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• x11vnc working in Ubuntu 10.10

  - by pablorc

  I'm trying to start x11vnc in a Ubuntu 10.10 (my server is in Amazon EC2), but I have the next error $ sudo x11vnc -forever -usepw -httpdir /usr/share/vnc-java/ -httpport 5900 -auth /usr/sbin/gdm 25/11/2010 13:29:51 passing arg to libvncserver: -httpport 25/11/2010 13:29:51 passing arg to libvncserver: 5900 25/11/2010 13:29:51 -usepw: found /home/ubuntu/.vnc/passwd 25/11/2010 13:29:51 x11vnc version: 0.9.10 lastmod: 2010-04-28 pid: 3504 25/11/2010 13:29:51 XOpenDisplay(":0.0") failed. 25/11/2010 13:29:51 Trying again with XAUTHLOCALHOSTNAME=localhost ... 25/11/2010 13:29:51 *************************************** 25/11/2010 13:29:51 *** XOpenDisplay failed (:0.0) *** x11vnc was unable to open the X DISPLAY: ":0.0", it cannot continue. *** There may be "Xlib:" error messages above with details about the failure. Some tips and guidelines: ** An X server (the one you wish to view) must be running before x11vnc is started: x11vnc does not start the X server. (however, see the -create option if that is what you really want). ** You must use -display <disp>, -OR- set and export your $DISPLAY environment variable to refer to the display of the desired X server. - Usually the display is simply ":0" (in fact x11vnc uses this if you forget to specify it), but in some multi-user situations it could be ":1", ":2", or even ":137". Ask your administrator or a guru if you are having difficulty determining what your X DISPLAY is. ** Next, you need to have sufficient permissions (Xauthority) to connect to the X DISPLAY. Here are some Tips: - Often, you just need to run x11vnc as the user logged into the X session. So make sure to be that user when you type x11vnc. - Being root is usually not enough because the incorrect MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE file may be accessed. The cookie file contains the secret key that allows x11vnc to connect to the desired X DISPLAY. - You can explicitly indicate which MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE file should be used by the -auth option, e.g.: x11vnc -auth /home/someuser/.Xauthority -display :0 x11vnc -auth /tmp/.gdmzndVlR -display :0 you must have read permission for the auth file. See also '-auth guess' and '-findauth' discussed below. ** If NO ONE is logged into an X session yet, but there is a greeter login program like "gdm", "kdm", "xdm", or "dtlogin" running, you will need to find and use the raw display manager MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE file. Some examples for various display managers: gdm: -auth /var/gdm/:0.Xauth -auth /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth kdm: -auth /var/lib/kdm/A:0-crWk72 -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0-crWk72 xdm: -auth /var/lib/xdm/authdir/authfiles/A:0-XQvaJk dtlogin: -auth /var/dt/A:0-UgaaXa Sometimes the command "ps wwwwaux | grep auth" can reveal the file location. Starting with x11vnc 0.9.9 you can have it try to guess by using: -auth guess (see also the x11vnc -findauth option.) Only root will have read permission for the file, and so x11vnc must be run as root (or copy it). The random characters in the filenames will of course change and the directory the cookie file resides in is system dependent. See also: http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/faq.html I've already tried with some -auth options but the error persist. I have gdm running. Thank you in advance

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• Windows 7, file properties - Is "date accessed" ALWAYS 100% accurate?

  - by Robert

  Hello, Here's the situation: I went on vacation for a couple of weeks, but before I left, I took the harddrive out of my computer and hid it in a different location. Upon coming back on Monday and putting the harddrive back in my computer, I right-clicked on different files to see their properties. Interestingly enough, several files had been accessed during the time I was gone! I right-clicked different files in various locations on the harddrive, and all of these suspect files had been accessed within a certain time range (Sunday, ?January ?09, ?2011, approximately ??between 6:52:16 PM - 7:16:25 PM). Some of them had been accessed at the exact same time--down to the very second. This makes me think that someone must have done a search on my harddrive for certain types of files and then copied all those files to some other medium. The Windows 7 installation on this harddrive is password protected, but NOT encrypted, so they could have easily put the harddrive into an enclosure/toaster to access it from a different computer. Of course I did not right-click every single file on my computer, but did so in different folders. For instance, one of the folders I went through has different types of files: .mp3, ,prproj, .3gp, .mpg, .wmv, .xmp, .txt with file-sizes ranging from 2 KB to 29.7 MB (there is also a sub-folder in this folder which contains only .jpg files); however, of all these different types of files in this folder and its subfolder, all of them had been accessed (including the .jpg files from the sub-folder) EXCEPT the .mp3 files (if it makes any difference, the .mp3 files in this folder range in size from 187 KB to 4881 KB). Additionally, this sub-folder which contained only .jpg files (48 .jpg files to be exact) was not accessed during this time--only the .jpg files within it were accessed-- (between 6:57:03 PM - 6:57:08 PM). I thought that perhaps this was some kind of Windows glitch that was displaying the wrong access date, but then I looked at the "date created" and "date modified" for all of these files in question, and their created/modified dates and times were spot on correct. My first thought was that someone put the harddrive into an enclosure/toaster and viewed the files; but then I realized that this was impossible because several of the files had been accessed at the same exact time down to the second. So this made me think that the only other way the "date accessed" could have changed would have been if someone copied the files. Is there any chance at all whatsoever that this is some kind of Windows glitch or something, or is it a fact that someone was indeed accessing my files (and if someone was accessing my files, am I right about the files in question having been copied)? Is there any other possibility for what could have happened? Do I need to use any kinds of forensics tools to further investigate this matter (and if so, which tools), or is there any other way in which I can be certain of what took place in that timeframe the day before I got back? Or is what I see with Windows 7 good enough (i.e. accurate and truthful)? Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any other details are required on my part.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: New Features in ASP.NET MVC 3

  - by mbridge

  Razor View Engine The Razor view engine is a new view engine option for ASP.NET MVC that supports the Razor templating syntax. The Razor syntax is a streamlined approach to HTML templating designed with the goal of being a code driven minimalist templating approach that builds on existing C#, VB.NET and HTML knowledge. The result of this approach is that Razor views are very lean and do not contain unnecessary constructs that get in the way of you and your code. ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 only supports C# Razor views which use the .cshtml file extension. VB.NET support will be enabled in later releases of ASP.NET MVC 3. For more information and examples, see Introducing “Razor” – a new view engine for ASP.NET on Scott Guthrie’s blog. Dynamic View and ViewModel Properties A new dynamic View property is available in views, which provides access to the ViewData object using a simpler syntax. For example, imagine two items are added to the ViewData dictionary in the Index controller action using code like the following: public ActionResult Index() {          ViewData["Title"] = "The Title";          ViewData["Message"] = "Hello World!"; } Those properties can be accessed in the Index view using code like this: <h2>View.Title</h2> <p>View.Message</p> There is also a new dynamic ViewModel property in the Controller class that lets you add items to the ViewData dictionary using a simpler syntax. Using the previous controller example, the two values added to the ViewData dictionary can be rewritten using the following code: public ActionResult Index() {     ViewModel.Title = "The Title";     ViewModel.Message = "Hello World!"; } “Add View” Dialog Box Supports Multiple View Engines The Add View dialog box in Visual Studio includes extensibility hooks that allow it to support multiple view engines, as shown in the following figure: Service Location and Dependency Injection Support ASP.NET MVC 3 introduces improved support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) via Inversion of Control (IoC) containers. ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 provides the following hooks for locating services and injecting dependencies: - Creating controller factories. - Creating controllers and setting dependencies. - Setting dependencies on view pages for both the Web Form view engine and the Razor view engine (for types that derive from ViewPage, ViewUserControl, ViewMasterPage, WebViewPage). - Setting dependencies on action filters. Using a Dependency Injection container is not required in order for ASP.NET MVC 3 to function properly. Global Filters ASP.NET MVC 3 allows you to register filters that apply globally to all controller action methods. Adding a filter to the global filters collection ensures that the filter runs for all controller requests. To register an action filter globally, you can make the following call in the Application_Start method in the Global.asax file: GlobalFilters.Filters.Add(new MyActionFilter()); The source of global action filters is abstracted by the new IFilterProvider interface, which can be registered manually or by using Dependency Injection. This allows you to provide your own source of action filters and choose at run time whether to apply a filter to an action in a particular request. New JsonValueProviderFactory Class The new JsonValueProviderFactory class allows action methods to receive JSON-encoded data and model-bind it to an action-method parameter. This is useful in scenarios such as client templating. Client templates enable you to format and display a single data item or set of data items by using a fragment of HTML. ASP.NET MVC 3 lets you connect client templates easily with an action method that both returns and receives JSON data. Support for .NET Framework 4 Validation Attributes and IvalidatableObject The ValidationAttribute class was improved in the .NET Framework 4 to enable richer support for validation. When you write a custom validation attribute, you can use a new IsValid overload that provides a ValidationContext instance. This instance provides information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated. This change enables scenarios such as validating the current value based on another property of the model. The following example shows a sample custom attribute that ensures that the value of PropertyOne is always larger than the value of PropertyTwo: public class CompareValidationAttribute : ValidationAttribute {     protected override ValidationResult IsValid(object value,              ValidationContext validationContext) {         var model = validationContext.ObjectInstance as SomeModel;         if (model.PropertyOne > model.PropertyTwo) {            return ValidationResult.Success;         }         return new ValidationResult("PropertyOne must be larger than PropertyTwo");     } } Validation in ASP.NET MVC also supports the .NET Framework 4 IValidatableObject interface. This interface allows your model to perform model-level validation, as in the following example: public class SomeModel : IValidatableObject {     public int PropertyOne { get; set; }     public int PropertyTwo { get; set; }     public IEnumerable<ValidationResult> Validate(ValidationContext validationContext) {         if (PropertyOne <= PropertyTwo) {            yield return new ValidationResult(                "PropertyOne must be larger than PropertyTwo");         }     } } New IClientValidatable Interface The new IClientValidatable interface allows the validation framework to discover at run time whether a validator has support for client validation. This interface is designed to be independent of the underlying implementation; therefore, where you implement the interface depends on the validation framework in use. For example, for the default data annotations-based validator, the interface would be applied on the validation attribute. Support for .NET Framework 4 Metadata Attributes ASP.NET MVC 3 now supports .NET Framework 4 metadata attributes such as DisplayAttribute. New IMetadataAware Interface The new IMetadataAware interface allows you to write attributes that simplify how you can contribute to the ModelMetadata creation process. Before this interface was available, you needed to write a custom metadata provider in order to have an attribute provide extra metadata. This interface is consumed by the AssociatedMetadataProvider class, so support for the IMetadataAware interface is automatically inherited by all classes that derive from that class (notably, the DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider class). New Action Result Types In ASP.NET MVC 3, the Controller class includes two new action result types and corresponding helper methods. HttpNotFoundResult Action The new HttpNotFoundResult action result is used to indicate that a resource requested by the current URL was not found. The status code is 404. This class derives from HttpStatusCodeResult. The Controller class includes an HttpNotFound method that returns an instance of this action result type, as shown in the following example: public ActionResult List(int id) {     if (id < 0) {                 return HttpNotFound();     }     return View(); } HttpStatusCodeResult Action The new HttpStatusCodeResult action result is used to set the response status code and description. Permanent Redirect The HttpRedirectResult class has a new Boolean Permanent property that is used to indicate whether a permanent redirect should occur. A permanent redirect uses the HTTP 301 status code. Corresponding to this change, the Controller class now has several methods for performing permanent redirects: - RedirectPermanent - RedirectToRoutePermanent - RedirectToActionPermanent These methods return an instance of HttpRedirectResult with the Permanent property set to true. Breaking Changes The order of execution for exception filters has changed for exception filters that have the same Order value. In ASP.NET MVC 2 and earlier, exception filters on the controller with the same Order as those on an action method were executed before the exception filters on the action method. This would typically be the case when exception filters were applied without a specified order Order value. In MVC 3, this order has been reversed in order to allow the most specific exception handler to execute first. As in earlier versions, if the Order property is explicitly specified, the filters are run in the specified order. Known Issues When you are editing a Razor view (CSHTML file), the Go To Controller menu item in Visual Studio will not be available, and there are no code snippets.

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• TFS 2010 Build Custom Activity for Merging Assemblies

  - by Jakob Ehn

  *** The sample build process template discussed in this post is available for download from here: http://cid-ee034c9f620cd58d.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogSamples/ILMerge.xaml ***   In my previous post I talked about library builds that we use to build and replicate dependencies between applications in TFS. This is typically used for common libraries and tools that several other application need to reference. When the libraries grow in size over time, so does the number of assemblies. So all solutions that uses the common library must reference all the necessary assemblies that they need, and if we for example do a refactoring and extract some code into a new assembly, all the clients must update their references to reflect these changes, otherwise it won’t compile. To improve on this, we use a tool from Microsoft Research called ILMerge (Download from here). It can be used to merge several assemblies into one assembly that contains all types. If you haven’t used this tool before, you should check it out. Previously I have implemented this in builds using a simple batch file that contains the full command, something like this: "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\microsoft\ilmerge\ilmerge.exe" /target:library /attr:ClassLibrary1.bl.dll /out:MyNewLibrary.dll ClassLibrary1.dll ClassLibrar2.dll ClassLibrary3.dll This merges 3 assemblies (ClassLibrary1, 2 and 3) into a new assembly called MyNewLibrary.dll. It will copy the attributes (file version, product version etc..) from ClassLibrary1.dll, using the /attr switch. For more info on ILMerge command line tool, see the above link. This approach works, but requires a little bit too much knowledge for the developers creating builds, therefor I have implemented a custom activity that wraps the use of ILMerge. This makes it much simpler to setup a new build definition and have the build automatically do the merging. The usage of the activity is then implemented as part of the Library Build process template mentioned in the previous post. For this article I have just created a simple build process template that only performs the ILMerge operation.   Below is the code for the custom activity. To make it compile, you need to reference the ILMerge.exe assembly. /// <summary> /// Activity for merging a list of assembies into one, using ILMerge /// </summary> public sealed class ILMergeActivity : BaseCodeActivity { /// <summary> /// A list of file paths to the assemblies that should be merged /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<IEnumerable<string>> InputAssemblies { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Full path to the generated assembly /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> OutputFile { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Which input assembly that the attibutes for the generated assembly should be copied from. /// Optional. If not specified, the first input assembly will be used /// </summary> public InArgument<string> AttributeFile { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Kind of assembly to generate, dll or exe /// </summary> public InArgument<TargetKindEnum> TargetKind { get; set; } // If your activity returns a value, derive from CodeActivity<TResult> // and return the value from the Execute method. protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) { string message = InputAssemblies.Get(context).Aggregate("", (current, assembly) => current + (assembly + " ")); TrackMessage(context, "Merging " + message + " into " + OutputFile.Get(context)); ILMerge m = new ILMerge(); m.SetInputAssemblies(InputAssemblies.Get(context).ToArray()); m.TargetKind = TargetKind.Get(context) == TargetKindEnum.Dll ? ILMerge.Kind.Dll : ILMerge.Kind.Exe; m.OutputFile = OutputFile.Get(context); m.AttributeFile = !String.IsNullOrEmpty(AttributeFile.Get(context)) ? AttributeFile.Get(context) : InputAssemblies.Get(context).First(); m.SetTargetPlatform(RuntimeEnvironment.GetSystemVersion().Substring(0,2), RuntimeEnvironment.GetRuntimeDirectory()); m.Merge(); TrackMessage(context, "Generated " + m.OutputFile); } } [Browsable(true)] public enum TargetKindEnum { Dll, Exe } NB: The activity inherits from a BaseCodeActivity class which is an internal helper class which contains some methods and properties useful for moste custom activities. In this case, it uses the TrackeMessage method for writing to the build log. You either need to remove the TrackMessage method calls, or implement this yourself (which is not very hard… ) The custom activity has the following input arguments: InputAssemblies A list with the (full) paths to the assemblies to merge OutputFile The name of the resulting merged assembly AttributeFile Which assembly to use as the template for the attribute of the merged assembly. This argument is optional and if left blank, the first assembly in the input list is used TargetKind Decides what type of assembly to create, can be either a dll or an exe Of course, there are more switches to the ILMerge.exe, and these can be exposed as input arguments as well if you need it. To show how the custom activity can be used, I have attached a build process template (see link at the top of this post) that merges the output of the projects being built (CommonLibrary.dll and CommonLibrary2.dll) into a merged assembly (NewLibrary.dll). The build process template has the following custom process parameters:   The Assemblies To Merge argument is passed into a FindMatchingFiles activity to located all assemblies that are located in the BinariesDirectory folder after the compilation has been performed by Team Build. Here is the complete sequence of activities that performs the merge operation. It is located at the end of the Try, Compile, Test and Associate… sequence: It splits the AssembliesToMerge parameter and appends the full path (using the BinariesDirectory variable) and then enumerates the matching files using the FindMatchingFiles activity. When running the build, you can see that it merges two assemblies into a new one:     And the merged assembly (and associated pdb file) is copied to the drop location together with the rest of the assemblies:

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• Our Look at Opera 10.50 Web Browser

