboards, and burndown charts. It includes support for acceptance criteria, story estimation, calculating team velocity, and email integration. In short, SonicAgile includes all of the tools that you need to coordinate work on a software project, get stuff done, and build great software. Let me discuss each of the features of SonicAgile in more detail. SonicAgile Backlog You use the backlog to create a prioritized list of user stories such as features, bugs, and change requests. Basically, all future work planned for a product should be captured in the backlog. We focused our attention on designing the user interface for the backlog. Because the main function of the backlog is to prioritize stories, we made it easy to prioritize a story by just drag and dropping the story from one location to another. We also wanted to make it easy to add stories from the product backlog to a sprint backlog. A sprint backlog contains the stories that you plan to complete during a particular sprint. To add a story to a sprint, you just drag the story from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. Finally, we made it easy to track team velocity — the average amount of work that your team completes in each sprint. Your team’s average velocity is displayed in the backlog. When you add too many stories to a sprint – in other words, you attempt to take on too much work – you are warned automatically: SonicAgile Scrumboard Every workday, your team meets to have their daily scrum. During the daily scrum, you can use the SonicAgile Scrumboard to see (at a glance) what everyone on the team is working on. For example, the following scrumboard shows that Stephen is working on the Fix Gravatar Bug story and Pete and Jane have finished working on the Product Details Page story: Every story can be broken into tasks. For example, to create the Product Details Page, you might need to create database objects, do page design, and create an MVC controller. You can use the Scrumboard to track the state of each task. A story can have acceptance criteria which clarify the requirements for the story to be done. For example, here is how you can specify the acceptance criteria for the Product Details Page story: You cannot close a story — and remove the story from the list of active stories on the scrumboard — until all tasks and acceptance criteria associated with the story are done. SonicAgile Burndown Charts You can use Burndown charts to track your team’s progress. SonicAgile supports Release Burndown, Sprint Burndown by Task Estimates, and Sprint Burndown by Story Points charts. For example, here’s a sample of a Sprint Burndown by Story Points chart: The downward slope shows the progress of the team when closing stories. The vertical axis represents story points and the horizontal axis represents time. Email Integration SonicAgile was designed to improve your team’s communication and collaboration. Most stories and tasks require discussion to nail down exactly what work needs to be done. The most natural way to discuss stories and tasks is through email. However, you don’t want these discussions to get lost. When you use SonicAgile, all email discussions concerning a story or a task (including all email attachments) are captured automatically. At any time in the future, you can view all of the email discussion concerning a story or a task by opening the Story Details dialog: Why We Built SonicAgile We built SonicAgile because we needed it for our team. Our consulting company, Superexpert, builds websites for financial services, startups, and large corporations. We have multiple teams working on multiple projects. Keeping on top of all of the work that needs to be done to complete a software project is challenging. You need a good sense of what needs to be done, who is doing it, and when the work will be done. We built SonicAgile because we wanted a lightweight project management tool which we could use to coordinate the work that our team performs on software projects. How We Built SonicAgile We wanted SonicAgile to be easy to use, highly scalable, and have a highly interactive client interface. SonicAgile is very close to being a pure Ajax application. We built SonicAgile using ASP.NET MVC 3, jQuery, and Knockout. We would not have been able to build such a complex Ajax application without these technologies. Almost all of our MVC controller actions return JSON results (While developing SonicAgile, I would have given my left arm to be able to use the new ASP.NET Web API). The controller actions are invoked from jQuery Ajax calls from the browser. We built SonicAgile on Windows Azure. We are taking advantage of SQL Azure, Table Storage, and Blob Storage. Windows Azure enables us to scale very quickly to handle whatever demand is thrown at us. Summary I hope that you will try SonicAgile. You can register at www.SonicAgile.com (there’s a free 30-day trial). The goal of SonicAgile is to make it easier for teams to get more stuff done, work better together, and build amazing software. Let us know what you think!

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