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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 31, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 31, 2010New ProjectsBase Class Libraries: The Base Class Libraries site hosts samples, previews, and prototypes from the BCL team. BB Scheduler - BroadBand Scheduler: Broadband Scheduler is highly useful as it helps the user to set the time when the computer will automatically enable the Broadband (Internet) conn...BFBC2 PRoCon: BFBC2 PRoCon makes it easier for Bad Company 2 GSP's and private server owners to administer their BFBC2 servers. It's developed in C# and targete...Business Process Management Virtual Environment (BPMVE): This BPMVE project has been separated into 3 different projects. BPMVE_DataStructure project contains all data structures (classes and attribute...Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test Steps: Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test StepsCint: CintContent Edit Extender for Ajax.Net: The Content Edit Extender is an Ajax.Net control extender that allows in-place editing of a div tag (panel). Double-click to edit, hit enter or tab...COV Game: Cov game is a worms like game made on Silverlight with Python server.Cybera: A continuing development project of the existing but now generally inactive former Cybera project.DotNetCRM Community Edition: DotNetCRM Community Edition is an open source, enterprise class CRM built on the .NET platform. It is designed to be extensible, configurable, data...EAV: A sample EAV pattern for SQL Server with: Tables and indexes Partial referential integrity Partial data typing Updatable views (like normal SQL table)EditRegion.MVC: EditRegion.MVC may be all you want, when you do not want a full CMS. It allows html areas to be edited by nominated users or roles. The API follo...Firestarter Modeller: Firestarter ModellerHabanero.Testability: Habanero.TestabilityProSoft CMS: CMS System - scalable over an undeclared amount of servers - publishing services - version control of sitesPS-Blog.net: This is my first project here on codeplex. I would like to write my own blog software. Any comments or critcs are welcome.ReleaseMe: ReleaseMe is a simple little tool I use to copy websites, and custom Window Services, from my development machine to a specified production machin...SAAS-RD: SAAS-RD: uma ferrameta utilizada para prover integração de SaaS com aplicações externasSample Web Application using Telerik's OpenAccess ORM: Sample Web Site Application Project that uses Telerik's OpenAccess ORM for data access.Sistema Facturacion: En el proyecto de Sistema de Facturacion se desarrollara una aplicacion para el total control de un establecimiento comercial Smooth Habanero: Smooth HabaneroSouthEast Conference 2011: For the Florida Institute of Technology IEEE Chapter regarding the Southeast Hardware Conference held in Nashville, TN 2011.SQL Server Bible Standards: A SQL Server Design and Development standards document. SSAS Profiler Trace Scheduler: AS Profiler Scheduler is a tool that will enable Scheduling of SQL AS Tracing using predefined Profiler Templates. For tracking different issues th...Symbolic Algebra: Another attempt to make an algebric system but to be natively in C# under the .net framework. Theocratic Ministry School System: This is an Open Source Theocratic Ministry School System designed for Jehovah's Witnesses. It will include much of the same features as the TMS ver...Weather Report WebControls: The First Release Version:1.0.10330.2334WPF 3D Labyrinth: A project for "Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms" subject at Kaunas University of Technology. Building a 3D labyrinth with a figure which ...WPF Zen Garden: This is intended to be a gallery for WPF Style sheets in the form of Css Zen Garden. New ReleasesAPSales CRM - Software as a Service: APSales 0.1.3: This version add some interesting features to the project: Implement "Filter By Additional Fields" in view edit Implement quick create function Im...Base Class Libraries: BigRational: BigRational builds on the BigInteger introduced in .NET Framework 4 to create an arbitrary-precision rational number type. A rational number is a ...Base Class Libraries: Long Path: The long path wrapper provides functionality to make it easier to work with paths that are longer than the current 259 character limit of the Syste...Base Class Libraries: PerfMonitor: PerfMonitor is a command-line tool for profiling the system using Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). PerfMonitor is built on top of the TraceEvent li...Base Class Libraries: TraceEvent: TraceEvent is an experimental library that greatly simplifies reading Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events. It is used by the PerfMonitor tool. ...BB Scheduler - BroadBand Scheduler: Broadband Scheduler v2.0: - Broadband service has some of the cheap and best monthly plans for the users all over the nation. And some of the plans include unlimited night d...BuildTools - Toolset for automated builds: BuildTools 2.0 Mar 2010 Milestone: The Mar 2010 Milestone release is a contains a bug fixes for projects not explicitly setting the StartingDate property, and no longer breaks when t...Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test Steps: BRE BizUnit Test Steps Ver. 1.0: Version 1.0Claymore MVP: Claymore 1.1.0.0: Changelog Added Compact Framework support Added fluent interface to configure the library.Content Edit Extender for Ajax.Net: ContentEditExtender 1.0 for Ajax.Net: Complete with source control and test/example Website and Web Service. Built with Visual Studio 2008 with the 3.5 BCL. Control requires the AjaxCon...dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.6: This stable version of the compiler for both .NET 3.5 and 4.0 adds the loading of numbers in a bult-in fashion. See code below: #refasm mscorlib...EAV: March 2010: The initial release as demoed at the SSWUG Virtual Conference Spring 2010Fax .NET: Fax .NET 1.0.1: FIX : bugs for x64 and WOW64 architecture. The zip file include : Binary file Demo executable file Help fileFluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0 for NET 4.0 RC: Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) compiled with .NET 4.0 RC Test application compiled with .NET 4.0 RC SourcesIceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 12.1 Full Install: Build Alpha 12.1 - March 30 2010 Fix Nick Name Change for Tabs/Server List for Queries Fix for running Channel List Multiple Times, clears list n...Import Excel data to SharePoint List: Import Data from Spreadsheet to SP List V1.5 x64: Import from Spreadsheet to a SharePoint List is the missing facet to the WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 List features. SharePoint lets a user create a custom...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.9: New items added since v1.1 include: Support for OAuth (via DotNetOpenAuth), secure communication via https, VB language support, serialization of ...mojoPortal: 2.3.4.1: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2341-released.aspxocculo: test: Release build for testers.PowerShell ToodleDo Module: 0.1: Initial Development Release - Very rough build.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.2: Fixed issue where app crash when performance counter disappear or becomes unavailable while the application is running. For now the exception is si...Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.3: Add 'view last error'Rule 18 - Love your clipboard: Rule 18 (Visual Studio 2010 + .NET 4 RC Version): This is the second public beta for the first version of Rule 18. It has had a extensive private beta and been used in big presentations since the ...Selection Maker: Selection Maker 1.5: New Features:If the source folder does not exist,a dialog box will appear and ask the user if he/she wants to create that folder or if select anoth...sPATCH: sPatch v0.9a: + Fixed: wrong path to elementclient.exeSQL Server Bible Standards: March 2010: Initial release as presented at SSWUG Virtual Conference Spring 2010Survey - web survey & form engine: Source Code Documentation: Documentation.chm file as published with Nsurvey v. 1.9.1 - april 2005 Basic technical documentation and description of source code for developers...Theocratic Ministry School System: Theocratic Ministry School System - TMSS: This is the first release of TMSS. It is far from complete but demonstrates the possiablities of what can be done with Access 2007 using developer ...Weather Report WebControls: WeatherReport Controls: 本下载包含一个已经经过编译的二进制运行库和一个测试的WebApplication项目，是2010年3月30日发布的Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)LiveUpload to FacebookASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBase Class LibrariesBlogEngine.NETManaged Extensibility FrameworkFarseer Physics EngineGraffiti CMSMicrosoft Biology FoundationLINQ to Twitterpatterns & practices – Enterprise Library

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• In Which We Demystify A Few Docupresentment Settings And Learn the Ethos of the Author

  - by Andy Little

  It's no secret that Docupresentment (part of the Oracle Documaker suite) is powerful tool for integrating on-demand and interactive applications for publishing with the Oracle Documaker framework.  It's also no secret there are are many details with respect to the configuration of Docupresentment that can elude even the most erudite of of techies.  To be sure, Docupresentment will work for you right out of the box, and in most cases will suit your needs without toying with a configuration file.  But, where's the adventure in that?   With this inaugural post to That's The Way, I'm going to introduce myself, and what my aim is with this blog.  If you didn't figure it out already by checking out my profile, my name is Andy and I've been with Oracle (nee Skywire Software nee Docucorp nee Formmaker) since the formative years of 1998.  Strangely, it doesn't seem that long ago, but it's certainly a lifetime in the age of technology.  I recall running a BBS from my parent's basement on a 1200 baud modem, and the trepidation and sweaty-palmed excitement of upgrading to the power and speed of 2400 baud!  Fine, I'll admit that perhaps I'm inflating the experience a bit, but I was kid!  This is the stuff of War Games and King's Quest I and the demise of TI-99 4/A.  Exciting times.  So fast-forward a bit and I'm 12 years into a career in the world of document automation and publishing working for the best (IMHO) software company on the planet.  With That's The Way I hope to shed a little light and peek under the covers of some of the more interesting aspects of implementations involving the tech space within the Oracle Insurance Global Business Unit (IGBU), which includes Oracle Documaker, Rating & Underwriting, and Policy Administration to name a few.  I may delve off course a bit, and you'll likely get a dose of humor (at least in my mind) but I hope you'll glean at least a tidbit of usefulness with each post.  Feel free to comment as I'm a fairly conversant guy and happy to talk -- it's stopping the talking that's the hard part... So, back to our regularly-scheduled post, already in progress.  By this time you've visited Oracle's E-Delivery site and acquired your properly-licensed version of Oracle Documaker.  Wait -- you didn't find it?  Understandable -- navigating the voluminous download library within Oracle can be a daunting task.  It's pretty simple once you’ve done it a few times.  Login to the e-delivery site, and accept the license terms and restrictions.  Then, you’ll be able to select the Oracle Insurance Applications product pack and your appropriate platform. Click Go and you’ll see a list of applicable products, and you’ll click on Oracle Documaker Media Pack (as I went to press with this article the version is 11.4): Finally, click the Download button next to Docupresentment (again, version at press time is 2.2 p5). This should give you a ZIP file that contains the installation packages for the Docupresentment Server and Client, cryptically named IDSServer22P05W32.exe and IDSClient22P05W32.exe. At this time, I’d like to take a little detour and explain that the world of Oracle, like most technical companies, is rife with acronyms.  One of the reasons Skywire Software was a appealing to Oracle was our use of many acronyms, including the occasional use of multiple acronyms with the same meaning.  I apologize in advance and will try to point these out along the way.  Here’s your first sticky note to go along with that: IDS = Internet Document Server = Docupresentment Once you’ve completed the installation, you’ll have a shiny new Docupresentment server and client, and if you installed the default location it will be living in c:\docserv. Unix users, I’m one of you!  You’ll find it by default in  ~/docupresentment/docserv.  Forging onward with the meat of this post is learning about some special configuration options.  By now you’ve read the documentation included with the download (specifically ids_book.pdf) which goes into some detail of the rubric of the configuration file and in fact there’s even a handy utility that provides an interface to the configuration file (see Running IDSConfig in the documentation).  But who wants to deal with a configuration utility when we have the tools and technology to edit the file <gasp> by hand! I shall now proceed with the standard Information Technology Under the Hood Disclaimer: Please remember to back up any files before you make changes.  I am not responsible for any havoc you may wreak! Go to your installation directory, and locate your docserv.xml file.  Open it in your favorite XML editor.  I happen to be fond of Notepad++ with the XML Tools plugin.  Almost immediately you will behold the splendor of the configuration file.  Just take a moment and let that sink in.  Ok – moving on.  If you reviewed the documentation you know that inside the root <configuration> node there are multiple <section> nodes, each containing a specific group of settings.  Let’s take a look at <section name=”DocumentServer”>: There are a few entries I’d like to discuss.  First, <entry name=”StartCommand”>. This should be pretty self-explanatory; it’s the name of the executable that’s run when you fire up Docupresentment.  Immediately following that is <entry name=”StartArguments”> and as you might imagine these are the arguments passed to the executable.  A few things to point out: The –Dids.configuration=docserv.xml parameter specifies the name of your configuration file. The –Dlogging.configuration=logconf.xml parameter specifies the name of your logging configuration file (this uses log4j so bone up on that before you delve here). The -Djava.endorsed.dirs=lib/endorsed parameter specifies the path where 3rd party Java libraries can be located for use with Docupresentment.  More on that in another post. The <entry name=”Instances”> allows you to specify the number of instances of Docupresentment that will be started.  By default this is two, and generally two instances per CPU is adequate, however you will always need to perform load testing to determine the sweet spot based on your hardware and types of transactions.  You may have many, many more instances than 2. Time for a sidebar on instances.  An instance is nothing more than a separate process of Docupresentment.  The Docupresentment service that you fire up with docserver.bat or docserver.sh actually starts a watchdog process, which is then responsible for starting up the actual Docupresentment processes.  Each of these act independently from one another, so if one crashes, it does not affect any others.  In the case of a crashed process, the watchdog will start up another instance so the number of configured instances are always running.  Bottom line: instance = Docupresentment process. And now, finally, to the settings which gave me pause on an not-too-long-ago implementation!  Docupresentment includes a feature that watches configuration files (such as docserv.xml and logconf.xml) and will automatically restart its instances to load the changes.  You can configure the time that Docupresentment waits to check these files using the setting <entry name=”FileWatchTimeMillis”>.  By default the number is 12000ms, or 12 seconds.  You can save yourself a few CPU cycles by extending this time, or by disabling  the check altogether by setting the value to 0.  This may or may not be appropriate for your environment; if you have 100% uptime requirements then you probably don’t want to bring down an entire set of processes just to accept a new configuration value, so it’s best to leave this somewhere between 12 seconds to a few minutes.  Another point to keep in mind: if you are using Documaker real-time processing under Docupresentment the Master Resource Library (MRL) files and INI options are cached, and if you need to affect a change, you’ll have to “restart” Docupresentment.  Touching the docserv.xml file is an easy way to do this (other methods including using the RSS request, but that’s another post). The next item up: <entry name=”FilePurgeTimeSeconds”>.  You may already know that the Docupresentment system can generate many temporary files based on certain request types that are processed through the system.  What you may not know is how those files are cleaned up.  There are many rules in Docupresentment that cause the creation of temporary files.  When these files are created, Docupresentment writes an entry into a properties file called the file cache.  This file contains the name, creation date, and expiration time of each temporary file created by each instance of Docupresentment.  Periodically Docupresentment will check the file cache to determine if there are files that are past the expiration time, not unlike that block of cheese festering away in the back of my refrigerator.  However, unlike my ‘fridge cleaning tendencies, Docupresentment is quick to remove files that are past their expiration time.  You, my friend, have the power to control how often Docupresentment inspects the file cache.  Simply set the value for <entry name=”FilePurgeTimeSeconds”> to the number of seconds appropriate for your requirements and you’re set.  Note that file purging happens on a separate thread from normal request processing, so this shouldn’t interfere with response times unless the CPU happens to be really taxed at the point of cache processing.  Finally, after all of this, we get to the final setting I’m going to address in this post: <entry name=”FilePurgeList”>.  The default is “filecache.properties”.  This establishes the root name for the Docupresentment file cache that I mentioned previously.  Docupresentment creates a separate cache file for each instance based on this setting.  If you have two instances, you’ll see two files created: filecache.properties.1 and filecache.properties.2.  Feel free to open these up and check them out. I hope you’ve enjoyed this first foray into the configuration file of Docupresentment.  If you did enjoy it, feel free to drop a comment, I welcome feedback.  If you have ideas for other posts you’d like to see, please do let me know.  You can reach me at [email protected]. ‘Til next time! ###

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• Windows 8 Will be Here Tomorrow; but Should Silverlight be Gone Today?

