copy constructor - Page 571

Hey, Google: It’s Time to Add Multi-Window Multitasking To Android

- by Chris Hoffman

In 2012, Google’s Dianne Hackborn threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market if they moved forward with adding “Cornerstone” multitasking to their custom ROM. Samsung has since created their own multi-window multitasking feature. Dianne Hackborn said this “is something that needs to be done at the mainline platform level” so apps wouldn’t break. She was right — Android needs this as a standard feature and it’s time for Google to provide it. Doesn’t Android Have Multitasking? Android originally stood out from Apple’s iOS with its powerful multitasking. Applications can continue running in the background while you’re using another application. This makes Android powerful — you can even have BitTorrent clients downloading files in the background while using another app. Android still kept the design of a single app on screen at a time. This made a lot of sense when Android only ran on smartphones with small screens. Today, Android runs on everything from smaller smartphones all the way up to huge “phablets” like the Galaxy Note. Android has gone beyond phones and runs on 12-inch tablets, convertibles with keyboard docks, laptops, and even Android desktops. Android isn’t just a phone operating system. Samsung’s Multi-Window Isn’t Good Enough Samsung has tried to add value to Android by adding a multi-window feature. When you’re using a high-end phone like the Galaxy Note or Galaxy S, or a Galaxy tablet, you have the ability to run certain apps side-by-side with each other. There are big problems here. This only works on Samsung devices, and only on specific Samsung devices. To add support for this feature in a way that doesn’t break other apps, Samsung’s multi-window feature also only works with specific apps. You can’t just run any app in multi-window view, only the apps on the Multi Window bar Samsung provides. This prevents third-party apps from breaking, which is what Google was worried about with CyanogenMod’s Cornerstone feature. A feature that only works with a handful of apps on specific devices from a single manufacturer isn’t good enough. This feature needs to work on every Android device — or at least ones with suitably large screens and powerful enough internals. It needs to be an Android platform feature so application developers can ensure their apps will work properly with it on every device. Android developers shouldn’t have to add support for each manufacturer’s own multi-window feature if other manufacturers decide to copy Samsung. Floating Apps Are a Dirty Hack Floating apps also enable real multitasking. Remember that Android allows apps to run in the background while you’re using an app in the foreground. These apps can present interfaces that appear floating above the current app — think of it like using “always on top” to make a window always appear over every other app on a desktop operating system. You can install floating apps to browse the web, take notes, chat, and watch videos while using any app. Only apps specifically designed to run as floating apps will work, so you have to seek them out. Floating apps are also awkward to use because they float over the app you’re using, blocking parts of its interface. Microsoft added floating-window support to Skype for Android. You can have a video conversation and the other person’s face will always appear on your screen, even when you leave the Skype app. Microsoft is using more of Android’s multi-window multitasking power than Google is. Custom ROMs and Root-Only Tweaks Aren’t Acceptable Some custom ROMs are adding this feature to Android. Google threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market (now known as Google Play) if they added this feature because it could potentially break third-party apps. Today, other custom ROMs are working on split-screen multitasking. Samsung added their own version to their own devices. You can also get this feature by using a root-only Xposed Framework tweak known as XMultiWindow. If you have root access, you can get multi-window multitasking or any app on your device. This shouldn’t require rooting your device or installing a custom ROM. These third-party solutions often have awkward interfaces and bugs. We need an integrated, supported solution that works the same on every device. Why Multi-Window is Important Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 stands out among tablet operating systems for its powerful multitasking support, allowing you to view several apps side-by-side at the same time. Apple is also reported to be working on adding side-by-side apps to the iPad with iOS 8. On every competitor’s operating system, you’ll be able to view a web page while you write an email, watch a video while you browse the web, or chat with someone while you do anything else. But Android’s still remained frozen in time. Despite all Android’s underlying power — and despite the way Android allows apps to adapt to different screen sizes — Google is resisting adding this feature. Large-screen Android tablets like the Nexus 10 (remember that tablet Google hasn’t updated in over 18 months?) need this feature. So do huge phones, convertibles, laptops, and Android desktops. If tablets are the future of personal computing, we should be able to do more than one thing at a time on our tablets’ big screens. Microsoft, Samsung, and even Apple are realizing this — now it’s Google’s turn. Image Credit: Sergey Galyonkin on Flickr, Karlis Dambrans on Flickr

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dasBlog

- by Daniel Moth

Some people like blogging on a site that is completely managed by someone else (e.g. http://wordpress.com/) and others, like me, prefer hosting their own blog at their own domain. In the latter case you need to decide what blog engine to install on your web space to power your blog. There are many free blog engines to choose from (e.g. the one from http://wordpress.org/). If, like me, you want to use a blog engine that is based on the .NET platform you have many choices including BlogEngine.NET, Subtext and the one I picked: dasBlog. In this post I'll describe the steps I took to get going with the open source dasBlog (home page, source page). A. Installing First I installed dasBlog on my local Windows 7 machine where I have IIS7 installed. To install dasBlog, I started by clicking the "Install" button on its web gallery page. After that I went through configuration, theming and adding content as described below. Once I was happy that everything was working correctly on the local machine, I set this up on a hosting service. I went for a Windows IIS7 shared hosting 3 month Economy plan from GoDaddy. The dasBlog site lists a bunch of other hosts. You can read the installation instructions for dasBlog, and with GoDaddy I just had to click one button since it is available as part of their quick-install apps. With GoDaddy I had a previewdns option that allowed me to play around and preview my site before going live. B. Configuring After it was installed (on local machine and/or hosting provider), I followed the obvious steps to create an admin user and logged in. This displays an admin navigation bar with the following options: 1. Navigator Links: I decided I was not going to use this feature. I manage links on the side of my blog manually elsewhere as part of the theme. So, I deleted every entry on this page and ignored it thereafter. 2. Blogroll: Ditto - same comment as for Navigator Links. 3. Content Filters: I did not delete (or add) these, but I did ensure both checkboxes are not checked. I.e. I am not using this feature now, but I may return to it in the future. 4. Activity: This is a read-only view of various statistics. So nothing to configure here, but useful to come back to for complementary statistics to whatever other statistical package you use (e.g. free stats as part of the hosting and I also use feedburner for syndication stats). 5. Cross-posting: I did not need that, so I turned it off via the Configuration Settings discussed next. 6. Configuration Settings: This is where the bulk of the configuration for the blog takes place and they are stored in a single XML file: Site.Config file. There are truly self-explanatory options to pick for Basic Settings, Services Settings and Services to Ping, Syndication Settings (this is where you link to your feedburner name if you have one) and Mail to Weblog Settings (I keep this turned off). There are also "Xml Storage System Settings" (I keep this turned off), "OpenId Settings" (I allow OpenID commenters), "Spammer Settings" (Enable captcha, never show email addresses) and "Comment settings" (Enable comments, don't allow on older posts, don't allow html). There are also Appearance Settings (I checked the "Use Post Title for Permalink", replaced spaces with hyphen and unchecked the "Use Unique Title"). Finally, there are also Notification Settings, but they are a bit of hit and miss in my case, in that I don’t always get the emails (still investigating this). C. Adding Content You can add content via the "Add Entry" link on the admin navigation bar or by configuring the "Mail to Weblog" settings and sending email or, do what I've started doing, use Live Writer (also the team has a blog). Another way to add content is programmatically if, for example, you are migrating content from another blog (and I'll cover that in separate post sharing the code). What you should know is that all blog content (posts and comments) live in XML files in a folder called "content" under your dasBlog installation. D. Theming There is a very good guide about themes for dasBlog, there is also a similar guide with screenshots (scroll down to "So how do I create a theme") and the dasBlog macro reference. When you install dasBlog, there are many themes available; each theme is in its own folder (representing the folder name) under the themes folder. You may have noticed that you can switch between these via the "Appearance Settings" described above (look for the combobox after the Default Theme label). I created my own theme by copy-pasting an existing theme folder, renaming it and then switching to it as the default. I then opened the folder in Visual Studio and hacked around the HTML in the 3 files (itemTemplate, homeTemplate and dayTemplate). These files have a blogtemplate file extension, which I temporarily renamed to HTML as I was editing them. There is no more advice I can offer here as this is a matter of taste and the aforementioned links is all I used. Personally, I had salvaged the CSS (and structure) from my previous blog and wanted to make this one match it as closely as possible - I think I have succeeded. E. If you run into any issue with dasBlog... ...use your favorite search engine to find answers. Many bloggers have been using this engine for a while and have documented issues and workarounds over time. One such example is ScottHa's dasBlog category; another example is therightstuff where I "borrowed" the idea/macro for the outlook-style on-page navigation. If you don't find what you want through searching, try posting a question to the forums. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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Overwriting TFS Web Services

- by javarg

In this blog I will share a technique I used to intercept TFS Web Services calls. This technique is a very invasive one and requires you to overwrite default TFS Web Services behavior. I only recommend taking such an approach when other means of TFS extensibility fail to provide the same functionality (this is not a supported TFS extensibility point). For instance, intercepting and aborting a Work Item change operation could be implemented using this approach (consider TFS Subscribers functionality before taking this approach, check Martin’s post about subscribers). So let’s get started. The technique consists in versioning TFS Web Services .asmx service classes. If you look into TFS’s ASMX services you will notice that versioning is supported by creating a class hierarchy between different product versions. For instance, let’s take the Work Item management service .asmx. Check the following .asmx file located at: %Program Files%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\_tfs_resources\WorkItemTracking\v3.0\ClientService.asmx The .asmx references the class Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.ClientService3: <%-- Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. --%> <%@ webservice language="C#" Class="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.ClientService3" %> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The inheritance hierarchy for this service class follows: Note the naming convention used for service versioning (ClientService3, ClientService2, ClientService). We will need to overwrite the latest service version provided by the product (in this case ClientService3 for TFS 2010). The following example intercepts and analyzes WorkItem fields. Suppose we need to validate state changes with more advanced logic other than the provided validations/constraints of the process template. Important: Backup the original .asmx file and create one of your own. Create a Visual Studio Web App Project and include a new ASMX Web Service in the project Add the following references to the project (check the folder %Program Files%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\): Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.QueryLanguage.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.DataAccessLayer.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.DataServices.dll Replace the default service implementation with the something similar to the following code: Code Snippet /// <summary> /// Inherit from ClientService3 to overwrite default Implementation /// </summary> [WebService(Namespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/TeamFoundation/2005/06/WorkItemTracking/ClientServices/03", Description = "Custom Team Foundation WorkItemTracking ClientService Web Service")] public class CustomTfsClientService : ClientService3 { [WebMethod, SoapHeader("requestHeader", Direction = SoapHeaderDirection.In)] public override bool BulkUpdate( XmlElement package, out XmlElement result, MetadataTableHaveEntry[] metadataHave, out string dbStamp, out Payload metadata) { var xe = XElement.Parse(package.OuterXml); // We only intercept WorkItems Updates (we can easily extend this sample to capture any operation). var wit = xe.Element("UpdateWorkItem"); if (wit != null) { if (wit.Attribute("WorkItemID") != null) { int witId = (int)wit.Attribute("WorkItemID"); // With this Id. I can query TFS for more detailed information, using TFS Client API (assuming the WIT already exists). var stateChanged = wit.Element("Columns").Elements("Column").FirstOrDefault(c => (string)c.Attribute("Column") == "System.State"); if (stateChanged != null) { var newStateName = stateChanged.Element("Value").Value; if (newStateName == "Resolved") { throw new Exception("Cannot change state to Resolved!"); } } } } // Finally, we call base method implementation return base.BulkUpdate(package, out result, metadataHave, out dbStamp, out metadata); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 4. Build your solution and overwrite the original .asmx with the new implementation referencing our new service version (don’t forget to backup it up first). 5. Copy your project’s .dll into the following path: %Program Files%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin 6. Try saving a WorkItem into the Resolved state. Enjoy!

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Preserving Permalinks

- by Daniel Moth

One of the things that gets me on a rant is websites that break permalinks. If you have posted something somewhere and there is a public URL pointing to it, that URL should never ever return a 404. You are breaking all websites that ever linked to you and you are breaking all search engine links to your content (that others will try and follow). It is a pet peeve of mine. So when I had to move my blog, obviously I would preserve the root URL (www.danielmoth.com/Blog/), but I also wanted to preserve every URL my blog has generated over the years. To be clear, our focus here is on the URL formatting, not the content migration which I'll talk about in my next post. In this post, I'll describe my solution first and then what it solves. 1. The IIS7 Rewrite Module and web.config There are a few ways you can map an old URL to a new one (so when requests to the old URL come in, they get redirected to the new one). The new blog engine I use (dasBlog) has built-in functionality to do that (Scott refers to it here). Instead, the way I chose to address the issue was to use the IIS7 rewrite module. The IIS7 rewrite module allows redirecting URLs based on pattern matching, regular expressions and, of course, hardcoded full URLs for things that don't fall into any pattern. You can configure it visually from IIS Manager using a handy dialog that allows testing patterns against input URLs. Here is what mine looked like after configuring a few rules: To learn more about this technology check out this video, the reference page and this overview blog post; all 3 pages have a collection of related resources at the bottom worth checking out too. All the visual configuration ends up in a web.config file at the root folder of your website. If you are on a shared hosting service, probably the only way you can use the Rewrite Module is by directly editing the web.config file. Next, I'll describe the URLs I had to map and how that manifested itself in the web.config file. What I did was create the rules locally using the GUI, and then took the generated web.config file and uploaded it to my live site. You can view my web.config here. 2. Monthly Archives Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/2004_07_01_mothblog_archive.html dasBlog: /Blog/default,month,2004-07.aspx In my web.config file, the rule that deals with this is the one named "monthlyarchive_redirect". 3. Categories Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/labels/Personal.html dasBlog: /Blog/CategoryView,category,Personal.aspx In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "category_redirect". 4. Posts Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/2004/07/hello-world.html dasBlog: /Blog/Hello-World.aspx In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "post_redirect". Note: The decision is taken to use dasBlog URLs that do not include the date info (see the description of my Appearance settings). If we included the date info then it would have to include the day part, which blogger did not generate. This makes it impossible to redirect correctly and to have a single permalink for blog posts moving forward. An implication of this decision, is that no two blog posts can have the same title. The tool I will describe in my next post (inelegantly) deals with duplicates, but not with triplicates or higher. 5. Unhandled by a generic rule Unfortunately, the two blog engines use different rules for generating URLs for blog posts. Most of the time the conversion is as simple as the example of the previous section where a post titled "Hello World" generates a URL with the words separated by a hyphen. Some times that is not the case, for example: /Blog/2006/05/medc-wrap-up.html /Blog/MEDC-Wrapup.aspx or /Blog/2005/01/best-of-moth-2004.html /Blog/Best-Of-The-Moth-2004.aspx or /Blog/2004/11/more-windows-mobile-2005-details.html /Blog/More-Windows-Mobile-2005-Details-Emerge.aspx In short, blogger does not add words to the title beyond ~39 characters, it drops some words from the title generation (e.g. a, an, on, the), and it preserve hyphens that appear in the title. For this reason, we need to detect these and explicitly list them for redirects (no regular expression can help here because the full set of rules is not listed anywhere). In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "Redirect rule1 for FullRedirects" combined with the rewriteMap named "StaticRedirects". Note: The tool I describe in my next post will detect all the URLs that need to be explicitly redirected and will list them in a file ready for you to copy them to your web.config rewriteMap. 6. C# code doing the same as the web.config I wrote some naive code that does the same thing as the web.config: given a string it will return a new string converted according to the 3 rules above. It does not take into account the 4th case where an explicit hard-coded conversion is needed (the tool I present in the next post does take that into account). static string REGEX_post_redirect = "[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/([0-9a-z-]+).html"; static string REGEX_category_redirect = "labels/([_0-9a-z-% ]+).html"; static string REGEX_monthlyarchive_redirect = "([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2})_[0-9]{2}_mothblog_archive.html"; static string Redirect(string oldUrl) { GroupCollection g; if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_post_redirect, 2, out g)) return string.Concat(g[1].Value, ".aspx"); if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_category_redirect, 2, out g)) return string.Concat("CategoryView,category,", g[1].Value, ".aspx"); if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_monthlyarchive_redirect, 3, out g)) return string.Concat("default,month,", g[1].Value, "-", g[2], ".aspx"); return string.Empty; } static bool RunRegExOnIt(string toRegEx, string pattern, int groupCount, out GroupCollection g) { if (pattern.Length == 0) { g = null; return false; } g = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Compiled).Match(toRegEx).Groups; return (g.Count == groupCount); } Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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C# in Depth, Third Edition by Jon Skeet, Manning Publications Co. Book Review