  - by Asian Angel

  Everyone has been talking about the newest version of Opera recently but perhaps you have not looked at it too closely yet. Today we will take a look at 10.50 and let you see what this “new browser” is all about. The New Engines Carakan JavaScript Engine: Runs web applications up to 7 times faster than its predecessor Futhark Vega Graphics Library: Enables super fast and smooth graphics on everything from tab switching to webpage animation Presto 2.5: Provides support for HTML5, CSS2.1 and the latest CSS3 standards A Look at the Features Available If you have installed or used older versions of Opera before then the default look after a clean install will probably seem rather different. The main differences in appearance are mainly located within the “glass border” areas of the browser. The “Speed Dial” setup looks and works just as well as in previous versions. You can set a favorite wallpaper or image as your background and choose the number of “dials” using the “Configure Speed Dial Command”. One of the “standout” differences is the “O Button”. All of the menus have been condensed into this single access point but it only takes a few moments to find what you are looking for. If you have used the style before in earlier versions of Opera some of the items have been moved around. For those who prefer the “Menu Bar” that can be easily restored using the “Show Menu Bar Command”. If desired you can actually “extend” the “Tab Bar” downwards to display thumbnails of your open tabs. Just use your mouse to grab the bottom of the “Tab Bar” and adjust it to suit your personal needs. The only problem with this feature is that it will quickly use up a good sized portion of your available UI and browser window space. The “Password Manager” is ready to access when needed…the background for the button will turn a shiny metallic blue when you open a webpage that you have “Login Information” saved for. One of the new features is a small “Recycle Bin Button” in the upper right corner. Clicking on this will display a list of recently closed tabs letting you have easy access to any tabs that you may have accidentally closed. This is definitely a great feature to have as an easy access button. For those who were used to how the “Zoom Feature” looked before it has a new “look” to it. Instead of the pop-up menu-type listing of “view sizes” present before you now have a slider button that you can use to adjust the zooming level. For our default setup here the “Sidebar Panels” available were: “Bookmarks, Widgets, Unite, Notes, Downloads, History, & Panels”. Additional panels such as “Links, Windows, Search, Info, etc.” are available if you want and/or need them (accessible using the “Panels Plus Sign Button”). The “Opera Link Button” makes it easy for you to synchronize your “Speed Dial, Bookmarks, Personal Bar, Custom Searches, History & Notes”. Note: “Opera Link” requires an account and can be signed up for using the link provided below. Want to share files with your family and friends? “Unite” allows you to do that and more. With “Unite” you can: “Stream Music, Show Photo Galleries, Share Files and/or Folders, & host webpages directly from your browser”. We have a more in-depth look at “Unite” in our article here. Note: Use of “Unite” requires an Opera account. Got a slow internet connection? “Opera Turbo” can help with that by running the web traffic through their “compression servers” to speed up your web browsing. Keep in mind that “Opera Turbo” will not engage if you are accessing a secure website (i.e. your bank’s website) thus preserving your security. Note: “Opera Turbo” can be set up to automatically detect slow internet connections (i.e. crowded Wi-Fi in a cafe). Opera has a built-in “Private Browsing Mode” now for those who prefer anonymous browsing and want to keep the “history records clean” on their computer. To access it go to “Tabs and windows” and select “New private tab” or “New private window” as desired. When you open your new “Private Tab or Window” you will see the following message with details on how Opera will handle browsing information and a large “door hanger symbol”. Notice that the one tab is locked into “Private Browsing Mode” while the others are still working in “Regular Browsing Mode”. Very nice! A miniature version of the “door hanger symbol” will be present on any tab that is locked into “Private Browsing Mode”. If you are using Windows 7 then you will love how things look from your “Taskbar”. Here you can see four very nice looking thumbnails for the tabs that we had open. All that you have to do is click on the desired thumbnail… The “Context Menu” looks just as lovely as the thumbnails and definitely has some terrific functionality built into it. Add Enhanced Aero Capability If you love “Aero” and want more for your new Opera install then we have the perfect theme for you. The theme’s name is Z1-AV69 and once you have downloaded it you will need to place it in the “Skins Subfolder” in Opera’s “Program Files Folder”. Note: For our example we used version 1.10 but version 2.00 is now available (link provided below). Once you have restarted Opera, go to the “O Menu” and select “Appearance”. When the “Appearance Window” opens click on “Z1-Glass Skin” and then click “OK”. All of a sudden you will have more “Aero Goodness” to enjoy. Compare this screenshot with the one at the top of this article…the only part that is not transparent now is the browser window area itself. Want even more “Aero Goodness”? Right click on the “Tab Bar” and set “Tab Bar Placement” to “Left”. Note: You can achieve the same effect by setting the “Tab Bar Placement” to “Right”. With the “Speed Dial” visible you will be able to see your wallpaper with ease. While this is obviously not for everyone it does make for a great visual trick. Portable Versions Perhaps you need this wonderful new version of Opera to go with you wherever you do during the day. Not a problem…just visit the Opera USB website to choose a version that works best for you. You can select from “Zip or Exe” setup files and if needed update an older portable version using a “Zipped Update Files Package”. If you are updating an older version keep in mind that you will need to delete the old “OperaUSB.exe. File” due to changes with the new setup files. During our tests updating older portable versions went well for the most part but we did experience a few “odd UI quirks” here and there…so we recommend setting up a clean install if possible. Conclusion The new 10.50 release is a pleasure to use and is a recommended install for your system. Whether you are considering trying Opera for the first time or have been using it for a bit we think that you will pleased with everything that the 10.50 release has to offer. For those who would like to add User Scripts to Opera be certain to look at our how-to article here. Links Download Opera 10.50 for your location (Windows) Get the latest Snapshot versions for Linux & Mac Sign up for an Opera Link account View In-Depth detail on Opera 10.50’s features Download the Z1-AV69 Aero Theme Download Portable Opera 10.50 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set the Speed Dial as the Opera Startup PageSet Up User Scripts in Opera BrowserScan Files for Viruses Before You Download With Dr.WebTurn Your Computer into a File, Music, and Web Server with Opera UniteSet the Default Browser on Ubuntu From the Command Line TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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• Enabling Kerberos Authentication for Reporting Services

  - by robcarrol

  Recently, I’ve helped several customers with Kerberos authentication problems with Reporting Services and Analysis Services, so I’ve decided to write this blog post and pull together some useful resources in one place (there are 2 whitepapers in particular that I found invaluable configuring Kerberos authentication, and these can be found in the references section at the bottom of this post). In most of these cases, the problem has manifested itself with the Login failed for User ‘NT Authority\Anonymous’ (“double-hop”) error. By default, Reporting Services uses Windows Integrated Authentication, which includes the Kerberos and NTLM protocols for network authentication. Additionally, Windows Integrated Authentication includes the negotiate security header, which prompts the client to select Kerberos or NTLM for authentication. The client can access reports which have the appropriate permissions by using Kerberos for authentication. Servers that use Kerberos authentication can impersonate those clients and use their security context to access network resources. You can configure Reporting Services to use both Kerberos and NTLM authentication; however this may lead to a failure to authenticate. With negotiate, if Kerberos cannot be used, the authentication method will default to NTLM. When negotiate is enabled, the Kerberos protocol is always used except when: Clients/servers that are involved in the authentication process cannot use Kerberos. The client does not provide the information necessary to use Kerberos. An in-depth discussion of Kerberos authentication is beyond the scope of this post, however when users execute reports that are configured to use Windows Integrated Authentication, their logon credentials are passed from the report server to the server hosting the data source. Delegation needs to be set on the report server and Service Principle Names (SPNs) set for the relevant services. When a user processes a report, the request must go through a Web server on its way to a database server for processing. Kerberos authentication enables the Web server to request a service ticket from the domain controller; impersonate the client when passing the request to the database server; and then restrict the request based on the user’s permissions. Each time a server is required to pass the request to another server, the same process must be used. Kerberos authentication is supported in both native and SharePoint integrated mode, but I’ll focus on native mode for the purpose of this post (I’ll explain configuring SharePoint integrated mode and Kerberos authentication in a future post). Configuring Kerberos avoids the authentication failures due to double-hop issues. These double-hop errors occur when a users windows domain credentials can’t be passed to another server to complete the user’s request. In the case of my customers, users were executing Reporting Services reports that were configured to query Analysis Services cubes on a separate machine using Windows Integrated security. The double-hop issue occurs as NTLM credentials are valid for only one network hop, subsequent hops result in anonymous authentication. The client attempts to connect to the report server by making a request from a browser (or some other application), and the connection process begins with authentication. With NTLM authentication, client credentials are presented to Computer 2. However Computer 2 can’t use the same credentials to access Computer 3 (so we get the Anonymous login error). To access Computer 3 it is necessary to configure the connection string with stored credentials, which is what a number of customers I have worked with have done to workaround the double-hop authentication error. However, to get the benefits of Windows Integrated security, a better solution is to enable Kerberos authentication. Again, the connection process begins with authentication. With Kerberos authentication, the client and the server must demonstrate to one another that they are genuine, at which point authentication is successful and a secure client/server session is established. In the illustration above, the tiers represent the following: Client tier (computer 1): The client computer from which an application makes a request. Middle tier (computer 2): The Web server or farm where the client’s request is directed. Both the SharePoint and Reporting Services server(s) comprise the middle tier (but we’re only concentrating on native deployments just now). Back end tier (computer 3): The Database/Analysis Services server/Cluster where the requested data is stored. In order to enable Kerberos authentication for Reporting Services it’s necessary to configure the relevant SPNs, configure trust for delegation for server accounts, configure Kerberos with full delegation and configure the authentication types for Reporting Services. Service Principle Names (SPNs) are unique identifiers for services and identify the account’s type of service. If an SPN is not configured for a service, a client account will be unable to authenticate to the servers using Kerberos. You need to be a domain administrator to add an SPN, which can be added using the SetSPN utility. For Reporting Services in native mode, the following SPNs need to be registered --SQL Server Service SETSPN -S mssqlsvc/servername:1433 Domain\SQL For named instances, or if the default instance is running under a different port, then the specific port number should be used. --Reporting Services Service SETSPN -S http/servername Domain\SSRS SETSPN -S http/servername.domain.com Domain\SSRS The SPN should be set for the NETBIOS name of the server and the FQDN. If you access the reports using a host header or DNS alias, then that should also be registered SETSPN -S http/www.reports.com Domain\SSRS --Analysis Services Service SETSPN -S msolapsvc.3/servername Domain\SSAS Next, you need to configure trust for delegation, which refers to enabling a computer to impersonate an authenticated user to services on another computer: Location Description Client 1. The requesting application must support the Kerberos authentication protocol. 2. The user account making the request must be configured on the domain controller. Confirm that the following option is not selected: Account is sensitive and cannot be delegated. Servers 1. The service accounts must be trusted for delegation on the domain controller. 2. The service accounts must have SPNs registered on the domain controller. If the service account is a domain user account, the domain administrator must register the SPNs. In Active Directory Users and Computers, verify that the domain user accounts used to access reports have been configured for delegation (the ‘Account is sensitive and cannot be delegated’ option should not be selected): We then need to configure the Reporting Services service account and computer to use Kerberos with full delegation:   We also need to do the same for the SQL Server or Analysis Services service accounts and computers (depending on what type of data source you are connecting to in your reports). Finally, and this is the part that sometimes gets over-looked, we need to configure the authentication type correctly for reporting services to use Kerberos authentication. This is configured in the Authentication section of the RSReportServer.config file on the report server. <Authentication> <AuthenticationTypes>           <RSWindowsNegotiate/> </AuthenticationTypes> <EnableAuthPersistence>true</EnableAuthPersistence> </Authentication> This will enable Kerberos authentication for Internet Explorer. For other browsers, see the link below. The report server instance must be restarted for these changes to take effect. Once these changes have been made, all that’s left to do is test to make sure Kerberos authentication is working properly by running a report from report manager that is configured to use Windows Integrated authentication (either connecting to Analysis Services or SQL Server back-end). Resources: Manage Kerberos Authentication Issues in a Reporting Services Environment http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/E/1/BE1AABB3-6ED8-4C3C-AF91-448AB733B1AF/SSRSKerberos.docx Configuring Kerberos Authentication for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=23176 How to: Configure Windows Authentication in Reporting Services http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281253.aspx RSReportServer Configuration File http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157273.aspx#Authentication Planning for Browser Support http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms156511.aspx

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• Compiling examples for consuming the REST Endpoints for WCF Service using Agatha

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I recently made two contributions to the Agatha Project by Davy Brion over on Google Code, and one of the things I wanted to follow up with was a post showing examples and some, seemingly required tid bits.  The contributions which I made where: To support StructureMap To include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract The examples which I have made, I want to format them so they fit in with the current format of examples over on Agatha and hopefully create and submit a third patch which will include these examples to help others who wish to use these additions. Whilst building these examples for both XML and JSON I have learnt a couple of things which I feel are not really well documented, but are extremely good practice and once known make perfect sense.  I have chosen a real basic e-commerce context for my example Requests and Responses, and have also made use of the excellent tool AutoMapper, again on Google Code. Setting the scene I have followed the Pipes and Filters Pattern with the IQueryable interface on my Repository and exposed the following methods to query Products: IQueryable<Product> GetProducts(); IQueryable<Product> ByCategoryName(this IQueryable<Product> products, string categoryName) Product ByProductCode(this IQueryable<Product> products, String productCode) I have an interface for the IProductRepository but for the concrete implementation I have simply created a protected getter which populates a private List<Product> with 100 test products with random data.  Another good reason for following an interface based approach is that it will demonstrate usage of my first contribution which is the StructureMap support.  Finally the two Domain Objects I have made are Product and Category as shown below: public class Product { public String ProductCode { get; set; } public String Name { get; set; } public Decimal Price { get; set; } public Decimal Rrp { get; set; } public Category Category { get; set; } }   public class Category { public String Name { get; set; } }   Requirements for the REST Support One of the things which you will notice with Agatha is that you do not have to decorate your Request and Response objects with the WCF Service Model Attributes like DataContract, DataMember etc… Unfortunately from what I have seen, these are required if you want the same types to work with your REST endpoint.  I have not tried but I assume the same result can be achieved by simply decorating the same classes with the Serializable Attribute.  Without this the operation will fail. Another surprising thing I have found is that it did not work until I used the following Attribute parameters: Name Namespace e.g. [DataContract(Name = "GetProductsRequest", Namespace = "AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests")] public class GetProductsRequest : Request { }   Although I was surprised by this, things kind of explained themselves when I got round to figuring out the exact construct required for both the XML and the REST.  One of the things which you already know and are then reminded of is that each of your Requests and Responses ultimately inherit from an abstract base class respectively. This information needs to be represented in a way native to the format being used.  I have seen this in XML but I have not seen the format which is required for the JSON. JSON Consumer Example I have used JQuery to create the example and I simply want to make two requests to the server which as you will know with Agatha are transmitted inside an array to reduce the service calls.  I have also used a tool called json2 which is again over at Google Code simply to convert my JSON expression into its string format for transmission.  You will notice that I specify the type of Request I am using and the relevant Namespace it belongs to.  Also notice that the second request has a parameter so each of these two object are representing an abstract Request and the parameters of the object describe it. <script type="text/javascript"> var bodyContent = $.ajax({ url: "http://localhost:50348/service.svc/json/processjsonrequests", global: false, contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", type: "POST", processData: true, data: JSON.stringify([ { __type: "GetProductsRequest:AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests" }, { __type: "GetProductsByCategoryRequest:AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests", CategoryName: "Category1" } ]), dataType: "json", success: function(msg) { alert(msg); } }).responseText; </script>   XML Consumer Example For the XML Consumer example I have chosen to use a simple Console Application and make a WebRequest to the service using the XML as a request.  I have made a crude static method which simply reads from an XML File, replaces some value with a parameter and returns the formatted XML.  I say crude but it simply shows how XML Templates for each type of Request could be made and then have a wrapper utility in whatever language you use to combine the requests which are required.  The following XML is the same Request array as shown above but simply in the XML Format. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <ArrayOfRequest xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/Agatha.Common" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <Request i:type="a:GetProductsRequest" xmlns:a="AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests"/> <Request i:type="a:GetProductsByCategoryRequest" xmlns:a="AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests"> <a:CategoryName>{CategoryName}</a:CategoryName> </Request> </ArrayOfRequest>   It is funny because I remember submitting a question to StackOverflow asking whether there was a REST Client Generation tool similar to what Microsoft used for their RestStarterKit but which could be applied to existing services which have REST endpoints attached.  I could not find any but this is now definitely something which I am going to build, as I think it is extremely useful to have but also it should not be too difficult based on the information I now know about the above.  Finally I thought that the Strategy Pattern would lend itself really well to this type of thing so it can accommodate for different languages. I think that is about it, I have included the code for the example Console app which I made below incase anyone wants to have a mooch at the code.  As I said above I want to reformat these to fit in with the current examples over on the Agatha project, but also now thinking about it, make a Documentation Web method…{brain ticking} :-) Cheers for now and here is the final bit of code: static void Main(string[] args) { var request = WebRequest.Create("http://localhost:50348/service.svc/xml/processxmlrequests"); request.Method = "POST"; request.ContentType = "text/xml"; using(var writer = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream())) { writer.WriteLine(GetExampleRequestsString("Category1")); } var response = request.GetResponse(); using(var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream())) { Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd()); } Console.ReadLine(); } static string GetExampleRequestsString(string categoryName) { var data = File.ReadAllText(Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location), "ExampleRequests.xml")); data = data.Replace("{CategoryName}", categoryName); return data; } }

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• AutoMapper MappingFunction from Source Type of NameValueCollection

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I have had a situation arise today where I need to construct a complex type from a source of a NameValueCollection.  A little while back I submitted a patch for the Agatha Project to include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract.  I realized today that as useful as it is, it did not actually support true REST conformance, as REST should support GET so that you can use JSONP from JavaScript directly meaning you can query cross domain services.  My original implementation for POX and JSON used the POST method and this immediately rules out JSONP as from reading, JSONP only works with GET Requests. This then raised another issue.  The current operation contract of Agatha and one of its main benefits is that you can supply an array of Request objects in a single request, limiting the about of server requests you need to make.  Now, at the present time I am thinking that this will not be the case for the REST imlementation but will yield the benefits of the fact that : The same Request objects can be used for SOAP and RST (POX, JSON) The construct of the JavaScript functions will be simpler and more readable It will enable the use of JSONP for cross domain REST Services The current contract for the Agatha WcfRequestProcessor is at time of writing the following: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessRequests")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] Response[] Process(params Request[] requests); [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessOneWayRequests", IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] void ProcessOneWayRequests(params OneWayRequest[] requests); }   My current proposed solution, and at the very early stages of my concept is as follows: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRestJsonRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name="process")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Response[] Process(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); [OperationContract(Name="processoneway",IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process-one-way/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] void ProcessOneWayRequests(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); }   Now this part I have not yet implemented, it is the preliminart step which I have developed which will allow me to take the name of the Request Type and the NameValueCollection and construct the complex type which is that of the Request which I can then supply to a nested instance of the original IWcfRequestProcessor  and work as it should normally.  To give an example of some of the urls which you I envisage with this method are: http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getweather/?location=london http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getproductsbycategory/?categoryid=1 http://www.url.om/service.svc/json/process/sayhello/?name=andy Another reason why my direction has gone to a single request for the REST implementation is because of restrictions which are imposed by browsers on the length of the url.  From what I have read this is on average 2000 characters.  I think that this is a very acceptable usage limit in the context of using 1 request, but I do not think this is acceptable for accommodating multiple requests chained together.  I would love to be corrected on that one, I really would but unfortunately from what I have read I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The mapping function So, as I say this is just the first pass I have made at this, and I am not overly happy with the try catch for detecting types without default constructors.  I know there is a better way but for the minute, it escapes me.  I would also like to know the correct way for adding mapping functions and not using the anonymous way that I have used.  To achieve this I have used recursion which I am sure is what other mapping function use. As you do have to go as deep as the complex type is. public static object RecurseType(NameValueCollection collection, Type type, string prefix) { try { var returnObject = Activator.CreateInstance(type); foreach (var property in type.GetProperties()) { foreach (var key in collection.AllKeys) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) || key.Length > prefix.Length) { var propertyNameToMatch = String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) ? key : key.Substring(property.Name.IndexOf(prefix) + prefix.Length + 1); if (property.Name == propertyNameToMatch) { property.SetValue(returnObject, Convert.ChangeType(collection.Get(key), property.PropertyType), null); } else if(property.GetValue(returnObject,null) == null) { property.SetValue(returnObject, RecurseType(collection, property.PropertyType, String.Concat(prefix, property.PropertyType.Name)), null); } } } } return returnObject; } catch (MissingMethodException) { //Quite a blunt way of dealing with Types without default constructor return null; } }   Another thing is performance, I have not measured this in anyway, it is as I say the first pass, so I hope this can be the start of a more perfected implementation.  I tested this out with a complex type of three levels, there is no intended logical meaning to the properties, they are simply for the purposes of example.  You could call this a spiking session, as from here on in, now I know what I am building I would take a more TDD approach.  OK, purists, why did I not do this from the start, well I didn’t, this was a brain dump and now I know what I am building I can. The console test and how I used with AutoMapper is as follows: static void Main(string[] args) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); collection.Add("Name", "Andrew Rea"); collection.Add("Number", "1"); collection.Add("AddressLine1", "123 Street"); collection.Add("AddressNumber", "2"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeCountry", "United Kingdom"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeNumber", "3"); AutoMapper.Mapper.CreateMap<NameValueCollection, Person>() .ConvertUsing(x => { return(Person) RecurseType(x, typeof(Person), null); }); var person = AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<NameValueCollection, Person>(collection); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); Console.WriteLine(person.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Line1); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Country); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Number); Console.ReadLine(); }   Notice the convention that I am using and that this method requires you do use.  Each property is prefixed with the constructed name of its parents combined.  This is the convention used by AutoMapper and it makes sense. I can also think of other uses for this including using with ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders for creating a complex type from the QueryString which is itself is a NameValueCollection. Hope this is of some help to people and I would welcome any code reviews you could give me. References: Agatha : http://code.google.com/p/agatha-rrsl/ AutoMapper : http://automapper.codeplex.com/   Cheers for now, Andrew   P.S. I will have the proposed solution for a more complete REST implementation for AGATHA very soon. 