  - by andrewbrust

  The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary.  IT interests intentionally live in the past.  On the other hand, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech’s future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it.  Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder and musings along the lines of “it takes all kinds.”  Different subcultures have different tendencies.  So be it. Microsoft, with its Windows operating system (OS), can’t take such a laissez-faire view of the world though.  Redmond relies on IT to deploy Windows and (at the very least) influence its procurement, but it also relies on developers to build software for Windows, especially software that has a dependency on features in new versions of the OS.  It must indulge and nourish developers’ fetish for an early birthing of the next generation of software, even as it acknowledges the IT reality that the next wave will arrive on-schedule in Redmond and will travel very slowly to end users. With the move to Windows 8, and the corresponding shift in application development models, this paradox is certainly in place. On the one hand, the next version of Windows is widely expected sometime in 2012, and its full-scale deployment will likely push into 2014 or even later.  Meanwhile, there’s a technology that runs on today’s Windows 7, will continue to run in the desktop mode of Windows 8 (the next version’s codename), and provides absolutely the best architectural bridge to the Windows 8 Metro-style application development stack.  That technology is Silverlight.  And given what we now know about Windows 8, one might think, as I do, that Microsoft ecosystem developers should be flocking to it. But because developers are trying to get a jump on the future, and since many of them believe the impending v5.0 release of Silverlight will be the technology’s last, not everyone is flocking to it; in fact some are fleeing from it.  Is this sensible?  Is it not unprecedented?  What options does it lead to?  What’s the right way to think about the situation? Is v5.0 really the last major version of the technology called Silverlight?  We don’t know.  But Scott Guthrie, the “father” and champion of the technology, left the Developer Division of Microsoft months ago to work on the Windows Azure team, and he took his people with him.  John Papa, who was a very influential Redmond-based evangelist for Silverlight (and is a Visual Studio Magazine author), left Microsoft completely.  About a year ago, when initial suspicion of Silverlight’s demise reached significant magnitude, Papa interviewed Guthrie on video and their discussion served to dispel developers’ fears; but now they’ve moved on. So read into that what you will and let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, speculation that Silverlight’s days of major revision and iteration are over now is correct.  Let’s assume the shine and glimmer has dimmed.  Let’s assume that any Silverlight application written today, and that therefore any investment of financial and human resources made in Silverlight development today, is destined for rework and extra investment in a few years, if the application’s platform needs to stay current. Is this really so different from any technology investment we make?  Every framework, language, runtime and operating system is subject to change, to improvement, to flux and, yes, to obsolescence.  What differs from project to project, is how near-term that obsolescence is and how disruptive the change will be.  The shift from .NET 1.1. to 2.0 was incremental.  Some of the further changes were too.  But the switch from Windows Forms to WPF was major, and the change from ASP.NET Web Services (asmx) to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was downright fundamental. Meanwhile, the transition to the .NET development model for Windows 8 Metro-style applications is actually quite gentle.  The finer points of this subject are covered nicely in Magenic’s excellent white paper “Assessing the Windows 8 Development Platform.” As the authors of that paper (including Rocky Lhotka)  point out, Silverlight code won’t just “port” to Windows 8.  And, no, Silverlight user interfaces won’t either; Metro always supports XAML, but that relationship is not commutative.  But the concepts, the syntax, the architecture and developers’ skills map from Silverlight to Windows 8 Metro and the Windows Runtime (WinRT) very nicely.  That’s not a coincidence.  It’s not an accident.  This is a protected transition.  It’s not a slap in the face. There are few things that are unnerving about this transition, which make it seem markedly different from others: The assumed end of the road for Silverlight is something many think they can see.  Instead of being ignorant of the technology’s expiration date, we believe we know it.  If ignorance is bliss, it would seem our situation lacks it. The new technology involving WinRT and Metro involves a name change from Silverlight. .NET, which underlies both Silverlight and the XAML approach to WinRT development, has just about reached 10 years of age.  That’s equivalent to 80 in human years, or so many fear. My take is that the combination of these three factors has contributed to what for many is a psychologically compelling case that Silverlight should be abandoned today and HTML 5 (the agnostic kind, not the Windows RT variety) should be embraced in its stead.  I understand the logic behind that.  I appreciate the preemptive, proactive, vigilant conscientiousness involved in its calculus.  But for a great many scenarios, I don’t agree with it.  HTML 5 clients, no matter how impressive their interactivity and the emulation of native application interfaces they present may be, are still second-class clients.  They are getting better, especially when hardware acceleration and fast processors are involved.  But they still lag.  They still feel like they’re emulating something, like they’re prototypes, like they’re not comfortable in their own skins.  They are based on compromise, and they feel compromised too. HTML 5/JavaScript development tools are getting better, and will get better still, but they are not as productive as tools for other environments, like Flash, like Silverlight or even more primitive tooling for iOS or Android.  HTML’s roots as a document markup language, rather than an application interface, create a disconnect that impedes productivity.  I do not necessarily think that problem is insurmountable, but it’s here today. If you’re building line-of-business applications, you need a first-class client and you need productivity.  Lack of productivity increases your costs and worsens your backlog.  A second class client will erode user satisfaction, which is never good.  Worse yet, this erosion will be inconspicuous, rather than easily identified and diagnosed, because the inferiority of an HTML 5 client over a native one is hard to identify and, notably, doing so at this juncture in the industry is unpopular.  Why would you fault a technology that everyone believes is revolutionary?  Instead, user disenchantment will remain latent and yet will add to the malaise caused by slower development. If you’re an ISV and you’re coveting the reach of running multi-platform, it’s a different story.  You’ve likely wanted to move to HTML 5 already, and the uncertainty around Silverlight may be the only remaining momentum or pretext you need to make the shift.  You’re deploying many more copies of your application than a line-of-business developer is anyway; this makes the economic hit from lower productivity less impactful, and the wider potential installed base might even make it profitable. But no matter who you are, it’s important to take stock of the situation and do it accurately.  Continued, but merely incremental changes in a development model lead to conservatism and general lack of innovation in the underlying platform.  Periods of stability and equilibrium are necessary, but permanence in that equilibrium leads to loss of platform relevance, market share and utility.  Arguably, that’s already happened to Windows.  The change Windows 8 brings is necessary and overdue.  The marked changes in using .NET if we’re to build applications for the new OS are inevitable.  We will ultimately benefit from the change, and what we can reasonably hope for in the interim is a migration path for our code and skills that is navigable, logical and conceptually comfortable. That path takes us to a place called WinRT, rather than a place called Silverlight.  But considering everything that is changing for the good, the number of disruptive changes is impressively minimal.  The name may be changing, and there may even be some significance to that in terms of Microsoft’s internal management of products and technologies.  But as the consumer, you should care about the ingredients, not the name.  Turkish coffee and Greek coffee are much the same. Although you’ll find plenty of interested parties who will find the names significant, drinkers of the beverage should enjoy either one.  It’s all coffee, it’s all sweet, and you can tell your fortune from the grounds that are left at the end.  Back on the software side, it’s all XAML, and C# or VB .NET, and you can make your fortune from the product that comes out at the end.  Coffee drinkers wouldn’t switch to tea.  Why should XAML developers switch to HTML?

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• Custom Content Pipeline with Automatic Serialization Load Error

  - by Direweasel

  I'm running into this error: Error loading "desert". Cannot find type TiledLib.MapContent, TiledLib, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null. at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentTypeReaderManager.InstantiateTypeReader(String readerTypeName, ContentReader contentReader, ContentTypeReader& reader) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentTypeReaderManager.GetTypeReader(String readerTypeName, ContentReader contentReader, List1& newTypeReaders) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentTypeReaderManager.ReadTypeManifest(Int32 typeCount, ContentReader contentReader) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentReader.ReadHeader() at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentReader.ReadAsset[T]() at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentManager.ReadAsset[T](String assetName, Action1 recordDisposableObject) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentManager.Load[T](String assetName) at TiledTest.Game1.LoadContent() in C:\My Documents\Dropbox\Visual Studio Projects\TiledTest\TiledTest\TiledTest\Game1.cs:line 51 at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Initialize() at TiledTest.Game1.Initialize() in C:\My Documents\Dropbox\Visual Studio Projects\TiledTest\TiledTest\TiledTest\Game1.cs:line 39 at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.RunGame(Boolean useBlockingRun) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Run() at TiledTest.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\My Documents\Dropbox\Visual Studio Projects\TiledTest\TiledTest\TiledTest\Program.cs:line 15 When trying to run the game. This is a basic demo to try and utilize a separate project library called TiledLib. I have four projects overall: TiledLib (C# Class Library) TiledTest (Windows Game) TiledTestContent (Content) TMX CP Ext (Content Pipeline Extension Library) TiledLib contains MapContent which is throwing the error, however I believe this may just be a generic error with a deeper root problem. EMX CP Ext contains one file: MapProcessor.cs using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Processors; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using TiledLib; namespace TMX_CP_Ext { // Each tile has a texture, source rect, and sprite effects. [ContentSerializerRuntimeType("TiledTest.Tile, TiledTest")] public class DemoMapTileContent { public ExternalReference<Texture2DContent> Texture; public Rectangle SourceRectangle; public SpriteEffects SpriteEffects; } // For each layer, we store the size of the layer and the tiles. [ContentSerializerRuntimeType("TiledTest.Layer, TiledTest")] public class DemoMapLayerContent { public int Width; public int Height; public DemoMapTileContent[] Tiles; } // For the map itself, we just store the size, tile size, and a list of layers. [ContentSerializerRuntimeType("TiledTest.Map, TiledTest")] public class DemoMapContent { public int TileWidth; public int TileHeight; public List<DemoMapLayerContent> Layers = new List<DemoMapLayerContent>(); } [ContentProcessor(DisplayName = "TMX Processor - TiledLib")] public class MapProcessor : ContentProcessor<MapContent, DemoMapContent> { public override DemoMapContent Process(MapContent input, ContentProcessorContext context) { // build the textures TiledHelpers.BuildTileSetTextures(input, context); // generate source rectangles TiledHelpers.GenerateTileSourceRectangles(input); // now build our output, first by just copying over some data DemoMapContent output = new DemoMapContent { TileWidth = input.TileWidth, TileHeight = input.TileHeight }; // iterate all the layers of the input foreach (LayerContent layer in input.Layers) { // we only care about tile layers in our demo TileLayerContent tlc = layer as TileLayerContent; if (tlc != null) { // create the new layer DemoMapLayerContent outLayer = new DemoMapLayerContent { Width = tlc.Width, Height = tlc.Height, }; // we need to build up our tile list now outLayer.Tiles = new DemoMapTileContent[tlc.Data.Length]; for (int i = 0; i < tlc.Data.Length; i++) { // get the ID of the tile uint tileID = tlc.Data[i]; // use that to get the actual index as well as the SpriteEffects int tileIndex; SpriteEffects spriteEffects; TiledHelpers.DecodeTileID(tileID, out tileIndex, out spriteEffects); // figure out which tile set has this tile index in it and grab // the texture reference and source rectangle. ExternalReference<Texture2DContent> textureContent = null; Rectangle sourceRect = new Rectangle(); // iterate all the tile sets foreach (var tileSet in input.TileSets) { // if our tile index is in this set if (tileIndex - tileSet.FirstId < tileSet.Tiles.Count) { // store the texture content and source rectangle textureContent = tileSet.Texture; sourceRect = tileSet.Tiles[(int)(tileIndex - tileSet.FirstId)].Source; // and break out of the foreach loop break; } } // now insert the tile into our output outLayer.Tiles[i] = new DemoMapTileContent { Texture = textureContent, SourceRectangle = sourceRect, SpriteEffects = spriteEffects }; } // add the layer to our output output.Layers.Add(outLayer); } } // return the output object. because we have ContentSerializerRuntimeType attributes on our // objects, we don't need a ContentTypeWriter and can just use the automatic serialization. return output; } } } TiledLib contains a large amount of files including MapContent.cs using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Globalization; using System.Xml; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline; namespace TiledLib { public enum Orientation : byte { Orthogonal, Isometric, } public class MapContent { public string Filename; public string Directory; public string Version = string.Empty; public Orientation Orientation; public int Width; public int Height; public int TileWidth; public int TileHeight; public PropertyCollection Properties = new PropertyCollection(); public List<TileSetContent> TileSets = new List<TileSetContent>(); public List<LayerContent> Layers = new List<LayerContent>(); public MapContent(XmlDocument document, ContentImporterContext context) { XmlNode mapNode = document["map"]; Version = mapNode.Attributes["version"].Value; Orientation = (Orientation)Enum.Parse(typeof(Orientation), mapNode.Attributes["orientation"].Value, true); Width = int.Parse(mapNode.Attributes["width"].Value, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); Height = int.Parse(mapNode.Attributes["height"].Value, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); TileWidth = int.Parse(mapNode.Attributes["tilewidth"].Value, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); TileHeight = int.Parse(mapNode.Attributes["tileheight"].Value, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); XmlNode propertiesNode = document.SelectSingleNode("map/properties"); if (propertiesNode != null) { Properties = new PropertyCollection(propertiesNode, context); } foreach (XmlNode tileSet in document.SelectNodes("map/tileset")) { if (tileSet.Attributes["source"] != null) { TileSets.Add(new ExternalTileSetContent(tileSet, context)); } else { TileSets.Add(new TileSetContent(tileSet, context)); } } foreach (XmlNode layerNode in document.SelectNodes("map/layer|map/objectgroup")) { LayerContent layerContent; if (layerNode.Name == "layer") { layerContent = new TileLayerContent(layerNode, context); } else if (layerNode.Name == "objectgroup") { layerContent = new MapObjectLayerContent(layerNode, context); } else { throw new Exception("Unknown layer name: " + layerNode.Name); } // Layer names need to be unique for our lookup system, but Tiled // doesn't require unique names. string layerName = layerContent.Name; int duplicateCount = 2; // if a layer already has the same name... if (Layers.Find(l => l.Name == layerName) != null) { // figure out a layer name that does work do { layerName = string.Format("{0}{1}", layerContent.Name, duplicateCount); duplicateCount++; } while (Layers.Find(l => l.Name == layerName) != null); // log a warning for the user to see context.Logger.LogWarning(string.Empty, new ContentIdentity(), "Renaming layer \"{1}\" to \"{2}\" to make a unique name.", layerContent.Type, layerContent.Name, layerName); // save that name layerContent.Name = layerName; } Layers.Add(layerContent); } } } } I'm lost as to why this is failing. Thoughts? -- EDIT -- After playing with it a bit, I would think it has something to do with referencing the projects. I'm already referencing the TiledLib within my main windows project (TiledTest). However, this doesn't seem to make a difference. I can place the dll generated from the TiledLib project into the debug folder of TiledTest, and this causes it to generate a different error: Error loading "desert". Cannot find ContentTypeReader for Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.ExternalReference`1[Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Graphics.Texture2DContent]. at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentTypeReaderManager.GetTypeReader(Type targetType, ContentReader contentReader) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentTypeReaderManager.GetTypeReader(Type targetType) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ReflectiveReaderMemberHelper..ctor(ContentTypeReaderManager manager, FieldInfo fieldInfo, PropertyInfo propertyInfo, Type memberType, Boolean canWrite) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ReflectiveReaderMemberHelper.TryCreate(ContentTypeReaderManager manager, Type declaringType, FieldInfo fieldInfo) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ReflectiveReader1.Initialize(ContentTypeReaderManager manager) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentTypeReaderManager.ReadTypeManifest(Int32 typeCount, ContentReader contentReader) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentReader.ReadHeader() at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentReader.ReadAsset[T]() at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentManager.ReadAsset[T](String assetName, Action1 recordDisposableObject) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentManager.Load[T](String assetName) at TiledTest.Game1.LoadContent() in C:\My Documents\Dropbox\Visual Studio Projects\TiledTest\TiledTest\TiledTest\Game1.cs:line 51 at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Initialize() at TiledTest.Game1.Initialize() in C:\My Documents\Dropbox\Visual Studio Projects\TiledTest\TiledTest\TiledTest\Game1.cs:line 39 at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.RunGame(Boolean useBlockingRun) at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Run() at TiledTest.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\My Documents\Dropbox\Visual Studio Projects\TiledTest\TiledTest\TiledTest\Program.cs:line 15 This is all incredibly frustrating as the demo doesn't appear to have any special linking properties. The TiledLib I am utilizing is from Nick Gravelyn, and can be found here: https://bitbucket.org/nickgravelyn/tiledlib. The demo it comes with works fine, and yet in recreating I always run into this error.

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• Adopting Technologies for the Sake of Technologies