- by Compudicted

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/10/24/c-in-depth-third-edition-by-jon-skeet-manning-publications.aspx I started reading this ebook on September 28, 2013, the same day it was sent my way by Manning Publications Co. for review while it still being fresh off the press. So 1st thing – thanks to Manning for this opportunity and a free copy of this must have on every C# developer’s desk book! Several hours ago I finished reading this book (well, except a for a large portion of its quite lengthy appendix). I jumped writing this review right away while still being full of emotions and impressions from reading it thoroughly and running code examples. Before I go any further I would like say that I used to program on various platforms using various languages starting with the Mainframe and ending on Windows, and I gradually shifted toward dealing with databases more than anything, however it happened with me to program in C# 1 a lot when it was first released and then some C# 2 with a big leap in between to C# 5. So my perception and experience reading this book may differ from yours. Also what I want to tell is somewhat funny that back then, knowing some Java and seeing C# 1 released, initially made me drawing a parallel that it is a copycat language, how wrong was I… Interestingly, Jon programs in Java full time, but how little it was mentioned in the book! So more on the book: Be informed, this is not a typical “Recipes”, “Cookbook” or any set of ready solutions, it is rather targeting mature, advanced developers who do not only know how to use a number of features, but are willing to understand how the language is operating “under the hood”. I must state immediately, at the same time I am glad the author did not go into the murky depths of the MSIL, so this is a very welcome decision on covering a modern language as C# for me, thank you Jon! Frankly, not all was that rosy regarding the tone and structure of the book, especially the the first half or so filled me with several negative and positive emotions overpowering each other. To expand more on that, some statements in the book appeared to be bias to me, or filled with pre-justice, it started to look like it had some PR-sole in it, but thankfully this was all gone toward the end of the 1st third of the book. Specifically, the mention on the C# language popularity, Java is the #1 language as per https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language (many other sources put C at the top which I highly doubt), also many interesting functional languages as Clojure and Groovy appeared and gained huge traction which run on top of Java/JVM whereas C# does not enjoy such a situation. If we want to discuss the popularity in general and say how fast a developer can find a new job that pays well it would be indeed the very Java, C++ or PHP, never C#. Or that phrase on language preference as a personal issue? We choose where to work or we are chosen because of a technology used at a given software shop, not vice versa. The book though it technically very accurate with valid code, concise examples, but I wish the author would give more concrete, real-life examples on where each feature should be used, not how. Another point to realize before you get the book is that it is almost a live book which started to be written when even C# 3 wasn’t around so a lot of ground is covered (nearly half of the book) on the pre-C# 3 feature releases so if you already have a solid background in the previous releases and do not plan to upgrade, perhaps half of the book can be skipped, otherwise this book is surely highly recommended. Alas, for me it was a hard read, most of it. It was not boring (well, only may be two times), it was just hard to grasp some concepts, but do not get me wrong, it did made me pause, on several occasions, and made me read and re-read a page or two. At times I even wondered if I have any IQ at all (LOL). Be prepared to read A LOT on generics, not that they are widely used in the field (I happen to work as a consultant and went thru a lot of code at many places) I can tell my impression is the developers today in best case program using examples found at OpenStack.com. Also unlike the Java world where having the most recent version is nearly mandated by the OSS most companies on the Microsoft platform almost never tempted to upgrade the .Net version very soon and very often. As a side note, I was glad to see code recently that included a nullable variable (myvariable? notation) and this made me smile, besides, I recommended that person this book to expand her knowledge. The good things about this book is that Jon maintains an active forum, prepared code snippets and even a small program (Snippy) that is happy to run the sample code saving you from writing any plumbing code. A tad now on the C# language itself – it sure enjoyed a wonderful road toward perfection and a very high adoption, especially for ASP development. But to me all the recent features that made this statically typed language more dynamic look strange. Don’t we have F#? Which supposed to be the dynamic language? Why do we need to have a hybrid language? Now the developers live their lives in dualism of the static and dynamic variables! And LINQ to SQL, it is covered in depth, but wasn’t it supposed to be dropped? Also it seems that very little is being added, and at a slower pace, e.g. Roslyn will come in late 2014 perhaps, and will be probably the only main feature. Again, it is quite hard to read this book as various chapters, C# versions mentioned every so often only if I only could remember what was covered exactly where! So the fact it has so many jumps/links back and forth I recommend the ebook format to make the navigations easier to perform and I do recommend using software that allows bookmarking, also make sure you have access to plenty of coffee and pizza (hey, you probably know this joke – who a programmer is) ! In terms of closing, if you stuck at C# 1 or 2 level, it is time to embrace the power of C# 5! Finally, to compliment Manning, this book unlike from any other publisher so far, was the only one as well readable (put it formatted) on my tablet as in Adobe Reader on a laptop.

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Using Teleriks new LINQ implementation to create OData feeds

This week Telerik released a new LINQ implementation that is simple to use and produces domain models very fast. Built on top of the enterprise grade OpenAccess ORM, you can connect to any database that OpenAccess can connect to such as: SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Azure, VistaDB, etc. While this is a separate LINQ implementation from traditional OpenAccess Entites, you can use the visual designer without ever interacting with OpenAccess, however, you can always hook into the advanced ORM features like caching, fetch plan optimization, etc, if needed. Just to show off how easy our LINQ implementation is to use, I will walk you through building an OData feed using Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. (Memo to Microsoft: P-L-E-A-S-E hire someone from Apple to name your products.) How easy is it? If you have a fast machine, are skilled with the mouse, and type fast, you can do this in about 60 seconds via three easy steps. (I promise in about 2-3 weeks that you can do this in less then 30 seconds. Stay tuned for that.) Step 1 (15-20 seconds): Building your Domain Model In your web project in Visual Studio, right click on the project and select Add|New Item and select Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model as your item template. Give the file a meaningful name as well. Select your database type (SQL Server, SQL Azure, Oracle, MySQL, VistaDB, etc) and build the connection string. If you already have a Visual Studio connection string already saved, this step is trivial. Then select your tables, enter a name for your model and click Finish. In this case I connected to Northwind and selected only Customers, Orders, and Order Details. I named my model NorthwindEntities and will use that in my DataService. Step 2 (20-25 seconds): Adding and Configuring your Data Service In your web project in Visual Studio, right click on the project and select Add|New Item and select ADO .NET Data Service as your item template and name your service. In the code behind for your Data Service you have to make three small changes. Add the name of your Telerik Domain Model (entered in Step 1) as the DataService name (shown on line 6 below as NorthwindEntities) and uncomment line 11 and add a * to show all entities. Optionally if you want to take advantage of the DataService 3.5 updates, add line 13 (and change IDataServiceConfiguration to DataServiceConfiguration in line 9.) 1: using System.Data.Services; 2: using System.Data.Services.Common; 3: 4: namespace Telerik.RLINQ.Astoria.Web 5: { 6: public class NorthwindService : DataService<NorthwindEntities> 7: { 8: //change the IDataServiceConfigurationto DataServiceConfiguration 9: public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) 10: { 11: config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All); 12: //take advantage of the "Astoria3.5 Update" features 13: config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; 14: } 15: } 16: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Step 3 (~30 seconds): Adding the DataServiceKeys You now have to tell your data service what are the primary keys of each entity. To do this you have to create a new code file and create a few partial classes. If you type fast, use copy and paste from your first entity, and use a refactoring productivity tool, you can add these 6-8 lines of code or so in about 30 seconds. This is the most tedious step, but dont worry, Ive bribed some of the developers and our next update will eliminate this step completely. Just create a partial class for each entity you have mapped and add the attribute [DataServiceKey] on top of it along with the keys field name. If you have any complex properties, you will need to make them a primitive type, as I do in line 15. Create this as a separate file, dont manipulate the generated data access classes in case you want to regenerate them again later (even thought that would be much faster.) 1: using System.Data.Services.Common; 2: 3: namespace Telerik.RLINQ.Astoria.Web 4: { 5: [DataServiceKey("CustomerID")] 6: public partial class Customer 7: { 8: } 9: 10: [DataServiceKey("OrderID")] 11: public partial class Order 12: { 13: } 14: 15: [DataServiceKey(new string[] { "OrderID", "ProductID" })] 16: public partial class OrderDetail 17: { 18: } 19: 20: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Done! Time to run the service. Now, lets run the service! Select the svc file and right click and say View in Browser. You will see your OData service and can interact with it in the browser. Now that you have an OData service set up, you can consume it in one of the many ways that OData is consumed: using LINQ, the Silverlight OData client, Excel PowerPivot, or PhP, etc. Happy Data Servicing! Technorati Tags: Telerik,Astoria,Data Services Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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Coherence - How to develop a custom push replication publisher

- by cosmin.tudor(at)oracle.com

CoherencePushReplicationDB.zipIn the example bellow I'm describing a way of developing a custom push replication publisher that publishes data to a database via JDBC. This example can be easily changed to publish data to other receivers (JMS,...) by performing changes to step 2 and small changes to step 3, steps that are presented bellow. I've used Eclipse as the development tool. To develop a custom push replication publishers we will need to go through 6 steps: Step 1: Create a custom publisher scheme class Step 2: Create a custom publisher class that should define what the publisher is doing. Step 3: Create a class data is performing the actions (publish to JMS, DB, etc ) for the custom publisher. Step 4: Register the new publisher against a ContentHandler. Step 5: Add the new custom publisher in the cache configuration file. Step 6: Add the custom publisher scheme class to the POF configuration file. All these steps are detailed bellow. The coherence project is attached and conclusions are presented at the end. Step 1: In the Coherence Eclipse project create a class called CustomPublisherScheme that should implement com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.publishers.AbstractPublisherScheme. In this class define the elements of the custom-publisher-scheme element. For instance for a CustomPublisherScheme that looks like that: <sync:publisher> <sync:publisher-name>Active2-JDBC-Publisher</sync:publisher-name> <sync:publisher-scheme> <sync:custom-publisher-scheme> <sync:jdbc-string>jdbc:oracle:thin:@machine-name:1521:XE</sync:jdbc-string> <sync:username>hr</sync:username> <sync:password>hr</sync:password> </sync:custom-publisher-scheme> </sync:publisher-scheme> </sync:publisher> the code is: package com.oracle.coherence; import java.io.DataInput; import java.io.DataOutput; import java.io.IOException; import com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.Publisher; import com.oracle.coherence.configuration.Configurable; import com.oracle.coherence.configuration.Mandatory; import com.oracle.coherence.configuration.Property; import com.oracle.coherence.configuration.parameters.ParameterScope; import com.oracle.coherence.environment.Environment; import com.tangosol.io.pof.PofReader; import com.tangosol.io.pof.PofWriter; import com.tangosol.util.ExternalizableHelper; @Configurable public class CustomPublisherScheme extends com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.publishers.AbstractPublisherScheme { /** * */ private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; private String jdbcString; private String username; private String password; public String getJdbcString() { return this.jdbcString; } @Property("jdbc-string") @Mandatory public void setJdbcString(String jdbcString) { this.jdbcString = jdbcString; } public String getUsername() { return username; } @Property("username") @Mandatory public void setUsername(String username) { this.username = username; } public String getPassword() { return password; } @Property("password") @Mandatory public void setPassword(String password) { this.password = password; } public Publisher realize(Environment environment, ClassLoader classLoader, ParameterScope parameterScope) { return new CustomPublisher(getJdbcString(), getUsername(), getPassword()); } public void readExternal(DataInput in) throws IOException { super.readExternal(in); this.jdbcString = ExternalizableHelper.readSafeUTF(in); this.username = ExternalizableHelper.readSafeUTF(in); this.password = ExternalizableHelper.readSafeUTF(in); } public void writeExternal(DataOutput out) throws IOException { super.writeExternal(out); ExternalizableHelper.writeSafeUTF(out, this.jdbcString); ExternalizableHelper.writeSafeUTF(out, this.username); ExternalizableHelper.writeSafeUTF(out, this.password); } public void readExternal(PofReader reader) throws IOException { super.readExternal(reader); this.jdbcString = reader.readString(100); this.username = reader.readString(101); this.password = reader.readString(102); } public void writeExternal(PofWriter writer) throws IOException { super.writeExternal(writer); writer.writeString(100, this.jdbcString); writer.writeString(101, this.username); writer.writeString(102, this.password); } } Step 2: Define what the CustomPublisher should basically do by creating a new java class called CustomPublisher that implements com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.Publisher package com.oracle.coherence; import com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.EntryOperation; import com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.Publisher; import com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.exceptions.PublisherNotReadyException; import java.io.BufferedWriter; import java.util.Iterator; public class CustomPublisher implements Publisher { private String jdbcString; private String username; private String password; private transient BufferedWriter bufferedWriter; public CustomPublisher() { } public CustomPublisher(String jdbcString, String username, String password) { this.jdbcString = jdbcString; this.username = username; this.password = password; this.bufferedWriter = null; } public String getJdbcString() { return this.jdbcString; } public String getUsername() { return username; } public String getPassword() { return password; } public void publishBatch(String cacheName, String publisherName, Iterator<EntryOperation> entryOperations) { DatabasePersistence databasePersistence = new DatabasePersistence( jdbcString, username, password); while (entryOperations.hasNext()) { EntryOperation entryOperation = (EntryOperation) entryOperations .next(); databasePersistence.databasePersist(entryOperation); } } public void start(String cacheName, String publisherName) throws PublisherNotReadyException { System.err .printf("Started: Custom JDBC Publisher for Cache %s with Publisher %s\n", new Object[] { cacheName, publisherName }); } public void stop(String cacheName, String publisherName) { System.err .printf("Stopped: Custom JDBC Publisher for Cache %s with Publisher %s\n", new Object[] { cacheName, publisherName }); } } In the publishBatch method from above we inform the publisher that he is supposed to persist data to a database: DatabasePersistence databasePersistence = new DatabasePersistence( jdbcString, username, password); while (entryOperations.hasNext()) { EntryOperation entryOperation = (EntryOperation) entryOperations .next(); databasePersistence.databasePersist(entryOperation); } Step 3: The class that deals with the persistence is a very basic one that uses JDBC to perform inserts/updates against a database. package com.oracle.coherence; import com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.EntryOperation; import java.sql.*; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; import com.oracle.coherence.Order; public class DatabasePersistence { public static String INSERT_OPERATION = "INSERT"; public static String UPDATE_OPERATION = "UPDATE"; public Connection dbConnection; public DatabasePersistence(String jdbcString, String username, String password) { this.dbConnection = createConnection(jdbcString, username, password); } public Connection createConnection(String jdbcString, String username, String password) { Connection connection = null; System.err.println("Connecting to: " + jdbcString + " Username: " + username + " Password: " + password); try { // Load the JDBC driver String driverName = "oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver"; Class.forName(driverName); // Create a connection to the database connection = DriverManager.getConnection(jdbcString, username, password); System.err.println("Connected to:" + jdbcString + " Username: " + username + " Password: " + password); } catch (ClassNotFoundException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } // driver catch (SQLException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return connection; } public void databasePersist(EntryOperation entryOperation) { if (entryOperation.getOperation().toString() .equalsIgnoreCase(INSERT_OPERATION)) { insert(((Order) entryOperation.getPublishableEntry().getValue())); } else if (entryOperation.getOperation().toString() .equalsIgnoreCase(UPDATE_OPERATION)) { update(((Order) entryOperation.getPublishableEntry().getValue())); } } public void update(Order order) { String update = "UPDATE Orders set QUANTITY= '" + order.getQuantity() + "', AMOUNT='" + order.getAmount() + "', ORD_DATE= '" + (new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yyyy")).format(order .getOrdDate()) + "' WHERE SYMBOL='" + order.getSymbol() + "'"; System.err.println("UPDATE = " + update); try { Statement stmt = getDbConnection().createStatement(); stmt.execute(update); stmt.close(); } catch (SQLException ex) { System.err.println("SQLException: " + ex.getMessage()); } } public void insert(Order order) { String insert = "insert into Orders values('" + order.getSymbol() + "'," + order.getQuantity() + "," + order.getAmount() + ",'" + (new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yyyy")).format(order .getOrdDate()) + "')"; System.err.println("INSERT = " + insert); try { Statement stmt = getDbConnection().createStatement(); stmt.execute(insert); stmt.close(); } catch (SQLException ex) { System.err.println("SQLException: " + ex.getMessage()); } } public Connection getDbConnection() { return dbConnection; } public void setDbConnection(Connection dbConnection) { this.dbConnection = dbConnection; } } Step 4: Now we need to register our publisher against a ContentHandler. In order to achieve that we need to create in our eclipse project a new class called CustomPushReplicationNamespaceContentHandler that should extend the com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.configuration.PushReplicationNamespaceContentHandler. In the constructor of the new class we define a new handler for our custom publisher. package com.oracle.coherence; import com.oracle.coherence.configuration.Configurator; import com.oracle.coherence.environment.extensible.ConfigurationContext; import com.oracle.coherence.environment.extensible.ConfigurationException; import com.oracle.coherence.environment.extensible.ElementContentHandler; import com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.PublisherScheme; import com.oracle.coherence.environment.extensible.QualifiedName; import com.oracle.coherence.patterns.pushreplication.configuration.PushReplicationNamespaceContentHandler; import com.tangosol.run.xml.XmlElement; public class CustomPushReplicationNamespaceContentHandler extends PushReplicationNamespaceContentHandler { public CustomPushReplicationNamespaceContentHandler() { super(); registerContentHandler("custom-publisher-scheme", new ElementContentHandler() { public Object onElement(ConfigurationContext context, QualifiedName qualifiedName, XmlElement xmlElement) throws ConfigurationException { PublisherScheme publisherScheme = new CustomPublisherScheme(); Configurator.configure(publisherScheme, context, qualifiedName, xmlElement); return publisherScheme; } }); } } Step 5: Now we should define our CustomPublisher in the cache configuration file according to the following documentation. <cache-config xmlns:sync="class:com.oracle.coherence.CustomPushReplicationNamespaceContentHandler" xmlns:cr="class:com.oracle.coherence.environment.extensible.namespaces.InstanceNamespaceContentHandler"> <caching-schemes> <sync:provider pof-enabled="false"> <sync:coherence-provider /> </sync:provider> <caching-scheme-mapping> <cache-mapping> <cache-name>publishing-cache</cache-name> <scheme-name>distributed-scheme-with-publishing-cachestore</scheme-name> <autostart>true</autostart> <sync:publisher> <sync:publisher-name>Active2 Publisher</sync:publisher-name> <sync:publisher-scheme> <sync:remote-cluster-publisher-scheme> <sync:remote-invocation-service-name>remote-site1</sync:remote-invocation-service-name> <sync:remote-publisher-scheme> <sync:local-cache-publisher-scheme> <sync:target-cache-name>publishing-cache</sync:target-cache-name> </sync:local-cache-publisher-scheme> </sync:remote-publisher-scheme> <sync:autostart>true</sync:autostart> </sync:remote-cluster-publisher-scheme> </sync:publisher-scheme> </sync:publisher> <sync:publisher> <sync:publisher-name>Active2-Output-Publisher</sync:publisher-name> <sync:publisher-scheme> <sync:stderr-publisher-scheme> <sync:autostart>true</sync:autostart> <sync:publish-original-value>true</sync:publish-original-value> </sync:stderr-publisher-scheme> </sync:publisher-scheme> </sync:publisher> <sync:publisher> <sync:publisher-name>Active2-JDBC-Publisher</sync:publisher-name> <sync:publisher-scheme> <sync:custom-publisher-scheme> <sync:jdbc-string>jdbc:oracle:thin:@machine_name:1521:XE</sync:jdbc-string> <sync:username>hr</sync:username> <sync:password>hr</sync:password> </sync:custom-publisher-scheme> </sync:publisher-scheme> </sync:publisher> </cache-mapping> </caching-scheme-mapping>  <remote-invocation-scheme> <service-name>remote-site1</service-name> <initiator-config> <tcp-initiator> <remote-addresses> <socket-address> <address>localhost</address> <port>20001</port> </socket-address> </remote-addresses> <connect-timeout>2s</connect-timeout> </tcp-initiator> <outgoing-message-handler> <request-timeout>5s</request-timeout> </outgoing-message-handler> </initiator-config> </remote-invocation-scheme>  <proxy-scheme> <service-name>ExtendTcpProxyService</service-name> <acceptor-config> <tcp-acceptor> <local-address> <address>localhost</address> <port>20002</port> </local-address> </tcp-acceptor> </acceptor-config> <autostart>true</autostart> </proxy-scheme> </caching-schemes> </cache-config> As you can see in the red-marked text from above I've: - set new Namespace Content Handler - define the new custom publisher that should work together with other publishers like: stderr and remote publishers in our case. Step 6: Add the com.oracle.coherence.CustomPublisherScheme to your custom-pof-config file: <pof-config> <user-type-list>  <include>coherence-pof-config.xml</include> <include>coherence-common-pof-config.xml</include> <include>coherence-messagingpattern-pof-config.xml</include> <include>coherence-pushreplicationpattern-pof-config.xml</include>  <user-type> <type-id>1901</type-id> <class-name>com.oracle.coherence.Order</class-name> <serializer> <class-name>com.oracle.coherence.OrderSerializer</class-name> </serializer> </user-type> <user-type> <type-id>1902</type-id> <class-name>com.oracle.coherence.CustomPublisherScheme</class-name> </user-type> </user-type-list> </pof-config> CONCLUSIONSThis approach allows for publishers to publish data to almost any other receiver (database, JMS, MQ, ...). The only thing that needs to be changed is the DatabasePersistence.java class that should be adapted to the chosen receiver. Only minor changes are needed for the rest of the code (to publishBatch method from CustomPublisher class).