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite Now Available

  - by chung.wu

  Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite is now available. The management suite combines features that were available in the standalone Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite and Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle's market leading real user monitoring and configuration management capabilities to provide the most complete solution for managing E-Business Suite applications. The features that were available in the standalone management packs are now packaged into Oracle E-Business Suite Plug-in 4.0, which is now fully certified with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control. This latest plug-in extends Grid Control with E-Business Suite specific management capabilities and features enhanced change management support. In addition, this latest release of Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite also includes numerous real user monitoring improvements. General Enhancements This new release of Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite offers the following key capabilities: Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control Support: All components of the management suite are certified with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control. Built-in Diagnostic Ability: This release has numerous major enhancements that provide the necessary intelligence to determine if the product has been installed and configured correctly. There are diagnostics for Discovery, Cloning, and User Monitoring that will validate if the appropriate patches, privileges, setups, and profile options have been configured. This feature improves the setup and configuration time to be up and operational. Lifecycle Automation Enhancements Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite provides a centralized view to monitor and orchestrate changes (both functional and technical) across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite systems. In this latest release, it provides even more control and flexibility in managing Oracle E-Business Suite changes.Change Management: Built-in Diagnostic Ability: This latest release has numerous major enhancements that provide the necessary intelligence to determine if the product has been installed and configured correctly. There are diagnostics for Customization Manager, Patch Manager, and Setup Manager that will validate if the appropriate patches, privileges, setups, and profile options have been configured. Enhancing the setup time and configuration time to be up and operational. Customization Manager: Multi-Node Custom Application Registration: This feature automates the process of registering and validating custom products/applications on every node in a multi-node EBS system. Public/Private File Source Mappings and E-Business Suite Mappings: File Source Mappings & E-Business Suite Mappings can be created and marked as public or private. Only the creator/owner can define/edit his/her own mappings. Users can use public mappings, but cannot edit or change settings. Test Checkout Command for Versions: This feature allows you to test/verify checkout commands at the version level within the File Source Mapping page. Prerequisite Patch Validation: You can specify prerequisite patches for Customization packages and for Release 12 Oracle E-Business Suite packages. Destination Path Population: You can now automatically populate the Destination Path for common file types during package construction. OAF File Type Support: Ability to package Oracle Application Framework (OAF) customizations and deploy them across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Extended PLL Support: Ability to distinguish between different types of PLLs (that is, Report and Forms PLL files). Providing better granularity when managing PLL objects. Enhanced Standard Checker: Provides greater and more comprehensive list of coding standards that are verified during the package build process (for example, File Driver exceptions, Java checks, XML checks, SQL checks, etc.) HTML Package Readme: The package Readme is in HTML format and includes the file listing. Advanced Package Search Capabilities: The ability to utilize more criteria within the advanced search package (that is, Public, Last Updated by, Files Source Mapping, and E-Business Suite Mapping). Enhanced Package Build Notifications: More detailed information on the results of a package build process. Better, more detailed troubleshooting guidance in the event of build failures. Patch Manager:Staged Patches: Ability to run Patch Manager with no external internet access. Customer can download Oracle E-Business Suite patches into a shared location for Patch Manager to access and apply. Supports highly secured production environments that prohibit external internet connections. Support for Superseded Patches: Automatic check for superseded patches. Allows users to easily add superseded patches into the Patch Run. More comprehensive and correct Patch Runs. Removes many manual and laborious tasks, frees up Apps DBAs for higher value-added tasks. Automatic Primary Node Identification: Users can now specify which is the "primary node" (that is, which node hosts the Shared APPL_TOP) during the Patch Run interview process, available for Release 12 only. Setup Manager:Preview Extract Results: Ability to execute an extract in "proof mode", and examine the query results, to determine accuracy. Used in conjunction with the "where" clause in Advanced Filtering. This feature can provide better and more accurate fine tuning of extracts. Use Uploaded Extracts in New Projects: Ability to incorporate uploaded extracts in new projects via new LOV fields in package construction. Leverages the Setup Manager repository to access extracts that have been uploaded. Allows customer to reuse uploaded extracts to provision new instances. Re-use Existing (that is, historical) Extracts in New Projects: Ability to incorporate existing extracts in new projects via new LOV fields in package construction. Leverages the Setup Manager repository to access point-in-time extracts (snapshots) of configuration data. Allows customer to reuse existing extracts to provision new instances. Allows comparative historical reporting of identical APIs, executed at different times. Support for BR100 formats: Setup Manager can now automatically produce reports in the BR100 format. Native support for industry standard formats. Concurrent Manager API Support: General Foundation now provides an API for management of "Concurrent Manager" configuration data. Ability to migrate Concurrent Managers from one instance to another. Complete the setup once and never again; no need to redefine the Concurrent Managers. User Experience Management Enhancements Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite includes comprehensive capabilities for user experience management, supporting both real user and synthetic transaction based user monitoring techniques. This latest release of the management suite include numerous improvements in real user monitoring support. KPI Reporting: Configurable decimal precision for reporting of KPI and SLA values. By default, this is two decimal places. KPI numerator and denominator information. It is now possible to view KPI numerator and denominator information, and to have it available for export. Content Messages Processing: The application content message facility has been extended to distinguish between notifications and errors. In addition, it is now possible to specify matching rules that can be used to refine a selected content message specification. Note this is only available for XPath-based (not literal) message contents. Data Export: The Enriched data export facility has been significantly enhanced to provide improved performance and accessibility. Data is no longer stored within XML-based files, but is now stored within the Reporter database. However, it is possible to configure an alternative database for its storage. Access to the export data is through SQL. With this enhancement, it is now more easy than ever to use tools such as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to analyze correlated data collected from real user monitoring and business data sources. SNMP Traps for System Events: Previously, the SNMP notification facility was only available for KPI alerting. It has now been extended to support the generation of SNMP traps for system events, to provide external health monitoring of the RUEI system processes. Performance Improvements: Enhanced dashboard performance. The dashboard facility has been enhanced to support the parallel loading of items. In the case of dashboards containing large numbers of items, this can result in a significant performance improvement. Initial period selection within Data Browser and reports. The User Preferences facility has been extended to allow you to specify the initial period selection when first entering the Data Browser or reports facility. The default is the last hour. Performance improvement when querying the all sessions group. Technical Prerequisites, Download and Installation Instructions The Linux version of the plug-in is available for immediate download from Oracle Technology Network or Oracle eDelivery. For specific information regarding technical prerequisites, product download and installation, please refer to My Oracle Support note 1224313.1. The following certifications are in progress: * Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit) (9, 10) * HP-UX Itanium (11.23, 11.31) * HP-UX PA-RISC (64-bit) (11.23, 11.31) * IBM AIX on Power Systems (64-bit) (5.3, 6.1)

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 3 – Table per Concrete Type (TPC) and Choosing Strategy Guidelines

  - by mortezam

  This is the third (and last) post in a series that explains different approaches to map an inheritance hierarchy with EF Code First. I've described these strategies in previous posts: Part 1 – Table per Hierarchy (TPH) Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)In today’s blog post I am going to discuss Table per Concrete Type (TPC) which completes the inheritance mapping strategies supported by EF Code First. At the end of this post I will provide some guidelines to choose an inheritance strategy mainly based on what we've learned in this series. TPC and Entity Framework in the Past Table per Concrete type is somehow the simplest approach suggested, yet using TPC with EF is one of those concepts that has not been covered very well so far and I've seen in some resources that it was even discouraged. The reason for that is just because Entity Data Model Designer in VS2010 doesn't support TPC (even though the EF runtime does). That basically means if you are following EF's Database-First or Model-First approaches then configuring TPC requires manually writing XML in the EDMX file which is not considered to be a fun practice. Well, no more. You'll see that with Code First, creating TPC is perfectly possible with fluent API just like other strategies and you don't need to avoid TPC due to the lack of designer support as you would probably do in other EF approaches. Table per Concrete Type (TPC)In Table per Concrete type (aka Table per Concrete class) we use exactly one table for each (nonabstract) class. All properties of a class, including inherited properties, can be mapped to columns of this table, as shown in the following figure: As you can see, the SQL schema is not aware of the inheritance; effectively, we’ve mapped two unrelated tables to a more expressive class structure. If the base class was concrete, then an additional table would be needed to hold instances of that class. I have to emphasize that there is no relationship between the database tables, except for the fact that they share some similar columns. TPC Implementation in Code First Just like the TPT implementation, we need to specify a separate table for each of the subclasses. We also need to tell Code First that we want all of the inherited properties to be mapped as part of this table. In CTP5, there is a new helper method on EntityMappingConfiguration class called MapInheritedProperties that exactly does this for us. Here is the complete object model as well as the fluent API to create a TPC mapping: public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } }          public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } }          public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } }      public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; }              protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)     {         modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("BankAccounts");         });         modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("CreditCards");         });                 } } The Importance of EntityMappingConfiguration ClassAs a side note, it worth mentioning that EntityMappingConfiguration class turns out to be a key type for inheritance mapping in Code First. Here is an snapshot of this class: namespace System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.Configuration.Mapping {     public class EntityMappingConfiguration<TEntityType> where TEntityType : class     {         public ValueConditionConfiguration Requires(string discriminator);         public void ToTable(string tableName);         public void MapInheritedProperties();     } } As you have seen so far, we used its Requires method to customize TPH. We also used its ToTable method to create a TPT and now we are using its MapInheritedProperties along with ToTable method to create our TPC mapping. TPC Configuration is Not Done Yet!We are not quite done with our TPC configuration and there is more into this story even though the fluent API we saw perfectly created a TPC mapping for us in the database. To see why, let's start working with our object model. For example, the following code creates two new objects of BankAccount and CreditCard types and tries to add them to the database: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount();     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard() { CardType = 1 };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Running this code throws an InvalidOperationException with this message: The changes to the database were committed successfully, but an error occurred while updating the object context. The ObjectContext might be in an inconsistent state. Inner exception message: AcceptChanges cannot continue because the object's key values conflict with another object in the ObjectStateManager. Make sure that the key values are unique before calling AcceptChanges. The reason we got this exception is because DbContext.SaveChanges() internally invokes SaveChanges method of its internal ObjectContext. ObjectContext's SaveChanges method on its turn by default calls AcceptAllChanges after it has performed the database modifications. AcceptAllChanges method merely iterates over all entries in ObjectStateManager and invokes AcceptChanges on each of them. Since the entities are in Added state, AcceptChanges method replaces their temporary EntityKey with a regular EntityKey based on the primary key values (i.e. BillingDetailId) that come back from the database and that's where the problem occurs since both the entities have been assigned the same value for their primary key by the database (i.e. on both BillingDetailId = 1) and the problem is that ObjectStateManager cannot track objects of the same type (i.e. BillingDetail) with the same EntityKey value hence it throws. If you take a closer look at the TPC's SQL schema above, you'll see why the database generated the same values for the primary keys: the BillingDetailId column in both BankAccounts and CreditCards table has been marked as identity. How to Solve The Identity Problem in TPC As you saw, using SQL Server’s int identity columns doesn't work very well together with TPC since there will be duplicate entity keys when inserting in subclasses tables with all having the same identity seed. Therefore, to solve this, either a spread seed (where each table has its own initial seed value) will be needed, or a mechanism other than SQL Server’s int identity should be used. Some other RDBMSes have other mechanisms allowing a sequence (identity) to be shared by multiple tables, and something similar can be achieved with GUID keys in SQL Server. While using GUID keys, or int identity keys with different starting seeds will solve the problem but yet another solution would be to completely switch off identity on the primary key property. As a result, we need to take the responsibility of providing unique keys when inserting records to the database. We will go with this solution since it works regardless of which database engine is used. Switching Off Identity in Code First We can switch off identity simply by placing DatabaseGenerated attribute on the primary key property and pass DatabaseGenerationOption.None to its constructor. DatabaseGenerated attribute is a new data annotation which has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5: public abstract class BillingDetail {     [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGenerationOption.None)]     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } As always, we can achieve the same result by using fluent API, if you prefer that: modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()             .Property(p => p.BillingDetailId)             .HasDatabaseGenerationOption(DatabaseGenerationOption.None); Working With The Object Model Our TPC mapping is ready and we can try adding new records to the database. But, like I said, now we need to take care of providing unique keys when creating new objects: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount()      {          BillingDetailId = 1                          };     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard()      {          BillingDetailId = 2,         CardType = 1     };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Polymorphic Associations with TPC is Problematic The main problem with this approach is that it doesn’t support Polymorphic Associations very well. After all, in the database, associations are represented as foreign key relationships and in TPC, the subclasses are all mapped to different tables so a polymorphic association to their base class (abstract BillingDetail in our example) cannot be represented as a simple foreign key relationship. For example, consider the the domain model we introduced here where User has a polymorphic association with BillingDetail. This would be problematic in our TPC Schema, because if User has a many-to-one relationship with BillingDetail, the Users table would need a single foreign key column, which would have to refer both concrete subclass tables. This isn’t possible with regular foreign key constraints. Schema Evolution with TPC is Complex A further conceptual problem with this mapping strategy is that several different columns, of different tables, share exactly the same semantics. This makes schema evolution more complex. For example, a change to a base class property results in changes to multiple columns. It also makes it much more difficult to implement database integrity constraints that apply to all subclasses. Generated SQLLet's examine SQL output for polymorphic queries in TPC mapping. For example, consider this polymorphic query for all BillingDetails and the resulting SQL statements that being executed in the database: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; Just like the SQL query generated by TPT mapping, the CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is merely to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type). TPC's SQL Queries are Union Based As you can see in the above screenshot, the first SELECT uses a FROM-clause subquery (which is selected with a red rectangle) to retrieve all instances of BillingDetails from all concrete class tables. The tables are combined with a UNION operator, and a literal (in this case, 0 and 1) is inserted into the intermediate result; (look at the lines highlighted in yellow.) EF reads this to instantiate the correct class given the data from a particular row. A union requires that the queries that are combined, project over the same columns; hence, EF has to pad and fill up nonexistent columns with NULL. This query will really perform well since here we can let the database optimizer find the best execution plan to combine rows from several tables. There is also no Joins involved so it has a better performance than the SQL queries generated by TPT where a Join is required between the base and subclasses tables. Choosing Strategy GuidelinesBefore we get into this discussion, I want to emphasize that there is no one single "best strategy fits all scenarios" exists. As you saw, each of the approaches have their own advantages and drawbacks. Here are some rules of thumb to identify the best strategy in a particular scenario: If you don’t require polymorphic associations or queries, lean toward TPC—in other words, if you never or rarely query for BillingDetails and you have no class that has an association to BillingDetail base class. I recommend TPC (only) for the top level of your class hierarchy, where polymorphism isn’t usually required, and when modification of the base class in the future is unlikely. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare relatively few properties (particularly if the main difference between subclasses is in their behavior), lean toward TPH. Your goal is to minimize the number of nullable columns and to convince yourself (and your DBA) that a denormalized schema won’t create problems in the long run. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare many properties (subclasses differ mainly by the data they hold), lean toward TPT. Or, depending on the width and depth of your inheritance hierarchy and the possible cost of joins versus unions, use TPC. By default, choose TPH only for simple problems. For more complex cases (or when you’re overruled by a data modeler insisting on the importance of nullability constraints and normalization), you should consider the TPT strategy. But at that point, ask yourself whether it may not be better to remodel inheritance as delegation in the object model (delegation is a way of making composition as powerful for reuse as inheritance). Complex inheritance is often best avoided for all sorts of reasons unrelated to persistence or ORM. EF acts as a buffer between the domain and relational models, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore persistence concerns when designing your classes. SummaryIn this series, we focused on one of the main structural aspect of the object/relational paradigm mismatch which is inheritance and discussed how EF solve this problem as an ORM solution. We learned about the three well-known inheritance mapping strategies and their implementations in EF Code First. Hopefully it gives you a better insight about the mapping of inheritance hierarchies as well as choosing the best strategy for your particular scenario. Happy New Year and Happy Code-Firsting! References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { color: #5A99FF; } a:visited { color: #5A99FF; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } .exception { background-color: #f0f0f0; font-style: italic; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px; }

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• Reporting Services - It's a Wrap!

  - by smisner

  If you have any experience at all with Reporting Services, you have probably developed a report using the matrix data region. It's handy when you want to generate columns dynamically based on data. If users view a matrix report online, they can scroll horizontally to view all columns and all is well. But if they want to print the report, the experience is completely different and you'll have to decide how you want to handle dynamic columns. By default, when a user prints a matrix report for which the number of columns exceeds the width of the page, Reporting Services determines how many columns can fit on the page and renders one or more separate pages for the additional columns. In this post, I'll explain two techniques for managing dynamic columns. First, I'll show how to use the RepeatRowHeaders property to make it easier to read a report when columns span multiple pages, and then I'll show you how to "wrap" columns so that you can avoid the horizontal page break. Included with this post are the sample RDLs for download. First, let's look at the default behavior of a matrix. A matrix that has too many columns for one printed page (or output to page-based renderer like PDF or Word) will be rendered such that the first page with the row group headers and the inital set of columns, as shown in Figure 1. The second page continues by rendering the next set of columns that can fit on the page, as shown in Figure 2.This pattern continues until all columns are rendered. The problem with the default behavior is that you've lost the context of employee and sales order - the row headers - on the second page. That makes it hard for users to read this report because the layout requires them to flip back and forth between the current page and the first page of the report. You can fix this behavior by finding the RepeatRowHeaders of the tablix report item and changing its value to True. The second (and subsequent pages) of the matrix now look like the image shown in Figure 3. The problem with this approach is that the number of printed pages to flip through is unpredictable when you have a large number of potential columns. What if you want to include all columns on the same page? You can take advantage of the repeating behavior of a tablix and get repeating columns by embedding one tablix inside of another. For this example, I'm using SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services. You can get similar results with SQL Server 2008. (In fact, you could probably do something similar in SQL Server 2005, but I haven't tested it. The steps would be slightly different because you would be working with the old-style matrix as compared to the new-style tablix discussed in this post.) I created a dataset that queries AdventureWorksDW2008 tables: SELECT TOP (100) e.LastName + ', ' + e.FirstName AS EmployeeName, d.FullDateAlternateKey, f.SalesOrderNumber, p.EnglishProductName, sum(SalesAmount) as SalesAmount FROM FactResellerSales AS f INNER JOIN DimProduct AS p ON p.ProductKey = f.ProductKey INNER JOIN DimDate AS d ON d.DateKey = f.OrderDateKey INNER JOIN DimEmployee AS e ON e.EmployeeKey = f.EmployeeKey GROUP BY p.EnglishProductName, d.FullDateAlternateKey, e.LastName + ', ' + e.FirstName, f.SalesOrderNumber ORDER BY EmployeeName, f.SalesOrderNumber, p.EnglishProductName To start the report: Add a matrix to the report body and drag Employee Name to the row header, which also creates a group. Next drag SalesOrderNumber below Employee Name in the Row Groups panel, which creates a second group and a second column in the row header section of the matrix, as shown in Figure 4. Now for some trickiness. Add another column to the row headers. This new column will be associated with the existing EmployeeName group rather than causing BIDS to create a new group. To do this, right-click on the EmployeeName textbox in the bottom row, point to Insert Column, and then click Inside Group-Right. Then add the SalesOrderNumber field to this new column. By doing this, you're creating a report that repeats a set of columns for each EmployeeName/SalesOrderNumber combination that appears in the data. Next, modify the first row group's expression to group on both EmployeeName and SalesOrderNumber. In the Row Groups section, right-click EmployeeName, click Group Properties, click the Add button, and select [SalesOrderNumber]. Now you need to configure the columns to repeat. Rather than use the Columns group of the matrix like you might expect, you're going to use the textbox that belongs to the second group of the tablix as a location for embedding other report items. First, clear out the text that's currently in the third column - SalesOrderNumber - because it's already added as a separate textbox in this report design. Then drag and drop a matrix into that textbox, as shown in Figure 5. Again, you need to do some tricks here to get the appearance and behavior right. We don't really want repeating rows in the embedded matrix, so follow these steps: Click on the Rows label which then displays RowGroup in the Row Groups pane below the report body. Right-click on RowGroup,click Delete Group, and select the option to delete associated rows and columns. As a result, you get a modified matrix which has only a ColumnGroup in it, with a row above a double-dashed line for the column group and a row below the line for the aggregated data. Let's continue: Drag EnglishProductName to the data textbox (below the line). Add a second data row by right-clicking EnglishProductName, pointing to Insert Row, and clicking Below. Add the SalesAmount field to the new data textbox. Now eliminate the column group row without eliminating the group. To do this, right-click the row above the double-dashed line, click Delete Rows, and then select Delete Rows Only in the message box. Now you're ready for the fit and finish phase: Resize the column containing the embedded matrix so that it fits completely. Also, the final column in the matrix is for the column group. You can't delete this column, but you can make it as small as possible. Just click on the matrix to display the row and column handles, and then drag the right edge of the rightmost column to the left to make the column virtually disappear. Next, configure the groups so that the columns of the embedded matrix will wrap. In the Column Groups pane, right-click ColumnGroup1 and click on the expression button (labeled fx) to the right of Group On [EnglishProductName]. Replace the expression with the following: =RowNumber("SalesOrderNumber" ). We use SalesOrderNumber here because that is the name of the group that "contains" the embedded matrix. The next step is to configure the number of columns to display before wrapping. Click any cell in the matrix that is not inside the embedded matrix, and then double-click the second group in the Row Groups pane - SalesOrderNumber. Change the group expression to the following expression: =Ceiling(RowNumber("EmployeeName")/3) The last step is to apply formatting. In my example, I set the SalesAmount textbox's Format property to C2 and also right-aligned the text in both the EnglishProductName and the SalesAmount textboxes. And voila - Figure 6 shows a matrix report with wrapping columns. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• The Windows Browser Ballot Screen Offers Web Browser Choice to European Users