  - by shiju

  Unlike other engineering industries, the software engineering industry is really lacking maturity. The lack of maturity can see in different aspects of entire software development life cycle. I think other engineering industries are well organised and structured with common, proven engineering practices. The software engineering industry is greatly a diverse industry with different operating systems, and variety of development platforms, programming languages, frameworks and tools. Now these days, people are going behind the hypes and intellectual thoughts without understanding their core business problems and adopting technologies and practices for the sake of technologies and practices and simply becoming a “poster child” of technologies and practices. Understanding the core business problem and providing best, solid solution with a platform neutral approach, will give you more business values and ROI, instead of blindly adopting technologies and tailor-made your applications for the sake of technologies and practices. People have been simply migrating their solutions in favour of new technologies and different versions of frameworks without any business need. The “Pepsi Challenge” in the Software Development  Pepsi Challenge marketing campaign of the 1980s was a popular and very interesting marketing promotion in which people taste one cup of Pepsi and another cup with Coca Cola. In the taste test, more than 50% of people were preferred Pepsi  over Coca Cola. The success story behind the Pepsi was more sweetness contains in the Pepsi cola. They have simply added more sugar and more people preferred more sweet flavour. You can’t simply identify the better one after sipping one cup of cola based on the sweetness which contains. These things have been happening in the software industry for choosing development frameworks and technologies. People have been simply choosing frameworks based on the initial sugary feeling without understanding its core strengths and weakness. The sugary framework might be more harmful when you develop real-world systems. There is not any silver bullet for solving all kind of problems and frameworks and tools do have strengths and weakness. So it would be better to understand their strength and weakness. And please keep in mind that you have to develop real apps to understand the real capabilities and weakness of a framework. Evaluating a technology based on few blog posts will harm your projects and these bloggers might be lacking real-world experience with the framework. The Problem with Align a Development Practice with Tools Recently I have observed a discussion in a group where one guy asked suggestions for practicing Continuous Delivery (CD) as part of the agile based application engineering. Then the discussion quickly went to using and choosing a Continuous Integration (CI) tool and different people suggested different Continuous Integration (CI) tools for simply practicing Continuous Delivery. If you have worked with core agile engineering practices, you could clearly know that the real essence of agile is neither choosing a tool nor choosing a process. By simply choosing CI tool from a particular vendor will not ensure that you are delivering an evolving software based on customer feedback. You have to understand the real essence of a engineering practice and choose a right tool for practicing it instead of simply focus on a particular tool for a practicing an development practice. If you want to adopt a practice, you need a solid understanding on it with its real essence where tools are just helping us for better automation. Adopting New Technologies for the Sake of Technologies The another problem is that developers have been a tendency to adopt new technologies and simply migrating their existing apps to new technologies. It is okay if your existing system is having problem  with a technology stack or or maintainability challenge with existing solution, and moving to new technology for solving the current problems. We have been adopting new technologies for solving new challenges like solving the scalability challenges when the application or user bases is growing unpredictably. Please keep in mind that all new technologies will become old after working with it for few years. The below Facebook status update of Janakiraman, expresses the attitude of a typical customer. For an example, Node.js is becoming a hottest buzzword in the software industry and many developers are trying to adopt Node.js for their apps. The important thing is that Node.js is a minimalist framework that does some great things for some problems, but it’s not a silver bullet. I have been also working with Node.js which is good for some problems, but really bad for choosing it for all kind of problems. By adopting new technologies for new projects is good if we could get real business values from it because newer framework would solve some existing well known problems and provide better solutions where it can incorporate good solutions for the latest challenges . But adopting a new technology for the sake of new technology is really bad idea. Another example is JavaScript is getting lot of attention so that lot of developers are developing heavy JavaScript centric web apps. First, they will adopt a client-side JavaScript MV* framework from AngularJS, Ember, Backbone etc, and develop a Single Page App(SPA) where they are repeating the mistakes we did in the past with server-side. The mistakes we did in the server-side is transforming to client-side. The problem is that people are just adopting new technologies, but not improving their solutions. I predict that many Single Page App will suck in the future. We need a hybrid approach where we should be able to leverage both server-side and client-side for developing next-generation web apps. The another problem is that if you like a particular framework, use it for all kind of apps. In the past, I know some Silverlight passionate guys were tried to use that framework for all kind of apps including larger line of business apps. And these days developers are migrating their existing Silverlight apps in favour of HTML5 buzzword. So the real question is, what is the business values we are getting from these apps when we are developing it for the sake of a particular technology instead of business need. The another problem is that our solutions consultants are trying to provide unnecessary solutions for the sake of a particular technology or for a hype. For an example, Big Data solutions are great for solving the problem of three Vs : volume, velocity and variety. But trying to put this for every application will make problems. Let’s say, there is a small web site running with limited budget and saying that we need a recommendation engine for the web site with a Hadoop based solution with a 16 node cluster, would be really horrible. If we really need a Hadoop based solution, got for it, but trying to put this for all application would be a big disaster. It would be great if could understand the core business problems first, and later choose a right framework for providing solutions for the actual business problem, instead of trying to provide so many solutions. The Problem with Tied Up to a Platform Vendor Some organizations and teams are tied up with a particular platform vendor where they don’t want to use any product other than their preferred or existing platform vendor. They will accept any product provided by the vendor regardless of its capability. This will lets you some benefits regards with integration and collaboration of different products provided by the same vendor, but it will loose your opportunity to provide better solution for your business problems. For a real world sample scenario, lot of companies have been using SAP for their ERP solutions. When they are thinking about mobility or thinking about developing hybrid mobile apps, they can easily find out a framework from SAP. SAP provides a framework for HTML 5 based UI development named SAPUI5. If you are simply adopting that framework only based for the preference of existing platform vendor, you might be loose different opportunities for providing better solution. Initially you might enjoy the sugary feeling provided by the platform vendor, but you have to think about developing apps which should be capable for solving future challenges. I am not saying that any framework is not good and I believe that all frameworks are good over another one for solving at least one problem. My point is that we should not tied up with any specific platform vendor unless your organization is having resource availability problems. Being Polyglot for Providing Right Solutions The modern software engineering industry is greatly diverse with different tools and platforms. Lot of open source frameworks and new programming languages have been releasing to the developer community, where choosing the right platform without any biased opinion, is really a difficult task. But it would really great if we could develop an attitude with platform neutral mindset and being a polyglot developer for providing better solutions based on the actual business problems. IMHO, we should learn a new programming language and a new framework every year. This will improve the quality of our developer capabilities and also improve the quality of our primary programming language skills. Being polyglot for individual developers and organizational teams will give you greater opportunity to your developer experience and also for your applications. Organizations can analyse their business problem without tied with any technology and later they can provide solutions by choosing different platform and tools. Summary    In this blog post, what I was trying to say that we should not tied up or biased with any development platform, technology, vendor or programming language and we should not adopt technologies and practices for the sake of technologies. If we are adopting a technology or a practice for the sake of it, we are simply becoming a “poster child” of the technology and practice. We should not become a poster child of other people’s intellectual thoughts and theories, instead of it we should become solutions developers and solutions consultants where we should be able to provide better solutions for the business problems. Being a polyglot developer is a good idea for improving your developer skills which lets you provide better solutions for the business problems. The most important thing is that we should become platform neutral developers where our passion should be for providing brilliant solutions. It would be great if we could provide minimalist, pragmatic business solutions. You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 24, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 24, 2012Popular Releasesmenu4web: menu4web 0.0.3: menu4web 0.0.3Craig's Utility Library: Craig's Utility Library 3.1: This update adds about 60 new extension methods, a couple of new classes, and a number of fixes including: Additions Added DateSpan class Added GenericDelimited class Random additions Added static thread friendly version of Random.Next called ThreadSafeNext. AOP Manager additions Added Destroy function to AOPManager (clears out all data so system can be recreated. Really only useful for testing...) ORM additions Added PagedCommand and PageCount functions to ObjectBaseClass (same as M...SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQLMon 4.2 alpha 14: 1. improved accuracy of logic fault checking in analysisMapWindow 6 Desktop GIS: MapWindow 6.1.1: MapWindow 6 Desktop GIS is an open source desktop GIS for Microsoft Windows that is built upon the DotSpatial Library. This release requires .Net 4 (Client Profile). Are you a software developer?Instead of downloading MapWindow for development purposes, get started with with the DotSpatial templateDotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.1: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components are available as NuGet pa...Indiefreaks Game Framework: 0.9.2.0: Feature: Added SunBurn engine v2.0.18.7 support (doesn't support versions below). Feature: Added GammaCorrection Post processor to allow developers or even players to tweak the Gamma of the game depending on their screen (courtesy of bamyazi) Feature: Added Windows, Xbox 360 & WP7 enabled StorageManager (based on Nick Gravelyn's EasyStorage) to read/write files for player or game data. Feature: Added VirtualGamePad feature for WP7 allowing developers to define Touch areas on screen and mapped...Code for Rapid C# Windows Development eBook + LINQPad and Data Tools: LLBLGen LINQPad Data Context Driver Version 2.1: Sixth release of a LLBLGen Pro Typed Data Context Driver for LINQPad. For LLBLGen Pro versions 3.1 and 3.5(coming). New features:When you switch the query language to SQL, LINQPad updates the Schema Explorer to show SQL column names rather than CLR property names Connection dialog unloads assemblies when it has closed down so they are no longer locked - this allows them to be rebuilt while LINQPad is still open Connection dialog includes a button to quickly add assemblies needed for the...People's Note: People's Note 0.40: Version 0.40 adds an option to compact the database from the profile screen. Compacting a database can make it smaller and faster by removing empty spaces left over by editing, moving, and deleting notes. To install: copy the appropriate CAB file onto your WM device and run it.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: C++, .NET Coding Guideline: Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Coding Guideline This document describes the coding style guideline for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team.WebDAV for WHS: Version 1.0.67: - Added: Check whether the Remote Web Access is turned on or not; - Added: Check for Add-In updates;Image 3D Viewer: Image 3D Viewer: WPF .Net 3.5 .Net 4 .Net 4.5Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (March 2012) for .NET 4.0: March release of Phalanger 3.0 significantly enhances performance, adds new features and fixes many issues. See following for the list of main improvements: New features: Phalanger Tools installable for Visual Studio 2011 Beta "filter" extension with several most used filters implemented DomDocument HTML parser, loadHTML() method mail() PHP compatible function PHP 5.4 T_CALLABLE token PHP 5.4 "callable" type hint PCRE: UTF32 characters in range support configuration supports <c...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.0: Version 8.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Internationalization Custom authentication provider Access control list for forums and threads Webdeploy package checksum: abc62990189cf0d488ef915d4a55e4b14169bc01 Visit Roadmap for more details.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6: This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build ...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 1: New feature - Windows 8 Metro build New feature - JsonTextReader automatically reads ISO strings as dates New feature - Added DateFormatHandling to control whether dates are written in the MS format or ISO format, with ISO as the default New feature - Added DateTimeZoneHandling to control reading and writing DateTime time zone details New feature - Added async serialize/deserialize methods to JsonConvert New feature - Added Path to JsonReader/JsonWriter/ErrorContext and exceptions w...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Fixed a bug when ping and cmd.exe kept running in endless loop after action progress was finished. Fixed update checking from Codeplex RSS feed. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA...WebSocket4Net: WebSocket4Net 0.5: Changes in this release fixed the wss's default port bug improved JsonWebSocket supported set client access policy protocol for silverlight fixed a handshake issue in Silverlight fixed a bug that "Host" field in handshake hadn't contained port if the port is not default supported passing in Origin parameter for handshaking supported reacting pings from server side fixed a bug in data sending fixed the bug sending a closing handshake with no message which would cause an excepti...SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.5: Changes included in this release: supported closing handshake queue checking improved JSON subprotocol supported sending ping from server to client fixed a bug about sending a closing handshake with no message refactored the code to improve protocol compatibility fixed a bug about sub protocol configuration loading in Mono improved BasicSubProtocol added JsonWebSocketSessionSurvey™ - web survey & form engine: Survey™ 2.0: The new stable Survey™ Project 2.0.0.1 version contains many new features like: Technical changes: - Use of Jquery, ASTreeview, Tabs, Tooltips and new menuprovider Features & Bugfixes: Survey list and search function Folder structure for surveys New Menustructure Library list New Library fields User list and search functions Layout options for a survey with CSS, page header and footer New IP filter security feature Enhanced Token Management New Question fields as ID, Alias...Speed up Printer migration using PrintBrm and it's configuration files: BRMC.EXE: Run the tool from the extracted directory of the printbrm backup. You can use the following command to extract a backup file to a directory - PRINTBRM.EXE -R -D C:\TEMP\EXPAND -F C:\TEMP\PRINTERBACKUP.PRINTEREXPORTNew ProjectsAsp.NET Url Router: 1.Url rewritting. 2.Provider regex matcher 3.Support custom url validate handler.BC-Web: ch projectCape: Dynamically generates Capistrano recipes for Rake tasks.cstgamebgs: Project for wp7GCalculator: GCalculator for performing basic arithmetic operations. Windows Sidebar Gadget invacc: Invacc- for inventory and Account Onlineirgsh-node: Worker nodes of BlankOn Package Factory - http://irgsh.blankonlinux.or.id/irgsh-repo: Repository manager node of BlankOn Package Factory - http://irgsh.blankonlinux.or.id/irgsh-web: Web interface and task manager of BlankOn Package Factory - http://irgsh.blankonlinux.or.id/Kinect Explorer For SharePoint 2010: Kinect Explorer for SharePoint is a tool which provide Natural User Interface to browse through SharePoint sites. Use body gestures to browse, read, move, copy documents. Use Speech services to read-out the files.MCU: mcu devMVC3ShellCode: MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode MVC3ShellCode NetWatch: NetWatch - network watchdog Small application primary designed for network connectivity monitoring. You can configure set of network tests (ping, http, ...) and time plan for this tests. Application is running in windows notification area and notife you each problem. NMortgage: The goal of this project will be to give a prospective home buyer or an existing home owner the insight they need to explore effects of different repayment strategies or different mortgage structures. Nucleo.NET MVP: The Nucleo MVP framework provides a Model-View-Presenter approach that isn't obtrusive, can be utilized in multiple environments, and is versatile. Providing a lot of features you see in other frameworks, the Nucleo MVP framework provides many extensibility points, pretty much allowing you to rewrite most of the framework. It features dynamic injection support, presenter and view initializers (like what you see in ASP.NET MVC), model property injection, attribute- and convention-based vie...P2PShare: This project is to build a new and moden System for p2p file shearing supporting downloads from HTTP, HTTPS, FTP support for P2Pshare client list servers so files can point to a server or a host only file so no servers are used and only p2p is usedPipeLayer: proyecto de sistemas inteligentespython-irgsh: Python library for BlankOn Package Factory - http://irgsh.blankonlinux.or.id/RamGec XNA Controls - Window Elements Library for XNA Solutions: Lightweight, ultra-high performance and flexible library for displaying and managing Window Controls for XNA system. Features its own Window Designer for creating custom windows and controls.RPG Character Generators and Tools: Various tools for pen and paper style role playing games.Screen scraper: A program that can be used to download public domain MP3 and other media such as pdf documents.SharePoint Bdc request library: The given set of classes simplifies an access to the external data, which can be reached through BDC. The library allows to make simple requests for values from external data source, using a BDC Entity Instance Identifier(s) or a value of a certain BDC Entity field. Developed to interact with Business Data Connectivity of SharePoint 2010.testtom03232012git01: testtom03232012git01testtom03232012git02: testtom03232012git02the north star uc: University projectTyphon: Typhon is a role playing simulation management application, much like Nova, but written in MVC/C#.VRE LabTrove-SharePoint connector: The VRE LabTrove-SharePoint Connector provides a means of integrating the ability to view, post to, and edit posts stored in a LabTrove electronic laboratory notebook from within the familiar environment of Microsoft SharePoint. Once installed and configured, these Web Parts give SharePoint users a straightforward way to interact with any LabTrove installation that they wish to use. They also facilitate users to attach data that is stored in a SharePoint Document Library to the LabTrove posts...

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• When someone deletes a shared data source in SSRS

  - by Rob Farley

  SQL Server Reporting Services plays nicely. You can have things in the catalogue that get shared. You can have Reports that have Links, Datasets that can be used across different reports, and Data Sources that can be used in a variety of ways too. So if you find that someone has deleted a shared data source, you potentially have a bit of a horror story going on. And this works for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday theme, hosted by Nick Haslam, who wants to hear about horror stories. I don’t write about LobsterPot client horror stories, so I’m writing about a situation that a fellow MVP friend asked me about recently instead. The best thing to do is to grab a recent backup of the ReportServer database, restore it somewhere, and figure out what’s changed. But of course, this isn’t always possible. And it’s much nicer to help someone with this kind of thing, rather than to be trying to fix it yourself when you’ve just deleted the wrong data source. Unfortunately, it lets you delete data sources, without trying to scream that the data source is shared across over 400 reports in over 100 folders, as was the case for my friend’s colleague. So, suddenly there’s a big problem – lots of reports are failing, and the time to turn it around is small. You probably know which data source has been deleted, but getting the shared data source back isn’t the hard part (that’s just a connection string really). The nasty bit is all the re-mapping, to get those 400 reports working again. I know from exploring this kind of stuff in the past that the ReportServer database (using its default name) has a table called dbo.Catalog to represent the catalogue, and that Reports are stored here. However, the information about what data sources these deployed reports are configured to use is stored in a different table, dbo.DataSource. You could be forgiven for thinking that shared data sources would live in this table, but they don’t – they’re catalogue items just like the reports. Let’s have a look at the structure of these two tables (although if you’re reading this because you have a disaster, feel free to skim past). Frustratingly, there doesn’t seem to be a Books Online page for this information, sorry about that. I’m also not going to look at all the columns, just ones that I find interesting enough to mention, and that are related to the problem at hand. These fields are consistent all the way through to SQL Server 2012 – there doesn’t seem to have been any changes here for quite a while. dbo.Catalog The Primary Key is ItemID. It’s a uniqueidentifier. I’m not going to comment any more on that. A minor nice point about using GUIDs in unfamiliar databases is that you can more easily figure out what’s what. But foreign keys are for that too… Path, Name and ParentID tell you where in the folder structure the item lives. Path isn’t actually required – you could’ve done recursive queries to get there. But as that would be quite painful, I’m more than happy for the Path column to be there. Path contains the Name as well, incidentally. Type tells you what kind of item it is. Some examples are 1 for a folder and 2 a report. 4 is linked reports, 5 is a data source, 6 is a report model. I forget the others for now (but feel free to put a comment giving the full list if you know it). Content is an image field, remembering that image doesn’t necessarily store images – these days we’d rather use varbinary(max), but even in SQL Server 2012, this field is still image. It stores the actual item definition in binary form, whether it’s actually an image, a report, whatever. LinkSourceID is used for Linked Reports, and has a self-referencing foreign key (allowing NULL, of course) back to ItemID. Parameter is an ntext field containing XML for the parameters of the report. Not sure why this couldn’t be a separate table, but I guess that’s just the way it goes. This field gets changed when the default parameters get changed in Report Manager. There is nothing in dbo.Catalog that describes the actual data sources that the report uses. The default data sources would be part of the Content field, as they are defined in the RDL, but when you deploy reports, you typically choose to NOT replace the data sources. Anyway, they’re not in this table. Maybe it was already considered a bit wide to throw in another ntext field, I’m not sure. They’re in dbo.DataSource instead. dbo.DataSource The Primary key is DSID. Yes it’s a uniqueidentifier... ItemID is a foreign key reference back to dbo.Catalog Fields such as ConnectionString, Prompt, UserName and Password do what they say on the tin, storing information about how to connect to the particular source in question. Link is a uniqueidentifier, which refers back to dbo.Catalog. This is used when a data source within a report refers back to a shared data source, rather than embedding the connection information itself. You’d think this should be enforced by foreign key, but it’s not. It does allow NULLs though. Flags this is an int, and I’ll come back to this. When a Data Source gets deleted out of dbo.Catalog, you might assume that it would be disallowed if there are references to it from dbo.DataSource. Well, you’d be wrong. And not because of the lack of a foreign key either. Deleting anything from the catalogue is done by calling a stored procedure called dbo.DeleteObject. You can look at the definition in there – it feels very much like the kind of Delete stored procedures that many people write, the kind of thing that means they don’t need to worry about allowing cascading deletes with foreign keys – because the stored procedure does the lot. Except that it doesn’t quite do that. If it deleted everything on a cascading delete, we’d’ve lost all the data sources as configured in dbo.DataSource, and that would be bad. This is fine if the ItemID from dbo.DataSource hooks in – if the report is being deleted. But if a shared data source is being deleted, you don’t want to lose the existence of the data source from the report. So it sets it to NULL, and it marks it as invalid. We see this code in that stored procedure. UPDATE [DataSource]    SET       [Flags] = [Flags] & 0x7FFFFFFD, -- broken link       [Link] = NULL FROM    [Catalog] AS C    INNER JOIN [DataSource] AS DS ON C.[ItemID] = DS.[Link] WHERE    (C.Path = @Path OR C.Path LIKE @Prefix ESCAPE '*') Unfortunately there’s no semi-colon on the end (but I’d rather they fix the ntext and image types first), and don’t get me started about using the table name in the UPDATE clause (it should use the alias DS). But there is a nice comment about what’s going on with the Flags field. What I’d LIKE it to do would be to set the connection information to a report-embedded copy of the connection information that’s in the shared data source, the one that’s about to be deleted. I understand that this would cause someone to lose the benefit of having the data sources configured in a central point, but I’d say that’s probably still slightly better than LOSING THE INFORMATION COMPLETELY. Sorry, rant over. I should log a Connect item – I’ll put that on my todo list. So it sets the Link field to NULL, and marks the Flags to tell you they’re broken. So this is your clue to fixing it. A bitwise AND with 0x7FFFFFFD is basically stripping out the ‘2’ bit from a number. So numbers like 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, etc, whose binary representation ends in either 11 or 10 get turned into 0, 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, etc. We can test for it using a WHERE clause that matches the SET clause we’ve just used. I’d also recommend checking for Link being NULL and also having no ConnectionString. And join back to dbo.Catalog to get the path (including the name) of broken reports are – in case you get a surprise from a different data source being broken in the past. SELECT c.Path, ds.Name FROM dbo.[DataSource] AS ds JOIN dbo.[Catalog] AS c ON c.ItemID = ds.ItemID WHERE ds.[Flags] = ds.[Flags] & 0x7FFFFFFD AND ds.[Link] IS NULL AND ds.[ConnectionString] IS NULL; When I just ran this on my own machine, having deleted a data source to check my code, I noticed a Report Model in the list as well – so if you had thought it was just going to be reports that were broken, you’d be forgetting something. So to fix those reports, get your new data source created in the catalogue, and then find its ItemID by querying Catalog, using Path and Name to find it. And then use this value to fix them up. To fix the Flags field, just add 2. I prefer to use bitwise OR which should do the same. Use the OUTPUT clause to get a copy of the DSIDs of the ones you’re changing, just in case you need to revert something later after testing (doing it all in a transaction won’t help, because you’ll just lock out the table, stopping you from testing anything). UPDATE ds SET [Flags] = [Flags] | 2, [Link] = '3AE31CBA-BDB4-4FD1-94F4-580B7FAB939D' /*Insert your own GUID*/ OUTPUT deleted.Name, deleted.DSID, deleted.ItemID, deleted.Flags FROM dbo.[DataSource] AS ds JOIN dbo.[Catalog] AS c ON c.ItemID = ds.ItemID WHERE ds.[Flags] = ds.[Flags] & 0x7FFFFFFD AND ds.[Link] IS NULL AND ds.[ConnectionString] IS NULL; But please be careful. Your mileage may vary. And there’s no reason why 400-odd broken reports needs to be quite the nightmare that it could be. Really, it should be less than five minutes. @rob_farley