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WebSocket and Java EE 7 - Getting Ready for JSR 356 (TOTD #181)

- by arungupta

WebSocket is developed as part of HTML 5 specification and provides a bi-directional, full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP socket. It provides dramatic improvement over the traditional approaches of Polling, Long-Polling, and Streaming for two-way communication. There is no latency from establishing new TCP connections for each HTTP message. There is a WebSocket API and the WebSocket Protocol. The Protocol defines "handshake" and "framing". The handshake defines how a normal HTTP connection can be upgraded to a WebSocket connection. The framing defines wire format of the message. The design philosophy is to keep the framing minimum to avoid the overhead. Both text and binary data can be sent using the API. WebSocket may look like a competing technology to Server-Sent Events (SSE), but they are not. Here are the key differences: WebSocket can send and receive data from a client. A typical example of WebSocket is a two-player game or a chat application. Server-Sent Events can only push data data to the client. A typical example of SSE is stock ticker or news feed. With SSE, XMLHttpRequest can be used to send data to the server. For server-only updates, WebSockets has an extra overhead and programming can be unecessarily complex. SSE provides a simple and easy-to-use model that is much better suited. SSEs are sent over traditional HTTP and so no modification is required on the server-side. WebSocket require servers that understand the protocol. SSE have several features that are missing from WebSocket such as automatic reconnection, event IDs, and the ability to send arbitrary events. The client automatically tries to reconnect if the connection is closed. The default wait before trying to reconnect is 3 seconds and can be configured by including "retry: XXXX\n" header where XXXX is the milliseconds to wait before trying to reconnect. Event stream can include a unique event identifier. This allows the server to determine which events need to be fired to each client in case the connection is dropped in between. The data can span multiple lines and can be of any text format as long as EventSource message handler can process it. WebSockets provide true real-time updates, SSE can be configured to provide close to real-time by setting appropriate timeouts. OK, so all excited about WebSocket ? Want to convert your POJOs into WebSockets endpoint ? websocket-sdk and GlassFish 4.0 is here to help! The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. On the server-side, the WebSocket SDK converts a POJO into a WebSocket endpoint using simple annotations. Here is how a WebSocket endpoint will look like: @WebSocket(path="/echo")public class EchoBean { @WebSocketMessage public String echo(String message) { return message + " (from your server)"; }} In this code "@WebSocket" is a class-level annotation that declares a POJO to accept WebSocket messages. The path at which the messages are accepted is specified in this annotation. "@WebSocketMessage" indicates the Java method that is invoked when the endpoint receives a message. This method implementation echoes the received message concatenated with an additional string. The client-side HTML page looks like <div style="text-align: center;"> <form action=""> <input onclick="send_echo()" value="Press me" type="button"> <input id="textID" name="message" value="Hello WebSocket!" type="text"><br> </form></div><div id="output"></div> WebSocket allows a full-duplex communication. So the client, a browser in this case, can send a message to a server, a WebSocket endpoint in this case. And the server can send a message to the client at the same time. This is unlike HTTP which follows a "request" followed by a "response". In this code, the "send_echo" method in the JavaScript is invoked on the button click. There is also a <div> placeholder to display the response from the WebSocket endpoint. The JavaScript looks like: <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> var wsUri = "ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo"; var websocket = new WebSocket(wsUri); websocket.onopen = function(evt) { onOpen(evt) }; websocket.onmessage = function(evt) { onMessage(evt) }; websocket.onerror = function(evt) { onError(evt) }; function init() { output = document.getElementById("output"); } function send_echo() { websocket.send(textID.value); writeToScreen("SENT: " + textID.value); } function onOpen(evt) { writeToScreen("CONNECTED"); } function onMessage(evt) { writeToScreen("RECEIVED: " + evt.data); } function onError(evt) { writeToScreen('<span style="color: red;">ERROR:</span> ' + evt.data); } function writeToScreen(message) { var pre = document.createElement("p"); pre.style.wordWrap = "break-word"; pre.innerHTML = message; output.appendChild(pre); } window.addEventListener("load", init, false);</script> In this code The URI to connect to on the server side is of the format ws://<HOST>:<PORT>/websockets/<PATH> "ws" is a new URI scheme introduced by the WebSocket protocol. <PATH> is the path on the endpoint where the WebSocket messages are accepted. In our case, it is ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo WEBSOCKET_SDK-1 will ensure that context root is included in the URI as well. WebSocket is created as a global object so that the connection is created only once. This object establishes a connection with the given host, port and the path at which the endpoint is listening. The WebSocket API defines several callbacks that can be registered on specific events. The "onopen", "onmessage", and "onerror" callbacks are registered in this case. The callbacks print a message on the browser indicating which one is called and additionally also prints the data sent/received. On the button click, the WebSocket object is used to transmit text data to the endpoint. Binary data can be sent as one blob or using buffering. The HTTP request headers sent for the WebSocket call are: GET ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo HTTP/1.1Origin: http://localhost:8080Connection: UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Extensions: x-webkit-deflate-frameHost: localhost:8080Sec-WebSocket-Key: mDbnYkAUi0b5Rnal9/cMvQ==Upgrade: websocketSec-WebSocket-Version: 13 And the response headers received are Connection:UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Accept:q4nmgFl/lEtU2ocyKZ64dtQvx10=Upgrade:websocket(Challenge Response):00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 The headers are shown in Chrome as shown below: The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. The builds from websocket-sdk are integrated in GlassFish 4.0 builds. Would you like to live on the bleeding edge ? Then follow the instructions below to check out the workspace and install the latest SDK: Check out the source code svn checkout https://svn.java.net/svn/websocket-sdk~source-code-repository Build and install the trunk in your local repository as: mvn install Copy "./bundles/websocket-osgi/target/websocket-osgi-0.3-SNAPSHOT.jar" to "glassfish3/glassfish/modules/websocket-osgi.jar" in your GlassFish 4 latest promoted build. Notice, you need to overwrite the JAR file. Anybody interested in building a cool application using WebSocket and get it running on GlassFish ? :-) This work will also feed into JSR 356 - Java API for WebSocket. On a lighter side, there seems to be less agreement on the name. Here are some of the options that are prevalent: WebSocket (W3C API, the URL is www.w3.org/TR/websockets though) Web Socket (HTML5 Demos - html5demos.com/web-socket) Websocket (Jenkins Plugin - wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Websocket%2BPlugin) WebSockets (Used by Mozilla - developer.mozilla.org/en/WebSockets, but use WebSocket as well) Web sockets (HTML5 Working Group - www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/network.html) Web Sockets (Chrome Blog - blog.chromium.org/2009/12/web-sockets-now-available-in-google.html) I prefer "WebSocket" as that seems to be most common usage and used by the W3C API as well. What do you use ?

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You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development Expert if…

- by Mark Rackley

So, all you aspiring SharePoint experts out there (especially those of you who put “expert” in your resumes). It’s time for a cold cool splash of reality. More than likely you are NOT an expert (I know I’m not). Yes, you may have some expertise in certain aspects in SharePoint (it’s questionable if I have THAT some days), but make sure you’ve got the basics down before you start throwing that word “expert” around. I know that it becomes frustrating to those looking to hire SharePoint people and having to sift through all the resumes of those who think very highly of themselves and their skills only to find those gaping holes in common best practices. I’m much more willing to hire a decent dev who KNOWS they are not an expert than to hire a decent+ dev who THINKS they are an expert. So… I’ve compiled a small reality check for you SharePoint Devs. and a “red flag” check for those of you wishing to hire a SharePoint developer. If any of these apply to you, you are probably not a SharePoint Development Expert. You are not a SharePoint Development Expert if you manually copy your DLLs Seriously, I don’t care if you write the best code in the world. If you are manually copying files to each web front end you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert. Yes, I realize the admins are generally the ones who do the actual deployments, but if you don’t know how to create solution packages for your admins, you are going to end up doing more damage than good some day. There are TONS of tools out there to help generate deployable solutions for you. You have ZERO excuse. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you can’t tell me the main artifacts of a solution package Directly related to the first one. If you don’t know what the Manifest, DDF, WSP, and Feature files are and how they are used in a solution package, you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. I’m not asking you to be able to write them all from scratch (heck, I can’t even do that), but you MUST know what they are and how to tweak them if necessary. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know what a Content Type or a Site Column is You would be absolutely amazed at how many “Expert” SharePoint Developers have NEVER EVER created a Content Type or Site Column or even know what they are. I mean, why would you ever want to create those when you can just do everything as a custom list or custom field? right???? (that’s sarcasm). You also need to know how to package a Content Type and a Site Column into a deployable package by the way. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you have not created at least one Web Part, Workflow, Timer Job, and Event Handler. If you haven’t written at least one of each, you don’t fully understand what they do or their limitations. Again, I expect NO ONE to be able to write these things blind. I think the last time I wrote an application from scratch without copying and pasting from another project I had done before was back in 1994? Seriously, coding is like a Sour Dough starter, you get it from someone else and keep adding to it. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know how to properly dispose of objects Another biggie with zero excuse for getting it wrong. It is so well known that you must dispose of your SPWeb and SPSite objects that if you aren’t doing it then you are not an expert. Heck, if you utilize “using” when handling SPWeb and SPSite objects and don’t realize that it disposes of those objects for you, then you are not a SharePoint Development expert. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you do not know how to properly elevate privileges Just one of those development basics that any decent SharePoint Developer has got to have down and understand how and why it’s used You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you don’t know all of the development options available to SharePoint and when they should be used Okay… so all you hard core .NET SharePoint dev geeks take a moment to listen. You may be the most top not SharePoint .NET developer in the world, but if you are opening Visual Studio to solve every problem in SharePoint, then you are NOT a SharePoint development expert. The SharePoint developer’s tool kit is growing every day with tools like Visual Studio, Data View Web Parts, XSL, jQuery, SPServices, etc. etc… If you don’t have the ability to at least recognize that “hey, you can basically do the same thing here but just dropping in Easy Tabs instead of writing some weird web part” then you are NOT a SharePoint Development expert AND you are doing a huge disservice to your clients and customers. You are probably NOT a SharePoint Development expert if you call yourself an Expert So, truth telling time. I’m not an expert. There, I said it. I feel so much better. Now, I realize the word “expert” has been used with my name before, but I am quick to point out that I KNOW the experts and know that they will help me if I need it, but I’m not an expert in all things SharePoint. The minute you take on that moniker you are setting yourself up for a fall. It’s too big, there’s too much to know, and there’s WAY too much you can do wrong. You are not a SharePoint Development expert if you are not involved in the community I expect to get the most flack for this one, but it’s always a huge red flag for me when someone says they are an expert and has ZERO knowledge of the SharePoint community. The SharePoint community is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to be an effective SharePoint developer, admin, architect, power user or whatever the heck you are!! The community keeps you sane, tells you when you are NOT using a best practice, recommends the best practice, and even knows when Microsoft is giving you the wrong information (*gasp* it does happen). If you can’t tell me who you are following on twitter, who's blog you read, what conferences you attend, or name the experts who you monitor to make sure you are not doing something stupid, then you are probably doing something stupid. Again, not asking you to be a speaker, blogger, or the least bit extroverted but you should be at LEAST stalking the experts. So… what’s the point? So… yeah… what’s my point in all this. Well, first of all let me point out that this is by far not a finished list and I could come up with a LOT more specific “deep dive” questions, but these should be high enough level that even non experts can recognize and ask them. If you have some common ones you run into let me know and add them in the comments below. Also, keep in mind I’m not saying you as a developer HAVE to know EVERYTHING, but you DO need to know what you don’t know and proudly and honestly state “I don’t know, but I’ll learn and find out”. Those of us hiring SharePoint developers and know and have a passion for SharePoint are not looking for that elusive “expert” who knows everything. We are looking for someone who “gets it”, has a similar passion, great attitude, an understanding that they DON’T know everything, and a desire to do it right. I would bet money that most SharePoint development disasters happen because of “experts” who think they know everything rather than the developer who is cautious and knows he doesn’t. Lastly, I know there’s a raging debate over what a “SharePoint Developer” is (I should know, as I keep bringing it up). So, obviously this blog post is more closely tied to the .NET side of SharePoint development and less towards the client side, middle tier, or whatever you want to call it. So, let’s please not get that argument going here as well… Thanks