  - by Matthew Guay

  Since March, our friends across the pond in Europe get to decide which browser they want to install with their Windows OS. Today we thought we would take a look at the ballot choices, some are well known, and others you may not have heard of. Windows users in European countries should start seeing the so called “Browser Ballot Screen” after installing the Windows Update KB976002 (link below). The browser ballot offers a dozen different browsers, including some you’ve likely never heard of.  They each have some unique features, and are all free, and here we take a quick look at each of them. Internet Explorer 8 Internet Explorer is the world’s most used web browser, as it’s bundled with Windows. It also includes several unique features, including Accelerators that make it easy to search or find a map of a location, and InPrivate filtering to directly control what sites can get personal information.  Additionally, it offers great integration with Windows Touch and the new taskbar in Windows 7. IE 8 runs on Windows XP and newer, and is bundled with Windows 7. Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Firefox is the most popular browser other than Internet Explorer.  It is the modern descendant of Netscape, and is loved by web developers for its adherence to web standards, openness, and expandability.  It offers thousands of Add-ons and themes to let you customize it to fit your preferences. The most recent version has added Personas, which are quick, lightweight themes to let you personalize the look your browser. It’s open source, and runs on all modern versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Of course thanks to Asian Angel, our resident browser expert, you can check out several articles regarding this popular IE alternative. Google Chrome 4 Google Chrome has gained an impressive amount of market share during its short time in the market. It offers a minimalistic interface and fast speeds with intensive web applications. The address bar is also a search bar, so you can enter a search query or web address and quickly get the information you need. With version 4 you can add a growing number of extensions, personalize it with a variety of stylish themes, and automatically translate foreign websites into your own language. Opera 10.50 Although Opera has been around for over a decade, relatively few users have used it. With the new 10.50 release, Opera has many unique features packed in a sleek UI. It integrates great with Aero and the Windows 7 taskbar, and lets you preview the contents of your websites in the tab bar. It also includes Opera Unite, a small personal web server to make file sharing easy, Opera Turbo to speed up your internet when the connection is slow, and Opera Link to keep all your copies of Opera in sync. It’s a popular browser on many mobile devices, and version 10.50 has a lot of enhancements. Apple Safari 4 Safari is the default browser in Mac OS X, and starting with version 3 it has been available for Windows as well. It’s based on Webkit, the popular new rendering engine that provides great speed and standards compatibility.  Safari 4 lets you browse your browsing history in a unique Coverflow interface, and shows your Top Sites in a fancy, 3D interface.  It’s also great for viewing mobile websites for the iPhone and other mobile devices through Developer Tools. Flock 2.5 Based on the popular Firefox core, Flock brings a multitude of social features to your browsing experience. You can view the latest YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, update your favorite social network, and keep up with your webmail thanks to It’s integration with a wide variety of services. You can even post to your blog through the integrated blog editor. If your time online is mostly spent in social services, this may be a browser you want to check out. Maxthon 2.5 Maxthon is a unique browser that builds on Internet Explorer to bring more features with IE’s rendering. Formerly known as MyIE2, Maxthon was popular for bringing tabbed browsing with IE rendering during the days of IE 6.  Today Maxthon supports a wide range of plugins and skins, so you can customize it however you want. It includes mouse gestures, a web accelerator to speed up pokey internet connections, a content blocker to remove unwanted content from sites, an online account to backup your favorites, and a nice download manager. Avant Browser Another nice browser based on Internet Explorer, Avant brings a wide variety of features in a nice brushed-metal interface. It includes an integrated AutoFill for forms, mouse gestures, customizable skins, and privacy protection features. It also includes a Flash blocker that will only load flash in webpages when you select them. You can also integrate Avant with an online account to store your bookmarks, feeds, settings and passwords online. Sleipnir Sleipnir is a customizable browser meant for advance users that is quite popular in Japan. It’s built on the Trident engine and virtually every aspect of is customizable unlike Internet Explorer.   FlashPeak SlimBrowser SlimBrowser from FlashPeak incorporates a lot of features like Popup Killer, Auto Login, site filtering and more. It’s based on Internet Explorer but offers a lot more customizable options out of the box.   K-meleon This basic browser is light on system resources and based on the Gecko engine. It’s been in development for years on SourceForge, and if you like to tweak virtually any aspect of your browser, this might be a good choice for you.   GreenBrowser GreenBrowser is based on Internet Explorer and is available in several languages. It has a large amount of features out of the box and is light on system resources.   Conclusion The European Union asked for more choices in the web browser they could choose from when installing Windows, and with the Browser Ballot Screen, they certainly get a variety to choose from.  If you’ve tried out some of the lesser known browsers, or think some important ones have been left out, leave a comment and tell us about it. Learn More About the Browser Ballot Screen and Download Alternatives to IE Windows Update KB976002 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set the Default Browser on Ubuntu From the Command LineQuick Tip: Empty Internet Explorer 7 Cache when Browser is ClosedView Hidden Files and Folders in Ubuntu File BrowserSet the Default Browser and Email Client in UbuntuAccess Multiple Browsers from Firefox with Browser View Plus TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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• Enterprise Library Logging / Exception handling and Postsharp

  - by subodhnpushpak

  One of my colleagues came-up with a unique situation where it was required to create log files based on the input file which is uploaded. For example if A.xml is uploaded, the corresponding log file should be A_log.txt. I am a strong believer that Logging / EH / caching are cross-cutting architecture aspects and should be least invasive to the business-logic written in enterprise application. I have been using Enterprise Library for logging / EH (i use to work with Avanade, so i have affection towards the library!! :D ). I have been also using excellent library called PostSharp for cross cutting aspect. Here i present a solution with and without PostSharp all in a unit test. Please see full source code at end of the this blog post. But first, we need to tweak the enterprise library so that the log files are created at runtime based on input given. Below is Custom trace listner which writes log into a given file extracted out of Logentry extendedProperties property. using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common.Configuration; using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Configuration; using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.TraceListeners; using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging; using System.IO; using System.Text; using System; using System.Diagnostics;   namespace Subodh.Framework.Logging { [ConfigurationElementType(typeof(CustomTraceListenerData))] public class LogToFileTraceListener : CustomTraceListener {   private static object syncRoot = new object();   public override void TraceData(TraceEventCache eventCache, string source, TraceEventType eventType, int id, object data) {   if ((data is LogEntry) & this.Formatter != null) { WriteOutToLog(this.Formatter.Format((LogEntry)data), (LogEntry)data); } else { WriteOutToLog(data.ToString(), (LogEntry)data); } }   public override void Write(string message) { Debug.Print(message.ToString()); }   public override void WriteLine(string message) { Debug.Print(message.ToString()); }   private void WriteOutToLog(string BodyText, LogEntry logentry) { try { //Get the filelocation from the extended properties if (logentry.ExtendedProperties.ContainsKey("filelocation")) { string fullPath = Path.GetFullPath(logentry.ExtendedProperties["filelocation"].ToString());   //Create the directory where the log file is written to if it does not exist. DirectoryInfo directoryInfo = new DirectoryInfo(Path.GetDirectoryName(fullPath));   if (directoryInfo.Exists == false) { directoryInfo.Create(); }   //Lock the file to prevent another process from using this file //as data is being written to it.   lock (syncRoot) { using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(fullPath, FileMode.Append, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.Write, 4096, true)) { using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(fs, Encoding.UTF8)) { Log(BodyText, sw); sw.Close(); } fs.Close(); } } } } catch (Exception ex) { throw new LoggingException(ex.Message, ex); } }   /// <summary> /// Write message to named file /// </summary> public static void Log(string logMessage, TextWriter w) { w.WriteLine("{0}", logMessage); } } }   The above can be “plugged into” the code using below configuration <loggingConfiguration name="Logging Application Block" tracingEnabled="true" defaultCategory="Trace" logWarningsWhenNoCategoriesMatch="true"> <listeners> <add listenerDataType="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Configuration.CustomTraceListenerData, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging, Version=4.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" traceOutputOptions="None" filter="All" type="Subodh.Framework.Logging.LogToFileTraceListener, Subodh.Framework.Logging, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null" name="Subodh Custom Trace Listener" initializeData="" formatter="Text Formatter" /> </listeners> Similarly we can use PostSharp to expose the above as cross cutting aspects as below using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Reflection; using PostSharp.Laos; using System.Diagnostics; using GC.FrameworkServices.ExceptionHandler; using Subodh.Framework.Logging;   namespace Subodh.Framework.ExceptionHandling { [Serializable] public sealed class LogExceptionAttribute : OnExceptionAspect { private string prefix; private MethodFormatStrings formatStrings;   // This field is not serialized. It is used only at compile time. [NonSerialized] private readonly Type exceptionType; private string fileName;   /// <summary> /// Declares a <see cref="XTraceExceptionAttribute"/> custom attribute /// that logs every exception flowing out of the methods to which /// the custom attribute is applied. /// </summary> public LogExceptionAttribute() { }   /// <summary> /// Declares a <see cref="XTraceExceptionAttribute"/> custom attribute /// that logs every exception derived from a given <see cref="Type"/> /// flowing out of the methods to which /// the custom attribute is applied. /// </summary> /// <param name="exceptionType"></param> public LogExceptionAttribute( Type exceptionType ) { this.exceptionType = exceptionType; }   public LogExceptionAttribute(Type exceptionType, string fileName) { this.exceptionType = exceptionType; this.fileName = fileName; }   /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the prefix string, printed before every trace message. /// </summary> /// <value> /// For instance <c>[Exception]</c>. /// </value> public string Prefix { get { return this.prefix; } set { this.prefix = value; } }   /// <summary> /// Initializes the current object. Called at compile time by PostSharp. /// </summary> /// <param name="method">Method to which the current instance is /// associated.</param> public override void CompileTimeInitialize( MethodBase method ) { // We just initialize our fields. They will be serialized at compile-time // and deserialized at runtime. this.formatStrings = Formatter.GetMethodFormatStrings( method ); this.prefix = Formatter.NormalizePrefix( this.prefix ); }   public override Type GetExceptionType( MethodBase method ) { return this.exceptionType; }   /// <summary> /// Method executed when an exception occurs in the methods to which the current /// custom attribute has been applied. We just write a record to the tracing /// subsystem. /// </summary> /// <param name="context">Event arguments specifying which method /// is being called and with which parameters.</param> public override void OnException( MethodExecutionEventArgs context ) { string message = String.Format("{0}Exception {1} {{{2}}} in {{{3}}}. \r\n\r\nStack Trace {4}", this.prefix, context.Exception.GetType().Name, context.Exception.Message, this.formatStrings.Format(context.Instance, context.Method, context.GetReadOnlyArgumentArray()), context.Exception.StackTrace); if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(fileName)) { ApplicationLogger.LogException(message, fileName); } else { ApplicationLogger.LogException(message, Source.UtilityService); } } } } To use the above below is the unit test [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(NotImplementedException))] public void TestMethod1() { MethodThrowingExceptionForLog(); try { MethodThrowingExceptionForLogWithPostSharp(); } catch (NotImplementedException ex) { throw ex; } }   private void MethodThrowingExceptionForLog() { try { throw new NotImplementedException(); } catch (NotImplementedException ex) { // create file and then write log ApplicationLogger.TraceMessage("this is a trace message which will be logged in Test1MyFile", @"D:\EL\Test1Myfile.txt"); ApplicationLogger.TraceMessage("this is a trace message which will be logged in YetAnotherTest1Myfile", @"D:\EL\YetAnotherTest1Myfile.txt"); } }   // Automatically log details using attributes // Log exception using attributes .... A La WCF [FaultContract(typeof(FaultMessage))] style] [Log(@"D:\EL\Test1MyfileLogPostsharp.txt")] [LogException(typeof(NotImplementedException), @"D:\EL\Test1MyfileExceptionPostsharp.txt")] private void MethodThrowingExceptionForLogWithPostSharp() { throw new NotImplementedException(); } The good thing about the approach is that all the logging and EH is done at centralized location controlled by PostSharp. Of Course, if some other library has to be used instead of EL, it can easily be plugged in. Also, the coder ARE ONLY involved in writing business code in methods, which makes code cleaner. Here is the full source code. The third party assemblies provided are from EL and PostSharp and i presume you will find these useful. Do let me know your thoughts / ideas on the same. Technorati Tags: PostSharp,Enterprize library,C#,Logging,Exception handling

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• 17 new features in Visual Studio 2010

  - by vik20000in

  Visual studio 2010 has been released to RTM a few days back. This release of Visual studio 2010 comes with a big number of improvements on many fronts. In this post I will try and point out some of the major improvements in Visual Studio 2010. 1)      Visual studio IDE Improvement. Visual studio IDE has been rewritten in WPF. The look and feel of the studio has been improved for improved readability. Start page has been redesigned and template so that anyone can change the start page as they wish. 2)      Multiple Monitor - Support for Multiple Monitor was already there in Visual studio. But in this edition it has been improved as much that we can now place the document, design and code window outside the IDE in another monitor. 3)      ZOOM in Code Editor – Making the editors in WPF has made significant improvement for them. The best one that I like is the ZOOM feature. We can now zoom in the code editor with the help of the ctrl + Mouse scroll. The zoom feature does not work on the Design surface or windows with icon like solution view and toolbox. 4)      Box Selection - Another Important improvement in the Visual studio 2010 is the box selection. We can select a rectangular by holding down the Alt Key and selecting with mouse.  Now in the rectangular selection we can insert text, Paste same code in different line etc. This is helpful if you want to convert a number of variables from public to private etc… 5)      New Improved Search – One of the best productivity improvements in Visual studio 2010 is its new search as you type support. This has been done in the Navigate To window which can be brought up by pressing (Ctrl + ,). The navigate To windows also take help of the Camel casing and will be able to search with the help of camel casing when character is entered in upper case. For example we can search AOH for AddOrederHeader. 6)      Call Hierarchy – This feature is only available to the Visual C# and Visual C++ editor. The call hierarchy windows displays the calls made to and from (yes both to and from) a selected method property or a constructor. The call hierarchy also shows the implementation of interface and the overrides of virtual or abstract methods. This window is very helpful in understanding the code flow, and evaluating the effect of making changes. The best part is it is available at design time and not at runtime only like a debugger. 7)      Highlighting references – One of the very cool stuff in Visual Studio 2010 is the fact if you select a variable then all the use of that variable will be highlighted alongside. This should work for all the result of symbols returned by Find all reference. This also works for Name of class, objects variable, properties and methods. We can also use the Ctrl + Shift + Down Arrow or Up Arror to move through them. 8)      Generate from usage - The Generate from usage feature lets you use classes and members before you define them. You can generate a stub for any undefined class, constructor, method, property, field, or enum that you want to use but have not yet defined. You can generate new types and members without leaving your current location in code, This minimizes interruption to your workflow.9)      IntelliSense Suggestion Mode - IntelliSense now provides two alternatives for IntelliSense statement completion, completion mode and suggestion mode. Use suggestion mode for situations where classes and members are used before they are defined. In suggestion mode, when you type in the editor and then commit the entry, the text you typed is inserted into the code. When you commit an entry in completion mode, the editor shows the entry that is highlighted on the members list. When an IntelliSense window is open, you can press CTRL+ALT+SPACEBAR to toggle between completion mode and suggestion mode. 10)   Application Lifecycle Management – A client application for management of application lifecycle like version control, work item tracking, build automation, team portal etc is available for free (this is not available for express edition.). 11)   Start Page – The start page has been redesigned with WPF for new functionality and look. Tabbed areas are provided for content from different source including MSDN. Once you open some project the start page closes automatically. The list of recent project also lets you remove project from the list. And above all the start page is customizable enough to be changed as per individual requirement. 12)   Extension Manager – Visual Studio 2010 has provided good ways to be extended. We can also use MEF to extend most of the features of Visual Studio. The new extension manager now can go the visual studio gallery and install the extension without even opening any explorer. 13)   Code snippets – Visual studio 2010 for HTML, Jscript and Asp.net also. 14)   Improved Intelligence for JavaScript has been improved vastly (around 2-5 times). Intelligence now also shows the XML documentation comment on the go. 15)   Web Deployment – Web Deployment has been vastly improved. We can package and publish the web application in one click. Three major supported deployment scenarios are Web packages, one click deployment and Web configuration Transformation. 16)   SharePoint - Visual Studio 2010 also brings vastly improved development experience for SharePoint. We can create, edit, debug, package, deploy and activate SharePoint project from within Visual Studio. Deployment of Site is as easy as hitting F5. 17)   Azure – Visual Studio 2010 also comes with handy improvement for developing on windows Azure environment. Vikram

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• SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services - The Word is But a Stage (T-SQL Tuesday #006)