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• Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• ASP.NET and HTML5 Local Storage

  - by Stephen Walther

  My favorite feature of HTML5, hands-down, is HTML5 local storage (aka DOM storage). By taking advantage of HTML5 local storage, you can dramatically improve the performance of your data-driven ASP.NET applications by caching data in the browser persistently. Think of HTML5 local storage like browser cookies, but much better. Like cookies, local storage is persistent. When you add something to browser local storage, it remains there when the user returns to the website (possibly days or months later). Importantly, unlike the cookie storage limitation of 4KB, you can store up to 10 megabytes in HTML5 local storage. Because HTML5 local storage works with the latest versions of all modern browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari), you can start taking advantage of this HTML5 feature in your applications right now. Why use HTML5 Local Storage? I use HTML5 Local Storage in the JavaScript Reference application: http://Superexpert.com/JavaScriptReference The JavaScript Reference application is an HTML5 app that provides an interactive reference for all of the syntax elements of JavaScript (You can read more about the application and download the source code for the application here). When you open the application for the first time, all of the entries are transferred from the server to the browser (all 300+ entries). All of the entries are stored in local storage. When you open the application in the future, only changes are transferred from the server to the browser. The benefit of this approach is that the application performs extremely fast. When you click the details link to view details on a particular entry, the entry details appear instantly because all of the entries are stored on the client machine. When you perform key-up searches, by typing in the filter textbox, matching entries are displayed very quickly because the entries are being filtered on the local machine. This approach can have a dramatic effect on the performance of any interactive data-driven web application. Interacting with data on the client is almost always faster than interacting with the same data on the server. Retrieving Data from the Server In the JavaScript Reference application, I use Microsoft WCF Data Services to expose data to the browser. WCF Data Services generates a REST interface for your data automatically. Here are the steps: Create your database tables in Microsoft SQL Server. For example, I created a database named ReferenceDB and a database table named Entities. Use the Entity Framework to generate your data model. For example, I used the Entity Framework to generate a class named ReferenceDBEntities and a class named Entities. Expose your data through WCF Data Services. I added a WCF Data Service to my project and modified the data service class to look like this:   using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.Web; using JavaScriptReference.Models; namespace JavaScriptReference.Services { [System.ServiceModel.ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)] public class EntryService : DataService<ReferenceDBEntities> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.UseVerboseErrors = true; config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } // Define a change interceptor for the Products entity set. [ChangeInterceptor("Entries")] public void OnChangeEntries(Entry entry, UpdateOperations operations) { if (!HttpContext.Current.Request.IsAuthenticated) { throw new DataServiceException("Cannot update reference unless authenticated."); } } } }     The WCF data service is named EntryService. Notice that it derives from DataService<ReferenceEntitites>. Because it derives from DataService<ReferenceEntities>, the data service exposes the contents of the ReferenceEntitiesDB database. In the code above, I defined a ChangeInterceptor to prevent un-authenticated users from making changes to the database. Anyone can retrieve data through the service, but only authenticated users are allowed to make changes. After you expose data through a WCF Data Service, you can use jQuery to retrieve the data by performing an Ajax call. For example, I am using an Ajax call that looks something like this to retrieve the JavaScript entries from the EntryService.svc data service: $.ajax({ dataType: "json", url: “/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries”, success: function (result) { var data = callback(result["d"]); } });     Notice that you must unwrap the data using result[“d”]. After you unwrap the data, you have a JavaScript array of the entries. I’m transferring all 300+ entries from the server to the client when the application is opened for the first time. In other words, I transfer the entire database from the server to the client, once and only once, when the application is opened for the first time. The data is transferred using JSON. Here is a fragment: { "d" : [ { "__metadata": { "uri": "http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries(1)", "type": "ReferenceDBModel.Entry" }, "Id": 1, "Name": "Global", "Browsers": "ff3_6,ie8,ie9,c8,sf5,es3,es5", "Syntax": "object", "ShortDescription": "Contains global variables and functions", "FullDescription": "<p>\nThe Global object is determined by the host environment. In web browsers, the Global object is the same as the windows object.\n</p>\n<p>\nYou can use the keyword <code>this</code> to refer to the Global object when in the global context (outside of any function).\n</p>\n<p>\nThe Global object holds all global variables and functions. For example, the following code demonstrates that the global <code>movieTitle</code> variable refers to the same thing as <code>window.movieTitle</code> and <code>this.movieTitle</code>.\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar movieTitle = \"Star Wars\";\nconsole.log(movieTitle === this.movieTitle); // true\nconsole.log(movieTitle === window.movieTitle); // true\n</pre>\n", "LastUpdated": "634298578273756641", "IsDeleted": false, "OwnerId": null }, { "__metadata": { "uri": "http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries(2)", "type": "ReferenceDBModel.Entry" }, "Id": 2, "Name": "eval(string)", "Browsers": "ff3_6,ie8,ie9,c8,sf5,es3,es5", "Syntax": "function", "ShortDescription": "Evaluates and executes JavaScript code dynamically", "FullDescription": "<p>\nThe following code evaluates and executes the string \"3+5\" at runtime.\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar result = eval(\"3+5\");\nconsole.log(result); // returns 8\n</pre>\n<p>\nYou can rewrite the code above like this:\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar result;\neval(\"result = 3+5\");\nconsole.log(result);\n</pre>", "LastUpdated": "634298580913817644", "IsDeleted": false, "OwnerId": 1 } … ]} I worried about the amount of time that it would take to transfer the records. According to Google Chome, it takes about 5 seconds to retrieve all 300+ records on a broadband connection over the Internet. 5 seconds is a small price to pay to avoid performing any server fetches of the data in the future. And here are the estimated times using different types of connections using Fiddler: Notice that using a modem, it takes 33 seconds to download the database. 33 seconds is a significant chunk of time. So, I would not use the approach of transferring the entire database up front if you expect a significant portion of your website audience to connect to your website with a modem. Adding Data to HTML5 Local Storage After the JavaScript entries are retrieved from the server, the entries are stored in HTML5 local storage. Here’s the reference documentation for HTML5 storage for Internet Explorer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197062(VS.85).aspx You access local storage by accessing the windows.localStorage object in JavaScript. This object contains key/value pairs. For example, you can use the following JavaScript code to add a new item to local storage: <script type="text/javascript"> window.localStorage.setItem("message", "Hello World!"); </script>   You can use the Google Chrome Storage tab in the Developer Tools (hit CTRL-SHIFT I in Chrome) to view items added to local storage: After you add an item to local storage, you can read it at any time in the future by using the window.localStorage.getItem() method: <script type="text/javascript"> window.localStorage.setItem("message", "Hello World!"); </script>   You only can add strings to local storage and not JavaScript objects such as arrays. Therefore, before adding a JavaScript object to local storage, you need to convert it into a JSON string. In the JavaScript Reference application, I use a wrapper around local storage that looks something like this: function Storage() { this.get = function (name) { return JSON.parse(window.localStorage.getItem(name)); }; this.set = function (name, value) { window.localStorage.setItem(name, JSON.stringify(value)); }; this.clear = function () { window.localStorage.clear(); }; }   If you use the wrapper above, then you can add arbitrary JavaScript objects to local storage like this: var store = new Storage(); // Add array to storage var products = [ {name:"Fish", price:2.33}, {name:"Bacon", price:1.33} ]; store.set("products", products); // Retrieve items from storage var products = store.get("products");   Modern browsers support the JSON object natively. If you need the script above to work with older browsers then you should download the JSON2.js library from: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js The JSON2 library will use the native JSON object if a browser already supports JSON. Merging Server Changes with Browser Local Storage When you first open the JavaScript Reference application, the entire database of JavaScript entries is transferred from the server to the browser. Two items are added to local storage: entries and entriesLastUpdated. The first item contains the entire entries database (a big JSON string of entries). The second item, a timestamp, represents the version of the entries. Whenever you open the JavaScript Reference in the future, the entriesLastUpdated timestamp is passed to the server. Only records that have been deleted, updated, or added since entriesLastUpdated are transferred to the browser. The OData query to get the latest updates looks like this: http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries?$filter=(LastUpdated%20gt%20634301199890494792L) If you remove URL encoding, the query looks like this: http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries?$filter=(LastUpdated gt 634301199890494792L) This query returns only those entries where the value of LastUpdated > 634301199890494792 (the version timestamp). The changes – new JavaScript entries, deleted entries, and updated entries – are merged with the existing entries in local storage. The JavaScript code for performing the merge is contained in the EntriesHelper.js file. The merge() method looks like this:   merge: function (oldEntries, newEntries) { // concat (this performs the add) oldEntries = oldEntries || []; var mergedEntries = oldEntries.concat(newEntries); // sort this.sortByIdThenLastUpdated(mergedEntries); // prune duplicates (this performs the update) mergedEntries = this.pruneDuplicates(mergedEntries); // delete mergedEntries = this.removeIsDeleted(mergedEntries); // Sort this.sortByName(mergedEntries); return mergedEntries; },   The contents of local storage are then updated with the merged entries. I spent several hours writing the merge() method (much longer than I expected). I found two resources to be extremely useful. First, I wrote extensive unit tests for the merge() method. I wrote the unit tests using server-side JavaScript. I describe this approach to writing unit tests in this blog entry. The unit tests are included in the JavaScript Reference source code. Second, I found the following blog entry to be super useful (thanks Nick!): http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2010/08/03/OData-Synchronization-with-WCF-Data-Services.aspx One big challenge that I encountered involved timestamps. I originally tried to store an actual UTC time as the value of the entriesLastUpdated item. I quickly discovered that trying to work with dates in JSON turned out to be a big can of worms that I did not want to open. Next, I tried to use a SQL timestamp column. However, I learned that OData cannot handle the timestamp data type when doing a filter query. Therefore, I ended up using a bigint column in SQL and manually creating the value when a record is updated. I overrode the SaveChanges() method to look something like this: public override int SaveChanges(SaveOptions options) { var changes = this.ObjectStateManager.GetObjectStateEntries( EntityState.Modified | EntityState.Added | EntityState.Deleted); foreach (var change in changes) { var entity = change.Entity as IEntityTracking; if (entity != null) { entity.LastUpdated = DateTime.Now.Ticks; } } return base.SaveChanges(options); }   Notice that I assign Date.Now.Ticks to the entity.LastUpdated property whenever an entry is modified, added, or deleted. Summary After building the JavaScript Reference application, I am convinced that HTML5 local storage can have a dramatic impact on the performance of any data-driven web application. If you are building a web application that involves extensive interaction with data then I recommend that you take advantage of this new feature included in the HTML5 standard.

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• Building a jQuery Plug-in to make an HTML Table scrollable