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ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: How to Deploy Web Apps Using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First - Part I

- by mbridge

First, you can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com. The following frameworks will be used for this step by step tutorial. public class Category { public int CategoryId { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")] [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")] public string Name { get; set;} public string Description { get; set; } public virtual ICollection<Expense> Expenses { get; set; } } Expense Class public class Expense { public int ExpenseId { get; set; } public string Transaction { get; set; } public DateTime Date { get; set; } public double Amount { get; set; } public int CategoryId { get; set; } public virtual Category Category { get; set; } } Define Domain Model Let’s create domain model for our simple web application Category Class We have two domain entities - Category and Expense. A single category contains a list of expense transactions and every expense transaction should have a Category. In this post, we will be focusing on CRUD operations for the entity Category and will be working on the Expense entity with a View Model object in the later post. And the source code for this application will be refactored over time. The above entities are very simple POCO (Plain Old CLR Object) classes and the entity Category is decorated with validation attributes in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. Now we want to use these entities for defining model objects for the Entity Framework 4. Using the Code First approach of Entity Framework, we can first define the entities by simply writing POCO classes without any coupling with any API or database library. This approach lets you focus on domain model which will enable Domain-Driven Development for applications. EF code first support is currently enabled with a separate API that is runs on top of the Entity Framework 4. EF Code First is reached CTP 5 when I am writing this article. Creating Context Class for Entity Framework We have created our domain model and let’s create a class in order to working with Entity Framework Code First. For this, you have to download EF Code First CTP 5 and add reference to the assembly EntitFramework.dll. You can also use NuGet to download add reference to EEF Code First. public class MyFinanceContext : DbContext { public MyFinanceContext() : base("MyFinance") { } public DbSet<Category> Categories { get; set; } public DbSet<Expense> Expenses { get; set; } } The above class MyFinanceContext is derived from DbContext that can connect your model classes to a database. The MyFinanceContext class is mapping our Category and Expense class into database tables Categories and Expenses using DbSet<TEntity> where TEntity is any POCO class. When we are running the application at first time, it will automatically create the database. EF code-first look for a connection string in web.config or app.config that has the same name as the dbcontext class. If it is not find any connection string with the convention, it will automatically create database in local SQL Express database by default and the name of the database will be same name as the dbcontext class. You can also define the name of database in constructor of the the dbcontext class. Unlike NHibernate, we don’t have to use any XML based mapping files or Fluent interface for mapping between our model and database. The model classes of Code First are working on the basis of conventions and we can also use a fluent API to refine our model. The convention for primary key is ‘Id’ or ‘<class name>Id’. If primary key properties are detected with type ‘int’, ‘long’ or ‘short’, they will automatically registered as identity columns in the database by default. Primary key detection is not case sensitive. We can define our model classes with validation attributes in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace and it automatically enforces validation rules when a model object is updated or saved. Generic Repository for EF Code First We have created model classes and dbcontext class. Now we have to create generic repository pattern for data persistence with EF code first. If you don’t know about the repository pattern, checkout Martin Fowler’s article on Repository Let’s create a generic repository to working with DbContext and DbSet generics. public interface IRepository<T> where T : class { void Add(T entity); void Delete(T entity); T GetById(long Id); IEnumerable<T> All(); } RepositoryBasse – Generic Repository class protected MyFinanceContext Database { get { return database ?? (database = DatabaseFactory.Get()); } } public virtual void Add(T entity) { dbset.Add(entity); } public virtual void Delete(T entity) { dbset.Remove(entity); } public virtual T GetById(long id) { return dbset.Find(id); } public virtual IEnumerable<T> All() { return dbset.ToList(); } } DatabaseFactory class public class DatabaseFactory : Disposable, IDatabaseFactory { private MyFinanceContext database; public MyFinanceContext Get() { return database ?? (database = new MyFinanceContext()); } protected override void DisposeCore() { if (database != null) database.Dispose(); } } Unit of Work If you are new to Unit of Work pattern, checkout Fowler’s article on Unit of Work . According to Martin Fowler, the Unit of Work pattern "maintains a list of objects affected by a business transaction and coordinates the writing out of changes and the resolution of concurrency problems." Let’s create a class for handling Unit of Work public interface IUnitOfWork { void Commit(); } UniOfWork class public class UnitOfWork : IUnitOfWork { private readonly IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory; private MyFinanceContext dataContext; public UnitOfWork(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory) { this.databaseFactory = databaseFactory; } protected MyFinanceContext DataContext { get { return dataContext ?? (dataContext = databaseFactory.Get()); } } public void Commit() { DataContext.Commit(); } } The Commit method of the UnitOfWork will call the commit method of MyFinanceContext class and it will execute the SaveChanges method of DbContext class. Repository class for Category In this post, we will be focusing on the persistence against Category entity and will working on other entities in later post. Let’s create a repository for handling CRUD operations for Category using derive from a generic Repository RepositoryBase<T>. public class CategoryRepository: RepositoryBase<Category>, ICategoryRepository { public CategoryRepository(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory) : base(databaseFactory) { } } public interface ICategoryRepository : IRepository<Category> { } If we need additional methods than generic repository for the Category, we can define in the CategoryRepository. Dependency Injection using Unity 2.0 If you are new to Inversion of Control/ Dependency Injection or Unity, please have a look on my articles at http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/tags/IoC/default.aspx. I want to create a custom lifetime manager for Unity to store container in the current HttpContext. public class HttpContextLifetimeManager<T> : LifetimeManager, IDisposable { public override object GetValue() { return HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName]; } public override void RemoveValue() { HttpContext.Current.Items.Remove(typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName); } public override void SetValue(object newValue) { HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName] = newValue; } public void Dispose() { RemoveValue(); } } Let’s create controller factory for Unity in the ASP.NET MVC 3 application. 404, String.Format( "The controller for path '{0}' could not be found" + "or it does not implement IController.", reqContext.HttpContext.Request.Path)); if (!typeof(IController).IsAssignableFrom(controllerType)) throw new ArgumentException( string.Format( "Type requested is not a controller: {0}", controllerType.Name), "controllerType"); try { controller= container.Resolve(controllerType) as IController; } catch (Exception ex) { throw new InvalidOperationException(String.Format( "Error resolving controller {0}", controllerType.Name), ex); } return controller; } } Configure contract and concrete types in Unity Let’s configure our contract and concrete types in Unity for resolving our dependencies. private void ConfigureUnity() { //Create UnityContainer IUnityContainer container = new UnityContainer() .RegisterType<IDatabaseFactory, DatabaseFactory>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<IDatabaseFactory>()) .RegisterType<IUnitOfWork, UnitOfWork>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<IUnitOfWork>()) .RegisterType<ICategoryRepository, CategoryRepository>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<ICategoryRepository>()); //Set container for Controller Factory ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory( new UnityControllerFactory(container)); } In the above ConfigureUnity method, we are registering our types onto Unity container with custom lifetime manager HttpContextLifetimeManager. Let’s call ConfigureUnity method in the Global.asax.cs for set controller factory for Unity and configuring the types with Unity. protected void Application_Start() { AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); ConfigureUnity(); } Developing web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 We have created our domain model for our web application and also have created repositories and configured dependencies with Unity container. Now we have to create controller classes and views for doing CRUD operations against the Category entity. Let’s create controller class for Category Category Controller public class CategoryController : Controller { private readonly ICategoryRepository categoryRepository; private readonly IUnitOfWork unitOfWork; public CategoryController(ICategoryRepository categoryRepository, IUnitOfWork unitOfWork) { this.categoryRepository = categoryRepository; this.unitOfWork = unitOfWork; } public ActionResult Index() { var categories = categoryRepository.All(); return View(categories); } [HttpGet] public ActionResult Edit(int id) { var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id); return View(category); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Edit(int id, FormCollection collection) { var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id); if (TryUpdateModel(category)) { unitOfWork.Commit(); return RedirectToAction("Index"); } else return View(category); } [HttpGet] public ActionResult Create() { var category = new Category(); return View(category); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create(Category category) { if (!ModelState.IsValid) { return View("Create", category); } categoryRepository.Add(category); unitOfWork.Commit(); return RedirectToAction("Index"); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Delete(int id) { var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id); categoryRepository.Delete(category); unitOfWork.Commit(); var categories = categoryRepository.All(); return PartialView("CategoryList", categories); } } Creating Views in Razor Now we are going to create views in Razor for our ASP.NET MVC 3 application. Let’s create a partial view CategoryList.cshtml for listing category information and providing link for Edit and Delete operations. CategoryList.cshtml @using MyFinance.Helpers; @using MyFinance.Domain; @model IEnumerable<Category> <table> <tr> <th>Actions</th> <th>Name</th> <th>Description</th> </tr> @foreach (var item in Model) { <tr> <td> @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit",new { id = item.CategoryId }) @Ajax.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.CategoryId }, new AjaxOptions { Confirm = "Delete Expense?", HttpMethod = "Post", UpdateTargetId = "divCategoryList" }) </td> <td> @item.Name </td> <td> @item.Description </td> </tr> } </table> <p> @Html.ActionLink("Create New", "Create") </p> The delete link is providing Ajax functionality using the Ajax.ActionLink. This will call an Ajax request for Delete action method in the CategoryCotroller class. In the Delete action method, it will return Partial View CategoryList after deleting the record. We are using CategoryList view for the Ajax functionality and also for Index view using for displaying list of category information. Let’s create Index view using partial view CategoryList Index.chtml @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Category> @{ ViewBag.Title = "Index"; } <h2>Category List</h2> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <div id="divCategoryList"> @Html.Partial("CategoryList", Model) </div> We can call the partial views using Html.Partial helper method. Now we are going to create View pages for insert and update functionality for the Category. Both view pages are sharing common user interface for entering the category information. So I want to create an EditorTemplate for the Category information. We have to create the EditorTemplate with the same name of entity object so that we can refer it on view pages using @Html.EditorFor(model => model) . So let’s create template with name Category. Category.cshtml @model MyFinance.Domain.Category <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Name) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Description) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Description) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Description) </div> Let’s create view page for insert Category information @model MyFinance.Domain.Category @{ ViewBag.Title = "Save"; } <h2>Create</h2> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> @using (Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.ValidationSummary(true) <fieldset> <legend>Category</legend> @Html.EditorFor(model => model) <p> <input type="submit" value="Create" /> </p> </fieldset> } <div> @Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") </div> ViewStart file In Razor views, we can add a file named _viewstart.cshtml in the views directory and this will be shared among the all views with in the Views directory. The below code in the _viewstart.cshtml, sets the Layout page for every Views in the Views folder. @{ Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml"; } Tomorrow, we will cotinue the second part of this article. :)

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Web Self Service installation on Windows

- by Rajesh Sharma

Web Self Service (WSS) installation on windows is pretty straight forward but you might face some issues if deployed under tomcat. Here's a step-by-step guide to install Oracle Utilities Web Self Service on windows. Below installation steps are done on: Oracle Utilities Framework version 2.2.0 Oracle Utilities Application - Customer Care & Billing version 2.2.0 Application server - Apache Tomcat 6.0.13 on default port 6500 Other settings include: SPLBASE = C:\spl\CCBDEMO22 SPLENVIRON = CCBV22 SPLWAS = TCAT Follow these steps for a Web Self Service installation on windows: Download Web Self Service application from edelivery. Copy the delivery file Release-SelfService-V2.2.0.zip from the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing version 2.2.0 Web Self Service folder on the installation media to a directory on your Windows box where you would like to install the application, in our case it's a temporary folder C:\wss_temp. Setup application environment, execute splenviron.cmd -e <ENVIRON_NAME> Create base folder for Self Service application named SelfService under %SPLEBASE%\splapp\applications Install Oracle Utilities Web Self Service C:\wss_temp\Release-SelfService-V2.2.0>install.cmd -d %SPLEBASE%\splapp\applications\SelfService Web Self Service installation menu. Populate environment values for each item. ******************************************************** Pick your installation options: ******************************************************** 1. Destination directory name for installation. | C:\spl\CCBDEMO22\splapp\applications\SelfService 2. Web Server Host. | CCBV22 3. Web Server Port Number. | 6500 4. Mail SMTP Host. | CCBV22 5. Top Product Installation directory. | C:\spl\CCBDEMO22 6. Web Application Server Type. | TCAT 7. When OAS: SPLWeb OC4J instance name is required. | OC4J1 8. When WAS: SPLWeb server instance name is required. | server1 P. Process the installation. Each item in the above list should be configured for a successful installation. Choose option to configure or (P) to process the installation: P Option 7 and Option 8 can be ignored for TCAT. Above step installs SelfService.war file in the destination directory. We need to explode this war file. Change directory to the installation destination folder, and C:\spl\CCBDEMO22\splapp\applications\SelfService>jar -xf SelfService.war Review SelfServiceConfig.properties and CMSelfServiceConfig.properties. Change any properties value within the file specific to your installation/site. Generally default settings apply, for this exercise assumes that WEB user already exists in your application database. For more information on property file customization, refer to Oracle Utilities Web Self Service Configuration section in Customer Care & Billing Installation Guide. Add context entry in server.xml located under tomcat-base folder C:\spl\CCBDEMO22\product\tomcatBase\conf ...  <Context path="" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/root" debug="0" privileged="true"/> <Context path="/appViewer" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/appViewer" debug="0" privileged="true"/> <Context path="/help" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/help" debug="0" privileged="true"/> <Context path="/XAIApp" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/XAIApp" debug="0" privileged="true"/> <Context path="/SelfService" docBase="C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/SelfService" debug="0" privileged="true"/> ... Add User in tomcat-users.xml file located under tomcat-base folder C:\spl\CCBDEMO22\product\tomcatBase\conf <user username="WEB" password="selfservice" roles="cisusers"/> Note the password is "selfservice", this is the default password set within the SelfServiceConfig.properties file with base64 encoding. Restart the application (spl.cmd stop | start) 12. Although Apache Tomcat version 6.0.13 does not come with the admin pack, you can verify whether SelfService application is loaded and running, go to following URL http://server:port/manager/list, in our case it'll be http://ccbv22:6500/manager/list Following output will be displayed OK - Listed applications for virtual host localhost /admin:running:0:C:/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.13/webapps/ROOT/admin /XAIApp:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/XAIApp /host-manager:running:0:C:/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.13/webapps/host-manager /SelfService:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/SelfService /appViewer:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/appViewer /manager:running:1:C:/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.13/webapps/manager /help:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/help /:running:0:C:/spl/CCBDEMO22/splapp/applications/root Also ensure that the XAIApp is running. Run Oracle Utilities Web Self Service application http://server:port/SelfService in our case it'll be http://ccbv22:6500/SelfService Still doesn't work? And you get '503 HTTP response' at the time of customer registration? This is because XAI service is still unavailable. There is initialize.waittime set for a default value of 90 seconds for the XAI Application to come up. Remember WSS uses XAI to perform actions/validations on the CC&B database.