  - by smisner

  Host Michael Coles (blog|twitter) has selected LOB data as the topic for this month's T-SQL Tuesday, so I'll take this opportunity to post an overview of reporting with spatial data types. As part of my work with SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services, I've been exploring the use of spatial data types in the new map data region. You can create a map using any of the following data sources: Map Gallery - a set of Shapefiles for the United States only that ships with Reporting Services ESRI Shapefile - a .shp file conforming to the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) shapefile spatial data format SQL Server spatial data - a query that includes SQLGeography or SQLGeometry data types Rob Farley (blog|twitter) points out today in his T-SQL Tuesday post that using the SQL geography field is a preferable alternative to ESRI shapefiles for storing spatial data in SQL Server. So how do you get spatial data? If you don't already have a GIS application in-house, you can find a variety of sources. Here are a few to get you started: US Census Bureau Website, http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ Global Administrative Areas Spatial Database, http://biogeo.berkeley.edu/gadm/ Digital Chart of the World Data Server, http://www.maproom.psu.edu/dcw/ In a recent post by Pinal Dave (blog|twitter), you can find a link to free shapefiles for download and a tutorial for using Shape2SQL, a free tool to convert shapefiles into SQL Server data. In my post today, I'll show you how to use combine spatial data that describes boundaries with spatial data in AdventureWorks2008R2 that identifies stores locations to embed a map in a report. Preparing the spatial data First, I downloaded Shapefile data for the administrative boundaries in France and unzipped the data to a local folder. Then I used Shape2SQL to upload the data into a SQL Server database called Spatial. I'm not sure of the reason why, but I had to uncheck the option to create a spatial index to upload the data. Otherwise, the upload appeared to run successfully, but no table appeared in my database. The zip file that I downloaded contained three files, but I didn't know what was in them until I used Shape2SQL to upload the data into tables. Then I found that FRA_adm0 contains spatial data for the country of France, FRA_adm1 contains spatial data for each region, and FRA_adm2 contains spatial data for each department (a subdivision of region). Next I prepared my SQL query containing sales data for fictional stores selling Adventure Works products in France. The Person.Address table in the AdventureWorks2008R2 database (which you can download from Codeplex) contains a SpatialLocation column which I joined - along with several other tables - to the Sales.Customer and Sales.Store tables. I'll be able to superimpose this data on a map to see where these stores are located. I included the SQL script for this query (as well as the spatial data for France) in the downloadable project that I created for this post. Step 1: Using the Map Wizard to Create a Map of France You can build a map without using the wizard, but I find it's rather useful in this case. Whether you use Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or Report Builder 3.0, the map wizard is the same. I used BIDS so that I could create a project that includes all the files related to this post. To get started, I added an empty report template to the project and named it France Stores. Then I opened the Toolbox window and dragged the Map item to the report body which starts the wizard. Here are the steps to perform to create a map of France: On the Choose a source of spatial data page of the wizard, select SQL Server spatial query, and click Next. On the Choose a dataset with SQL Server spatial data page, select Add a new dataset with SQL Server spatial data. On the Choose a connection to a SQL Server spatial data source page, select New. In the Data Source Properties dialog box, on the General page, add a connecton string like this (changing your server name if necessary): Data Source=(local);Initial Catalog=Spatial Click OK and then click Next. On the Design a query page, add a query for the country shape, like this: select * from fra_adm1 Click Next. The map wizard reads the spatial data and renders it for you on the Choose spatial data and map view options page, as shown below. You have the option to add a Bing Maps layer which shows surrounding countries. Depending on the type of Bing Maps layer that you choose to add (from Road, Aerial, or Hybrid) and the zoom percentage you select, you can view city names and roads and various boundaries. To keep from cluttering my map, I'm going to omit the Bing Maps layer in this example, but I do recommend that you experiment with this feature. It's a nice integration feature. Use the + or - button to rexize the map as needed. (I used the + button to increase the size of the map until its edges were just inside the boundaries of the visible map area (which is called the viewport). You can eliminate the color scale and distance scale boxes that appear in the map area later. Select the Embed map data in this report for faster rendering. The spatial data won't be changing, so there's no need to leave it in the database. However, it does increase the size of the RDL. Click Next. On the Choose map visualization page, select Basic Map. We'll add data for visualization later. For now, we have just the outline of France to serve as the foundation layer for our map. Click Next, and then click Finish. Now click the color scale box in the lower left corner of the map, and press the Delete key to remove it. Then repeat to remove the distance scale box in the lower right corner of the map. Step 2: Add a Map Layer to an Existing Map The map data region allows you to add multiple layers. Each layer is associated with a different data set. Thus far, we have the spatial data that defines the regional boundaries in the first map layer. Now I'll add in another layer for the store locations by following these steps: If the Map Layers windows is not visible, click the report body, and then click twice anywhere on the map data region to display it. Click on the New Layer Wizard button in the Map layers window. And then we start over again with the process by choosing a spatial data source. Select SQL Server spatial query, and click Next. Select Add a new dataset with SQL Server spatial data, and click Next. Click New, add a connection string to the AdventureWorks2008R2 database, and click Next. Add a query with spatial data (like the one I included in the downloadable project), and click Next. The location data now appears as another layer on top of the regional map created earlier. Use the + button to resize the map again to fill as much of the viewport as possible without cutting off edges of the map. You might need to drag the map within the viewport to center it properly. Select Embed map data in this report, and click Next. On the Choose map visualization page, select Basic Marker Map, and click Next. On the Choose color theme and data visualization page, in the Marker drop-down list, change the marker to diamond. There's no particular reason for a diamond; I think it stands out a little better than a circle on this map. Clear the Single color map checkbox as another way to distinguish the markers from the map. You can of course create an analytical map instead, which would change the size and/or color of the markers according to criteria that you specify, such as sales volume of each store, but I'll save that exploration for another post on another day. Click Finish and then click Preview to see the rendered report. Et voilà...c'est fini. Yes, it's a very simple map at this point, but there are many other things you can do to enhance the map. I'll create a series of posts to explore the possibilities. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Working with PivotTables in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  PivotTables are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Excel.  They allow large amounts of data to be analyzed and summarized in just a few mouse clicks. In this article, we explore PivotTables, understand what they are, and learn how to create and customize them. Note:  This article is written using Excel 2010 (Beta).  The concept of a PivotTable has changed little over the years, but the method of creating one has changed in nearly every iteration of Excel.  If you are using a version of Excel that is not 2010, expect different screens from the ones you see in this article. A Little History In the early days of spreadsheet programs, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost.  Its dominance was so complete that people thought it was a waste of time for Microsoft to bother developing their own spreadsheet software (Excel) to compete with Lotus.  Flash-forward to 2010, and Excel’s dominance of the spreadsheet market is greater than Lotus’s ever was, while the number of users still running Lotus 1-2-3 is approaching zero.  How did this happen?  What caused such a dramatic reversal of fortunes? Industry analysts put it down to two factors:  Firstly, Lotus decided that this fancy new GUI platform called “Windows” was a passing fad that would never take off.  They declined to create a Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 (for a few years, anyway), predicting that their DOS version of the software was all anyone would ever need.  Microsoft, naturally, developed Excel exclusively for Windows.  Secondly, Microsoft developed a feature for Excel that Lotus didn’t provide in 1-2-3, namely PivotTables.  The PivotTables feature, exclusive to Excel, was deemed so staggeringly useful that people were willing to learn an entire new software package (Excel) rather than stick with a program (1-2-3) that didn’t have it.  This one feature, along with the misjudgment of the success of Windows, was the death-knell for Lotus 1-2-3, and the beginning of the success of Microsoft Excel. Understanding PivotTables So what is a PivotTable, exactly? Put simply, a PivotTable is a summary of some data, created to allow easy analysis of said data.  But unlike a manually created summary, Excel PivotTables are interactive.  Once you have created one, you can easily change it if it doesn’t offer the exact insights into your data that you were hoping for.  In a couple of clicks the summary can be “pivoted” – rotated in such a way that the column headings become row headings, and vice versa.  There’s a lot more that can be done, too.  Rather than try to describe all the features of PivotTables, we’ll simply demonstrate them… The data that you analyze using a PivotTable can’t be just any data – it has to be raw data, previously unprocessed (unsummarized) – typically a list of some sort.  An example of this might be the list of sales transactions in a company for the past six months. Examine the data shown below: Notice that this is not raw data.  In fact, it is already a summary of some sort.  In cell B3 we can see $30,000, which apparently is the total of James Cook’s sales for the month of January.  So where is the raw data?  How did we arrive at the figure of $30,000?  Where is the original list of sales transactions that this figure was generated from?  It’s clear that somewhere, someone must have gone to the trouble of collating all of the sales transactions for the past six months into the summary we see above.  How long do you suppose this took?  An hour?  Ten?  Probably. If we were to track down the original list of sales transactions, it might look something like this: You may be surprised to learn that, using the PivotTable feature of Excel, we can create a monthly sales summary similar to the one above in a few seconds, with only a few mouse clicks.  We can do this – and a lot more too! How to Create a PivotTable First, ensure that you have some raw data in a worksheet in Excel.  A list of financial transactions is typical, but it can be a list of just about anything:  Employee contact details, your CD collection, or fuel consumption figures for your company’s fleet of cars. So we start Excel… …and we load such a list… Once we have the list open in Excel, we’re ready to start creating the PivotTable. Click on any one single cell within the list: Then, from the Insert tab, click the PivotTable icon: The Create PivotTable box appears, asking you two questions:  What data should your new PivotTable be based on, and where should it be created?  Because we already clicked on a cell within the list (in the step above), the entire list surrounding that cell is already selected for us ($A$1:$G$88 on the Payments sheet, in this example).  Note that we could select a list in any other region of any other worksheet, or even some external data source, such as an Access database table, or even a MS-SQL Server database table.  We also need to select whether we want our new PivotTable to be created on a new worksheet, or on an existing one.  In this example we will select a new one: The new worksheet is created for us, and a blank PivotTable is created on that worksheet: Another box also appears:  The PivotTable Field List.  This field list will be shown whenever we click on any cell within the PivotTable (above): The list of fields in the top part of the box is actually the collection of column headings from the original raw data worksheet.  The four blank boxes in the lower part of the screen allow us to choose the way we would like our PivotTable to summarize the raw data.  So far, there is nothing in those boxes, so the PivotTable is blank.  All we need to do is drag fields down from the list above and drop them in the lower boxes.  A PivotTable is then automatically created to match our instructions.  If we get it wrong, we only need to drag the fields back to where they came from and/or drag new fields down to replace them. The Values box is arguably the most important of the four.  The field that is dragged into this box represents the data that needs to be summarized in some way (by summing, averaging, finding the maximum, minimum, etc).  It is almost always numerical data.  A perfect candidate for this box in our sample data is the “Amount” field/column.  Let’s drag that field into the Values box: Notice that (a) the “Amount” field in the list of fields is now ticked, and “Sum of Amount” has been added to the Values box, indicating that the amount column has been summed. If we examine the PivotTable itself, we indeed find the sum of all the “Amount” values from the raw data worksheet: We’ve created our first PivotTable!  Handy, but not particularly impressive.  It’s likely that we need a little more insight into our data than that. Referring to our sample data, we need to identify one or more column headings that we could conceivably use to split this total.  For example, we may decide that we would like to see a summary of our data where we have a row heading for each of the different salespersons in our company, and a total for each.  To achieve this, all we need to do is to drag the “Salesperson” field into the Row Labels box: Now, finally, things start to get interesting!  Our PivotTable starts to take shape….   With a couple of clicks we have created a table that would have taken a long time to do manually. So what else can we do?  Well, in one sense our PivotTable is complete.  We’ve created a useful summary of our source data.  The important stuff is already learned!  For the rest of the article, we will examine some ways that more complex PivotTables can be created, and ways that those PivotTables can be customized. First, we can create a two-dimensional table.  Let’s do that by using “Payment Method” as a column heading.  Simply drag the “Payment Method” heading to the Column Labels box: Which looks like this: Starting to get very cool! Let’s make it a three-dimensional table.  What could such a table possibly look like?  Well, let’s see… Drag the “Package” column/heading to the Report Filter box: Notice where it ends up…. This allows us to filter our report based on which “holiday package” was being purchased.  For example, we can see the breakdown of salesperson vs payment method for all packages, or, with a couple of clicks, change it to show the same breakdown for the “Sunseekers” package: And so, if you think about it the right way, our PivotTable is now three-dimensional.  Let’s keep customizing… If it turns out, say, that we only want to see cheque and credit card transactions (i.e. no cash transactions), then we can deselect the “Cash” item from the column headings.  Click the drop-down arrow next to Column Labels, and untick “Cash”: Let’s see what that looks like…As you can see, “Cash” is gone. Formatting This is obviously a very powerful system, but so far the results look very plain and boring.  For a start, the numbers that we’re summing do not look like dollar amounts – just plain old numbers.  Let’s rectify that. A temptation might be to do what we’re used to doing in such circumstances and simply select the whole table (or the whole worksheet) and use the standard number formatting buttons on the toolbar to complete the formatting.  The problem with that approach is that if you ever change the structure of the PivotTable in the future (which is 99% likely), then those number formats will be lost.  We need a way that will make them (semi-)permanent. First, we locate the “Sum of Amount” entry in the Values box, and click on it.  A menu appears.  We select Value Field Settings… from the menu: The Value Field Settings box appears. Click the Number Format button, and the standard Format Cells box appears: From the Category list, select (say) Accounting, and drop the number of decimal places to 0.  Click OK a few times to get back to the PivotTable… As you can see, the numbers have been correctly formatted as dollar amounts. While we’re on the subject of formatting, let’s format the entire PivotTable.  There are a few ways to do this.  Let’s use a simple one… Click the PivotTable Tools/Design tab: Then drop down the arrow in the bottom-right of the PivotTable Styles list to see a vast collection of built-in styles: Choose any one that appeals, and look at the result in your PivotTable:   Other Options We can work with dates as well.  Now usually, there are many, many dates in a transaction list such as the one we started with.  But Excel provides the option to group data items together by day, week, month, year, etc.  Let’s see how this is done. First, let’s remove the “Payment Method” column from the Column Labels box (simply drag it back up to the field list), and replace it with the “Date Booked” column: As you can see, this makes our PivotTable instantly useless, giving us one column for each date that a transaction occurred on – a very wide table! To fix this, right-click on any date and select Group… from the context-menu: The grouping box appears.  We select Months and click OK: Voila!  A much more useful table: (Incidentally, this table is virtually identical to the one shown at the beginning of this article – the original sales summary that was created manually.) Another cool thing to be aware of is that you can have more than one set of row headings (or column headings): …which looks like this…. You can do a similar thing with column headings (or even report filters). Keeping things simple again, let’s see how to plot averaged values, rather than summed values. First, click on “Sum of Amount”, and select Value Field Settings… from the context-menu that appears: In the Summarize value field by list in the Value Field Settings box, select Average: While we’re here, let’s change the Custom Name, from “Average of Amount” to something a little more concise.  Type in something like “Avg”: Click OK, and see what it looks like.  Notice that all the values change from summed totals to averages, and the table title (top-left cell) has changed to “Avg”: If we like, we can even have sums, averages and counts (counts = how many sales there were) all on the same PivotTable! Here are the steps to get something like that in place (starting from a blank PivotTable): Drag “Salesperson” into the Column Labels Drag “Amount” field down into the Values box three times For the first “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Total” and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the second “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Average”, its function to Average and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the third “Amount” field, change its name to “Count” and its function to Count Drag the automatically created field from Column Labels to Row Labels Here’s what we end up with: Total, average and count on the same PivotTable! Conclusion There are many, many more features and options for PivotTables created by Microsoft Excel – far too many to list in an article like this.  To fully cover the potential of PivotTables, a small book (or a large website) would be required.  Brave and/or geeky readers can explore PivotTables further quite easily:  Simply right-click on just about everything, and see what options become available to you.  There are also the two ribbon-tabs: PivotTable Tools/Options and Design.  It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – it’s easy to delete the PivotTable and start again – a possibility old DOS users of Lotus 1-2-3 never had. We’ve included an Excel that should work with most versions of Excel, so you can download to practice your PivotTable skills. Download Our Practice Excel File Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Magnify Selected Cells In Excel 2007Share Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer

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• Upgrading Windows 8 boot to VHD to Windows 8.1&ndash;Step by step guide

  - by Liam Westley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/10/19/upgrading-windows-8-boot-to-vhd-to-windows-8.1ndashstep-by.aspxBoot to VHD – dual booting Windows 7 and Windows 8 became easy When Windows 8 arrived, quite a few people decided that they would still dual boot their machines, and instead of mucking about with resizing disk partitions to free up space for Windows 8 they decided to use the boot from VHD feature to create a huge hard disc image into which Windows 8 could be installed.  Scott Hanselman wrote this installation guide, while I myself used the installation guide from Ed Bott of ZD net fame. Boot to VHD is a great solution, it achieves a dual boot, can be backed up easily and had virtually no effect on the original Windows 7 partition. As a developer who has dual booted Windows operating systems for years, hacking boot.ini files, the boot to VHD was a much easier solution. Upgrade to Windows 8.1 – ah, you can’t do that on a virtual disk installation (boot to VHD) Last week the final version of Windows 8.1 arrived, and I went into the Windows Store to upgrade.  Luckily I’m on a fast download service, and use an SSD, because once the upgrade was downloaded and prepared Windows informed that This PC can’t run Windows 8.1, and provided the reason, You can’t install Windows on a virtual drive.  You can see an image of the message and discussion that sparked my search for a solution in this Microsoft Technet forum post. I was determined not to have to resize partitions yet again and fiddle with VHD to disk utilities and back again, and in the end I did succeed in upgrading to a Windows 8.1 boot to VHD partition.  It takes quite a bit of effort though … tldr; Simple steps of how you upgrade Boot into Windows 7 – make a copy of your Windows 8 VHD, to become Windows 8.1 Enable Hyper-V in your Windows 8 (the original boot to VHD partition) Create a new virtual machine, attaching the copy of your Windows 8 VHD Start the virtual machine, upgrade it via the Windows Store to Windows 8.1 Shutdown the virtual machine Boot into Windows 7 – use the bcedit tool to create a new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD option (pointing at the copy) Boot into the new Windows 8.1 option Reactivate Windows 8.1 (it will have become deactivated by running under Hyper-V) Remove the original Windows 8 VHD, and in Windows 7 use bcedit to remove it from the boot menu Things you’ll need A system that can run Hyper-V under Windows 8 (Intel i5, i7 class CPU) Enough space to have your original Windows 8 boot to VHD and a copy at the same time An ISO or DVD for Windows 8 to create a bootable Windows 8 partition Step by step guide Boot to your base o/s, the real one, Windows 7. Make a copy of the Windows 8 VHD file that you use to boot Windows 8 (via boot from VHD) – I copied it from a folder on C: called VHD-Win8 to VHD-Win8.1 on my N: drive. Reboot your system into Windows 8, and enable Hyper-V if not already present (this may require reboot) Use the Hyper-V manager , create a new Hyper-V machine, using half your system memory, and use the option to attach an existing VHD on the main IDE controller – this will be the new copy you made in Step 2. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and you’ll probably discover it cannot boot as there is no boot record If this is the case, go to Hyper-V manager, edit the Settings for the virtual machine to attach an ISO of a Windows 8 DVD to the second IDE controller. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and it should now attempt a fresh installation of Windows 8.  You should select Advanced Options and choose Repair - this will make VHD bootable When the setup reboots your virtual machine, turn off the virtual machine, and remove the ISO of the Windows 8 DVD from the virtual machine settings. Start virtual machine, use Connect to view it.  You will see the devices to be re-discovered (including your quad CPU becoming single CPU).  Eventually you should see the Windows Login screen. You may notice that your desktop background (Win+D) will have turned black as your Windows installation has become deactivate due to the hardware changes between your real PC and Hyper-V. Fortunately becoming deactivated, does not stop you using the Windows Store, where you can select the update to Windows 8.1. You can now watch the progress joy of the Windows 8 update; downloading, preparing to update, checking compatibility, gathering info, preparing to restart, and finally, confirm restart - remember that you are restarting your virtual machine sitting on the copy of the VHD, not the Windows 8 boot to VHD you are currently using to run Hyper-V (confused yet?) After the reboot you get the real upgrade messages; setting up x%, xx%, (quite slow) After a while, Getting ready Applying PC Settings x%, xx% (really slow) Updating your system (fast) Setting up a few more things x%, (quite slow) Getting ready, again Accept license terms Express settings Confirmed previous password Next, I had to set up a Microsoft account – which is possibly now required, and not optional Using the Microsoft account required a 2 factor authorization, via text message, a 7 digit code for me Finalising settings Blank screen, HI .. We're setting up things for you (similar to original Windows 8 install) 'You can get new apps from the Store', below which is ’Installing your apps’ - I had Windows Media Center which is counts as an app from the Store ‘Taking care of a few things’, below which is ‘Installing your apps’ ‘Taking care of a few things’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Getting your apps ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Almost ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ … finally, we get the Windows 8.1 start menu, and a quick Win+D to check the desktop confirmed all the application icons I expected, pinned items on the taskbar, and one app moaning about a missing drive At this point the upgrade is complete – you can shutdown the virtual machine Reboot from the original Windows 8 and return to Windows 7 to configure booting to the Windows 8.1 copy of the VHD In an administrator command prompt do following use the bcdedit tool (from an MSDN blog about configuring VHD to boot in Windows 7) Type bcedit to list the current boot options, so you can copy the GUID (complete with brackets/braces) for the original Windows 8 boot to VHD Create a new menu option, copy of the Windows 8 option; bcdedit /copy {originalguid} /d "Windows 8.1" Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} device vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} osdevice vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Set autodetection of the HAL (may already be set); bcdedit /set {newguid} detecthal on Reboot from Windows 7 and select the new option 'Windows 8.1' on the boot menu, and you’ll have some messages to look at, as your hardware is redetected (as you are back from 1 CPU to 4 CPUs) ‘Getting devices ready, blank then %xx, with occasional blank screen, for the graphics driver, (fast-ish) Getting Ready message (fast) You will have to suffer one final reboots, choose 'Windows 8.1' and you can now login to a lovely Windows 8.1 start screen running on non virtualized hardware via boot to VHD After checking everything is running fine, you can now choose to Activate Windows, which for me was a toll free phone call to the automated system where you type in lots of numbers to be given a whole bunch of new activation codes. Once you’re happy with your new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD, and no longer need the Windows 8 boot to VHD, feel free to delete the old one.  I do believe once you upgrade, you are no longer licensed to use it anyway. There, that was simple wasn’t it? Looking at the huge list of steps it took to perform this upgrade, you may wonder whether I think this is worth it.  Well, I think it is worth booting to VHD.  It makes backups a snap (go to Windows 7, copy the VHD, you backed up the o/s) and helps with disk management – want to move the o/s, you can move the VHD and repoint the boot menu to the new location. The downside is that Microsoft has complete neglected to support boot to VHD as an upgradable option.  Quite a poor decision in my opinion, and if you read twitter and the forums quite a few people agree with that view.  It’s a shame this got missed in the work on creating the upgrade packages for Windows 8.1.