  - by Rick Strahl

  Today I got a call from a customer and we were looking over an older application that uses a lot of tables to display financial and other assorted data. The application is mostly meta-data driven with lots of layout formatting automatically driven through meta data rather than through explicit hand coded HTML layouts. One of the problems in this apps are tables that display a non-fixed amount of data. The users of this app don't want to use paging to see more data, but instead want to display overflow data using a scrollbar. Many of the forms are very densely populated, often with multiple data tables that display a few rows of data in the UI at the most. This sort of layout does not lend itself well to paging, but works much better with scrollable data. Unfortunately scrollable tables are not easily created. HTML Tables are mangy beasts as anybody who's done any sort of Web development knows. Tables are finicky when it comes to styling and layout, and they have many funky quirks, especially when it comes to scrolling both of the table rows themselves or even the child columns. There's no built-in way to make tables scroll and to lock headers while you do, and while you can embed a table (or anything really) into a scrolling div with something like this: <div style="position:relative; overflow: hidden; overflow-y: scroll; height: 200px; width: 400px;"> <table id="table" style="width: 100%" class="blackborder" > <thead> <tr class="gridheader"> <th>Column 1</th> <th>Column 2</th> <th>Column 3</th> <th >Column 4</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> … </tbody> </table> </div> </div> that won't give a very satisfying visual experience: Both the header and body scroll which looks odd. You lose context as soon as the header scrolls off the top and when you reach the bottom of the list the bottom outline of the table shows which also looks off. The the side bar shows all the way down the length of the table yet another visual miscue. In a pinch this will work, but it's ugly. What's out there? Before we go further here you should know that there are a few capable grid plug-ins out there already. Among them: Flexigrid (can work of any table as well as with AJAX data) jQuery Scrollable Table Plug-in (feature similar to what I need but not quite) jqGrid (mostly an Ajax Grid which is very powerful and works very well) But in the end none of them fit the bill of what I needed in this situation. All of these require custom CSS and some of them are fairly complex to restyle. Others are AJAX only or work better with AJAX loaded data. However, I need to actually try (as much as possible) to maintain the original styling of the tables without requiring extensive re-styling. Building the makeTableScrollable() Plug-in To make a table scrollable requires rearranging the table a bit. In the plug-in I built I create two <div> tags and split the table into two: one for the table header and one for the table body. The bottom <div> tag then contains only the table's row data and can be scrolled while the header stays fixed. Using jQuery the basic idea is pretty simple: You create the divs, copy the original table into the bottom, then clone the table, clear all content append the <thead> section, into new table and then copy that table into the second header <div>. Easy as pie, right? Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that as it's tricky to get the width of the table right to account for the scrollbar (by adding a small column) and making sure the borders properly line up for the two tables. A lot of style settings have to be made to ensure the table is a fixed size, to remove and reattach borders, to add extra space to allow for the scrollbar and so forth. The end result of my plug-in is a table with a scrollbar. Using the same table I used earlier the result looks like this: To create it, I use the following jQuery plug-in logic to select my table and run the makeTableScrollable() plug-in against the selector: $("#table").makeTableScrollable( { cssClass:"blackborder"} ); Without much further ado, here's the short code for the plug-in: (function ($) { $.fn.makeTableScrollable = function (options) { return this.each(function () { var $table = $(this); var opt = { // height of the table height: "250px", // right padding added to support the scrollbar rightPadding: "10px", // cssclass used for the wrapper div cssClass: "" } $.extend(opt, options); var $thead = $table.find("thead"); var $ths = $thead.find("th"); var id = $table.attr("id"); var cssClass = $table.attr("class"); if (!id) id = "_table_" + new Date().getMilliseconds().ToString(); $table.width("+=" + opt.rightPadding); $table.css("border-width", 0); // add a column to all rows of the table var first = true; $table.find("tr").each(function () { var row = $(this); if (first) { row.append($("<th>").width(opt.rightPadding)); first = false; } else row.append($("<td>").width(opt.rightPadding)); }); // force full sizing on each of the th elemnts $ths.each(function () { var $th = $(this); $th.css("width", $th.width()); }); // Create the table wrapper div var $tblDiv = $("<div>").css({ position: "relative", overflow: "hidden", overflowY: "scroll" }) .addClass(opt.cssClass); var width = $table.width(); $tblDiv.width(width).height(opt.height) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper") .css("border-top", "none"); // Insert before $tblDiv $tblDiv.insertBefore($table); // then move the table into it $table.appendTo($tblDiv); // Clone the div for header var $hdDiv = $tblDiv.clone(); $hdDiv.empty(); var width = $table.width(); $hdDiv.attr("style", "") .css("border-bottom", "none") .width(width) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper_header"); // create a copy of the table and remove all children var $newTable = $($table).clone(); $newTable.empty() .attr("id", $table.attr("id") + "_header"); $thead.appendTo($newTable); $hdDiv.insertBefore($tblDiv); $newTable.appendTo($hdDiv); $table.css("border-width", 0); }); } })(jQuery); Oh sweet spaghetti code :-) The code starts out by dealing the parameters that can be passed in the options object map: height The height of the full table/structure. The height of the outside wrapper container. Defaults to 200px. rightPadding The padding that is added to the right of the table to account for the scrollbar. Creates a column of this width and injects it into the table. If too small the rightmost column might get truncated. if too large the empty column might show. cssClass The CSS class of the wrapping container that appears to wrap the table. If you want a border around your table this class should probably provide it since the plug-in removes the table border. The rest of the code is obtuse, but pretty straight forward. It starts by creating a new column in the table to accommodate the width of the scrollbar and avoid clipping of text in the rightmost column. The width of the columns is explicitly set in the header elements to force the size of the table to be fixed and to provide the same sizing when the THEAD section is moved to a new copied table later. The table wrapper div is created, formatted and the table is moved into it. The new wrapper div is cloned for the header wrapper and configured. Finally the actual table is cloned and cleared of all elements. The original table's THEAD section is then moved into the new table. At last the new table is added to the header <div>, and the header <div> is inserted before the table wrapper <div>. I'm always amazed how easy jQuery makes it to do this sort of re-arranging, and given of what's happening the amount of code is rather small. Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary A word of warning: I make no guarantees about the code above. It's a first cut and I provided this here mainly to demonstrate the concepts of decomposing and reassembling an HTML layout :-) which jQuery makes so nice and easy. I tested this component against the typical scenarios we plan on using it for which are tables that use a few well known styles (or no styling at all). I suspect if you have complex styling on your <table> tag that things might not go so well. If you plan on using this plug-in you might want to minimize your styling of the table tag and defer any border formatting using the class passed in via the cssClass parameter, which ends up on the two wrapper div's that wrap the header and body rows. There's also no explicit support for footers. I rarely if ever use footers (when not using paging that is), so I didn't feel the need to add footer support. However, if you need that it's not difficult to add - the logic is the same as adding the header. The plug-in relies on a well-formatted table that has THEAD and TBODY sections along with TH tags in the header. Note that ASP.NET WebForm DataGrids and GridViews by default do not generate well-formatted table HTML. You can look at my Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView post for more info on how to get a GridView to render properly. The plug-in has no dependencies other than jQuery. Even with the limitations in mind I hope this might be useful to some of you. I know I've already identified a number of places in my own existing applications where I will be plugging this in almost immediately. Resources Download Sample and Plug-in code Latest version in the West Wind Web & AJAX Toolkit Repository © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery  HTML  ASP.NET  

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• You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down.  Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you.  :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer:  “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields.  You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well.  Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET,  sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast!  Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe.  Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible.  Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, April 14, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, April 14, 2012Popular ReleasesJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 3: Change - DefaultContractResolver.IgnoreSerializableAttribute is now true by default Fix - Fixed MaxDepth on JsonReader recursively throwing an error Fix - Fixed SerializationBinder.BindToName not being called with full assembly namesVisual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide: v2 - For Visual Studio 11: Welcome to the BETA of the Branching and Merging Guide preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Documentation has been reviewed by the quality and recording te...Media Companion: MC 3.435b Release: This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. A handful of problems have been sorted out since last weeks release. If there are no major problems this time, it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable at the end of the week! General The .NET Framework has been modified to use the Client profile, as provided by normal Windows updates; no longer is there a requirement to download and install the Full profile! mc_com.exe has been worked on to mimic proper Media Companion output (a big thanks to vbat99...THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.12: SIM??????，TRA??????，ZIP????。 ????????????????，??????~（??????????????????） ??????? simpatch1440x900 trapatch1440x900 ?????1400x900??1440x900，?????????????Data.xp3。 ???? ?????3.12?EXE????????????????， ??????????????，??Tool/krkrconf.exe，??Editor.exe， ???????????????「??????」。 ?????Editor.exe??????。 ???? ???? http://etale.us/gameupload/THE_NVL_Maker_ver3.12_sim.zip ???? http://www.mediafire.com/?je51683g22bz8vo ??Infinite Creation?? http://bbs.etale.us/forum.php ?????? ???? 3.12 ??? ???、????...SnmpMessenger: 0.1.1.1: Project Description SnmpMessenger, a messenger. Using the SNMP protocol to exchange messages. It's developed in C#. SnmpMessenger For .Net 4.0, Mono 2.8. Support SNMP V1, V2, V3. Features Send get, set and other requests and get the response. Send and receive traps. Handle requests and return the response. Note This library is compliant with the Common Language Specification(CLS). The latest version is 0.1.1.1. It is only a messenger, does not involve VACM. Any problems, Please mailto: wa...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.1.1: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.1.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports CPython and IronPython • Python editor with advanced member and signature intellisense • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging • Profiling with multiple view...Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1 - Team Foundation Service Whitepapers: Welcome to the BETA release of the Team Foundation Service Whitepapers preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issue...Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer: .NET Gadgeteer Core 2.42.550 (BETA): Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer Core RELEASE NOTES Version 2.42.550 11 April 2012 BETA VERSION WARNING: This is a beta version! Please note: - API changes may be made before the next version (2.42.600) - The designer will not show modules/mainboards for NETMF 4.2 until you get upgraded libraries from the module/mainboard vendors - Install NETMF 4.2 (see link below) to use the new features of this release That warning aside, this version should continue to sup...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.24: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, and Client Profile. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet.Kendo UI ASP.NET Sample Applications: Sample Applications (2012-04-11): Sample application(s) demonstrating the use of Kendo UI in ASP.NET applications.SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Improved WMI date conversion to be aware of timezone differences and DST. Fixed new version check. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA on Windows XP. Cmdkey.exe is natively availab...Dual Browsing: Dual Browser: Please note the following: I setup the address bar temporarily to only accepts http:// .com addresses. Just type in the name of the website excluding: http://, www., and .com; (Ex: for www.youtube.com just type: youtube then click OK). The page splitter can be grabbed by holding down your left mouse button and move left or right. By right clicking on the page background, you can choose to refresh, go back a page and so on. Demo video: http://youtu.be/L7NTFVM3JUYCslaGenFork: Rules sample v.1.1.0: On projects for CSLA v.4.2.2, added 5 new Business Rules: - DependencyFrom - RequiredWhenCanWrite - RequiredWhenIsNotNew - RequiredWhenNew - StopIfNotFieldExists Added new projects for CSLA v.4.3.10 with 6 new Business Rules: - DependencyFrom - FieldExists - RequiredWhenCanWrite - RequiredWhenIsNotNew - RequiredWhenNew - StopIfNotFieldExists Following CSLA convention, SL stands for Silverligth 5 and SL4 stands for Silverlight 4. NOTE - Although the projects for CSLA v.4.1.0 still exist, thi...Multiwfn: Multiwfn 2.3.3: Multiwfn 2.3.3Liberty: v3.2.0.1 Release 9th April 2012: Change Log-Fixed -Reach Fixed a bug where the object editor did not work on non-English operating systemsCommonData - Common Functions for ASP.NET projects: CommonData 0.3L: Common Data has been updated to the latest NUnit (2.6.0) The demo project has been updated with an example on how to correctly compare a floating point value.ASP.Net MVC Dynamic JS/CSS Script Compression Framework: Initial Stable: Initial Stable Version Contains Source for Compression Library and example for usage in web application.Path Copy Copy: 10.1: This release addresses the following work items: 11357 11358 11359 This release is a recommended upgrade, especially for users who didn't install the 10.0.1 version.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.3: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-04-08 v3.1.3 -??Language="zh_TW"?JS???BUG（??）。 +?D...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.5.5: New Controls ChatBubble ChatBubbleTextBox OpacityToggleButton New Stuff TimeSpan languages added: RU, SK, CS Expose the physics math from TimeSpanPicker Image Stretch now on buttons Bug Fixes Layout fix so RoundToggleButton and RoundButton are exactly the same Fix for ColorPicker when set via code behind ToastPrompt bug fix with OnNavigatedTo Toast now adjusts its layout if the SIP is up Fixed some issues with Expression Blend supportNew ProjectsArkadia Operating System: This operating system is based on Cosmos Project and C# Programming Langage.Copy Microsoft Online User Attributes from one domain user to another: CopyMSOLAttributes copies MSOL-specific user attributes from source user to target user (legacyExchangeDN, mail, msExchMailboxGuid, proxyAddresses, targetAddress). This assists in migrating to Office 365 in a multi-domain, multi-forest environment.DevChat: DevChat is a small secure chat for dev groups or teams inside of an organisation that wish to control their information.Dynamic UI Framework: Dynamic UI FrameworkEjemploAndroid: Prueba Trabajar con eclipse y codeplexElfos vs Orcos: videojuego xna elfos vs orcosFacebook Suite Rules Orchard module: Part of the Facebook Suite Orchard module that provides various rules for the Rules engine to interact with Facebook.FakeMail: FakeMail makes testing of email enabled applications easier for DEVs and QAs. You no longer need to have multiple "real" email addresses to test and validate registration and notification features. Written in C# this ASP.Net MVC application uses RavenDB Embedded as a document store and hosts a custom SMTP server. Configure FakeMail and update your existing email-enabled application's SMTP server settings are you are ready to go. FakeMail mail server will accept email sent to ANY addre...FIM Object Visualizer: The FIM Object Visualizer is a tool to display and document configurable FIM objects such as Synchronization Rules, Workflows and Management Policy Rules. FXIB: ThisGoogle Places Autocomplete API for WP7: The Google Places Autocomplete API for WP7 is a project for WP7 developers to use when implementing an autocomplete box in their application. This project provides an easy non-blocking way to get fast results from the Google Places Autocomplete API. hook send/recv function with CreateRemoteThread: this sample is hooking send/recv function with CreateRemoteThread api.Infinity Music: Entertainment center, music player, youtube player, Internet radio, Facebook, Twitter ... All in one application ...! Centro de entretenimiento, reproductor de música, reproductor videos you tube, radio por internet, Facebook, Twitter... Todo en una misma aplicación...! Centre de divertissement, lecteur de musique, lecteur YouTube, la radio sur Internet, Facebook, Twitter ... Tout dans une seule application ...!Library Guard: Library Guard helps you maintain your media library(primarily audio) by correcting tags, maintaining location of your files, etc.MVVM Source Control Monitor: An exercise in MVVM with Wpf to create a useful and unobtrusive source control notification tool that lives in the system tray, and can also be viewed in a window. This is meant to provide a 'real world' application to provide examples of MVVM implementation without understanding any other frameworks that can blur the lines about what MVVM really is (it's a pattern, folks). The application will use as little 3rd party code as possible (Wpf Toolkit, some other goodies) that are all unrel...Orchard Calendar: Module provides calendar capabilities in Orchard. This is accomplished by a new calendar content part and content type along with new calendar layout for Projector module. PaidRanks: PaidRanks makes it easier for minecraft admins to mangae user rights and rewards donators. You'll no longer have to manually change nick names again. It's developed in Java 7.Perritos Project: Practice of the subject projectPython Pygame Sprites Example: This project example uses Python and Pygame to create a game environment. This code requires major refactoring and there is no warranty. Reversi.NET: Reversi is a board game involving abstract strategy and played by two players on a board with 8 rows and 8 columns and a set of distinct pieces for each side.SharePoint Social Tag Counters: The SharePoint Social Tag Counter project takes the social features from SharePoint 2010 to another level. It allows you to immediately show your SharePoint visitors how popular the content is with the help of Social "I like it" and "Tag" counters.Shop systems1: dddddddddddSource Block - Data Access Components: Source Block - Data Access Components Contains two components. 1. DBHandler 2. DBSchemaHandler DBHandler : Pure ADO.Net based Data access layer DBSchemaHandler : Pure ADO.Net based Database schema handlerSource Block - Domain Driven Development Framework: A framework which promotes domain pattern based development. This promotes patterns such as : Repository, Unit of work, Dependency injection and Inversion of control. Built on MS E.F 4.2 using code first approach. Includes features such as code generationSuperSocket Proxy Server: A .NET proxy server based on SuperSocketTestC-Q: This project is on working with KDB database and fetching data from open market data providers. This will do rigorous analysis. Don't try to find any code till Oct 2012.tofinish: tofinishUse National Geographic Photo of the Day as Wallpaper: I used to watch National Geographic Photo of the day everyday. http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day So I thought it might be helpful for people like me if a software synchronise the wallpaper with national geographic photo of the day. It also archives photo of the day along with publication date and photo title.VAMP: Projet industriel MBDS 2012?????: ???????Model???????: ????：??Model??????? ???：??? ??：?????????python?SDK: ??python??????SDK。????

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• Creating ASP.NET MVC Negotiated Content Results