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The hidden cost of interrupting knowledge workers

- by Piet

The November issue of pragpub has an interesting article on interruptions. The article is written by Brian Tarbox, who also mentions the article on his blog. I like the subtitle: ‘Simple Strategies for Avoiding Dumping Your Mental Stack’. Brian talks about the effective cost of interrupting a ‘knowledge worker’, often with trivial questions or distractions. In the eyes of the interruptor, the interruption only costs the time the interrupted had to listen to the question and give an answer. However, depending on what the interrupted was doing at the time, getting fully immersed in their task again might take up to 15-20 minutes. Enough interruptions might even cause a knowledge worker to mentally call it a day. According to this article interruptions can consume about 28% of a knowledge worker’s time, translating in a $588 billion loss for US companies each year. Looking for a new developer to join your team? Ever thought about optimizing your team’s environment and the way they work instead? Making non knowledge workers aware You can’t. Well, I haven’t succeeded yet. And believe me: I’ve tried. When you’ve got a simple way to really increase your productivity (’give me 2 hours of uninterrupted time a day’) it wouldn’t be right not to tell your boss or team-leader about it. The problem is: only productive knowledge workers seem to understand this. People who don’t fall into this category just seem to think you’re joking, being arrogant or anti-social when you tell them the interruptions can really have an impact on your productivity. Also, knowledge workers often work in a very concentrated mental state which is described here as: It is the same mindfulness as ecstatic lovemaking, the merging of two into a fluidly harmonious one. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task. Yes, coding can be addictive and if you’re interrupting a programmer at the wrong moment, you’re effectively bringing down a junkie from his high in just a few seconds. This can result in seemingly arrogant, almost aggressive reactions. How to make people aware of the production-cost they’re inflicting: I’ve been often pondering that question myself. The article suggests that solutions based on that question never seem to work. To be honest: I’ve never even been able to find a half decent solution for this question. People who are not in this situations just don’t understand the issue, no matter how you try to explain it. Fun (?) thing I’ve noticed: Programmers or IT people in general who don’t get this are often the kind of people who just don’t get anything done. Interrupt handling (interruption management?) IRL Have non-urgent questions handled in a non-interruptive way It helps a bit to educate people into using non-interruptive ways to ask questions: “duh, I have no idea, but I’m a bit busy here now could you put it in an email so I don’t forget?”. Eventually, a considerable amount of people will skip interrupting you and just send an email right away. Some stubborn-headed people however will continue to just interrupt you, saying “you’re 10 meters from my desk, why can’t we just talk?”. Just remember to disable your email notifications, it can be hard to resist opening your email client when you know a new email just arrived. Use Do Not Disturb signals When working in a group of programmers, often the unofficial sign you can only be interrupted for something important is to put on headphones. And when the environment is quiet enough, often people aren’t even listening to music. Otherwise music can help to block the indirect distractions (someone else talking on the phone or tapping their feet). You might get a “they’re all just surfing and listening to music”-reaction from outsiders though. Peopleware talks about a team where the no-interruption sign was placing a shawl on the desk. If I remember correctly, I am unable to locate my copy of this really excellent must-read book. If you have all standardized on the same IM tool, maybe that tool has a ‘do not disturb’ setting. Also some phone-systems have a ‘DND’ (do not disturb) setting. Hide Brian offers a number of good suggestions, some obvious like: hide away somewhere they can’t find you. Not sure how long it’ll be till someone thinks you’re just taking a nap somewhere though. Also, this often isn’t possible or your boss might not understand this. And if you really get caught taking a nap, make sure to explain that your were powernapping. Counter-act interruptions Another suggestion he offers is when you’re being interrupted to just hold up your hand, blocking the interruption, and at least giving you time to finish your sentence or your block/line of code. The last suggestion works more as a way to make it obvious to the interruptor that they really are interrupting your work and to offload some of the cost on the interruptor. In practice, this can also helps you cool down a bit so you don’t start saying nasty things to the interruptor. Unfortunately I’ve sometimes been confronted with people who just ignore this signal and keep talking, as if they’re sure that whatever they’ve got to say is really worth listening to and without a doubt more important than anything you might be doing. This behaviour usually leaves me speechless (not good when someone just asked a question). I’ve noticed that these people are usually also the first to complain when being interrupted themselves. They’re generally not very liked as colleagues, so try not to imitate their behaviour. TDD as a way to minimize recovery time I don’t like Test Driven Development. Mainly for only one reason: It interrupts flow. At least, that’s what it does for me, but maybe I’m just not grown used to TDD yet. BUT a positive effect TDD has on me when I have to work in an interruptive environment and can’t really get into the ‘flow’ (also supposedly called ‘the zone’ by software developers, although I’ve never heard it 1st hand), TDD helps me to concentrate on the tasks at hand and helps me to get back at work after an interruption. I feel when using TDD, I can get by without the need for being totally ‘in’ the project and I can be reasonably productive without obtaining ‘flow’. Do you have a suggestion on how to make people aware of the concept of ‘flow’ and the cost of interruptions? (without looking like an arrogant ass or a weirdo)

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Use Those Extra Mouse Buttons to Increase Efficiency

- by Mark Virtue

Did you know that the most commonly used mouse actions are clicking a window’s “Close” button (the X in the top-right corner), and clicking the “Back” button (in a browser and various other programs)? How much time do you spend every day locating the Close button or the Back button with your mouse so that you can click on them? And what about that mouse you’re using – how many buttons does it have, besides the two main ones? Most mouses these days have at least four (including the scroll-wheel, which a lot of people don’t realize is also a button as well). Why not assign those extra buttons to your most common mouse actions, and save yourself a bundle of mousing-around time every day? If your mouse was manufactured by one of the “premium” mouse manufacturers (Microsoft, Logitech, etc), it almost certain came with driver software to allow you to customize your mouse’s controls and take advantage of your mouse’s special features. Microsoft, for example, provides driver software called IntelliPoint (link below), while Logitech provides SetPoint. It’s possible that your mouse has some extra buttons but doesn’t come with its own driver software (the author is using a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, which amazingly is not supported by the Microsoft IntelliPoint software!). If your mouse falls into this category, you can use a marvelous free product called X-Mouse Button Control, from Highresolution Enterprises (link below). It provides a truly amazing array of mouse configuration options, including assigning actions to buttons on a per-application basis. Once X-Mouse Button Control is downloaded, its setup process is quite straightforward. Once downloaded, you can start the program via Start / Highresolution Enterprises / X-Mouse Button Control. You will find the program’s icon in the system tray: Right-click on the icon and select Setup from the pop-up menu. The program’s configuration window appears: It’s extremely unlikely that we will want to change the functionality of our mouse’s two main buttons (left and right), so instead we’ll look at the rest of the options on the right side of the window. The Middle Button refers to either the third, middle button (found on some old mouses), or the pressing of the wheel itself, as a button (if you didn’t know you could press your wheel like a button, try it out now). Mouse Button 4 and Mouse Button 5 usually refer to the extra buttons found on the side of the mouse, often near your thumb. So what can we use these extra mouse buttons for? Well, clearly Close and Back are two obvious candidates. Each of these can be found by selecting them from the drop-down menu next to each button field: Once the two options are chosen, the window will look something like this: If you’re not interested in choosing Back or Close, you may like to try some of the other options in the list, including: Cut, Copy and Paste Undo Show the Desktop Next/Previous track (for media playback) Open any program Simulate any keystroke or combination of keystrokes ….and many other options. Explore the drop-down list to see them all. You may decide, for example, that closing the current document (as opposed to the current program) would be a good use for Mouse Button 5. In other words, we need to simulate the keypress of Ctrl-F4. Let’s see how we achieve this. First we select Simulated Keystrokes from the drop-down list: The Simulated Keystrokes window opens: The instructions on the page are pretty comprehensive. If you want to simulate the Ctrl-F4 keystroke, you need to type {CTRL}{F4} into the box: …and then click OK. Assigning Actions to Buttons on a Per-Application Basis One of the most powerful features of X-Mouse Button Control is the ability to assign actions to buttons on a per-application basis. This means that if we have a particular program open, then our mouse will behave differently – our buttons will do different things. For example, when we have Windows Media Player open, for example, we may wish to have buttons assigned to Play/Pause, Next track and Previous track, as well as changing the volume with the mouse! This is easy with X-Mouse Button Control. We start by opening Windows Media Player. This makes the next step easier. Then we return to X-Mouse Button Control and add a new “configuration”. This is done by clicking the Add button: A window opens containing a list of all running programs, including our recently opened Windows Media Player: We select Windows Media Player and click OK. A new, blank “configuration” is created: We repeat the earlier steps to assign buttons to Play/Pause, Next track and Previous track, and assign scrolling the wheel to alter the volume: To save all our changes and close the window, we click Apply. Now spend a few minutes thinking of all the applications you use the most, and what are the most common simple tasks you perform in each of those applications. Those tasks are then perfect candidates for per-application button assignments. There are many more configuration options and capabilities of X-Mouse Button Control – too many to list here. We encourage you to spend a bit of time exploring the Setup window. Then, most important of all, don’t forget to use your new mouse buttons! Get into the habit of using them, and then after a while you’ll start to wonder how you ever tolerated the laborious, tedious, time-consuming process of actually locating each window’s Close button… Download X-Mouse Button Control Highresolution Enterprise Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Specialized Toolbar Buttons to Firefox the Easy WayBoost Your Mouse Pointing Accuracy in WindowsMake Mouse Navigation Faster in WindowsVista Style Popup Previews for Firefox TabsStupid Geek Tricks: Using the Quick Zoom Feature in Outlook TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses Mashpedia is a Real-time Encyclopedia

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Customize Team Build 2010 – Part 13: Get control over the Build Output

In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application In the part 8, I have explained how you can add informational messages, warnings or errors to the build output. If you want to integrate with other lines of text to the build output, you need to do more. This post will show you how you can add extra steps, additional information and hyperlinks to the build output. UPDATE 13-12-2010: Thanks to Jason Pricket, it is now also possible to not show every activity in the build log. This is really useful when you are doing for-loops in your template. To see how you can do that, check out Jason's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jpricket/archive/2010/12/09/tfs-2010-making-your-build-log-less-noisy.aspx Add an hyperlink to the end of the build output Lets start with a simple example of how you can adjust the build output. In this case we are going to add at the end of the build output an hyperlink where a user can click on to for example start the deployment to the test environment. In part 4 you can find information how you can create a custom activity To add information to the build output, you need the BuildDetail. This value is a variable in your xaml and is thus easily transferable to you custom activity. Besides the BuildDetail the user has also to specify the text and the url that has to be added to the end of the build output. The following code segment shows you how you can achieve this. [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.All)] public sealed class AddHyperlinkToBuildOutput : CodeActivity { [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<IBuildDetail> BuildDetail { get; set; } [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> DisplayText { get; set; } [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> Url { get; set; } protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) { // Obtain the runtime value of the input arguments IBuildDetail buildDetail = context.GetValue(this.BuildDetail); string displayText = context.GetValue(this.DisplayText); string url = context.GetValue(this.Url); // Add the hyperlink buildDetail.Information.AddExternalLink(displayText, new Uri(url)); buildDetail.Information.Save(); } } If you add this activity to somewhere in your build process template (within the scope Run on Agent), you will get the following build output Add an line of text to the build output The next challenge is to add this kind of output not only to the end of the build output but at the step that is currently executing. To be able to do this, you need the current node in the build output. The following code shows you how you can achieve this. First you need to get the current activity tracking, which you can get with the following line of code IActivityTracking currentTracking = context.GetExtension<IBuildLoggingExtension>().GetActivityTracking(context); Then you can create a new node and set its type to Activity Tracking Node (so copy it from the current node) and do nice things with the node. IBuildInformationNode childNode = currentTracking.Node.Children.CreateNode(); childNode.Type = currentTracking.Node.Type; childNode.Fields.Add("DisplayText", "This text is displayed."); You can also add a build step to display progress IBuildStep buildStep = childNode.Children.AddBuildStep("Custom Build Step", "This is my custom build step"); buildStep.FinishTime = DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(10); buildStep.Status = BuildStepStatus.Succeeded; Or you can add an hyperlink to the node childNode.Children.AddExternalLink("My link", new Uri(http://www.ewaldhofman.nl)); When you combine this together you get the following result in the build output You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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Customize Team Build 2010 – Part 13: Get control over the Build Output

In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application In the part 8, I have explained how you can add informational messages, warnings or errors to the build output. If you want to integrate with other lines of text to the build output, you need to do more. This post will show you how you can add extra steps, additional information and hyperlinks to the build output. Add an hyperlink to the end of the build output Lets start with a simple example of how you can adjust the build output. In this case we are going to add at the end of the build output an hyperlink where a user can click on to for example start the deployment to the test environment. In part 4 you can find information how you can create a custom activity To add information to the build output, you need the BuildDetail. This value is a variable in your xaml and is thus easily transferable to you custom activity. Besides the BuildDetail the user has also to specify the text and the url that has to be added to the end of the build output. The following code segment shows you how you can achieve this. [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.All)] public sealed class AddHyperlinkToBuildOutput : CodeActivity { [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<IBuildDetail> BuildDetail { get; set; } [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> DisplayText { get; set; } [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> Url { get; set; } protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) { // Obtain the runtime value of the input arguments IBuildDetail buildDetail = context.GetValue(this.BuildDetail); string displayText = context.GetValue(this.DisplayText); string url = context.GetValue(this.Url); // Add the hyperlink buildDetail.Information.AddExternalLink(displayText, new Uri(url)); buildDetail.Information.Save(); } } If you add this activity to somewhere in your build process template (within the scope Run on Agent), you will get the following build output Add an line of text to the build output The next challenge is to add this kind of output not only to the end of the build output but at the step that is currently executing. To be able to do this, you need the current node in the build output. The following code shows you how you can achieve this. First you need to get the current activity tracking, which you can get with the following line of code IActivityTracking currentTracking = context.GetExtension<IBuildLoggingExtension>().GetActivityTracking(context); Then you can create a new node and set its type to Activity Tracking Node (so copy it from the current node) and do nice things with the node. IBuildInformationNode childNode = currentTracking.Node.Children.CreateNode(); childNode.Type = currentTracking.Node.Type; childNode.Fields.Add("DisplayText", "This text is displayed."); You can also add a build step to display progress IBuildStep buildStep = childNode.Children.AddBuildStep("Custom Build Step", "This is my custom build step"); buildStep.FinishTime = DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(10); buildStep.Status = BuildStepStatus.Succeeded; Or you can add an hyperlink to the node childNode.Children.AddExternalLink("My link", new Uri(http://www.ewaldhofman.nl)); When you combine this together you get the following result in the build output You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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Silverlight Recruiting Application Part 6 - Adding an Interview Scheduling Module/View