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• Getting Started with Media Browser for Windows Media Center

  - by DigitalGeekery

  If you are a Windows Media Center user, you’ll really want to check out Media Browser. The Media Browser plug-in for Windows Media Center takes your digital media files and displays them in a visually appealing, user friendly interface, complete with images and metadata. Requirements Windows 7 or Vista Microsoft .Net 3.5 Framework  Preparing your Media Files For Media Browser to be able to automatically download images and metadata for your media libraries, your files will have to be correctly named. For example, if you have an mp4 file of the movie Batman Begins, it needs to be named Batman Begins.mp4. It cannot be Batmanbegins.mp4 or Batman-begins.mp4. Otherwise, it’s unlikely that Media Browser will display images and metadata. If you find some of your files aren’t pulling cover art or metadata, double-check the official title of the media on a site like IMBD.com. TV Show files TV show files are handled a bit differently. Every TV series in your collection must have a main folder with the show’s name and individual subfolders for each season. Here is an example of folder structure and supported naming conventions. TV Shows\South Park\Season 1\s01e01 – episode 1.mp4 TV Shows\South Park\Season 1\South Park 1×01 – episode 1.mp4 TV Shows\South Park\Season 1\101 – episode 1.mp4  Note: You need to always have a Season 1 folder even if the show only has only one season. If you have several seasons of a particular show, but don’t happen to have Season 1, simply create a blank season 1 folder. Without a season 1 folder, other seasons will not display properly. Installation and Configuration Download and run the latest Media Browser .msi file by taking the defaults. (Download link below) When you reach the final window, leave the “Configure initial settings” box checked, and click “Finish.” You may get a pop up window informing you that folder permissions are not set correctly for Media Browser. Click “Yes.” Adding Your Media The Browser Configuration Tool should have opened automatically. If not, you can open it by going to Start > All Programs > Media Browser > Media Browser Configuration Wizard. To begin adding media files, click “Add.” Browse for a folder that contains media files and click “OK.” Here we are adding a folder with a group of movie files. You can add multiple folders to each media library. For example, if you have movie files stored in 4 or 5 different folders, you can add them all under a single library in Media Browser.  To add additional folders, click the “Add” button on the right side under your currently added folder. The “Add” button to the left will add an additional Media Library, such as one for TV Shows. When you are finished, close out of the Media Browser Configuration Tool. Open Windows Media Center. You will see Media Browser tile on the main interface. Click to open it. When you initially open Media Browser, you will be prompted to run the initial configuration. Click “OK.” You will see a few general configuration options. The important option is the Metadata. Leave this option checked (it is by default) if you wish to pull images & other metadata for your media. When finished, click “Continue,” and then “OK” to restart Media Browser. When you re-enter Media Browser you’ll see your Media Categories listed below, and recently added files in the main display. Click on a Media Library to view the files.   Click “View” at the top to check out some of the different display options to choose from. Below you see can “Detail.” This presents your videos in a list to the left. When you hover over a title, the synopsis and cover art is displayed to the right. “Cover Flow” displays your titles in a right to left format with mirror cover art. “Thumb Strip” displays your titles in a strip along the bottom with a synopsis, image, and movie data above. Configurations Settings and options can be changed through the Media Browser Configuration Tool, or directly in Media Browser by clicking on the “Wrench” at the bottom right of the main Media Browser page. Certain settings may only be available in one location or the other. Some will be available in both places.   Plug-ins and Themes Media Browser features a variety of Plug-ins and Themes that can add optional customization and slick visual appeal. To install plug-ins or themes, open the Media Browser Configuration Tool. Click on the “plug-ins” tab, and then the “More Plug-ins…” button. Note: Clicking on “Advanced” at the top will reveal several additional configuration tabs. Browse the list of plug-ins on the left. When you find want you like, select it and then click “Install.” When the install is complete, you’ll see them listed under “Installed Plug-ins.” To activate any installed theme, click on the “Display” tab. Select it from the Visual Theme drop down list. Close out of the Media Browser Configuration Tool when finished. Some themes, such as the “Diamond” theme shown below, include optional views and settings which can be accessed through a configuration button at the top of the screen. Clicking on the movie gives you additional images and information such as a synopsis, runtime, IMDB rating…   … and even actors and character names.   All that’s left is to hit “Play” when you’re ready to watch.   Conclusion Media Browser is a fantastic plug-in that brings an entirely different level of media management and aesthetics to Windows Media Center. There are numerous additional customizations and configurations we have not covered here such as adding film trailers, music support, and integrating Recorded TV. Media Browser will run on both Windows 7 and Vista. Extenders are also supported but may require additional configuration. Download Media Browser Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Schedule Updates for Windows Media CenterIntegrate Hulu Desktop and Windows Media Center in Windows 7Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideIntegrate Boxee with Media 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 If it were only this easy SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver

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• Find More Streaming TV Online with Clicker.tv

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Looking for a way to access more of your favorite TV Shows and other online entertainment? Today we’ll take a look at Clicker.tv which offers an awesome way to find tons of TV programs and movies. Clicker.tv Clicker.tv is an HTML5 web application that indexes both free and premium content from sources like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and more. Some movies or episodes, such as those from Netflix and Amazon.com’s Video on Demand, will require viewers to have a membership, or pay a fee to access content. There is also a Clicker.tv app for Boxee.   Navigation Navigating in Clicker.tv is rather easy with your keyboard. Directional Keys: navigate up, down, left, and right. Enter: make a selection Backspace: return to previous screen Escape: return to the Clicker.tv home screen. Note: You can also navigate through Clicker.tv with your PC remote. Recommended Browsers Firefox 3.6 + Safari 4.0 + Internet Explorer 8 + Google Chrome Note: You’ll need the latest version of Flash installed to play the majority of content. Earlier versions of the above browsers may work, but for full keyboard functionality, stick with the recommendations. Using Clicker.tv The first time you go to Clicker.tv, (link below) you’ll be met with a welcome screen and some helpful hints. Click Enter when finished.   The Home screen feature Headliners, Trending Shows, and Trending Episodes. You can scroll through the different options and category links along the left side.   The Search link pulls up an onscreen keyboard so you can enter search terms with a remote as well as a keyboard. Type in your search terms and matching items are displayed on the screen.   You can also browse by a wide variety of categories. Select TV to browse only available TV programs. Or, browse only Movies in the movie category. There are also links for Web content and Music.   Creating an Account You can access all Clicker.tv content without an account, but a Clicker account allows users to create playlists and subscribe to shows and have them automatically added to their playlist. You’ll need to go to Clicker.com and create an account. You’ll find the link at the upper right of the page. Enter a username, password and email address. There also an option to link with Facebook, or you can simply Skip this step.   Go to Clicker.tv and sign in. You can manually type in your credentials or use the onscreen keyboard with your remote.   Settings If you’d prefer not to display content from premium sites or Netflix, you can remove them through the Settings. Toggle Amazon, iTunes and Netflix on or off.   Watching Episodes To watch an episode, select the image to begin playing from the default source, or select one of the other options. You can see in the example below that you can choose to watch the episode from Fox, Hulu, or Amazon Video on Demand.   Your episode will then launch and begin playing from your chosen source. If you choose a premium content source such as iTunes or Amazon’s VOD, you’ll be taken to the Amazon’s website or iTunes and prompted to purchase the content.   Playlists Once you’ve created an account and signed in, you can begin adding Shows to your playlist. Choose a series and select Add to Playlist.   You’ll see in the example below that Family Guy has been Added and the number 142 is shown next to the playlist icon to indicate that 142 episodes has been added to your playlist. Underneath the listings for each episode in your playlist you can mark as Watched, or Remove individual episodes.   You can also view the playlist or make any changes from the Clicker.com website. Click on “Playlist” on the top right of the Clicker.com site to access your playlists. You can select individual episodes from your playlists, remove them, or mark them as watched or unwatched. Clicker.TV and Boxee Boxee offers a Clicker.TV app that features a limited amount of the Clicker.TV content. You’ll find Clicker.TV located in the Boxee Apps Library. Select the Clicker App and then choose Start. From the Clicker App interface you can search or browse for available content. Select an episode you’d like to view… Then select play in the pop up window. You can also add it to your Boxee queue, share it, or add a shortcut, just as you can from other Boxee apps. When you click play your episode will launch and begin playing in Boxee. Conclusion Clicker.TV is currently still in Beta and has some limitations. Typical remotes won’t work completely in all external websites. So, you’ll still need a keyboard to be able to perform some operations such as switching to full screen mode. The Boxee app offers a more fully remote friendly environment, but unfortunately lacks a good portion of the Clicker.tv content. As with many content sites, availability of certain programming may be limited by your geographic location. Want to add Clicker.TV functionality to Windows Media Center? You can do so through the Boxee Integration for Windows 7 Media Center plug-in. Clicker.tv Clicker.com Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Share Digital Media With Other Computers on a Home Network with Windows 7Stream Music and Video Over the Internet with Windows Media Player 12Listen to Online Radio with AntennaEnable Media Streaming in Windows Home Server to Windows Media PlayerNorton Internet Security 2010 [Review] 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 HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos

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• How To Skip Commercials in Windows 7 Media Center

  - by DigitalGeekery

  If you use Windows 7 Media Center to record live TV, you’re probably interested in skipping through commercials. After all, a big reason to record programs is to avoid commercials, right? Today we focus on a fairly simple and free way to get you skipping commercials in no time. In Windows 7, the .wtv file format has replaced the dvr-ms file format used in previous versions of Media Center for Recorded TV. The .wtv file format, however, does not work very well with commercial skipping applications.  The Process Our first step will be to convert the recorded .wtv files to the previously used dvr-ms file format. This conversion will be done automatically by WtvWatcher. It’s important to note that this process deletes the original .wtv file after successfully converting to .dvr-ms. Next, we will use DVRMSToolBox with the DTB Addin to handle commercials skipping. This process does not “cut” or remove the commercials from the file. It merely skips the commercials during playback. WtvWatcher Download and install the WTVWatcher (link below). To install WtvWatcher, you’ll need to have Windows Installer 3.1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. If you get the Publisher cannot be verified warning you can go ahead and click Install. We’ve completely tested this app and it contains no malware and runs successfully.   After installing, the WtvWatcher will pop up in the lower right corner of your screen. You will need to set the path to your Recorded TV directory. Click on the button for “Click here to set your recorded TV path…”   The WtvWatcher Preferences window will open…   …and you’ll be prompted to browse for your Recorded TV folder. If you did not change the default location at setup, it will be found at C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV. Click “OK” when finished. Click the “X” to close the Preferences screen. You should now see WtvWatcher begin to convert any existing WTV files.   The process should only take a few minutes per file. Note: If WtvWatcher detects an error during the conversion process, it will not delete the original WTV file.    You will probably want to run WtvWatcher on startup. This will allow WtvWatcher too constantly scan for new .wtv files to convert. There is no setting in the application to run on startup, so you’ll need to copy the WTV icon from your desktop into your Windows start menu “Startup” directory. To do so, click on Start > All Programs, right-click on Startup and click on Open all users. Drag and drop, or cut and paste, the WtvWatcher desktop shortcut into the Startup folder. DVRMSToolBox and DTBAddIn Next, we need to download and install the DVRMSToolBox and the DTBAddIn. These two pieces of software will do the actual commercial skipping. After downloading the DVRMSToolBox zip file, extract it and double-click the setup.exe file.  Click “Next” to begin the installation.   Unless DVRMSToolBox will only be used by Administrator accounts, check the “Modify File Permissions” box. Click “Next.” When you get to the Optional Components window, uncheck Download/Install ShowAnalyzer. We will not be using that application. When the installation is complete, click “Close.”    Next we need to install the DTBAddin. Unzip the download folder and run the appropriate .msi file for your system. It is available in 32 & 64 bit versions. Just double click on the file and take the default options. Click “Finish” when the install is completed. You will then be prompted to restart your computer. After your computer has restarted, open DVRMSToolBox settings by going to Start > All Programs, DVRMSToolBox, and click on DVRMStoMPEGSettings. On the MC Addin tab, make sure that Skip Commercials is checked. It should be by default.   On the Commercial Skip tab, make sure the Auto Skip option is selected. Click “Save.”   If you try to watch recorded TV before the file conversion and commercial indexing process is complete you’ll get the following message pop up in Media Center. If you click Yes, it will start indexing the commercials if WtvWatcher has already converted it to dvr-ms. Now you’re ready to kick back and watch your recorded tv without having to wait through those long commercial breaks. Conclusion The DVRMSToolBox is a powerful and complex application with a multitude of features and utilities. We’ve showed you a quick and easy way to get your Windows Media Center setup to skip commercials. This setup, like virtually all commercial skipping setups, is not perfect. You will occasionally find a commercial that doesn’t get skipped. Need help getting your Windows 7 PC configured for TV? Check out our previous tutorial on setting up live TV in Windows Media Center. Links Download WTV Watcher Download DVRMSToolBox Download DTBAddin Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Netflix Watchnow in Windows Vista Media Center (Gmedia)Increase Skip and Replay Intervals in Windows 7 Media CenterSchedule Updates for Windows Media CenterIntegrate Hulu Desktop and Windows Media Center in Windows 7Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program Guide TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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• Solaris 11.1: Changes to included FOSS packages