  - by Rick Strahl

  In a recent ASP.NET MVC application I’m involved with, we had a late in the process request to handle Content Negotiation: Returning output based on the HTTP Accept header of the incoming HTTP request. This is standard behavior in ASP.NET Web API but ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this functionality directly out of the box. Another reason this came up in discussion is last week’s announcements of ASP.NET vNext, which seems to indicate that ASP.NET Web API is not going to be ported to the cloud version of vNext, but rather be replaced by a combined version of MVC and Web API. While it’s not clear what new API features will show up in this new framework, it’s pretty clear that the ASP.NET MVC style syntax will be the new standard for all the new combined HTTP processing framework. Why negotiated Content? Content negotiation is one of the key features of Web API even though it’s such a relatively simple thing. But it’s also something that’s missing in MVC and once you get used to automatically having your content returned based on Accept headers it’s hard to go back to manually having to create separate methods for different output types as you’ve had to with Microsoft server technologies all along (yes, yes I know other frameworks – including my own – have done this for years but for in the box features this is relatively new from Web API). As a quick review,  Accept Header content negotiation works off the request’s HTTP Accept header:POST http://localhost/mydailydosha/Editable/NegotiateContent HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: application/json Accept: application/json Host: localhost Content-Length: 76 Pragma: no-cache { ElementId: "header", PageName: "TestPage", Text: "This is a nice header" } If I make this request I would expect to get back a JSON result based on my application/json Accept header. To request XML  I‘d just change the accept header:Accept: text/xml and now I’d expect the response to come back as XML. Now this only works with media types that the server can process. In my case here I need to handle JSON, XML, HTML (using Views) and Plain Text. HTML results might need more than just a data return – you also probably need to specify a View to render the data into either by specifying the view explicitly or by using some sort of convention that can automatically locate a view to match. Today ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this sort of automatic content switching out of the box. Unfortunately, in my application scenario we have an application that started out primarily with an AJAX backend that was implemented with JSON only. So there are lots of JSON results like this:[Route("Customers")] public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return Json(repo.GetCustomers(),JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } These work fine, but they are of course JSON specific. Then a couple of weeks ago, a requirement came in that an old desktop application needs to also consume this API and it has to use XML to do it because there’s no JSON parser available for it. Ooops – stuck with JSON in this case. While it would have been easy to add XML specific methods I figured it’s easier to add basic content negotiation. And that’s what I show in this post. Missteps – IResultFilter, IActionFilter My first attempt at this was to use IResultFilter or IActionFilter which look like they would be ideal to modify result content after it’s been generated using OnResultExecuted() or OnActionExecuted(). Filters are great because they can look globally at all controller methods or individual methods that are marked up with the Filter’s attribute. But it turns out these filters don’t work for raw POCO result values from Action methods. What we wanted to do for API calls is get back to using plain .NET types as results rather than result actions. That is  you write a method that doesn’t return an ActionResult, but a standard .NET type like this:public Customer UpdateCustomer(Customer cust) { … do stuff to customer :-) return cust; } Unfortunately both OnResultExecuted and OnActionExecuted receive an MVC ContentResult instance from the POCO object. MVC basically takes any non-ActionResult return value and turns it into a ContentResult by converting the value using .ToString(). Ugh. The ContentResult itself doesn’t contain the original value, which is lost AFAIK with no way to retrieve it. So there’s no way to access the raw customer object in the example above. Bummer. Creating a NegotiatedResult This leaves mucking around with custom ActionResults. ActionResults are MVC’s standard way to return action method results – you basically specify that you would like to render your result in a specific format. Common ActionResults are ViewResults (ie. View(vn,model)), JsonResult, RedirectResult etc. They work and are fairly effective and work fairly well for testing as well as it’s the ‘standard’ interface to return results from actions. The problem with the this is mainly that you’re explicitly saying that you want a specific result output type. This works well for many things, but sometimes you do want your result to be negotiated. My first crack at this solution here is to create a simple ActionResult subclass that looks at the Accept header and based on that writes the output. I need to support JSON and XML content and HTML as well as text – so effectively 4 media types: application/json, text/xml, text/html and text/plain. Everything else is passed through as ContentResult – which effecively returns whatever .ToString() returns. Here’s what the NegotiatedResult usage looks like:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return new NegotiatedResult(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return new NegotiatedResult("Show", repo.GetCustomer(id)); } There are two overloads of this method – one that returns just the raw result value and a second version that accepts an optional view name. The second version returns the Razor view specified only if text/html is requested – otherwise the raw data is returned. This is useful in applications where you have an HTML front end that can also double as an API interface endpoint that’s using the same model data you send to the View. For the application I mentioned above this was another actual use-case we needed to address so this was a welcome side effect of creating a custom ActionResult. There’s also an extension method that directly attaches a Negotiated() method to the controller using the same syntax:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return this.Negotiated(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return this.Negotiated("Show",repo.GetCustomer(id)); } Using either of these mechanisms now allows you to return JSON, XML, HTML or plain text results depending on the Accept header sent. Send application/json you get just the Customer JSON data. Ditto for text/xml and XML data. Pass text/html for the Accept header and the "Show.cshtml" Razor view is rendered passing the result model data producing final HTML output. While this isn’t as clean as passing just POCO objects back as I had intended originally, this approach fits better with how MVC action methods are intended to be used and we get the bonus of being able to specify a View to render (optionally) for HTML. How does it work An ActionResult implementation is pretty straightforward. You inherit from ActionResult and implement the ExecuteResult method to send your output to the ASP.NET output stream. ActionFilters are an easy way to effectively do post processing on ASP.NET MVC controller actions just before the content is sent to the output stream, assuming your specific action result was used. Here’s the full code to the NegotiatedResult class (you can also check it out on GitHub):/// <summary> /// Returns a content negotiated result based on the Accept header. /// Minimal implementation that works with JSON and XML content, /// can also optionally return a view with HTML. /// </summary> /// <example> /// // model data only /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult(repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// // optional view for HTML /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public class NegotiatedResult : ActionResult { /// <summary> /// Data stored to be 'serialized'. Public /// so it's potentially accessible in filters. /// </summary> public object Data { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Optional name of the HTML view to be rendered /// for HTML responses /// </summary> public string ViewName { get; set; } public static bool FormatOutput { get; set; } static NegotiatedResult() { FormatOutput = HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data to serialize /// </summary> /// <param name="data">Data to serialize</param> public NegotiatedResult(object data) { Data = data; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data and an optional view for HTML views /// </summary> /// <param name="data"></param> /// <param name="viewName"></param> public NegotiatedResult(string viewName, object data) { Data = data; ViewName = viewName; } public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { if (context == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("context"); HttpResponseBase response = context.HttpContext.Response; HttpRequestBase request = context.HttpContext.Request; // Look for specific content types if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/html")) { response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/plain")) { response.ContentType = "text/plain"; response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("application/json")) { using (JsonTextWriter writer = new JsonTextWriter(response.Output)) { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings(); if (FormatOutput) settings.Formatting = Newtonsoft.Json.Formatting.Indented; JsonSerializer serializer = JsonSerializer.Create(settings); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/xml")) { response.ContentType = "text/xml"; if (Data != null) { using (var writer = new XmlTextWriter(response.OutputStream, new UTF8Encoding())) { if (FormatOutput) writer.Formatting = System.Xml.Formatting.Indented; XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(Data.GetType()); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } } else { // just write data as a plain string response.Write(Data); } } } /// <summary> /// Extends Controller with Negotiated() ActionResult that does /// basic content negotiation based on the Accept header. /// </summary> public static class NegotiatedResultExtensions { /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated( repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(data); } /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="viewName">Name of the View to when Accept is text/html</param> /// /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, string viewName, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(viewName, data); } } Output Generation – JSON and XML Generating output for XML and JSON is simple – you use the desired serializer and off you go. Using XmlSerializer and JSON.NET it’s just a handful of lines each to generate serialized output directly into the HTTP output stream. Please note this implementation uses JSON.NET for its JSON generation rather than the default JavaScriptSerializer that MVC uses which I feel is an additional bonus to implementing this custom action. I’d already been using a custom JsonNetResult class previously, but now this is just rolled into this custom ActionResult. Just keep in mind that JSON.NET outputs slightly different JSON for certain things like collections for example, so behavior may change. One addition to this implementation might be a flag to allow switching the JSON serializer. Html View Generation Html View generation actually turned out to be easier than anticipated. Initially I used my generic ASP.NET ViewRenderer Class that can render MVC views from any ASP.NET application. However it turns out since we are executing inside of an active MVC request there’s an easier way: We can simply create a custom ViewResult and populate its members and then execute it. The code in text/html handling code that renders the view is simply this:response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); which is a neat and easy way to render a Razor view assuming you have an active controller that’s ready for rendering. Sweet – dependency removed which makes this class self-contained without any external dependencies other than JSON.NET. Summary While this isn’t exactly a new topic, it’s the first time I’ve actually delved into this with MVC. I’ve been doing content negotiation with Web API and prior to that with my REST library. This is the first time it’s come up as an issue in MVC. But as I have worked through this I find that having a way to specify both HTML Views *and* JSON and XML results from a single controller certainly is appealing to me in many situations as we are in this particular application returning identical data models for each of these operations. Rendering content negotiated views is something that I hope ASP.NET vNext will provide natively in the combined MVC and WebAPI model, but we’ll see how this actually will be implemented. In the meantime having a custom ActionResult that provides this functionality is a workable and easily adaptable way of handling this going forward. Whatever ends up happening in ASP.NET vNext the abstraction can probably be changed to support the native features of the future. Anyway I hope some of you found this useful if not for direct integration then as insight into some of the rendering logic that MVC uses to get output into the HTTP stream… Related Resources Latest Version of NegotiatedResult.cs on GitHub Understanding Action Controllers Rendering ASP.NET Views To String© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 15, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 15, 2011Popular ReleasesPeople's Note: People's Note 0.22: Fixed the recent TODO checkbox problem. If you cannot synchronize, try deleting the last note with TODO checkboxes. Fixed notes created before signing in for the first time not syncing. Made a number of small user interface improvements. To install: copy the appropriate CAB file onto your WM device and run it.Network Asset Manager: Release 1.0.9: Release notes for version 1.0.9New FeaturesAdded new report subsystem for better report handling and report history management. Added support for Network adapter discovery Added reports for low disk space, disk utilization, hardware, OS installation Some application fixes. Bug fixesArtifact ID 2979655 : Fixed issue with installed software collection on windows 64 bit. (Thanks to nielsvdc for this patch) NotesPrevious versions of NAM installations need to be manually uninstalled bef...JetBrowser: JetBrowser 5: JetBrowser 5 ( specifically Version 5.0.1.239 ) is here . I uploaded it here in codeplex because i had nowhere else to upload it . Changes made from last release : Improvements made throughout the code of JetBrowser. Bug fixes made in JetMail and the Feedback tool. Bug fixes were made in other vital points of the code and a lot of features were added. Visual parts of the JB were modified as well If you notice a but , pl...mytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.0 beta 2: New MVC3 RTM WEB.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.0 Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.0 System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.5, MVC3 RTM WARNING For run and debug SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.0 download and...IIS Tuner: IIS Tuner: Performance optimization tool for IISBloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.3.0: NOTE: If you have a previous version of BloodSim, you must update WControls.dll from the Required DLLs download. - Removed average stats from main window as this is no longer necessary - Added ability to name a set of runs that will show up in the title bar of the graph window - Added ability to run progressive simulation sets, increasing up to 2 chosen stats by a value each time - Added option to set the amount that Death Strike heals for on the Last 5s Damage - Added option for Blood Shiel...WCF Community Site: WCF Web APIs 11.01.14: Welcome to the third release of WCF Web APIs on codeplex New Features - WCF HTTP New HttpClient API which replaces the REST Starter kit has been introduced. In addition to supporting strongly typed messages, the API supports async through Task<T>. It also has a pluggable channel stack for plugging in handlers for the request / response from the client side. See the QueryableSample for an example of the new channels. New extension methods for serializing / deserializing to/from HttpContent. ...NuGet: NuGet 1.0 RTM: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog.MVC Music Store: MVC Music Store v2.0: This is the 2.0 release of the MVC Music Store Tutorial. This tutorial is updated for ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework Code-First, and contains fixes and improvements based on feedback and common questions from previous releases. The main download, MvcMusicStore-v2.0.zip, contains everything you need to build the sample application, including A detailed tutorial document in PDF format Assets you will need to build the project, including images, a stylesheet, and a pre-populated databas...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.7 GA Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.7 GA with the following feature: * Inlines property has been implemented in Title. Also, this release contains fix for the following bugs: * In Column and Bar chart DataPoint’s label properties were not working as expected at real-time if marker enabled was set to true. * 3D Column and Bar chart were not rendered properly if AxisMinimum property was set in x-axis. You can download Visifire v3.6.7 here. Cheers, Team VisifireASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: paging for the lookup lookup with multiselect changes: the css classes used by the framework where renamed to be more standard the lookup controller requries an item.ascx (no more ViewData["structure"]), and LookupList action renamed to Search all the...??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-01-12: 2011???????All-In-One Code Framework（??） 2011?1??????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????release?，???????ASP.NET, AJAX, WinForm, Windows Shell????13?Sample Code。???，??????????sample code。 ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011/01/13/6135037.aspx ??，??????MSDN????????????。 http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/zh-CN/codezhchs/threads ?????????????????，??Email ????patterns & practices – Enterprise Library: Enterprise Library 5.0 - Extensibility Labs: This is a preview release of the Hands-on Labs to help you learn and practice different ways the Enterprise Library can be extended. Learning MapCustom exception handler (estimated time to complete: 1 hr 15 mins) Custom logging trace listener (1 hr) Custom configuration source (registry-based) (30 mins) System requirementsEnterprise Library 5.0 / Unity 2.0 installed SQL Express 2008 installed Visual Studio 2010 Pro (or better) installed AuthorsChris Tavares, Microsoft Corporation ...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.0: Orchard Release Notes Build: 1.0.20 Published: 1/12/2010 How to Install OrchardTo install the Orchard tech preview using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. --OR-- Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.0.20.zip file. The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents of the Orchard folder from ...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6.1: The Umbraco 4.6.1 (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains nearly 200 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to check the free foundation videos on how to get started building Umbraco sites. They're ...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14986.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Features: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the ...SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.1 beta 1: 1. support alert message template 2. dynamic toolbar commands depending on functionality 3. fixed some bugs 4. refactored part of the code, now more stable and more clean upFacebook C# SDK: 4.2.1: - Authentication bug fixes - Updated Json.Net to version 4.0.0 - BREAKING CHANGE: Removed cookieSupport config setting, now automatic. This download is also availible on NuGet: Facebook FacebookWeb FacebookWebMvcPhalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (January 2011): Another release build for daily use; it contains many new features, enhanced compatibility with latest PHP opensource applications and several issue fixes. To improve the performance of your application using MySQL, please use Managed MySQL Extension for Phalanger. Changes made within this release include following: New features available only in Phalanger. Full support of Multi-Script-Assemblies was implemented; you can build your application into several DLLs now. Deploy them separately t...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.3: A message will be displayed when there's an update available Shows a list of recent mastery files in the Editor Tab (requested by quite a few people) Updater: Update information is now scrollable Added a buton to launch AutoLoL after updating is finished Updated the UI to match that of AutoLoL Fix: Detects and resolves 'Read Only' state on Version.xmlNew Projects6 piece burr analysis: An educational project for researching a 6 piece burrsBabySmash7: BabySmash for WP7C# 4.0 library to generate INotifyPropertyChanged proxy from POCO type: C# 4.0 library to generate INotifyPropertyChanged proxy from POCO type at runtime. It will inherit from the type given and override any public virtual properties with wrappers that notify on change. Text templates are used to define the source of the generated class.CompositeC1Contrib: User contributions, hacks and optimization to Composite C1 CMS.CrtTfsDemo: demo project to test code review tool integration with tfsDbExpressions: An abstract syntax tree for Sql.DefaultAndZipTemplate.xaml (Build Process Template for TFS 2010): Just the given default build process template in TFS 2010 plus one additional activity to put the drop folder content into a zip file located in the same folder.DotNetNuke easy.News Multilanguage template module: This is a DotNetNuke 5.5+ module for news. It allows users to create, manage and preview news on DotNetNuke portals. Module is template based and can work on multilanguage portals. It is free of charge and constantly improving.DragonBone Software: DragonBone Software is a software that allows developers to create 2D skeletal animations that can be exported via XML and added into your project.DuckCallLib: Extension methods that allow for something that approximates to duck typing in C#. While certainly not as syntactically clean as Ruby, using this library allows the user to not have to write the same reflection code over and over again when duck typing is desired.EPAT: Energy Performance Assessment ToolsHCMUS Bug Tracker: HCMUS Bug Tracker is project to management bug in software developer. This project execute by students at Falculty of Natural Sciences University.IIS Tuner: Simple Tuning tool for IISinteLibrary: inteLibraryLearnPad: A light and easy to use note writer and learn aid. Project LearnPad aims to make the life of students a lot easier with it's ability to capture information in textual form easy and fast with the ability to refine and review the content later.LiveTiss: Solução web em Silverlight 4, para criação, edição e gerenciamento de guias TISS. Essa solução poderá ser hospedada no Windows Azure e sua base de dados no SQL Azure.MakeMayhem: Mayhem makes it simple for end users to control complex events with their PCs. Whether you want to Update a Twitter status when your cat is detected by your webcam or monitor your serial ports and trigger events, it's no problem with Mayhem -- wreak your own personal havoc. MangaEplision: A manga viewer/downloader. You no longer have to use multiple applications when you can download the latest and view them in MangaEplision. It is written in C#/VB.NET.Min-Mang: A logical game implementation.OCPforStudent: OCP for Student, whose full name is Online Collabration Platform for Student, is the course project for OOAD.Orchard Google Analytics Module: This is an Orchard module adding Google Analytics support.Orchard Voting API: Voting is a set of APIs used by other modules to manage votes on content items, calculating different values automatically and efficiently.Parser SQL Query: Class C++ of parse SQL query. Simple, but effective to add a condition to the SQL query of any complexity or replace a variable by its value. Variable begins with a '$'. Sample app for Adventureworks database: The purpose of this project is to show people how to build apps around Adventureworks sample database with latest Microsoft technologies including WPF, Silverlight, Asp.Net, WF, WIF, etc.SCRotUM: student project scrumtoolSecFtp: secftp makes it easier for people to upload ftp fileSharePoint 2010 Custom Ribbon Demo: This demo projects shows you how to create a custom Ribbon tab at runtime and how to activate the Ribbon tab on page load! see my blog for details: http://ikarstein.wordpress.comSimple but Cool Silverlight Message Boxes (Info, Error, Confirm, etc.): Simple but presentable message boxes for Silverlight developers. Designed for ease of integration with existing projects.SMSFilter: Windows Mobile application much talked about on XDA-Developers at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=6350352#post6350352 SMSFilter is a new app which has been designed to filter you PRIVATE message away from normal inboxTata: Tata is a small language I invented and implemented. It's dedicated for test automation in Embedding Systems.Unix Tools in F#: some simple unix command line tools written in f sharp.viprava.net: The Viprava.NET is programming language using sanskrit. The primary focus is to help the Indian Public to get more attached to the Progamming environment. Please visit http://amarakosha.hpage.com/ for contact Information.Visual Studio PS3 Extension and Tools: An extension to Visual Studio to compile Playstation 3. Including an SFO editor and Package creator.WebDev: A simple notepad replacement that is specially made to help web developers without any unneeded "extra features*. Short, simple, sweet.Wpf Touch Enabled List View: A simple control that inherits from WPF standard listview to handle some mouse event for support on touch screen.XHTMLr: Normalizes HTML into XML that can be parsed and manipulated.