Between the last post and this one I went ahead and carried the ideas for the Jobs module and view into the Applicants module and view- they're both doing more or less the same thing, except with different objects being at their core. Made for an easy cut-and-paste operation with a few items being switched from one to another. Now that we have the ability to add postings and applicants, wouldn't it be nice if we could schedule an interview? Of course it would! Scheduling Module I think you get the drift from previous posts that these project structures start looking somewhat similar. The interview scheduling module is no different than the rest- it gets a SchedulingModule.cs file at the root that inherits from IModule, and there is a single SchedulerView.xsml and SchedulerViewModel.cs setup for our V+VM. We have one unique concern as we enter into this- RadScheduler deals with AppointmentsSource, not ItemsSource, so there are some special considerations to take into account when planning this module. First, I need something which inherits from AppointmentBase. This is the core of the RadScheduler appointment, and if you are planning to do any form of custom appointment, you'll want it to inherit from this. Then you can add-on functionality as needed. Here is my addition to the mix, the InterviewAppointment: 01.public class InterviewAppointment : AppointmentBase 02.{ 03. private int _applicantID; 04. public int ApplicantID 05. { 06. get { return this._applicantID; } 07. set 08. { 09. if (_applicantID != value) 10. { 11. _applicantID = value; 12. OnPropertyChanged("ApplicantID"); 13. } 14. } 15. } 16. 17. private int _postingID; 18. public int PostingID 19. { 20. get { return _postingID; } 21. set 22. { 23. if (_postingID != value) 24. { 25. _postingID = value; 26. OnPropertyChanged("PostingID"); 27. } 28. } 29. } 30. 31. private string _body; 32. public string Body 33. { 34. get { return _body; } 35. set 36. { 37. if (_body != value) 38. { 39. _body = value; 40. OnPropertyChanged("Body"); 41. } 42. } 43. } 44. 45. private int _interviewID; 46. public int InterviewID 47. { 48. get { return _interviewID; } 49. set 50. { 51. if (_interviewID != value) 52. { 53. _interviewID = value; 54. OnPropertyChanged("InterviewID"); 55. } 56. } 57. } 58. 59. public override IAppointment Copy() 60. { 61. IAppointment appointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 62. appointment.CopyFrom(this); 63. return appointment; 64. } 65. 66. public override void CopyFrom(IAppointment other) 67. { 68. base.CopyFrom(other); 69. var appointment = other as InterviewAppointment; 70. if (appointment != null) 71. { 72. ApplicantID = appointment.ApplicantID; 73. PostingID = appointment.PostingID; 74. Body = appointment.Body; 75. InterviewID = appointment.InterviewID; 76. } 77. } 78.} Nothing too exciting going on here, we just make sure that our custom fields are persisted (specifically set in CopyFrom at the bottom) and notifications are fired- otherwise this ends up exactly like the standard appointment as far as interactions, etc. But if we've got custom appointment items... that also means we need to customize what our appointment dialog window will look like. Customizing the Edit Appointment Dialog This initially sounds a lot more intimidating than it really is. The first step here depends on what you're dealing with for theming, but for ease of everything I went ahead and extracted my templates in Blend for RadScheduler so I could modify it as I pleased. For the faint of heart, the RadScheduler template is a few thousand lines of goodness since there are some very complex things going on in that control. I've gone ahead and trimmed down the template parts I don't need as much as possible, so what is left is all that is relevant to the Edit Appointment Dialog. Here's the resulting Xaml, with line numbers, so I can explain further: 001.<UserControl.Resources> 002.  003. <helpers:DataContextProxy x:Key="DataContextProxy" /> 004. 005. <telerik:Windows7Theme x:Key="Theme" /> 006. <SolidColorBrush x:Key="DialogWindowBackground" 007. Color="White" /> 008. <SolidColorBrush x:Key="CategorySelectorBorderBrush" 009. Color="#FFB1B1B1" /> 010. <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="RadToolBar_InnerBackground" 011. EndPoint="0.5,1" 012. StartPoint="0.5,0"> 013. <GradientStop Color="#FFFDFEFF" 014. Offset="0" /> 015. <GradientStop Color="#FFDDE9F7" 016. Offset="1" /> 017. <GradientStop Color="#FFE6F0FA" 018. Offset="0.5" /> 019. <GradientStop Color="#FFDCE6F4" 020. Offset="0.5" /> 021. </LinearGradientBrush> 022. <Style x:Key="FormElementTextBlockStyle" 023. TargetType="TextBlock"> 024. <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" 025. Value="Right" /> 026. <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" 027. Value="Top" /> 028. <Setter Property="Margin" 029. Value="15, 15, 0, 2" /> 030. </Style> 031. <Style x:Key="FormElementStyle" 032. TargetType="FrameworkElement"> 033. <Setter Property="Margin" 034. Value="10, 10, 0, 2" /> 035. </Style> 036. <SolidColorBrush x:Key="GenericShallowBorderBrush" 037. Color="#FF979994" /> 038. <telerik:BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="BooleanToVisibilityConverter" /> 039. <telerikScheduler:ImportanceToBooleanConverter x:Key="ImportanceToBooleanConverter" /> 040. <telerikScheduler:NullToVisibilityConverter x:Key="NullToVisibilityConverter" /> 041. <telerikScheduler:InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter x:Key="InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter" /> 042. <scheduler:ResourcesSeparatorConverter x:Key="ResourcesSeparatorConverter" /> 043. <DataTemplate x:Key="IconDataEditTemplate"> 044. <Image Source="/Telerik.Windows.Controls.Scheduler;component/Themes/Office/Images/cal.png" 045. Margin="3,3,0,0" 046. Width="16" 047. Height="16" /> 048. </DataTemplate> 049. <DataTemplate x:Key="SingleSelectionTemplate"> 050. <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 051. HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"> 052. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 053. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 054. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 055. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 056. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 057. MinWidth="84" /> 058. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 059. MinWidth="200" /> 060. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 061. <TextBlock x:Name="SelectionNameLabel" 062. Margin="0,13,4,2" 063. Text="{Binding ResourceType.DisplayName}" 064. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" 065. Grid.Column="0" /> 066. <telerikInput:RadComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding ResourceItems}" 067. Width="185" 068. Margin="5,10,20,2" 069. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 070. Grid.Column="1" 071. ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 072. ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear All" 073. DisplayMemberPath="Resource.DisplayName" 074. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 075. SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedItem, Mode=TwoWay}" /> 076. </Grid> 077. </DataTemplate> 078. <DataTemplate x:Key="MultipleSelectionTemplate"> 079. <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 080. HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"> 081. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 082. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 083. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 084. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 085. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 086. MinWidth="84" /> 087. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 088. MinWidth="200" /> 089. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 090. <TextBlock x:Name="SelectionNameLabel" 091. Grid.Column="0" 092. Text="{Binding ResourceType.DisplayName}" 093. Margin="0,13,4,2" 094. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 095. <telerikInput:RadComboBox Grid.Column="1" 096. Width="185" 097. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 098. Margin="5,10,20,2" 099. ItemsSource="{Binding ResourceItems}" 100. SelectedIndex="{Binding SelectedIndex, Mode=TwoWay}" 101. ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 102. ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear All" 103. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}"> 104. <telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 105. <DataTemplate> 106. <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 107. VerticalAlignment="Stretch"> 108. <CheckBox VerticalAlignment="Center" 109. HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" 110. VerticalContentAlignment="Center" 111. IsChecked="{Binding IsChecked, Mode=TwoWay}" 112. Content="{Binding Resource.DisplayName}"> 113. <CheckBox.ContentTemplate> 114. <DataTemplate> 115. <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 116. VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 117. Text="{Binding Content, RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent}}" /> 118. </DataTemplate> 119. </CheckBox.ContentTemplate> 120. </CheckBox> 121. </Grid> 122. </DataTemplate> 123. </telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 124. </telerikInput:RadComboBox> 125. </Grid> 126. </DataTemplate> 127. <scheduler:ResourceTypeTemplateSelector x:Key="ItemTemplateSelector" 128. MultipleSelectionTemplate="{StaticResource MultipleSelectionTemplate}" 129. SingleSelectionTemplate="{StaticResource SingleSelectionTemplate}" /> 130.  131. 132. <ControlTemplate x:Key="EditAppointmentTemplate" 133. TargetType="telerikScheduler:AppointmentDialogWindow"> 134. <StackPanel Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" 135. UseLayoutRounding="True"> 136. <StackPanel Grid.Row="0" 137. Orientation="Horizontal" 138. Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 139. Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 140. Height="0"> 141.  142. <Border Margin="1,1,0,0" 143. Background="#50000000" 144. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 145. VerticalAlignment="Center" 146. Width="2" 147. Height="16"> 148. <Border Margin="0,0,1,1" 149. Background="#80FFFFFF" 150. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 151. Width="1" /> 152. </Border> 153. <Border Margin="1,1,0,0" 154. Background="#50000000" 155. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 156. VerticalAlignment="Center" 157. Width="2" 158. Height="16"> 159. <Border Margin="0,0,1,1" 160. Background="#80FFFFFF" 161. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 162. Width="1" /> 163. </Border> 164. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="ShowAs" 165. VerticalAlignment="Center" 166. Margin="5,0,0,0" /> 167. <telerikInput:RadComboBox ItemsSource="{TemplateBinding TimeMarkers}" 168. Width="100" 169. Height="20" 170. VerticalAlignment="Center" 171. Margin="5,0,0,0" 172. ClearSelectionButtonVisibility="Visible" 173. ClearSelectionButtonContent="Clear" 174. SelectedItem="{Binding TimeMarker,RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent},Mode=TwoWay}" 175. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}"> 176. <telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 177. <DataTemplate> 178. <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> 179. <Rectangle Fill="{Binding TimeMarkerBrush}" 180. Margin="2" 181. Width="12" 182. Height="12" /> 183. <TextBlock Text="{Binding TimeMarkerName}" 184. Margin="2" /> 185. </StackPanel> 186. </DataTemplate> 187. </telerikInput:RadComboBox.ItemTemplate> 188. </telerikInput:RadComboBox> 189. <telerik:RadToggleButton x:Name="High" 190. BorderThickness="0" 191. Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 192. DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 193. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 194. IsChecked="{Binding Importance,Mode=TwoWay, Converter={StaticResource ImportanceToBooleanConverter},ConverterParameter=High}" 195. Margin="2,2,0,2" 196. Width="23" 197. Height="23" 198. HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" 199. ToolTipService.ToolTip="High importance" 200. CommandParameter="High" 201. Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SetAppointmentImportance"> 202. <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Center"> 203. <Path Stretch="Fill" 204. Height="10" 205. HorizontalAlignment="Center" 206. VerticalAlignment="Top" 207. Width="5.451" 208. Data="M200.39647,58.840393 C200.39337,58.336426 201.14566,57.683922 202.56244,57.684292 C204.06589,57.684685 204.73764,58.357765 204.72783,58.992363 C205.04649,61.795574 203.04713,64.181099 202.47388,66.133446 C201.93753,64.154961 199.9471,61.560352 200.39647,58.840393 z"> 209. <Path.Fill> 210. <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1.059,0.375" 211. StartPoint="-0.457,0.519"> 212. <GradientStop Color="#FFFF0606" 213. Offset="0.609" /> 214. <GradientStop Color="#FFBF0303" 215. Offset="0.927" /> 216. </LinearGradientBrush> 217. </Path.Fill> 218. </Path> 219. <Ellipse Height="3" 220. HorizontalAlignment="Center" 221. Margin="0,-1,0,0" 222. VerticalAlignment="Top" 223. Width="3"> 224. <Ellipse.Fill> 225. <RadialGradientBrush> 226. <GradientStop Color="#FFFF0606" 227. Offset="0" /> 228. <GradientStop Color="#FFBF0303" 229. Offset="1" /> 230. </RadialGradientBrush> 231. </Ellipse.Fill> 232. </Ellipse> 233. </StackPanel> 234. </telerik:RadToggleButton> 235. <telerik:RadToggleButton x:Name="Low" 236. HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" 237. BorderThickness="0" 238. Background="{StaticResource RadToolBar_InnerBackground}" 239. DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 240. IsChecked="{Binding Importance,Mode=TwoWay, Converter={StaticResource ImportanceToBooleanConverter},ConverterParameter=Low}" 241. Margin="0,2,0,2" 242. Width="23" 243. Height="23" 244. ToolTipService.ToolTip="Low importance" 245. CommandParameter="Low" 246. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 247. Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SetAppointmentImportance"> 248. <Path Stretch="Fill" 249. Height="12" 250. HorizontalAlignment="Center" 251. VerticalAlignment="Top" 252. Width="9" 253. Data="M222.40353,60.139881 L226.65768,60.139843 L226.63687,67.240196 L229.15347,67.240196 L224.37816,71.394943 L219.65274,67.240196 L222.37572,67.219345 z" 254. Stroke="#FF0365A7"> 255. <Path.Fill> 256. <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="1.059,0.375" 257. StartPoint="-0.457,0.519"> 258. <GradientStop Color="#FFBBE4FF" /> 259. <GradientStop Color="#FF024572" 260. Offset="0.836" /> 261. <GradientStop Color="#FF43ADF4" 262. Offset="0.466" /> 263. </LinearGradientBrush> 264. </Path.Fill> 265. </Path> 266. </telerik:RadToggleButton> 267. </StackPanel > 268. <Border DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 269. Background="{Binding Category.CategoryBrush}" 270. Visibility="{Binding Category,Converter={StaticResource NullToVisibilityConverter}}" 271. CornerRadius="3" 272. Height="20" 273. Margin="5,10,5,0"> 274. <TextBlock Text="{Binding Category.DisplayName}" 275. VerticalAlignment="Center" 276. Margin="5,0,0,0" /> 277. </Border> 278. <Grid VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 279. HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" 280. DataContext="{TemplateBinding EditedAppointment}" 281. Background="{TemplateBinding Background}"> 282. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 283. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 284. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 285. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 286. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 287. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 288. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 289. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 290. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 291. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 292. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 293. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 294. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 295. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 296. MinWidth="100" /> 297. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 298. MinWidth="200" /> 299. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 300.  301. <TextBlock x:Name="SubjectLabel" 302. Grid.Row="0" 303. Grid.Column="0" 304. Margin="0,15,0,2" 305. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Subject" 306. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 307. <TextBox x:Name="Subject" 308. Grid.Row="0" 309. Grid.Column="1" 310. MinHeight="22" 311. Padding="4 2" 312. Width="340" 313. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 314. Text="{Binding Subject, Mode=TwoWay}" 315. MaxLength="255" 316. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 317. Margin="10,12,20,2" /> 318.  319. <TextBlock x:Name="DescriptionLabel" 320. Grid.Row="1" 321. Grid.Column="0" 322. Margin="0,13,0,2" 323. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Body" 324. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 325. <TextBox x:Name="Body" 326. VerticalAlignment="top" 327. Grid.Row="1" 328. Grid.Column="1" 329. Height="Auto" 330. MaxHeight="82" 331. Width="340" 332. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 333. MinHeight="22" 334. Padding="4 2" 335. TextWrapping="Wrap" 336. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 337. Text="{Binding Body, Mode=TwoWay}" 338. AcceptsReturn="true" 339. Margin="10,10,20,2" 340. HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" 341. VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" /> 342.  343. <TextBlock x:Name="StartDateLabel" 344. Grid.Row="2" 345. Grid.Column="0" 346. Margin="0,13,0,2" 347. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="StartTime" 348. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 349. <telerikScheduler:DateTimePicker x:Name="StartDateTime" 350. Height="22" 351. Grid.Row="2" 352. Grid.Column="1" 353. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 354. Margin="10,10,20,2" 355. Style="{StaticResource FormElementStyle}" 356. SelectedDateTime="{Binding Start, Mode=TwoWay}" 357. telerikScheduler:StartEndDatePicker.EndPicker="{Binding ElementName=EndDateTime}" 358. IsTabStop="False" 359. IsEnabled="False" /> 360. <TextBlock x:Name="EndDateLabel" 361. Grid.Row="3" 362. Grid.Column="0" 363. Margin="0,13,0,2" 364. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="EndTime" 365. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 366. <telerikScheduler:DateTimePicker x:Name="EndDateTime" 367. Height="22" 368. Grid.Row="3" 369. Grid.Column="1" 370. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 371. Margin="10,10,20,2" 372. Style="{StaticResource FormElementStyle}" 373. IsTabStop="False" 374. IsEnabled="False" 375. SelectedDateTime="{Binding End, Mode=TwoWay}" /> 376.  377. <CheckBox x:Name="AllDayEventCheckbox" 378. IsChecked="{Binding IsAllDayEvent, Mode=TwoWay}" 379. Grid.Row="4" 380. Grid.Column="1" 381. Margin="10,10,20,2" 382. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 383. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 384. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="AllDayEvent"> 385. <telerik:CommandManager.InputBindings> 386. <telerik:InputBindingCollection> 387. <telerik:MouseBinding Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.ChangeTimePickersVisibility" 388. Gesture="LeftClick" /> 389. </telerik:InputBindingCollection> 390. </telerik:CommandManager.InputBindings> 391. </CheckBox> 392. <Grid Grid.Row="5" 393. Grid.ColumnSpan="2"> 394. <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 395. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 396. MinWidth="100" /> 397. <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" 398. MinWidth="200" /> 399. </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 400. <Grid.RowDefinitions> 401. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 402. <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> 403. </Grid.RowDefinitions> 404. <TextBlock Text="Applicant" 405. Margin="0,13,0,2" 406. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 407. <telerikInput:RadComboBox IsEditable="False" 408. Grid.Column="1" 409. Height="24" 410. VerticalAlignment="Center" 411. ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource DataContextProxy}, Path=DataSource.ApplicantList}" 412. SelectedValue="{Binding ApplicantID, Mode=TwoWay}" 413. SelectedValuePath="ApplicantID" 414. DisplayMemberPath="FirstName" /> 415. 416. <TextBlock Text="Job" 417. Margin="0,13,0,2" 418. Grid.Row="1" 419. Style="{StaticResource FormElementTextBlockStyle}" /> 420. <telerikInput:RadComboBox IsEditable="False" 421. Grid.Column="1" 422. Grid.Row="1" 423. Height="24" 424. VerticalAlignment="Center" 425. ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource DataContextProxy}, Path=DataSource.JobsList}" 426. SelectedValue="{Binding PostingID, Mode=TwoWay}" 427. SelectedValuePath="PostingID" 428. DisplayMemberPath="JobTitle"/> 429. </Grid> 430.  431. <Grid x:Name="ResourcesLayout" 432. Grid.Row="7" 433. Grid.Column="0" 434. Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 435. MaxHeight="130" 436. Margin="20,5,20,0"> 437. <Border Margin="0" 438. BorderThickness="1" 439. BorderBrush="{StaticResource GenericShallowBorderBrush}" 440. Visibility="{Binding ElementName=ResourcesScrollViewer, Path=ComputedVerticalScrollBarVisibility}"></Border> 441. <ScrollViewer x:Name="ResourcesScrollViewer" 442. IsTabStop="false" 443. Grid.Row="6" 444. Grid.Column="0" 445. Grid.ColumnSpan="2" 446. Margin="1" 447. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 448. VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto"> 449. <scheduler:ResourcesItemsControl x:Name="PART_Resources" 450. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 451. Padding="0,2,0,5" 452. IsTabStop="false" 453. ItemsSource="{TemplateBinding ResourceTypeModels}" 454. ItemTemplateSelector="{StaticResource ItemTemplateSelector}" /> 455. </ScrollViewer> 456. </Grid> 457. <StackPanel x:Name="FooterControls" 458. Margin="5 10 10 10" 459. Grid.Row="8" 460. Grid.Column="1" 461. HorizontalAlignment="Left" 462. Orientation="Horizontal"> 463. <telerik:RadButton x:Name="OKButton" 464. Margin="5" 465. Padding="10 0" 466. MinWidth="80" 467. Command="telerikScheduler:RadSchedulerCommands.SaveAppointment" 468. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 469. telerikNavigation:RadWindow.ResponseButton="Accept" 470. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="SaveAndCloseCommandText"> 471. </telerik:RadButton> 472. <telerik:RadButton x:Name="CancelButton" 473. Margin="5" 474. Padding="10 0" 475. MinWidth="80" 476. telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Cancel" 477. telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource Theme}" 478. telerikNavigation:RadWindow.ResponseButton="Cancel" 479. Command="telerik:WindowCommands.Close"> 480. </telerik:RadButton> 481. </StackPanel> 482. </Grid> 483. <vsm:VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> 484. <vsm:VisualStateGroup x:Name="RecurrenceRuleState"> 485. <vsm:VisualState x:Name="RecurrenceRuleIsNull"> 486. <Storyboard> 487. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="StartDateTime" 488. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 489. Duration="0"> 490. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 491. Value="True" /> 492. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 493. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="EndDateTime" 494. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 495. Duration="0"> 496. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 497. Value="True" /> 498. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 499. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="AllDayEventCheckbox" 500. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 501. Duration="0"> 502. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 503. Value="True" /> 504. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 505. </Storyboard> 506. </vsm:VisualState> 507. <vsm:VisualState x:Name="RecurrenceRuleIsNotNull"> 508. <Storyboard> 509. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="StartDateTime" 510. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 511. Duration="0"> 512. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 513. Value="False" /> 514. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 515. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="EndDateTime" 516. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 517. Duration="0"> 518. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 519. Value="False" /> 520. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 521. <ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="AllDayEventCheckbox" 522. Storyboard.TargetProperty="IsEnabled" 523. Duration="0"> 524. <DiscreteObjectKeyFrame KeyTime="0" 525. Value="False" /> 526. </ObjectAnimationUsingKeyFrames> 527. </Storyboard> 528. </vsm:VisualState> 529. </vsm:VisualStateGroup> 530. </vsm:VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> 531. </StackPanel> 532. </ControlTemplate> 533. <DataTemplate x:Key="AppointmentDialogWindowHeaderDataTemplate"> 534. <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" 535. MaxWidth="400"> 536. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Event" 537. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.IsAllDayEvent, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 538. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Appointment" 539. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.IsAllDayEvent, Converter={StaticResource InvertedBooleanToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 540. <TextBlock Text=" - " /> 541. <TextBlock x:Name="SubjectTextBlock" 542. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.Subject, Converter={StaticResource NullToVisibilityConverter}}" 543. Text="{Binding Appointment.Subject}" /> 544. <TextBlock telerik:LocalizationManager.ResourceKey="Untitled" 545. Visibility="{Binding Appointment.Subject, Converter={StaticResource InvertedNullToVisibilityConverter}}" /> 546. </StackPanel> 547. </DataTemplate> 548. <Style x:Key="EditAppointmentStyle" 549. TargetType="telerikScheduler:AppointmentDialogWindow"> 550. <Setter Property="IconTemplate" 551. Value="{StaticResource IconDataEditTemplate}" /> 552. <Setter Property="HeaderTemplate" 553. Value="{StaticResource AppointmentDialogWindowHeaderDataTemplate}" /> 554. <Setter Property="Background" 555. Value="{StaticResource DialogWindowBackground}" /> 556. <Setter Property="Template" 557. Value="{StaticResource EditAppointmentTemplate}" /> 558. </Style> 559.</UserControl.Resources> The first line there is the DataContextProxy I mentioned previously- we use that again to work a bit of magic in this template. Where we start getting into the dialog in question is line 132, but line 407 is where things start getting interesting. The ItemsSource is pointing at a list that exists in my ViewModel (or code-behind, if it is used as a DataContext), the SelectedValue is the item I am actually binding from the applicant (note the TwoWay binding), and SelectedValuePath and DisplayMemberPath ensure the proper applicant is being displayed from the collection. You will also see similar starting on line 420 where I do the same for the Jobs we'll be displaying. Just to wrap-up the Xaml, here's the RadScheduler declaraction that ties this all together and will be the main focus of our view: 01.<telerikScheduler:RadScheduler x:Name="xJobsScheduler" 02. Grid.Row="1" 03. Grid.Column="1" 04. Width="800" 05. MinWidth="600" 06. Height="500" 07. MinHeight="300" 08. AppointmentsSource="{Binding Interviews}" 09. EditAppointmentStyle="{StaticResource EditAppointmentStyle}" 10. command:AppointmentAddedEventClass.Command="{Binding AddAppointmentCommand}" 11. command:ApptCreatedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptCreatingCommand}" 12. command:ApptEditedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptEditedCommand}" 13. command:ApptDeletedEventClass.Command="{Binding ApptDeletedCommand}"> 14.</telerikScheduler:RadScheduler> Now, we get to the ViewModel and what it takes to get that rigged up. And for those of you who remember the jobs post, those command:s in the Xaml are pointing to attached behavior commands that reproduce the respective events. This becomes very handy when we're setting up the code-behind version. ;) ViewModel I've been liking this approach so far, so I'm going to put the entire ViewModel here and then go into the lines of interest. Of course, feel free to ask me questions about anything that isn't clear (by line number, ideally) so I can help out if I have missed anything important: 001.public class SchedulerViewModel : ViewModelBase 002.{ 003. private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator; 004. private readonly IRegionManager regionManager; 005. 006. public RecruitingContext context; 007. 008. private ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> _interviews = new ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment>(); 009. public ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> Interviews 010. { 011. get { return _interviews; } 012. set 013. { 014. if (_interviews != value) 015. { 016. _interviews = value; 017. NotifyChanged("Interviews"); 018. } 019. } 020. } 021. 022. private QueryableCollectionView _jobsList; 023. public QueryableCollectionView JobsList 024. { 025. get { return this._jobsList; } 026. set 027. { 028. if (this._jobsList != value) 029. { 030. this._jobsList = value; 031. this.NotifyChanged("JobsList"); 032. } 033. } 034. } 035. 036. private QueryableCollectionView _applicantList; 037. public QueryableCollectionView ApplicantList 038. { 039. get { return _applicantList; } 040. set 041. { 042. if (_applicantList != value) 043. { 044. _applicantList = value; 045. NotifyChanged("ApplicantList"); 046. } 047. } 048. } 049. 050. public DelegateCommand<object> AddAppointmentCommand { get; set; } 051. public DelegateCommand<object> ApptCreatingCommand { get; set; } 052. public DelegateCommand<object> ApptEditedCommand { get; set; } 053. public DelegateCommand<object> ApptDeletedCommand { get; set; } 054. 055. public SchedulerViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAgg, IRegionManager regionmanager) 056. { 057. // set Unity items 058. this.eventAggregator = eventAgg; 059. this.regionManager = regionmanager; 060. 061. // load our context 062. context = new RecruitingContext(); 063. LoadOperation<Interview> loadOp = context.Load(context.GetInterviewsQuery()); 064. loadOp.Completed += new EventHandler(loadOp_Completed); 065. 066. this._jobsList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.JobPostings); 067. context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 068. 069. this._applicantList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.Applicants); 070. context.Load(context.GetApplicantsQuery()); 071. 072. AddAppointmentCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.AddAppt); 073. ApptCreatingCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptCreating); 074. ApptEditedCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptEdited); 075. ApptDeletedCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(this.ApptDeleted); 076. 077. } 078. 079. void loadOp_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) 080. { 081. LoadOperation loadop = sender as LoadOperation; 082. 083. foreach (var ent in loadop.Entities) 084. { 085. _interviews.Add(EntityToAppointment(ent as Interview)); 086. } 087. } 088. 089. #region Appointment Adding 090. 091. public void AddAppt(object obj) 092. { 093. // now we have a new InterviewAppointment to add to our QCV :) 094. InterviewAppointment newInterview = obj as InterviewAppointment; 095. 096. this.context.Interviews.Add(AppointmentToEntity(newInterview)); 097. this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 098. { 099. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 100. myAction.InterviewID = newInterview.InterviewID; 101. myAction.PostingID = newInterview.PostingID; 102. myAction.ApplicantID = newInterview.ApplicantID; 103. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been created by {1}", newInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 104. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 105. eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 106. } 107. , null); 108. } 109. 110. public void ApptCreating(object obj) 111. { 112. // handled in the behavior, just a placeholder to ensure it runs :) 113. } 114. 115. #endregion 116. 117. #region Appointment Editing 118. 119. public void ApptEdited(object obj) 120. { 121. Interview editedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 122. where x.InterviewID == (obj as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 123. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 124. 125. CopyAppointmentEdit(editedInterview, obj as InterviewAppointment); 126. 127. context.SubmitChanges((s) => { 128. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 129. myAction.InterviewID = editedInterview.InterviewID; 130. myAction.PostingID = editedInterview.PostingID; 131. myAction.ApplicantID = editedInterview.ApplicantID; 132. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been modified by {1}", editedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 133. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 134. eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); } 135. , null); 136. } 137. 138. #endregion 139. 140. #region Appointment Deleting 141. 142. public void ApptDeleted(object obj) 143. { 144. Interview deletedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 145. where x.InterviewID == (obj as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 146. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 147. 148. context.Interviews.Remove(deletedInterview); 149. context.SubmitChanges((s) => 150. { 151. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 152. myAction.InterviewID = deletedInterview.InterviewID; 153. myAction.PostingID = deletedInterview.PostingID; 154. myAction.ApplicantID = deletedInterview.ApplicantID; 155. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been deleted by {1}", deletedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 156. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 157. eventAggregator.GetEvent<AddActionEvent>().Publish(myAction); 158. } 159. , null); 160. } 161. 162. #endregion 163. 164. #region Appointment Helpers :) 165. 166. public Interview AppointmentToEntity(InterviewAppointment ia) 167. { 168. Interview newInterview = new Interview(); 169. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 170. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 171. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 172. newInterview.End = ia.End; 173. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 174. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 175. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 176. 177. return newInterview; 178. } 179. 180. public InterviewAppointment EntityToAppointment(Interview ia) 181. { 182. InterviewAppointment newInterview = new InterviewAppointment(); 183. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 184. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 185. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 186. newInterview.End = ia.End; 187. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 188. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 189. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 190. 191. return newInterview; 192. } 193. 194. public void CopyAppointmentEdit(Interview entityInterview, InterviewAppointment appointmentInterview) 195. { 196. entityInterview.Subject = appointmentInterview.Subject; 197. entityInterview.Body = appointmentInterview.Body; 198. entityInterview.Start = appointmentInterview.Start; 199. entityInterview.End = appointmentInterview.End; 200. entityInterview.ApplicantID = appointmentInterview.ApplicantID; 201. entityInterview.PostingID = appointmentInterview.PostingID; 202. } 203. 204. #endregion 205.} One thing we're doing here which you won't see in any of the other ViewModels is creating a duplicate collection. I know this is something which will be fixed down the line for using RadScheduler, simplifying this process, but with WCF RIA changing as it does I wanted to ensure functionality would remain consistent as I continued development on this application. So, I do a little bit of duplication, but for the greater good. This all takes place starting on line 79, so for every entity that comes back we add it to the collection that is bound to RadScheduler. Otherwise, the DelegateCommands that you see correspond directly to the events they are named after. In each case, rather than sending over the full event arguments, I just send in the appointment in question (coming through as the object obj in all cases) so I can add (line 91), edit (line 119), and delete appointments (line 142) like normal. This just ensures they get updated back to my database. Also, the one bit of code you won't see is for the Appointment Creating (line 110) event- that is because in the command I've created I simply make the replacement I need to: 1.void element_AppointmentCreating(object sender, AppointmentCreatingEventArgs e) 2.{ 3. e.NewAppointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 4. base.ExecuteCommand(); 5.} And the ViewModel is none the wiser, the appointments just work as far as it is concerned since as they are created they become InterviewAppointments. End result? I've customized my EditAppointmentDialog as follows: And adding, editing, and deleting appointments works like a charm. I can even 'edit' by moving appointments around RadScheduler, so as they are dropped into a timeslot they perform their full edit routine and things get updated. And then, the Code-Behind Version Perhaps the thing I like the most about doing one then the other is I get to steal 90% or more of the code from the MVVM version. For example, the only real changes to the Code-Behind Xaml file exist in the control declaration, in which I use events instead of attached-behavior-event-commands: 01.<telerikScheduler:RadScheduler x:Name="xJobsScheduler" 02. Grid.Row="1" 03. Grid.Column="1" 04. Width="800" 05. MinWidth="600" 06. Height="500" 07. MinHeight="300" 08. EditAppointmentStyle="{StaticResource EditAppointmentStyle}" 09. AppointmentAdded="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentAdded" 10. AppointmentCreating="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentCreating" 11. AppointmentEdited="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentEdited" 12. AppointmentDeleted="xJobsScheduler_AppointmentDeleted"> 13.</telerikScheduler:RadScheduler> Easy, right? Otherwise, all the same styling in UserControl.Resources was re-used, right down to the DataContextProxy that lets us bind to a collection from our viewmodel (in this case, our code-behind) to use within the DataTemplate. The code conversion gets even easier, as I could literally copy and paste almost everything from the ViewModel to my Code-Behind, just a matter of pasting the right section into the right event. Here's the code-behind as proof: 001.public partial class SchedulingView : UserControl, INotifyPropertyChanged 002.{ 003. public RecruitingContext context; 004. 005. private QueryableCollectionView _jobsList; 006. public QueryableCollectionView JobsList 007. { 008. get { return this._jobsList; } 009. set 010. { 011. if (this._jobsList != value) 012. { 013. this._jobsList = value; 014. this.NotifyChanged("JobsList"); 015. } 016. } 017. } 018. 019. private QueryableCollectionView _applicantList; 020. public QueryableCollectionView ApplicantList 021. { 022. get { return _applicantList; } 023. set 024. { 025. if (_applicantList != value) 026. { 027. _applicantList = value; 028. NotifyChanged("ApplicantList"); 029. } 030. } 031. } 032. 033. private ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> _interviews = new ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment>(); 034. public ObservableItemCollection<InterviewAppointment> Interviews 035. { 036. get { return _interviews; } 037. set 038. { 039. if (_interviews != value) 040. { 041. _interviews = value; 042. NotifyChanged("Interviews"); 043. } 044. } 045. } 046. 047. public SchedulingView() 048. { 049. InitializeComponent(); 050. 051. this.DataContext = this; 052. 053. this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(SchedulingView_Loaded); 054. } 055. 056. void SchedulingView_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 057. { 058. this.xJobsScheduler.AppointmentsSource = Interviews; 059. 060. context = new RecruitingContext(); 061. 062. LoadOperation loadop = context.Load(context.GetInterviewsQuery()); 063. loadop.Completed += new EventHandler(loadop_Completed); 064. 065. this._applicantList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.Applicants); 066. context.Load(context.GetApplicantsQuery()); 067. 068. this._jobsList = new QueryableCollectionView(context.JobPostings); 069. context.Load(context.GetJobPostingsQuery()); 070. } 071. 072. void loadop_Completed(object sender, EventArgs e) 073. { 074. LoadOperation loadop = sender as LoadOperation; 075. 076. _interviews.Clear(); 077. 078. foreach (var ent in loadop.Entities) 079. { 080. _interviews.Add(EntityToAppointment(ent as Interview)); 081. } 082. } 083. 084. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentAdded(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentAddedEventArgs e) 085. { 086. // now we have a new InterviewAppointment to add to our QCV :) 087. InterviewAppointment newInterview = e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment; 088. 089. this.context.Interviews.Add(AppointmentToEntity(newInterview)); 090. this.context.SubmitChanges((s) => 091. { 092. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 093. myAction.InterviewID = newInterview.InterviewID; 094. myAction.PostingID = newInterview.PostingID; 095. myAction.ApplicantID = newInterview.ApplicantID; 096. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been created by {1}", newInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 097. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 098. context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 099. context.SubmitChanges(); 100. } 101. , null); 102. } 103. 104. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentCreating(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentCreatingEventArgs e) 105. { 106. e.NewAppointment = new InterviewAppointment(); 107. } 108. 109. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentEdited(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentEditedEventArgs e) 110. { 111. Interview editedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 112. where x.InterviewID == (e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 113. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 114. 115. CopyAppointmentEdit(editedInterview, e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment); 116. 117. context.SubmitChanges((s) => 118. { 119. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 120. myAction.InterviewID = editedInterview.InterviewID; 121. myAction.PostingID = editedInterview.PostingID; 122. myAction.ApplicantID = editedInterview.ApplicantID; 123. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been modified by {1}", editedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 124. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 125. context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 126. context.SubmitChanges(); 127. } 128. , null); 129. } 130. 131. private void xJobsScheduler_AppointmentDeleted(object sender, Telerik.Windows.Controls.AppointmentDeletedEventArgs e) 132. { 133. Interview deletedInterview = (from x in context.Interviews 134. where x.InterviewID == (e.Appointment as InterviewAppointment).InterviewID 135. select x).SingleOrDefault(); 136. 137. context.Interviews.Remove(deletedInterview); 138. context.SubmitChanges((s) => 139. { 140. ActionHistory myAction = new ActionHistory(); 141. myAction.InterviewID = deletedInterview.InterviewID; 142. myAction.PostingID = deletedInterview.PostingID; 143. myAction.ApplicantID = deletedInterview.ApplicantID; 144. myAction.Description = String.Format("Interview with {0} has been deleted by {1}", deletedInterview.ApplicantID.ToString(), "default user"); 145. myAction.TimeStamp = DateTime.Now; 146. context.ActionHistories.Add(myAction); 147. context.SubmitChanges(); 148. } 149. , null); 150. } 151. 152. #region Appointment Helpers :) 153. 154. public Interview AppointmentToEntity(InterviewAppointment ia) 155. { 156. Interview newInterview = new Interview(); 157. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 158. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 159. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 160. newInterview.End = ia.End; 161. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 162. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 163. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 164. 165. return newInterview; 166. } 167. 168. public InterviewAppointment EntityToAppointment(Interview ia) 169. { 170. InterviewAppointment newInterview = new InterviewAppointment(); 171. newInterview.Subject = ia.Subject; 172. newInterview.Body = ia.Body; 173. newInterview.Start = ia.Start; 174. newInterview.End = ia.End; 175. newInterview.ApplicantID = ia.ApplicantID; 176. newInterview.PostingID = ia.PostingID; 177. newInterview.InterviewID = ia.InterviewID; 178. 179. return newInterview; 180. } 181. 182. public void CopyAppointmentEdit(Interview entityInterview, InterviewAppointment appointmentInterview) 183. { 184. entityInterview.Subject = appointmentInterview.Subject; 185. entityInterview.Body = appointmentInterview.Body; 186. entityInterview.Start = appointmentInterview.Start; 187. entityInterview.End = appointmentInterview.End; 188. entityInterview.ApplicantID = appointmentInterview.ApplicantID; 189. entityInterview.PostingID = appointmentInterview.PostingID; 190. } 191. 192. #endregion 193. 194. #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members 195. 196. public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; 197. 198. public void NotifyChanged(string propertyName) 199. { 200. if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(propertyName)) 201. throw new ArgumentException("propertyName"); 202. 203. PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); 204. } 205. 206. #endregion 207.} Nice... right? :) One really important thing to note as well. See on line 51 where I set the DataContext before the Loaded event? This is super important, as if you don't have this set before the usercontrol is loaded, the DataContextProxy has no context to use and your EditAppointmentDialog Job/Applicant dropdowns will be blank and empty. Trust me on this, took a little bit of debugging to figure out that by setting the DataContext post-loaded would only lead to disaster and frustration. Otherwise, the only other real difference is that instead of sending an ActionHistory item through an event to get added to the database and saved, I do those right in the callback from submitting. The Result Again, I only have to post one picture because these bad boys used nearly identical code for both the MVVM and the code-behind views, so our end result is... So what have we learned here today? One, for the most part this MVVM thing is somewhat easy. Yeah, you sometimes have to write a bunch of extra code, but with the help of a few useful snippits you can turn the process into a pretty streamlined little workflow. Heck, this story gets even easier as you can see in this blog post by Michael Washington- specifically run a find on 'InvokeCommandAction' and you'll see the section regarding the command on TreeView in Blend 4. Brilliant! MVVM never looked so sweet! Otherwise, it is business as usual with RadScheduler for Silverlight whichever path you're choosing for your development. Between now and the next post, I'll be cleaning up styles a bit (those RadComboBoxes are a little too close to my labels!) and adding some to the RowDetailsViews for Applicants and Jobs, so you can see all the info for an appointment in the dropdown tab view. Otherwise, we're about ready to call a wrap on this oneDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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Is Berkeley DB a NoSQL solution?