  - by alanc

  Besides the documentation changes I mentioned last time, another place you can see Solaris 11.1 changes before upgrading is in the online package repository, now that the 11.1 packages have been published to http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/, as the “0.175.1.0.0.24.2” branch. (Oracle Solaris Package Versioning explains what each field in that version string means.) When you’re ready to upgrade to the packages from either this repo, or the support repository, you’ll want to first read How to Update to Oracle Solaris 11.1 Using the Image Packaging System by Pete Dennis, as there are a couple issues you will need to be aware of to do that upgrade, several of which are due to changes in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) packages included with Solaris, as I’ll explain in a bit. Solaris 11 can update more readily than Solaris 10 In the Solaris 10 and older update models, the way the updates were built constrained what changes we could make in those releases. To change an existing SVR4 package in those releases, we created a Solaris Patch, which applied to a given version of the SVR4 package and replaced, added or deleted files in it. These patches were released via the support websites (originally SunSolve, now My Oracle Support) for applying to existing Solaris 10 installations, and were also merged into the install images for the next Solaris 10 update release. (This Solaris Patches blog post from Gerry Haskins dives deeper into that subject.) Some of the restrictions of this model were that package refactoring, changes to package dependencies, and even just changing the package version number, were difficult to do in this hybrid patch/OS update model. For instance, when Solaris 10 first shipped, it had the Xorg server from X11R6.8. Over the first couple years of update releases we were able to keep it up to date by replacing, adding, & removing files as necessary, taking it all the way up to Xorg server release 1.3 (new version numbering begun after the X11R7 split of the X11 tree into separate modules gave each module its own version). But if you run pkginfo on the SUNWxorg-server package, you’ll see it still displayed a version number of 6.8, confusing users as to which version was actually included. We stopped upgrading the Xorg server releases in Solaris 10 after 1.3, as later versions added new dependencies, such as HAL, D-Bus, and libpciaccess, which were very difficult to manage in this patching model. (We later got libpciaccess to work, but HAL & D-Bus would have been much harder due to the greater dependency tree underneath those.) Similarly, every time the GNOME team looked into upgrading Solaris 10 past GNOME 2.6, they found these constraints made it so difficult it wasn’t worthwhile, and eventually GNOME’s dependencies had changed enough it was completely infeasible. Fortunately, this worked out for both the X11 & GNOME teams, with our management making the business decision to concentrate on the “Nevada” branch for desktop users - first as Solaris Express Desktop Edition, and later as OpenSolaris, so we didn’t have to fight to try to make the package updates fit into these tight constraints. Meanwhile, the team designing the new packaging system for Solaris 11 was seeing us struggle with these problems, and making this much easier to manage for both the development teams and our users was one of their big goals for the IPS design they were working on. Now that we’ve reached the first update release to Solaris 11, we can start to see the fruits of their labors, with more FOSS updates in 11.1 than we had in many Solaris 10 update releases, keeping software more up to date with the upstream communities. Of course, just because we can more easily update now, doesn’t always mean we should or will do so, it just removes the package system limitations from forcing the decision for us. So while we’ve upgraded the X Window System in the 11.1 release from X11R7.6 to 7.7, the Solaris GNOME team decided it was not the right time to try to make the jump from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, though they did update some individual components of the desktop, especially those with security fixes like Firefox. In other parts of the system, decisions as to what to update were prioritized based on how they affected other projects, or what customer requests we’d gotten for them. So with all that background in place, what packages did we actually update or add between Solaris 11.0 and 11.1? Core OS Functionality One of the FOSS changes with the biggest impact in this release is the upgrade from Grub Legacy (0.97) to Grub 2 (1.99) for the x64 platform boot loader. This is the cause of one of the upgrade quirks, since to go from Solaris 11.0 to 11.1 on x64 systems, you first need to update the Boot Environment tools (such as beadm) to a new version that can handle boot environments that use the Grub2 boot loader. System administrators can find the details they need to know about the new Grub in the Administering the GRand Unified Bootloader chapter of the Booting and Shutting Down Oracle Solaris 11.1 Systems guide. This change was necessary to be able to support new hardware coming into the x64 marketplace, including systems using UEFI firmware or booting off disk drives larger than 2 terabytes. For both platforms, Solaris 11.1 adds rsyslog as an optional alternative to the traditional syslogd, and OpenSCAP for checking security configuration settings are compliant with site policies. Note that the support repo actually has newer versions of BIND & fetchmail than the 11.1 release, as some late breaking critical fixes came through from the community upstream releases after the Solaris 11.1 release was frozen, and made their way to the support repository. These are responsible for the other big upgrade quirk in this release, in which to upgrade a system which already installed those versions from the support repo, you need to either wait for those packages to make their way to the 11.1 branch of the support repo, or follow the steps in the aforementioned upgrade walkthrough to let the package system know it's okay to temporarily downgrade those. Developer Stack While Solaris 11.0 included Python 2.7, many of the bundled python modules weren’t packaged for it yet, limiting its usability. For 11.1, many more of the python modules include 2.7 versions (enough that I filtered them out of the below table, but you can always search on the package repository server for them. For other language runtimes and development tools, 11.1 expands the use of IPS mediated links to choose which version of a package is the default when the packages are designed to allow multiple versions to install side by side. For instance, in Solaris 11.0, GNU automake 1.9 and 1.10 were provided, and developers had to run them as either automake-1.9 or automake-1.10. In Solaris 11.1, when automake 1.11 was added, also added was a /usr/bin/automake mediated link, which points to the automake-1.11 program by default, but can be changed to another version by running the pkg set-mediator command. Mediated links were also used for the Java runtime & development kits in 11.1, changing the default versions to the Java 7 releases (the 1.7.0.x package versions), while allowing admins to switch links such as /usr/bin/javac back to Java 6 if they need to for their site, to deal with Java 7 compatibility or other issues, without having to update each usage to use the full versioned /usr/jdk/jdk1.6.0_35/bin/javac paths for every invocation. Desktop Stack As I mentioned before, we upgraded from X11R7.6 to X11R7.7, since a pleasant coincidence made the X.Org release dates line up nicely with our feature & code freeze dates for this release. (Or perhaps it wasn’t so coincidental, after all, one of the benefits of being the person making the release is being able to decide what schedule is most convenient for you, and this one worked well for me.) For the table below, I’ve skipped listing the packages in which we use the X11 “katamari” version for the Solaris package version (mainly packages combining elements of multiple upstream modules with independent version numbers), since they just all changed from 7.6 to 7.7. In the graphics drivers, we worked with Intel to update the Intel Integrated Graphics Processor support to support 3D graphics and kernel mode setting on the Ivy Bridge chipsets, and updated Nvidia’s non-FOSS graphics driver from 280.13 to 295.20. Higher up in the desktop stack, PulseAudio was added for audio support, and liblouis for Braille support, and the GNOME applications were built to use them. The Mozilla applications, Firefox & Thunderbird moved to the current Extended Support Release (ESR) versions, 10.x for each, to bring up-to-date security fixes without having to be on Mozilla’s agressive 6 week feature cycle release train. Detailed list of changes This table shows most of the changes to the FOSS packages between Solaris 11.0 and 11.1. As noted above, some were excluded for clarity, or to reduce noise and duplication. All the FOSS packages which didn't change the version number in their packaging info are not included, even if they had updates to fix bugs, security holes, or add support for new hardware or new features of Solaris. Package11.011.1 archiver/unrar 3.8.5 4.1.4 audio/sox 14.3.0 14.3.2 backup/rdiff-backup 1.2.1 1.3.3 communication/im/pidgin 2.10.0 2.10.5 compress/gzip 1.3.5 1.4 compress/xz not included 5.0.1 database/sqlite-3 3.7.6.3 3.7.11 desktop/remote-desktop/tigervnc 1.0.90 1.1.0 desktop/window-manager/xcompmgr 1.1.5 1.1.6 desktop/xscreensaver 5.12 5.15 developer/build/autoconf 2.63 2.68 developer/build/autoconf/xorg-macros 1.15.0 1.17 developer/build/automake-111 not included 1.11.2 developer/build/cmake 2.6.2 2.8.6 developer/build/gnu-make 3.81 3.82 developer/build/imake 1.0.4 1.0.5 developer/build/libtool 1.5.22 2.4.2 developer/build/makedepend 1.0.3 1.0.4 developer/documentation-tool/doxygen 1.5.7.1 1.7.6.1 developer/gnu-binutils 2.19 2.21.1 developer/java/jdepend not included 2.9 developer/java/jdk-6 1.6.0.26 1.6.0.35 developer/java/jdk-7 1.7.0.0 1.7.0.7 developer/java/jpackage-utils not included 1.7.5 developer/java/junit 4.5 4.10 developer/lexer/jflex not included 1.4.1 developer/parser/byaccj not included 1.14 developer/parser/java_cup not included 0.10 developer/quilt 0.47 0.60 developer/versioning/git 1.7.3.2 1.7.9.2 developer/versioning/mercurial 1.8.4 2.2.1 developer/versioning/subversion 1.6.16 1.7.5 diagnostic/constype 1.0.3 1.0.4 diagnostic/nmap 5.21 5.51 diagnostic/scanpci 0.12.1 0.13.1 diagnostic/wireshark 1.4.8 1.8.2 diagnostic/xload 1.1.0 1.1.1 editor/gnu-emacs 23.1 23.4 editor/vim 7.3.254 7.3.600 file/lndir 1.0.2 1.0.3 image/editor/bitmap 1.0.5 1.0.6 image/gnuplot 4.4.0 4.6.0 image/library/libexif 0.6.19 0.6.21 image/library/libpng 1.4.8 1.4.11 image/library/librsvg 2.26.3 2.34.1 image/xcursorgen 1.0.4 1.0.5 library/audio/pulseaudio not included 1.1 library/cacao 2.3.0.0 2.3.1.0 library/expat 2.0.1 2.1.0 library/gc 7.1 7.2 library/graphics/pixman 0.22.0 0.24.4 library/guile 1.8.4 1.8.6 library/java/javadb 10.5.3.0 10.6.2.1 library/java/subversion 1.6.16 1.7.5 library/json-c not included 0.9 library/libedit not included 3.0 library/libee not included 0.3.2 library/libestr not included 0.1.2 library/libevent 1.3.5 1.4.14.2 library/liblouis not included 2.1.1 library/liblouisxml not included 2.1.0 library/libtecla 1.6.0 1.6.1 library/libtool/libltdl 1.5.22 2.4.2 library/nspr 4.8.8 4.8.9 library/openldap 2.4.25 2.4.30 library/pcre 7.8 8.21 library/perl-5/subversion 1.6.16 1.7.5 library/python-2/jsonrpclib not included 0.1.3 library/python-2/lxml 2.1.2 2.3.3 library/python-2/nose not included 1.1.2 library/python-2/pyopenssl not included 0.11 library/python-2/subversion 1.6.16 1.7.5 library/python-2/tkinter-26 2.6.4 2.6.8 library/python-2/tkinter-27 2.7.1 2.7.3 library/security/nss 4.12.10 4.13.1 library/security/openssl 1.0.0.5 (1.0.0e) 1.0.0.10 (1.0.0j) mail/thunderbird 6.0 10.0.6 network/dns/bind 9.6.3.4.3 9.6.3.7.2 package/pkgbuild not included 1.3.104 print/filter/enscript not included 1.6.4 print/filter/gutenprint 5.2.4 5.2.7 print/lp/filter/foomatic-rip 3.0.2 4.0.15 runtime/java/jre-6 1.6.0.26 1.6.0.35 runtime/java/jre-7 1.7.0.0 1.7.0.7 runtime/perl-512 5.12.3 5.12.4 runtime/python-26 2.6.4 2.6.8 runtime/python-27 2.7.1 2.7.3 runtime/ruby-18 1.8.7.334 1.8.7.357 runtime/tcl-8/tcl-sqlite-3 3.7.6.3 3.7.11 security/compliance/openscap not included 0.8.1 security/nss-utilities 4.12.10 4.13.1 security/sudo 1.8.1.2 1.8.4.5 service/network/dhcp/isc-dhcp 4.1 4.1.0.6 service/network/dns/bind 9.6.3.4.3 9.6.3.7.2 service/network/ftp (ProFTPD) 1.3.3.0.5 1.3.3.0.7 service/network/samba 3.5.10 3.6.6 shell/conflict 0.2004.9.1 0.2010.6.27 shell/pipe-viewer 1.1.4 1.2.0 shell/zsh 4.3.12 4.3.17 system/boot/grub 0.97 1.99 system/font/truetype/liberation 1.4 1.7.2 system/library/freetype-2 2.4.6 2.4.9 system/library/libnet 1.1.2.1 1.1.5 system/management/cim/pegasus 2.9.1 2.11.0 system/management/ipmitool 1.8.10 1.8.11 system/management/wbem/wbemcli 1.3.7 1.3.9.1 system/network/routing/quagga 0.99.8 0.99.19 system/rsyslog not included 6.2.0 terminal/luit 1.1.0 1.1.1 text/convmv 1.14 1.15 text/gawk 3.1.5 3.1.8 text/gnu-grep 2.5.4 2.10 web/browser/firefox 6.0.2 10.0.6 web/browser/links 1.0 1.0.3 web/java-servlet/tomcat 6.0.33 6.0.35 web/php-53 not included 5.3.14 web/php-53/extension/php-apc not included 3.1.9 web/php-53/extension/php-idn not included 0.2.0 web/php-53/extension/php-memcache not included 3.0.6 web/php-53/extension/php-mysql not included 5.3.14 web/php-53/extension/php-pear not included 5.3.14 web/php-53/extension/php-suhosin not included 0.9.33 web/php-53/extension/php-tcpwrap not included 1.1.3 web/php-53/extension/php-xdebug not included 2.2.0 web/php-common not included 11.1 web/proxy/squid 3.1.8 3.1.18 web/server/apache-22 2.2.20 2.2.22 web/server/apache-22/module/apache-sed 2.2.20 2.2.22 web/server/apache-22/module/apache-wsgi not included 3.3 x11/diagnostic/xev 1.1.0 1.2.0 x11/diagnostic/xscope 1.3 1.3.1 x11/documentation/xorg-docs 1.6 1.7 x11/keyboard/xkbcomp 1.2.3 1.2.4 x11/library/libdmx 1.1.1 1.1.2 x11/library/libdrm 2.4.25 2.4.32 x11/library/libfontenc 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/library/libfs 1.0.3 1.0.4 x11/library/libice 1.0.7 1.0.8 x11/library/libsm 1.2.0 1.2.1 x11/library/libx11 1.4.4 1.5.0 x11/library/libxau 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/library/libxcb 1.7 1.8.1 x11/library/libxcursor 1.1.12 1.1.13 x11/library/libxdmcp 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/library/libxext 1.3.0 1.3.1 x11/library/libxfixes 4.0.5 5.0 x11/library/libxfont 1.4.4 1.4.5 x11/library/libxft 2.2.0 2.3.1 x11/library/libxi 1.4.3 1.6.1 x11/library/libxinerama 1.1.1 1.1.2 x11/library/libxkbfile 1.0.7 1.0.8 x11/library/libxmu 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/library/libxmuu 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/library/libxpm 3.5.9 3.5.10 x11/library/libxrender 0.9.6 0.9.7 x11/library/libxres 1.0.5 1.0.6 x11/library/libxscrnsaver 1.2.1 1.2.2 x11/library/libxtst 1.2.0 1.2.1 x11/library/libxv 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/library/libxvmc 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/library/libxxf86vm 1.1.1 1.1.2 x11/library/mesa 7.10.2 7.11.2 x11/library/toolkit/libxaw7 1.0.9 1.0.11 x11/library/toolkit/libxt 1.0.9 1.1.3 x11/library/xtrans 1.2.6 1.2.7 x11/oclock 1.0.2 1.0.3 x11/server/xdmx 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xephyr 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xorg 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-input-keyboard 1.6.0 1.6.1 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-input-mouse 1.7.1 1.7.2 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-input-synaptics 1.4.1 1.6.2 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-input-vmmouse 12.7.0 12.8.0 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-ast 0.91.10 0.93.10 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-ati 6.14.1 6.14.4 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-cirrus 1.3.2 1.4.0 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-dummy 0.3.4 0.3.5 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-intel 2.10.0 2.18.0 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-mach64 6.9.0 6.9.1 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-mga 1.4.13 1.5.0 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-openchrome 0.2.904 0.2.905 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-r128 6.8.1 6.8.2 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-trident 1.3.4 1.3.5 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-vesa 2.3.0 2.3.1 x11/server/xorg/driver/xorg-video-vmware 11.0.3 12.0.2 x11/server/xserver-common 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xvfb 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/server/xvnc 1.0.90 1.1.0 x11/session/sessreg 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/session/xauth 1.0.6 1.0.7 x11/session/xinit 1.3.1 1.3.2 x11/transset 0.9.1 1.0.0 x11/trusted/trusted-xorg 1.10.3 1.12.2 x11/x11-window-dump 1.0.4 1.0.5 x11/xclipboard 1.1.1 1.1.2 x11/xclock 1.0.5 1.0.6 x11/xfd 1.1.0 1.1.1 x11/xfontsel 1.0.3 1.0.4 x11/xfs 1.1.1 1.1.2 P.S. To get the version numbers for this table, I ran a quick perl script over the output from: % pkg contents -H -r -t depend -a type=incorporate -o fmri \ `pkg contents -H -r -t depend -a type=incorporate -o fmri [email protected],5.11-0.175.1.0.0.24` \ | sort /tmp/11.1 % pkg contents -H -r -t depend -a type=incorporate -o fmri \ `pkg contents -H -r -t depend -a type=incorporate -o fmri [email protected],5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2` \ | sort /tmp/11.0

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• Scott Guthrie in Glasgow

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Last week Scott Guthrie was in Glasgow for his new Guathon tour, which was a roaring success. Scott did talks on the new features in Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET MVC 2 and Windows Phone 7. Scott talked from 10am till 4pm, so this can only contain what I remember and I am sure lots of things he discussed just went in one ear and out another, however I have tried to capture at least all of my Ohh’s and Ahh’s. Visual Studio 2010 Right now you can download and install Visual Studio 2010 Candidate Release, but soon we will have the final product in our hands. With it there are some amazing improvements, and not just in the IDE. New versions of VB and C# come out of the box as well as Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 integration. The new Intellisense features allow inline support for Types and Dictionaries as well as being able to type just part of a name and have the list filter accordingly. Even better, and my personal favourite is one that Scott did not mention, and that is that it is not case sensitive so I can actually find things in C# with its reasonless case sensitivity (Scott, can we please have an option to turn that off.) Another nice feature is the Routing engine that was created for ASP.NET MVC is now available for WebForms which is good news for all those that just imported the MVC DLL’s to get at it anyway. Another fantastic feature that will need some exploring is the ability to add validation rules to your entities and have them validated automatically on the front end. This removes the need to add your own validators and means that you can control an objects validation rules from a single location, the object. A simple command “GridView.EnableDynamicData(gettype(product))“ will enable this feature on controls. What was not clear was wither there would be support for this in WPF and WinForms as well. If there is, we can write our validation rules once and use everywhere. I was disappointed to here that there would be no inbuilt support for the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with VS2010, but I think it will be there for .vNext. Because I have been concentrating on the Visual Studio ALM enhancements to VS2010 I found this section invaluable as I now know at least some of what I missed. Silverlight 4 I am not a big fan of Silverlight. There I said it, and I will probably get lynched for it. My big problem with Silverlight is that most of the really useful things I leaned from WPF do not work. I am only going to mention one thing and that is “x:Type”. If you are a WPF developer you will know how much power these 6 little letters provide; the ability to target templates at object types being the the most magical and useful. But, and this is a massive but, if you are developing applications that MUST run on platforms other than windows then Silverlight is your only choice (well that and Flash, but lets just not go there). And Silverlight has a huge install base as well.. 60% of all internet connected devices have Silverlight. Can Adobe say that? Even though I am not a fan of it my current project is a Silverlight one. If you start your XAML experience with Silverlight you will not be disappointed and neither will the users of the applications you build. Scott showed us a fantastic application called “Silverface” that is a Silverlight 4 Out of Browser application. I have looked for a link and can’t find one, but true to form, here is a fantastic WPF version called Fish Bowl from Microsoft. ASP.NET MVC 2 ASP.NET MVC is something I have played with but never used in anger. It is definitely the way forward, but WebForms is not dead yet. there are still circumstances when WebForms are better. If you are starting from greenfield and you are using TDD, then MVC is ultimately the only way you can go. New in version 2 are Dynamic Scaffolding helpers that let you control how data is presented in the UI from the Entities. Adding validation rules and other options that make sense there can help improve the overall ease of developing the UI. Also the Microsoft team have heard the cries of help from the larger site builders and provided “Areas” which allow a level of categorisation to your Controllers and Views. These work just like add-ins and have their own folder, but also have sub Controllers and Views. Areas are totally pluggable and can be dropped onto existing sites giving the ability to have boxed products in MVC, although what you do with all of those views is anyone's guess. They have been listening to everyone again with the new option to encapsulate UI using the Html.Action or Html.ActionRender. This uses the existing  .ascx functionality in ASP.NET to render partial views to the screen in certain areas. While this was possible before, it makes the method official thereby opening it up to the masses and making it a standard. At the end of the session Scott pulled out some IIS goodies including the IIS SEO Toolkit which can be used to verify your own site is “good” for search engine consumption. Better yet he suggested that you run it against your friends sites and shame them with how bad they are. note: make sure you have fixed yours first. Windows Phone 7 Series I had already seen the new UI for WP7 and heard about the developer story, but Scott brought that home by building a twitter application in about 20 minutes using the emulator. Scott’s only mistake was loading @plip’s tweets into the app… And guess what, it was written in Silverlight. When Windows Phone 7 launches you will be able to use about 90% of the codebase of your existing Silverlight application and use it on the phone! There are two downsides to the new WP7 architecture: No, your existing application WILL NOT work without being converted to either a Silverlight or XNA UI. NO, you will not be able to get your applications onto the phone any other way but through the Marketplace. Do I think these are problems? No, not even slightly. This phone is aimed at consumers who have probably never tried to install an application directly onto a device. There will be support for enterprise apps in the future, but for now enterprises should stay on Windows Phone 6.5.x devices. Post Event drinks At the after event drinks gathering Scott was checking out my HTC HD2 (released to the US this month on T-Mobile) and liked the Windows Phone 6.5.5 build I have on it. We discussed why Microsoft were not going to allow Windows Phone 7 Series onto it with my understanding being that it had 5 buttons and not 3, while Scott was sure that there was more to it from a hardware standpoint. I think he is right, and although the HTC HD2 has a DX9 compatible processor, it was never built with WP7 in mind. However, as if by magic Saturday brought fantastic news for all those that have already bought an HD2: Yes, this appears to be Windows Phone 7 running on a HTC HD2. The HD2 itself won't be getting an official upgrade to Windows Phone 7 Series, so all eyes are on the ROM chefs at the moment. The rather massive photos have been posted by Tom Codon on HTCPedia and they've apparently got WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and other bits working. The ROM isn't online yet but according to the post there's a beta version coming soon. Leigh Geary - http://www.coolsmartphone.com/news5648.html  What was Scott working on on his flight back to the US?   Technorati Tags: VS2010,MVC2,WP7S,WP7 Follow: @CAMURPHY, @ColinMackay, @plip and of course @ScottGu