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• Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure

  After successful automatic distribution of IPv6 address information via DHCPv6 in your local network it might be time to start offering some more services. Usually, we would use host names in order to communicate with other machines instead of their bare IPv6 addresses. During the following paragraphs we are going to enable our own DNS name server with IPv6 address resolving. This is the third article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. What's your name and your IPv6 address? $ sudo service bind9 status * bind9 is running If the service is not recognised, you have to install it first on your system. This is done very easy and quickly like so: $ sudo apt-get install bind9 Once again, there is no specialised package for IPv6. Just the regular application is good to go. But of course, it is necessary to enable IPv6 binding in the options. Let's fire up a text editor and modify the configuration file. $ sudo nano /etc/bind/named.conf.optionsacl iosnet {        127.0.0.1;        192.168.1.0/24;        ::1/128;        2001:db8:bad:a55::/64;};listen-on { iosnet; };listen-on-v6 { any; };allow-query { iosnet; };allow-transfer { iosnet; }; Most important directive is the listen-on-v6. This will enable your named to bind to your IPv6 addresses specified on your system. Easiest is to specify any as value, and named will bind to all available IPv6 addresses during start. More details and explanations are found in the man-pages of named.conf. Save the file and restart the named service. As usual, check your log files and correct your configuration in case of any logged error messages. Using the netstat command you can validate whether the service is running and to which IP and IPv6 addresses it is bound to, like so: $ sudo service bind9 restart $ sudo netstat -lnptu | grep "named\W*$"tcp        0      0 192.168.1.2:53        0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1734/named      tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:53          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1734/named      tcp6       0      0 :::53                 :::*                    LISTEN      1734/named      udp        0      0 192.168.1.2:53        0.0.0.0:*                           1734/named      udp        0      0 127.0.0.1:53          0.0.0.0:*                           1734/named      udp6       0      0 :::53                 :::*                                1734/named   Sweet! Okay, now it's about time to resolve host names and their assigned IPv6 addresses using our own DNS name server. $ host -t aaaa www.6bone.net 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Using domain server:Name: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Address: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2#53Aliases: www.6bone.net is an alias for 6bone.net.6bone.net has IPv6 address 2001:5c0:1000:10::2 Alright, our newly configured BIND named is fully operational. Eventually, you might be more familiar with the dig command. Here is the same kind of IPv6 host name resolve but it will provide more details about that particular host as well as the domain in general. $ dig @2001:db8:bad:a55::2 www.6bone.net. AAAA More details on the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (bind) daemon and IPv6 are available in Chapter 22.1 of Peter Bieringer's HOWTO on IPv6. Setting up your own DNS zone Now, that we have an operational named in place, it's about time to implement and configure our own host names and IPv6 address resolving. The general approach is to create your own zone database below the bind folder and to add AAAA records for your hosts. In order to achieve this, we have to define the zone first in the configuration file named.conf.local. $ sudo nano /etc/bind/named.conf.local //// Do any local configuration here//zone "ios.mu" {        type master;        file "/etc/bind/zones/db.ios.mu";}; Here we specify the location of our zone database file. Next, we are going to create it and add our host names, our IP and our IPv6 addresses. $ sudo nano /etc/bind/zones/db.ios.mu $ORIGIN .$TTL 259200     ; 3 daysios.mu                  IN SOA  ios.mu. hostmaster.ios.mu. (                                2014031101 ; serial                                28800      ; refresh (8 hours)                                7200       ; retry (2 hours)                                604800     ; expire (1 week)                                86400      ; minimum (1 day)                                )                        NS      server.ios.mu.$ORIGIN ios.mu.server                  A       192.168.1.2server                  AAAA    2001:db8:bad:a55::2client1                 A       192.168.1.3client1                 AAAA    2001:db8:bad:a55::3client2                 A       192.168.1.4client2                 AAAA    2001:db8:bad:a55::4 With a couple of machines in place, it's time to reload that new configuration. Note: Each time you are going to change your zone databases you have to modify the serial information, too. Named loads the plain text zone definitions and converts them into an internal, indexed binary format to improve lookup performance. If you forget to change your serial then named will not use the new records from the text file but the indexed ones. Or you have to flush the index and force a reload of the zone. This can be done easily by either restarting the named: $ sudo service bind9 restart or by reloading the configuration file using the name server control utility - rndc: $ sudo rndc reconfig Check your log files for any error messages and whether the new zone database has been accepted. Next, we are going to resolve a host name trying to get its IPv6 address like so: $ host -t aaaa server.ios.mu. 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Using domain server:Name: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2Address: 2001:db8:bad:a55::2#53Aliases: server.ios.mu has IPv6 address 2001:db8:bad:a55::2 Looks good. Alternatively, you could have just ping'd the system as well using the ping6 command instead of the regular ping: $ ping6 serverPING server(2001:db8:bad:a55::2) 56 data bytes64 bytes from 2001:db8:bad:a55::2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.615 ms64 bytes from 2001:db8:bad:a55::2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.407 ms^C--- ios1 ping statistics ---2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1001msrtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.407/0.511/0.615/0.104 ms That also looks promising to me. How about your configuration? Next, it might be interesting to extend the range of available services on the network. One essential service would be to have web sites at hand.

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• Tips for XNA WP7 Developers

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  There are several things any XNA developer should know/consider when coming to the Windows Phone 7 platform. This post assumes you are familiar with the XNA Framework and with the changes between XNA 3.1 and XNA 4.0. It’s not exhaustive; it’s simply a list of things I’ve gathered over time. I may come back and add to it over time, and I’m happy to add anything anyone else has experienced or learned as well. Display · The screen is either 800x480 or 480x800. · But you aren’t required to use only those resolutions. · The hardware scaler on the phone will scale up from 240x240. · One dimension will be capped at 800 and the other at 480; which depends on your code, but you cannot have, e.g., an 800x600 back buffer – that will be created as 800x480. · The hardware scaler will not normally change aspect ratio, though, so no unintended stretching. · Any dimension (width, height, or both) below 240 will be adjusted to 240 (without any aspect ratio adjustment such that, e.g. 200x240 will be treated as 240x240). · Dimensions below 240 will be honored in terms of calculating whether to use portrait or landscape. · If dimensions are exactly equal or if height is greater than width then game will be in portrait. · If width is greater than height, the game will be in landscape. · Landscape games will automatically flip if the user turns the phone 180°; no code required. · Default landscape is top = left. In other words a user holding a phone who starts a landscape game will see the first image presented so that the “top” of the screen is along the right edge of his/her phone, such that the natural behavior would be to turn the phone 90° so that the top of the phone will be held in the user’s left hand and the bottom would be held in the user’s right hand. · The status bar (where the clock, battery power, etc., are found) is hidden when the Game-derived class sets GraphicsDeviceManager.IsFullScreen = true. It is shown when IsFullScreen = false. The default value is false (i.e. the status bar is shown). · You should have a good reason for hiding the status bar. Users find it helpful to know what time it is, how much charge their battery has left, and whether or not their phone is in service range. This is especially true for casual games that you expect someone to play for a few minutes at a time, e.g. while waiting for some event to start, for a phone call to come in, or for a train, bus, or subway to arrive. · In portrait mode, the status bar occupies 32 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 480x800 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 461x768 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 480x768 (or some resolution with the same 0.625 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. · In landscape mode, the status bar occupies 72 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 800x480 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 728x437 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 728x480 (or some resolution with the same 1.51666667 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. Input · Touch input is scaled with screen size. · So if your back buffer is 600x360, a tap in the bottom right corner will come in as (599,359). You don’t need to do anything special to get this automatic scaling of touch behavior. · If you do not use full area of the screen, any touch input outside the area you use will still register as a touch input. For example, if you set a portrait resolution of 240x240, it would be scaled up to occupy a 480x480 area, centered in the screen. If you touch anywhere above this area, you will get a touch input of (X,0) where X is a number from 0 to 239 (in accordance with your 240 pixel wide back buffer). Any touch below this area will give a touch input of (X,239). · If you keep the status bar visible, touches within its area will not be passed to your game. · In general, a screen measurement is the diagonal. So a 3.5” screen is 3.5” long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6 (480/800 = 0.6), this means that a phone with a 3.5” screen is only approximately 1.8” wide by 3” tall. So there are approximately 267 pixels in an inch on a 3.5” screen. · Again, this time in metric! 3.5 inches is approximately 8.89 cm. So an 8.89 cm screen is 8.89 cm long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6, this means that a phone with an 8.89 cm screen is only approximately 4.57 cm wide by 7.62 cm tall. So there are approximately 105 pixels in a centimeter on an 8.89 cm screen. · Think about the size of your finger tip. If you do not have large hands, think about the size of the fingertip of someone with large hands. Consider that when you are sizing your touch input. Especially consider that when you are spacing two touch targets near one another. You need to judge it for yourself, but items that are next to each other and are each 100x100 should be fine when it comes to selecting items individually. Smaller targets than that are ok provided that you leave space between them. · You want your users to have a pleasant experience. Making touch controls too small or too close to one another will make them nervous about whether they will touch the right target. Take this into account when you plan out your game initially. If possible, do some quick size mockups on an actual phone using colored rectangles that you position and size where you plan to have your game controls. Adjust as necessary. · People do not have transparent hands! Nor are their hands the size of a mouse pointer icon. Consider leaving a dedicated space for input rather than forcing the user to cover up to one-third of the screen with a finger just to play the game. · Another benefit of designing your controls to use a dedicated area is that you’re less likely to have players moving their finger(s) so frantically that they accidentally hit the back button, start button, or search button (many phones have one or more of these on the screen itself – it’s easy to hit one by accident and really annoying if you hit, e.g., the search button and then quickly tap back only to find out that the game didn’t save your progress such that you just wasted all the time you spent playing). · People do not like doing somersaults in order to move something forward with accelerometer-based controls. Test your accelerometer-based controls extensively and get a lot of feedback. Very well-known games from noted publishers have created really bad accelerometer controls and been virtually unplayable as a result. Also be wary of exceptions and other possible failures that the documentation warns about. · When done properly, the accelerometer can add a nice touch to your game (see, e.g. ilomilo where the accelerometer was used to move the background; it added a nice touch without frustrating the user; I also think CarniVale does direct accelerometer controls very well). However, if done poorly, it will make your game an abomination unto the Marketplace. Days, weeks, perhaps even months of development time that you will never get back. I won’t name names; you can search the marketplace for games with terrible reviews and you’ll find them. Graphics · The maximum frame rate is 30 frames per second. This was set as a compromise between battery life and quality. · At least one model of phone is known to have a screen refresh rate that is between 59 and 60 hertz. Because of this, using a fixed time step with a target frame rate of 30 will cause a slight internal delay to build up as the framework is forced to wait slightly for the next refresh. Eventually the delay will get to the point where a draw is skipped in order to recover from the delay. (See Nick's comment below for clarification.) · To deal with that delay, you can either stay with a fixed time step and set the frame rate slightly lower or else you can go to a variable time step and make sure to adjust all of your update data (e.g. player movement distance) to take into account the elapsed time from the last update. A variable time step makes your update logic slightly more complicated but will avoid frame skips entirely. · Currently there are no custom shaders. This might change in the future (there is no hardware limitation preventing it; it simply wasn’t a feature that could be implemented in the time available before launch). · There are five built-in shaders. You can create a lot of nice effects with the built-in shaders. · There is more power on the CPU than there is on the GPU so things you might typically off-load to the GPU will instead make sense to do on the CPU side. · This is a phone. It is not a PC. It is not an Xbox 360. The emulator runs on a PC and uses the full power of your PC. It is very good for testing your code for bugs and doing early prototyping and layout. You should not use it to measure performance. Use actual phone hardware instead. · There are many phone models, each of which has slightly different performance levels for I/O, screen blitting, CPU performance, etc. Do not take your game right to the performance limit on your phone since for some other phones you might be crossing their limits and leaving players with a bad experience. Leave a cushion to account for hardware differences. · Smaller screened phones will have slightly more dots per inch (dpi). Larger screened phones will have slightly less. Either way, the dpi will be much higher than the typical 96 found on most computer screens. Make sure that whoever is doing art for your game takes this into account. · Screens are only required to have 16 bit color (65,536 colors). This is common among smart phones. Using gradients on a 16 bit display can produce an ugly artifact known as banding. Banding is when, rather than a smooth transition from one color to another, you instead see distinct lines. Be careful to avoid this when possible. Banding can be avoided through careful art creation. Its effects can be minimized and even unnoticeable when the texture in question is always moving. You should be careful not to rely on “looks good on my phone” since some phones do have 32-bit displays and thus you’ll find yourself wondering why you’re getting bad reviews that complain about the graphics. Avoid gradients; if you can’t, make sure they are 16-bit safe. Audio · Never rely on sounds as your sole signal to the player that something is happening in the game. They might have the sound off. They might be playing somewhere loud. Etc. · You have to provide controls to disable sound & music. These should be separate. · On at least one model of phone, the volume control API currently has no effect. Players can adjust sound with their hardware volume buttons, but in game selectors simply won’t work. As such, it may not be worth the effort of providing anything beyond on/off switches for sound and music. · MediaPlayer.GameHasControl will return true when a game is hooked up to a PC running Zune. When Zune is running, any attempts to do anything (beyond check GameHasControl) with MediaPlayer will cause an exception to be thrown. If this exception is thrown, catch it and disable music. Exceptions take time to propagate; you don’t want one popping up in every single run of your game’s Update method. · Remember that players can already be listening to music or using the FM radio. In this case GameHasControl will be false and you should handle this appropriately. You can, alternately, ask the player for permission to stop their current music and play your music instead, but the (current) requirement that you restore their music when done is very hard (if not impossible) to deal with. · You can still play sound effects even when the game doesn’t have control of the music, but don’t think this is a backdoor to playing music. Your game will fail certification if your “sound effect” seems to be more like music in scope and length.

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• From HttpRuntime.Cache to Windows Azure Caching (Preview)

  - by Jeff

  I don’t know about you, but the announcement of Windows Azure Caching (Preview) (yes, the parentheses are apparently part of the interim name) made me a lot more excited about using Azure. Why? Because one of the great performance tricks of any Web app is to cache frequently used data in memory, so it doesn’t have to hit the database, a service, or whatever. When you run your Web app on one box, HttpRuntime.Cache is a sweet and stupid-simple solution. Somewhere in the data fetching pieces of your app, you can see if an object is available in cache, and return that instead of hitting the data store. I did this quite a bit in POP Forums, and it dramatically cuts down on the database chatter. The problem is that it falls apart if you run the app on many servers, in a Web farm, where one server may initiate a change to that data, and the others will have no knowledge of the change, making it stale. Of course, if you have the infrastructure to do so, you can use something like memcached or AppFabric to do a distributed cache, and achieve the caching flavor you desire. You could do the same thing in Azure before, but it would cost more because you’d need to pay for another role or VM or something to host the cache. Now, you can use a portion of the memory from each instance of a Web role to act as that cache, with no additional cost. That’s huge. So if you’re using a percentage of memory that comes out to 100 MB, and you have three instances running, that’s 300 MB available for caching. For the uninitiated, a Web role in Azure is essentially a VM that runs a Web app (worker roles are the same idea, only without the IIS part). You can spin up many instances of the role, and traffic is load balanced to the various instances. It’s like adding or removing servers to a Web farm all willy-nilly and at your discretion, and it’s what the cloud is all about. I’d say it’s my favorite thing about Windows Azure. The slightly annoying thing about developing for a Web role in Azure is that the local emulator that’s launched by Visual Studio is a little on the slow side. If you’re used to using the built-in Web server, you’re used to building and then alt-tabbing to your browser and refreshing a page. If you’re just changing an MVC view, you’re not even doing the building part. Spinning up the simulated Azure environment is too slow for this, but ideally you want to code your app to use this fantastic distributed cache mechanism. So first off, here’s the link to the page showing how to code using the caching feature. If you’re used to using HttpRuntime.Cache, this should be pretty familiar to you. Let’s say that you want to use the Azure cache preview when you’re running in Azure, but HttpRuntime.Cache if you’re running local, or in a regular IIS server environment. Through the magic of dependency injection, we can get there pretty quickly. First, design an interface to handle the cache insertion, fetching and removal. Mine looks like this: public interface ICacheProvider {     void Add(string key, object item, int duration);     T Get<T>(string key) where T : class;     void Remove(string key); } Now we’ll create two implementations of this interface… one for Azure cache, one for HttpRuntime: public class AzureCacheProvider : ICacheProvider {     public AzureCacheProvider()     {         _cache = new DataCache("default"); // in Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching, see how-to      }         private readonly DataCache _cache;     public void Add(string key, object item, int duration)     {         _cache.Add(key, item, new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, duration));     }     public T Get<T>(string key) where T : class     {         return _cache.Get(key) as T;     }     public void Remove(string key)     {         _cache.Remove(key);     } } public class LocalCacheProvider : ICacheProvider {     public LocalCacheProvider()     {         _cache = HttpRuntime.Cache;     }     private readonly System.Web.Caching.Cache _cache;     public void Add(string key, object item, int duration)     {         _cache.Insert(key, item, null, DateTime.UtcNow.AddMilliseconds(duration), System.Web.Caching.Cache.NoSlidingExpiration);     }     public T Get<T>(string key) where T : class     {         return _cache[key] as T;     }     public void Remove(string key)     {         _cache.Remove(key);     } } Feel free to expand these to use whatever cache features you want. I’m not going to go over dependency injection here, but I assume that if you’re using ASP.NET MVC, you’re using it. Somewhere in your app, you set up the DI container that resolves interfaces to concrete implementations (Ninject call is a “kernel” instead of a container). For this example, I’ll show you how StructureMap does it. It uses a convention based scheme, where if you need to get an instance of IFoo, it looks for a class named Foo. You can also do this mapping explicitly. The initialization of the container looks something like this: ObjectFactory.Initialize(x =>             {                 x.Scan(scan =>                         {                             scan.AssembliesFromApplicationBaseDirectory();                             scan.WithDefaultConventions();                         });                 if (Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime.RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable)                     x.For<ICacheProvider>().Use<AzureCacheProvider>();                 else                     x.For<ICacheProvider>().Use<LocalCacheProvider>();             }); If you use Ninject or Windsor or something else, that’s OK. Conceptually they’re all about the same. The important part is the conditional statement that checks to see if the app is running in Azure. If it is, it maps ICacheProvider to AzureCacheProvider, otherwise it maps to LocalCacheProvider. Now when a request comes into your MVC app, and the chain of dependency resolution occurs, you can see to it that the right caching code is called. A typical design may have a call stack that goes: Controller –> BusinessLogicClass –> Repository. Let’s say your repository class looks like this: public class MyRepo : IMyRepo {     public MyRepo(ICacheProvider cacheProvider)     {         _context = new MyDataContext();         _cache = cacheProvider;     }     private readonly MyDataContext _context;     private readonly ICacheProvider _cache;     public SomeType Get(int someTypeID)     {         var key = "somename-" + someTypeID;         var cachedObject = _cache.Get<SomeType>(key);         if (cachedObject != null)         {             _context.SomeTypes.Attach(cachedObject);             return cachedObject;         }         var someType = _context.SomeTypes.SingleOrDefault(p => p.SomeTypeID == someTypeID);         _cache.Add(key, someType, 60000);         return someType;     } ... // more stuff to update, delete or whatever, being sure to remove // from cache when you do so  When the DI container gets an instance of the repo, it passes an instance of ICacheProvider to the constructor, which in this case will be whatever implementation was specified when the container was initialized. The Get method first tries to hit the cache, and of course doesn’t care what the underlying implementation is, Azure, HttpRuntime, or otherwise. If it finds the object, it returns it right then. If not, it hits the database (this example is using Entity Framework), and inserts the object into the cache before returning it. The important thing not pictured here is that other methods in the repo class will construct the key for the cached object, in this case “somename-“ plus the ID of the object, and then remove it from cache, in any method that alters or deletes the object. That way, no matter what instance of the role is processing the request, it won’t find the object if it has been made stale, that is, updated or outright deleted, forcing it to attempt to hit the database. So is this good technique? Well, sort of. It depends on how you use it, and what your testing looks like around it. Because of differences in behavior and execution of the two caching providers, for example, you could see some strange errors. For example, I immediately got an error indicating there was no parameterless constructor for an MVC controller, because the DI resolver failed to create instances for the dependencies it had. In reality, the NuGet packaged DI resolver for StructureMap was eating an exception thrown by the Azure components that said my configuration, outlined in that how-to article, was wrong. That error wouldn’t occur when using the HttpRuntime. That’s something a lot of people debate about using different components like that, and how you configure them. I kinda hate XML config files, and like the idea of the code-based approach above, but you should be darn sure that your unit and integration testing can account for the differences.