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• Agile Awakenings and the Rules of Agile

  - by Robert May

  For those that care, you can read my history of management and technology to understand why I think I’m qualified to talk about this at all.  It’s boring, so feel free to skip it. Awakenings I first started to play around with the idea of “agile” in 2004 or 2005.  I found a book on the Rational Unified Process that I thought was good, and attempted to implement parts of it.  I thought I was agile, but really, it wasn’t.   I still didn’t understand the concept of a team.  I still wanted to tell the team what to do and how to get it done.  I still thought I was smarter than the team. After that job, I started work on another project and began helping that team.  The first few months were really rough.  We were implementing Scrum, which was relatively new to everyone on the team, and, quite frankly, I was doing a poor job of it.  I was trying to micro-manage every aspect of the teams work, and we were all miserable. The moment of change came when the senior architect bailed on the project.  His comment to me was: “This isn’t Agile.  Where are the stand-ups?  Where are the stories?”  He was dead on, and I finally woke up.  I finally realized that I was the problem!  I wasn’t trusting the team.  I wasn’t helping the team.  I was being a manager. Like many (most?), I was claiming to be Agile and use Scrum, but I wasn’t in fact following the rules Scrum.  Since then, I’ve done a lot of studying, hands on practice, coaching of many different teams, and other learning around Scrum, and I have discovered that Scrum has some rules that must be followed for success, even though the process is about continuous improvement. I’ve been practicing Scrum right for about 4 years now and have helped multiple teams implement it successfully, so what you’re about to get is based on experience, rather than just theory. The Rules of Scrum In my experience, what I’ve found is that most companies that claim to be doing Scrum or Agile are actually NOT doing either.  This stems largely because they think that they can “adopt the rules of Agile that fit their organization.”  Sadly, many of them think that this means they can adopt iterations (sprints) and not much else.  Either that, or they think they can do whatever they want, or were doing before, and call it Scrum.  This is simply not true. Here are some rules that must be followed for you to really be doing Scrum.  I’ll go into detail on each one of these posts in future blog posts and update links here.  My intent is that this will help other teams implementing scrum to see more success. Agile does not allow you to do whatever you want A Product Owner is required A ScrumMaster is required The team must function as a Team, and QA must be part of the team Support from upper management is required A prioritized product backlog is required A prioritized sprint backlog is required Release planning is required Complete spring planning is required Showcases are required Velocity must be measured Retrospectives are required Daily stand-ups are required Visibility is absolutely required For now, I think that’s enough, although I reserve the right to add more.  If you’re breaking any of these rules, you’re probably not doing Scrum.  There are exceptions to these rules, but until you have practiced Scrum for a while, you don’t know what those exceptions are. Breaking the Rules Many teams break these rules because they are the ones that expose the most pain.  Scrum is not Advil.  It’s not intended to mask the pain, its intended to cure it.  Let me explain that analogy a bit more.  Recently, my 7 year old son broke his arm, quite severely (see the X-Ray to the right).  That caused him a great deal of pain.  We went first to one doctor, and after viewing the X-Ray, they determined that there was no way that they’d cast the arm at their location.  It was simply too bad of a break for them to deal with.  They did, however, give him some Advil for the pain and put a splint on his arm to stabilize the broken bones.  Within minutes, he was feeling much better.  Had we been stupid, we could have gone home and he’d have been just as happy as ever . . . until the pain medication wore off or one of his siblings touched the splint.  Then, all of that pain would come right back to the top.  Sure, he could make it go away by just taking more Advil and moving the splint out of the way, but that wasn’t going to fix the problem permanently. We ended up in an emergency room with a doctor who could fix his arm.  However, we were warned that the fix was going to be VERY painful, and it was.  Even with heavy sedation (Propofol), my son was in enough pain that he squirmed and wiggled trying to get his arm away from the doctor.  He had to endure this pain in order to have a functional arm. But the setting wasn’t the end.  He had to have several casts, had to have it re-broken once, since the first setting didn’t take and finally was given a clean bill of health. Agile implementation is much like this story.  Agile was developed as a result of people recognizing that the development methodologies that were currently in place simply were ineffective.  However, the fix to the broken development that’s been festering for many years is not painless.  Many people start Agile thinking that things will be wonderful.  They won’t!  Agile is about visibility, and often, it brings great pain to surface.  It causes all of the missed deadlines, the cowboy coders, the coasters, the micro-managers, the lazy, and all of the other problems that are really part of your development process now to become painfully visible to EVERYONE.  Many people don’t like this exposure.  Agile will make the pain better, but not if you remove the cast (the rules above) prematurely and start breaking the rules that expose the most pain.  The healing will take time and is not instant (like Advil).  Figuring out what the true source of pain and fixing it is very valuable to you, your team, and your company.  Remember as you’re doing this that Agile isn’t the source of the pain, it’s really just exposing it.  Find the source. My recommendation is that ALL of these rules are followed for a minimum of six months, and preferably for an entire year, before you decide to break any of these rules.  Get a few good releases under your belt.  Figure out what your velocity is and start firing as a team.  Chances are, after you see agile really in action, you won’t want to break the rules because you’ll see their value. More Reading Jean Tabaka recently published a list of 78 Things I Have Learned in 6 Years of Agile Coaching.  Highly recommended. Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Rules

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• 10 Essential Tools for building ASP.NET Websites

  - by Stephen Walther

  I recently put together a simple public website created with ASP.NET for my company at Superexpert.com. I was surprised by the number of free tools that I ended up using to put together the website. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to create a list of essential tools for building ASP.NET websites. These tools work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Performance Tools After reading Steve Souders two (very excellent) books on front-end website performance High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, I have been super sensitive to front-end website performance. According to Souders’ Performance Golden Rule: “Optimize front-end performance first, that's where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent” You can use the tools below to reduce the size of the images, JavaScript files, and CSS files used by an ASP.NET application. 1. Sprite and Image Optimization Framework CSS sprites were first described in an article written for A List Apart entitled CSS sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death. When you use sprites, you combine multiple images used by a website into a single image. Next, you use CSS trickery to display particular sub-images from the combined image in a webpage. The primary advantage of sprites is that they reduce the number of requests required to display a webpage. Requesting a single large image is faster than requesting multiple small images. In general, the more resources – images, JavaScript files, CSS files – that must be moved across the wire, the slower your website. However, most people avoid using sprites because they require a lot of work. You need to combine all of the images and write just the right CSS rules to display the sub-images. The Microsoft Sprite and Image Optimization Framework enables you to avoid all of this work. The framework combines the images for you automatically. Furthermore, the framework includes an ASP.NET Web Forms control and an ASP.NET MVC helper that makes it easy to display the sub-images. You can download the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework from CodePlex at http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/50869. The Sprite and Image Optimization Framework was written by Morgan McClean who worked in the office next to mine at Microsoft. Morgan was a scary smart Intern from Canada and we discussed the Framework while he was building it (I was really excited to learn that he was working on it). Morgan added some great advanced features to this framework. For example, the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework supports something called image inlining. When you use image inlining, the actual image is stored in the CSS file. Here’s an example of what image inlining looks like: .Home_StephenWalther_small-jpg { width:75px; height:100px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEsAAABkCAIAAABB1lpeAAAAB GdBTUEAALGOfPtRkwAAACBjSFJNAACHDwAAjA8AAP1SAACBQAAAfXkAAOmLAAA85QAAGcxzPIV3AAAKL s+zNfREAAAAASUVORK5CYII=) no-repeat 0% 0%; } The actual image (in this case a picture of me that is displayed on the home page of the Superexpert.com website) is stored in the CSS file. If you visit the Superexpert.com website then very few separate images are downloaded. For example, all of the images with a red border in the screenshot below take advantage of CSS sprites: Unfortunately, there are some significant Gotchas that you need to be aware of when using the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework. There are workarounds for these Gotchas. I plan to write about these Gotchas and workarounds in a future blog entry. 2. Microsoft Ajax Minifier Whenever possible you should combine, minify, compress, and cache with a far future header all of your JavaScript and CSS files. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier makes it easy to minify JavaScript and CSS files. Don’t confuse minification and compression. You need to do both. According to Souders, you can reduce the size of a JavaScript file by an additional 20% (on average) by minifying a JavaScript file after you compress the file. When you minify a JavaScript or CSS file, you use various tricks to reduce the size of the file before you compress the file. For example, you can minify a JavaScript file by replacing long JavaScript variables names with short variables names and removing unnecessary white space and comments. You can minify a CSS file by doing such things as replacing long color names such as #ffffff with shorter equivalents such as #fff. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier was created by Microsoft employee Ron Logan. Internally, this tool was being used by several large Microsoft websites. We also used the tool heavily on the ASP.NET team. I convinced Ron to publish the tool on CodePlex so that everyone in the world could take advantage of it. You can download the tool from the ASP.NET Ajax website and read documentation for the tool here. I created the installer for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. When creating the installer, I also created a Visual Studio build task to make it easy to minify all of your JavaScript and CSS files whenever you do a build within Visual Studio automatically. Read the Ajax Minifier Quick Start to learn how to configure the build task. 3. ySlow The ySlow tool is a free add-on for Firefox created by Yahoo that enables you to test the front-end of your website. For example, here are the current test results for the Superexpert.com website: The Superexpert.com website has an overall score of B (not perfect but not bad). The ySlow tool is not perfect. For example, the Superexpert.com website received a failing grade of F for not using a Content Delivery Network even though the website using the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network for JavaScript files such as jQuery. Uptime After publishing a website live to the world, you want to ensure that the website does not encounter any issues and that it stays live. I use the following tools to monitor the Superexpert.com website now that it is live. 4. ELMAH ELMAH stands for Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET. ELMAH enables you to record any errors that happen at your website so you can review them in the future. You can download ELMAH for free from the ELMAH project website. ELMAH works great with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. You can configure ELMAH to store errors in a number of different stores including XML files, the Event Log, an Access database, a SQL database, an Oracle database, or in computer RAM. You also can configure ELMAH to email error messages to you when they happen. By default, you can access ELMAH by requesting the elmah.axd page from a website with ELMAH installed. Here’s what the elmah page looks like from the Superexpert.com website (this page is password-protected because secret information can be revealed in an error message): If you click on a particular error message, you can view the original Yellow Screen ASP.NET error message (even when the error message was never displayed to the actual user). I installed ELMAH by taking advantage of the new package manager for ASP.NET named NuGet (originally named NuPack). You can read the details about NuGet in the following blog entry by Scott Guthrie. You can download NuGet from CodePlex. 5. Pingdom I use Pingdom to verify that the Superexpert.com website is always up. You can sign up for Pingdom by visiting Pingdom.com. You can use Pingdom to monitor a single website for free. At the Pingdom website, you configure the frequency that your website gets pinged. I verify that the Superexpert.com website is up every 5 minutes. I have the Pingdom service verify that it can retrieve the string “Contact Us” from the website homepage. If your website goes down, you can configure Pingdom so that it sends an email, Twitter, SMS, or iPhone alert. I use the Pingdom iPhone app which looks like this: 6. Host Tracker If your website does go down then you need some way of determining whether it is a problem with your local network or if your website is down for everyone. I use a website named Host-Tracker.com to check how badly a website is down. Here’s what the Host-Tracker website displays for the Superexpert.com website when the website can be successfully pinged from everywhere in the world: Notice that Host-Tracker pinged the Superexpert.com website from 68 locations including Roubaix, France and Scranton, PA. Debugging I mean debugging in the broadest possible sense. I use the following tools when building a website to verify that I have not made a mistake. 7. HTML Spell Checker Why doesn’t Visual Studio have a built-in spell checker? Don’t know – I’ve always found this mysterious. Fortunately, however, a former member of the ASP.NET team wrote a free spell checker that you can use with your ASP.NET pages. I find a spell checker indispensible. It is easy to delude yourself that you are capable of perfect spelling. I’m always super embarrassed when I actually run the spell checking tool and discover all of my spelling mistakes. The fastest way to add the HTML Spell Checker extension to Visual Studio is to select the menu option Tools, Extension Manager within Visual Studio. Click on Online Gallery and search for HTML Spell Checker: 8. IIS SEO Toolkit If people cannot find your website through Google then you should not even bother to create it. Microsoft has a great extension for IIS named the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit that you can use to identify issue with your website that would hurt its page rank. You also can use this tool to quickly create a sitemap for your website that you can submit to Google or Bing. You can even generate the sitemap for an ASP.NET MVC website. Here’s what the report overview for the Superexpert.com website looks like: Notice that the Sueprexpert.com website had plenty of violations. For example, there are 65 cases in which a page has a broken hyperlink. You can drill into these violations to identity the exact page and location where these violations occur. 9. LinqPad If your ASP.NET website accesses a database then you should be using LINQ to Entities with the Entity Framework. Using LINQ involves some magic. LINQ queries written in C# get converted into SQL queries for you. If you are not careful about how you write your LINQ queries, you could unintentionally build a really badly performing website. LinqPad is a free tool that enables you to experiment with your LINQ queries. It even works with Microsoft SQL CE 4 and Azure. You can use LinqPad to execute a LINQ to Entities query and see the results. You also can use it to see the resulting SQL that gets executed against the database: 10. .NET Reflector I use .NET Reflector daily. The .NET Reflector tool enables you to take any assembly and disassemble the assembly into C# or VB.NET code. You can use .NET Reflector to see the “Source Code” of an assembly even when you do not have the actual source code. You can download a free version of .NET Reflector from the Redgate website. I use .NET Reflector primarily to help me understand what code is doing internally. For example, I used .NET Reflector with the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework to better understand how the MVC Image helper works. Here’s part of the disassembled code from the Image helper class: Summary In this blog entry, I’ve discussed several of the tools that I used to create the Superexpert.com website. These are tools that I use to improve the performance, improve the SEO, verify the uptime, or debug the Superexpert.com website. All of the tools discussed in this blog entry are free. Furthermore, all of these tools work with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Let me know if there are any tools that you use daily when building ASP.NET websites.

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• T4 Template error - Assembly Directive cannot locate referenced assembly in Visual Studio 2010 proje

  - by CodeSniper

  I ran into the following error recently in Visual Studio 2010 while trying to port Phil Haack’s excellent T4CSS template which was originally built for Visual Studio 2008.   The Problem Error Compiling transformation: Metadata file 'dotless.Core' could not be found In “T4 speak”, this simply means that you have an Assembly directive in your T4 template but the T4 engine was not able to locate or load the referenced assembly. In the case of the T4CSS Template, this was a showstopper for making it work in Visual Studio 2010. On a side note: The T4CSS template is a sweet little wrapper to allow you to use DotLessCss to generate static .css files from .less files rather than using their default HttpHandler or command-line tool.    If you haven't tried DotLessCSS yet, go check it out now!  In short, it is a tool that allows you to templatize and program your CSS files so that you can use variables, expressions, and mixins within your CSS which enables rapid changes and a lot of developer-flexibility as you evolve your CSS and UI. Back to our regularly scheduled program… Anyhow, this post isn't about DotLessCss, its about the T4 Templates and the errors I ran into when converting them from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010. In VS2010, there were quite a few changes to the T4 Template Engine; most were excellent changes, but this one bit me with T4CSS: “Project assemblies are no longer used to resolve template assembly directives.” In VS2008, if you wanted to reference a custom assembly in your T4 Template (.tt file) you would simply right click on your project, choose Add Reference and select that assembly.  Afterwards you were allowed to use the following syntax in your T4 template to tell it to look at the local references: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core.dll" #> This told the engine to look in the “usual place” for the assembly, which is your project references. However, this is exactly what they changed in VS2010.  They now basically sandbox the T4 Engine to keep your T4 assemblies separate from your project assemblies.  This can come in handy if you want to support different versions of an assembly referenced both by your T4 templates and your project. Who broke the build?  Oh, Microsoft Did! In our case, this change causes a problem since the templates are no longer compatible when upgrading to VS 2010 – thus its a breaking change.  So, how do we make this work in VS 2010? Luckily, Microsoft now offers several options for referencing assemblies from T4 Templates: GAC your assemblies and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name Use a hard-coded Fully Qualified UNC path Copy assembly to Visual Studio "Public Assemblies Folder" and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name.  Use or Define a Windows Environment Variable to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Use a Visual Studio Macro to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Option #1 & 2 were already supported in Visual Studio 2008, so if you want to keep your templates compatible with both Visual Studio versions, then you would have to adopt one of these approaches. Yakkety Yak, use the GAC! Option #1 requires an additional pre-build step to GAC the referenced assembly, which could be a pain.  But, if you go that route, then after you GAC, all you need is a simple type name or namespace reference such as: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Hard Coding aint that hard! The other option of using hard-coded paths in Option #2 is pretty impractical in most situations since each developer would have to use the same local project folder paths, or modify this setting each time for their local machines as well as for production deployment.  However, if you want to go that route, simply use the following assembly directive style: <#@ assembly name="C:\Code\Lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> Lets go Public! Option #3, the Visual Studio Public Assemblies Folder, is the recommended place to put commonly used tools and libraries that are only needed for Visual Studio.  Think of it like a VS-only GAC.  This is likely the best place for something like dotLessCSS and is my preferred solution.  However, you will need to either use an installer or a pre-build action to copy the assembly to the right folder location.   Normally this is located at:  C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies Once you have copied your assembly there, you use the type name or namespace syntax again: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Save the Environment! Option #4, using a Windows Environment Variable, is interesting for enterprise use where you may have standard locations for files, but less useful for demo-code, frameworks, and products where you don't have control over the local system.  The syntax for including a environment variable in your assembly directive looks like the following, just as you would expect: <#@ assembly name="%mypath%\dotless.Core.dll" #> “mypath” is a Windows environment variable you setup that points to some fully qualified UNC path on your system.  In the right situation this can be a great solution such as one where you use a msi installer for deployment, or where you have a pre-existing environment variable you can re-use. OMG Macros! Finally, Option #5 is a very nice option if you want to keep your T4 template’s assembly reference local and relative to the project or solution without muddying-up your dev environment or GAC with extra deployments.  An example looks like this: <#@ assembly name="$(SolutionDir)lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> In this example, I’m using the “SolutionDir” VS macro so I can reference an assembly in a “/lib” folder at the root of the solution.   This is just one of the many macros you can use.  If you are familiar with creating Pre/Post-build Event scripts, you can use its dialog to look at all of the different VS macros available. This option gives the best solution for local assemblies without the hassle of extra installers or other setup before the build.   However, its still not compatible with Visual Studio 2008, so if you have a T4 Template you want to use with both, then you may have to create multiple .tt files, one for each IDE version, or require the developer to set a value in the .tt file manually.   I’m not sure if T4 Templates support any form of compiler switches like “#if (VS2010)”  statements, but it would definitely be nice in this case to switch between this option and one of the ones more compatible with VS 2008. Conclusion As you can see, we went from 3 options with Visual Studio 2008, to 5 options (plus one problem) with Visual Studio 2010.  As a whole, I think the changes are great, but the short-term growing pains during the migration may be annoying until we get used to our new found power. Hopefully this all made sense and was helpful to you.  If nothing else, I’ll just use it as a reference the next time I need to port a T4 template to Visual Studio 2010.  Happy T4 templating, and “May the fourth be with you!”

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