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• How to match ColdFusion encryption with Java 1.4.2?

  - by JohnTheBarber

  * sweet - thanks to Edward Smith for the CF Technote that indicated the key from ColdFusion was Base64 encoded. See generateKey() for the 'fix' My task is to use Java 1.4.2 to match the results a given ColdFusion code sample for encryption. Known/given values: A 24-byte key A 16-byte salt (IVorSalt) Encoding is Hex Encryption algorithm is AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding A sample clear-text value The encrypted value of the sample clear-text after going through the ColdFusion code Assumptions: Number of iterations not specified in the ColdFusion code so I assume only one iteration 24-byte key so I assume 192-bit encryption Given/working ColdFusion encryption code sample: <cfset ThisSalt = "16byte-salt-here"> <cfset ThisAlgorithm = "AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding"> <cfset ThisKey = "a-24byte-key-string-here"> <cfset thisAdjustedNow = now()> <cfset ThisDateTimeVar = DateFormat( thisAdjustedNow , "yyyymmdd" )> <cfset ThisDateTimeVar = ThisDateTimeVar & TimeFormat( thisAdjustedNow , "HHmmss" )> <cfset ThisTAID = ThisDateTimeVar & "|" & someOtherData> <cfset ThisTAIDEnc = Encrypt( ThisTAID , ThisKey , ThisAlgorithm , "Hex" , ThisSalt)> My Java 1.4.2 encryption/decryption code swag: package so.example; import java.security.*; import javax.crypto.Cipher; import javax.crypto.spec.IvParameterSpec; import javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec; import org.apache.commons.codec.binary.*; public class SO_AES192 { private static final String _AES = "AES"; private static final String _AES_CBC_PKCS5Padding = "AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding"; private static final String KEY_VALUE = "a-24byte-key-string-here"; private static final String SALT_VALUE = "16byte-salt-here"; private static final int ITERATIONS = 1; private static IvParameterSpec ivParameterSpec; public static String encryptHex(String value) throws Exception { Key key = generateKey(); Cipher c = Cipher.getInstance(_AES_CBC_PKCS5Padding); ivParameterSpec = new IvParameterSpec(SALT_VALUE.getBytes()); c.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key, ivParameterSpec); String valueToEncrypt = null; String eValue = value; for (int i = 0; i < ITERATIONS; i++) { // valueToEncrypt = SALT_VALUE + eValue; // pre-pend salt - Length > sample length valueToEncrypt = eValue; // don't pre-pend salt Length = sample length byte[] encValue = c.doFinal(valueToEncrypt.getBytes()); eValue = Hex.encodeHexString(encValue); } return eValue; } public static String decryptHex(String value) throws Exception { Key key = generateKey(); Cipher c = Cipher.getInstance(_AES_CBC_PKCS5Padding); ivParameterSpec = new IvParameterSpec(SALT_VALUE.getBytes()); c.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE, key, ivParameterSpec); String dValue = null; char[] valueToDecrypt = value.toCharArray(); for (int i = 0; i < ITERATIONS; i++) { byte[] decordedValue = Hex.decodeHex(valueToDecrypt); byte[] decValue = c.doFinal(decordedValue); // dValue = new String(decValue).substring(SALT_VALUE.length()); // when salt is pre-pended dValue = new String(decValue); // when salt is not pre-pended valueToDecrypt = dValue.toCharArray(); } return dValue; } private static Key generateKey() throws Exception { // Key key = new SecretKeySpec(KEY_VALUE.getBytes(), _AES); // this was wrong Key key = new SecretKeySpec(new BASE64Decoder().decodeBuffer(keyValueString), _AES); // had to un-Base64 the 'known' 24-byte key. return key; } } I cannot create a matching encrypted value nor decrypt a given encrypted value. My guess is it's something to do with how I'm handling the initial vector/salt. I'm not very crypto-savvy but I'm thinking I should be able to take the sample clear-text and produce the same encrypted value in Java as ColdFusion produced. I am able to encrypt/decrypt my own data with my Java code (so I'm consistent) but I cannot match nor decrypt the ColdFusion sample encrypted value. I have access to a local webservice that can test the encrypted output. The given ColdFusion output sample passes/decrypts fine (of course). If I try to decrypt the same sample with my Java code (using the actual key and salt) I get a "Given final block not properly padded" error. I get the same net result when I pass my attempt at encryption (using the actual key and salt) to the test webservice. Any Ideas?

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• Jquery fade and swap an element when clicked which will also relate to an accordian menu

  - by Nik

  You will notice when you click posture 1 the description drops down and images appear on the right. Now when you click posture 2 or posture 3 the images and description change as they should. What I need to do now is - If posture 1 has been clicked and then posture 2 is clicked the posture 1 menu needs to close so that there is only one posture description visible at one time. If I could also make it so that if the current open posture item is clicked so that it closes and there are no open posture descriptions that there also no images displayed on the right. Finally is there a way to make sure only one set of animation images is running, because just say the user goes through all 26 options and they continue to run in the background it may get sluggish (thanks to Nick Craver for bringing that up). At this stage only posture 1, 2 and 3 are available. Ok finally some code - //Description drop-down boxes $(document).ready(function(){ //Hide (Collapse) the toggle containers on load $(".toggle_container").hide(); //Switch the "Open" and "Close" state per click $("h5.trigger").toggle(function(){ $(this).addClass("active"); }, function () { $(this).removeClass("active"); }); //Slide up and down on click $("h5.trigger").click(function(){ $(this).next(".toggle_container").slideToggle("slow"); }); }); //Images on the right fade in and out thanks to aSeptik $(document).ready(function(){ $('#section_Q_01,#section_Q_02,#section_Q_03').hide(); $(function() { $('h5.trigger a').click( function(e) { e.preventDefault(); var trigger_id = $(this).parent().attr('id'); //get id Q_## $('.current').removeClass('current').hide(); //add a class for easy access & hide $('#section_' + trigger_id).addClass('current').fadeIn(5000); //show clicked one }); }); }); //Fading pics $(document).ready(function(){ $('.pics').cycle({ fx: 'fade', speed: 2500 }); }); Description boxes - <h5 class="trigger" id="Q_01" ><a href="#">Posture 1 : Standing Deep Breathing :</a></h5> <div class="toggle_container" > <div class="block"> <span class="sc">Pranayama Series</span> <p class="bold">Benefits:</p> </div> </div> <h5 class="trigger" id="Q_02" ><a href="#">Posture 2 : Half Moon Pose With Hands To Feet Pose :</a></h5> <div class="toggle_container"> <div class="block"> <span class="sc">Ardha Chandrasana with Pada-Hastasana</span> <p class="bold">Benefits:</p> </div> </div> <h5 class="trigger" id="Q_03" ><a href="#">Posture 3 : Awkward Pose :</a></h5> <div class="toggle_container"> <div class="block"> <span class="sc">Utkatasana</span> <p class="bold">Benefits:</p> </div> </div> and the images on the right - <div id="section_Q_01" class="01"> <div class="pics"> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose1/Pranayama._01.jpg"/> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose1/Pranayama._02.jpg"/> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose1/Pranayama._03.jpg"/> </div> </div> <div id="section_Q_02" class="02"> <div class="pics"> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose2/Half_Moon_Pose_04.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose2/Backward_Bending_05.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose2/Hands_to_Feet_Pose_06.jpg" /> </div> </div> <div id="section_Q_03" class="03"> <div class="pics"> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose3/Awkward_01.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose3/Awkward_02.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose3/Awkward_03.jpg" /> </div> </div> It would be a bonus if images faded out when another element is clicked... but not a big deal. Thanks for having a look

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• Can't create admin user on Heroku

  - by Nick5a1

  I am new to rails and I have gone through Kevin Skoglund's Ruby on Rails 3 Essential Training course on Lynda.com. Through the course you set up a simple cms, which I did. It doesn't cover Git or deployment but I've pushed my simple cms to github (https://github.com/nick5a1/Simple_CMS) and deployed to Heroku (http://nkarrasch.herokuapp.com/). In order to deploy to Heroku I followed the Heroku setup guide (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails3) and switched my database from MySQL to PostgreSQL. As instructed I changed gen'mysql2' to gen 'sqlite3' in my Gemfile and ran bundle install before pushing. I then ran heroku run rake db:migrate. I'm running into 2 problems. When I try to log in (http://nkarrasch.herokuapp.com/access) I get an error "We're sorry, but something went wrong". I should instead be getting a flash message with invalid username/password combination. This is what I'm getting on my test environment on my local machine. Secondly, when I log into the Heroku console to create and create an admin user, when I try to save that user I get the following error: irb(main):004:0> user.save (1.2ms) BEGIN AdminUser Exists (1.9ms) SELECT 1 AS one FROM "admin_users" WHERE "admin_users"."username" = 'Nick5a1' LIMIT 1 (1.7ms) ROLLBACK => false Any advice on how to troubleshoot would be greatly appreciated :). Thanks very much, Nick EDIT: Here are my Heroku logs: 2012-06-27T20:36:44+00:00 heroku[slugc]: Slug compilation started 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Add shared-database:5mb add-on by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Release v2 created by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Add RAILS_ENV, LANG, PATH, RACK_ENV, GEM_PATH config by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Release v3 created by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Release v4 created by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:34+00:00 heroku[api]: Deploy 1d82839 by [email protected] 2012-06-27T20:37:35+00:00 heroku[slugc]: Slug compilation finished 2012-06-27T20:37:36+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec rails server -p 45450` 2012-06-27T20:37:40+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:5) 2012-06-27T20:37:40+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:5) 2012-06-27T20:37:40+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:5) 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: => Rails 3.2.6 application starting in production on http://0.0.0.0:45450 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: => Call with -d to detach 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: => Booting WEBrick 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: Connecting to database specified by DATABASE_URL 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: => Ctrl-C to shutdown server 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-06-27 20:37:44] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-06-27 20:37:44] INFO ruby 1.9.2 (2011-07-09) [x86_64-linux] 2012-06-27T20:37:44+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-06-27 20:37:44] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=2 port=45450 2012-06-27T20:37:45+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-06-27T20:39:44+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Awaiting client 2012-06-27T20:39:44+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec rake db:migrate` 2012-06-27T20:39:44+00:00 heroku[run.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-06-27T20:39:51+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Process exited with status 0 2012-06-27T20:39:51+00:00 heroku[run.1]: State changed from up to complete 2012-06-27T20:41:05+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Awaiting client 2012-06-27T20:41:05+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec rails console` 2012-06-27T20:41:05+00:00 heroku[run.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-06-27T20:46:09+00:00 heroku[run.1]: Process exited with status 0 2012-06-27T20:46:09+00:00 heroku[run.1]: State changed from up to complete

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• The impossible inline Javascript delay/sleep

  - by trex005

  There is a JavaScript function, of which I have zero control of the code, which calls a function that I wrote. My function uses DOM to generate an iFrame, defines it's src and then appends it to another DOM element. However, before my function returns, and thus allows continued execution of the containing function, it is imperative that the iFrame be fully loaded. Here are the things that I have tried and why they do not work : 1. The SetTimeout option : 99.999% of the time, this is THE answer. As a matter of fact, in the past decade that I have been mentoring in JavaScript, I have always insisted that code could always be refactored to use this option, and never believed a scenario existed where that was not the case. Well, I finally found one! The problem is that because my function is being called inline, if the very next line is executed before my iFrame finishes loading, it totally neuters my script, and since the moment my script completes, the external script continues. A callback of sorts will not work 2. The "Do nothing" loop :This option you use while(//iFrame is not loaded){//do nothing}. In theory this would not return until the frame is loaded. The problem is that since this hogs all the resources, the iFrame never loads. This trick, although horribly unprofessional, dirty etc. will work when you just need an inline delay, but since I require an external thread to complete, it will not.In FF, after a few seconds, it pauses the script and an alert pops up stating that there is an unresponsive script. While that alert is up, the iFrame is able to load, and then my function is able to return, but having the browser frozen for 10 seconds, and then requiring the user to correctly dismiss an error is a no go. 3. The model dialogue : I was inspired by the fact that the FF popup allowed the iFrame to load while halting the execution of the function, and thinking about it, I realized that it is because the modal dialogue, is a way of halting execution yet allowing other threads to continue! Brilliant, so I decided to try other modal options. Things like alert() work beautifully! When it pops up, even if only up for 1/10th of a second, the iFrame is able to complete, and all works great. And just in case the 1/10 of a second is not sufficient, I can put the model dialogue in the while loop from solution 2, and it would ensure that the iFrame is loaded in time. Sweet right? Except for the fact that I now have to pop up a very unprofessional dialogue for the user to dismiss in order to run my script. I fought with myself about this cost/benefit of this action, but then I encountered a scenario where my code was called 10 times on a single page! Having to dismiss 10 alerts before acessing a page?! That reminds me of the late 90s script kiddie pages, and is NOT an option. 4. A gazillion other delay script out there:There are about 10 jQuery delay or sleep functions, some of them actually quite cleverly developed, but none worked. A few prototype options, and again, none I found could do it! A dozen or so other libraries and frameworks claimed they had what I needed, but alas they all conspired to give me false hope. I am convinced that since a built in model dialogue can halt execution, while allowing other threads to continue, there must be some code accessible way to do the same thing with out user input. The Code is literally thousands upon thousands of lines and is proprietary, so I wrote this little example of the problem for you to work with. It is important to note the ONLY code you are able to change is in the onlyThingYouCanChange function Test File : <html> <head> </head> </html> <body> <div id='iFrameHolder'></div> <script type='text/javascript'> function unChangeableFunction() { new_iFrame = onlyThingYouCanChange(document.getElementById('iFrameHolder')); new_iFrame_doc = (new_iFrame.contentWindow || new_iFrame.contentDocument); if(new_iFrame_doc.document)new_iFrame_doc=new_iFrame_doc.document; new_iFrame_body = new_iFrame_doc.body; if(new_iFrame_body.innerHTML != 'Loaded?') { //The world explodes!!! alert('you just blew up the world! Way to go!'); } else { alert('wow, you did it! Way to go!'); } } var iFrameLoaded = false; function onlyThingYouCanChange(objectToAppendIFrameTo) { iFrameLoaded = false; iframe=document.createElement('iframe'); iframe.onload = new Function('iFrameLoaded = true'); iframe.src = 'blank_frame.html'; //Must use an HTML doc on the server because there is a very specific DOM structure that must be maintained. objectToAppendIFrameTo.appendChild(iframe); var it = 0; while(!iFrameLoaded) //I put the limit on here so you don't { //If I was able to put some sort of delay here that paused the exicution of the script, but did not halt all other browser threads, and did not require user interaction we'd be golden! //alert('test'); //This would work if it did not require user interaction! } return iframe; } unChangeableFunction(); </script> </body> blank_frame.html : <html> <head> </head> <body style='margin:0px'>Loaded?</body> </html>

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• Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE

  - by ScottGu

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

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• Rendering ASP.NET MVC Views to String

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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