- by Gregory Burd

Berkeley DB is a library. To use it to store data you must link the library into your application. You can use most programming languages to access the API, the calls across these APIs generally mimic the Berkeley DB C-API which makes perfect sense because Berkeley DB is written in C. The inspiration for Berkeley DB was the DBM library, a part of the earliest versions of UNIX written by AT&T's Ken Thompson in 1979. DBM was a simple key/value hashtable-based storage library. In the early 1990s as BSD UNIX was transitioning from version 4.3 to 4.4 and retrofitting commercial code owned by AT&T with unencumbered code, it was the future founders of Sleepycat Software who wrote libdb (aka Berkeley DB) as the replacement for DBM. The problem it addressed was fast, reliable local key/value storage. At that time databases almost always lived on a single node, even the most sophisticated databases only had simple fail-over two node solutions. If you had a lot of data to store you would choose between the few commercial RDBMS solutions or to write your own custom solution. Berkeley DB took the headache out of the custom approach. These basic market forces inspired other DBM implementations. There was the "New DBM" (ndbm) and the "GNU DBM" (GDBM) and a few others, but the theme was the same. Even today TokyoCabinet calls itself "a modern implementation of DBM" mimicking, and improving on, something first created over thirty years ago. In the mid-1990s, DBM was the name for what you needed if you were looking for fast, reliable local storage. Fast forward to today. What's changed? Systems are connected over fast, very reliable networks. Disks are cheep, fast, and capable of storing huge amounts of data. CPUs continued to follow Moore's Law, processing power that filled a room in 1990 now fits in your pocket. PCs, servers, and other computers proliferated both in business and the personal markets. In addition to the new hardware entire markets, social systems, and new modes of interpersonal communication moved onto the web and started evolving rapidly. These changes cause a massive explosion of data and a need to analyze and understand that data. Taken together this resulted in an entirely different landscape for database storage, new solutions were needed. A number of novel solutions stepped up and eventually a category called NoSQL emerged. The new market forces inspired the CAP theorem and the heated debate of BASE vs. ACID. But in essence this was simply the market looking at what to trade off to meet these new demands. These new database systems shared many qualities in common. There were designed to address massive amounts of data, millions of requests per second, and scale out across multiple systems. The first large-scale and successful solution was Dynamo, Amazon's distributed key/value database. Dynamo essentially took the next logical step and added a twist. Dynamo was to be the database of record, it would be distributed, data would be partitioned across many nodes, and it would tolerate failure by avoiding single points of failure. Amazon did this because they recognized that the majority of the dynamic content they provided to customers visiting their web store front didn't require the services of an RDBMS. The queries were simple, key/value look-ups or simple range queries with only a few queries that required more complex joins. They set about to use relational technology only in places where it was the best solution for the task, places like accounting and order fulfillment, but not in the myriad of other situations. The success of Dynamo, and it's design, inspired the next generation of Non-SQL, distributed database solutions including Cassandra, Riak and Voldemort. The problem their designers set out to solve was, "reliability at massive scale" so the first focal point was distributed database algorithms. Underneath Dynamo there is a local transactional database; either Berkeley DB, Berkeley DB Java Edition, MySQL or an in-memory key/value data structure. Dynamo was an evolution of local key/value storage onto networks. Cassandra, Riak, and Voldemort all faced similar design decisions and one, Voldemort, choose Berkeley DB Java Edition for it's node-local storage. Riak at first was entirely in-memory, but has recently added write-once, append-only log-based on-disk storage similar type of storage as Berkeley DB except that it is based on a hash table which must reside entirely in-memory rather than a btree which can live in-memory or on disk. Berkeley DB evolved too, we added high availability (HA) and a replication manager that makes it easy to setup replica groups. Berkeley DB's replication doesn't partitioned the data, every node keeps an entire copy of the database. For consistency, there is a single node where writes are committed first - a master - then those changes are delivered to the replica nodes as log records. Applications can choose to wait until all nodes are consistent, or fire and forget allowing Berkeley DB to eventually become consistent. Berkeley DB's HA scales-out quite well for read-intensive applications and also effectively eliminates the central point of failure by allowing replica nodes to be elected (using a PAXOS algorithm) to mastership if the master should fail. This implementation covers a wide variety of use cases. MemcacheDB is a server that implements the Memcache network protocol but uses Berkeley DB for storage and HA to replicate the cache state across all the nodes in the cache group. Google Accounts, the user authentication layer for all Google properties, was until recently running Berkeley DB HA. That scaled to a globally distributed system. That said, most NoSQL solutions try to partition (shard) data across nodes in the replication group and some allow writes as well as reads at any node, Berkeley DB HA does not. So, is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution? Not really, but it certainly is a component of many of the existing NoSQL solutions out there. Forgetting all the noise about how NoSQL solutions are complex distributed databases when you boil them down to a single node you still have to store the data to some form of stable local storage. DBMs solved that problem a long time ago. NoSQL has more to do with the layers on top of the DBM; the distributed, sometimes-consistent, partitioned, scale-out storage that manage key/value or document sets and generally have some form of simple HTTP/REST-style network API. Does Berkeley DB do that? Not really. Is Berkeley DB a "NoSQL" solution today? Nope, but it's the most robust solution on which to build such a system. Re-inventing the node-local data storage isn't easy. A lot of people are starting to come to appreciate the sophisticated features found in Berkeley DB, even mimic them in some cases. Could Berkeley DB grow into a NoSQL solution? Absolutely. Our key/value API could be extended over the net using any of a number of existing network protocols such as memcache or HTTP/REST. We could adapt our node-local data partitioning out over replicated nodes. We even have a nice query language and cost-based query optimizer in our BDB XML product that we could reuse were we to build out a document-based NoSQL-style product. XML and JSON are not so different that we couldn't adapt one to work with the other interchangeably. Without too much effort we could add what's missing, we could jump into this No SQL market withing a single product development cycle. Why isn't Berkeley DB already a NoSQL solution? Why aren't we working on it? Why indeed...

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Code Contracts: Unit testing contracted code

- by DigiMortal

Code contracts and unit tests are not replacements for each other. They both have different purpose and different nature. It does not matter if you are using code contracts or not – you still have to write tests for your code. In this posting I will show you how to unit test code with contracts. In my previous posting about code contracts I showed how to avoid ContractExceptions that are defined in code contracts runtime and that are not accessible for us in design time. This was one step further to make my randomizer testable. In this posting I will complete the mission. Problems with current code This is my current code. public class Randomizer { public static int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max) { Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>( min < max, "Min must be less than max" ); Contract.Ensures( Contract.Result<int>() >= min && Contract.Result<int>() <= max, "Return value is out of range" ); var rnd = new Random(); return rnd.Next(min, max); } } As you can see this code has some problems: randomizer class is static and cannot be instantiated. We cannot move this class between components if we need to, GetRandomFromRangeContracted() is not fully testable because we cannot currently affect random number generator output and therefore we cannot test post-contract. Now let’s solve these problems. Making randomizer testable As a first thing I made Randomizer to be class that must be instantiated. This is simple thing to do. Now let’s solve the problem with Random class. To make Randomizer testable I define IRandomGenerator interface and RandomGenerator class. The public constructor of Randomizer accepts IRandomGenerator as argument. public interface IRandomGenerator { int Next(int min, int max); } public class RandomGenerator : IRandomGenerator { private Random _random = new Random(); public int Next(int min, int max) { return _random.Next(min, max); } } And here is our Randomizer after total make-over. public class Randomizer { private IRandomGenerator _generator; private Randomizer() { _generator = new RandomGenerator(); } public Randomizer(IRandomGenerator generator) { _generator = generator; } public int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max) { Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>( min < max, "Min must be less than max" ); Contract.Ensures( Contract.Result<int>() >= min && Contract.Result<int>() <= max, "Return value is out of range" ); return _generator.Next(min, max); } } It seems to be inconvenient to instantiate Randomizer now but you can always use DI/IoC containers and break compiled dependencies between the components of your system. Writing tests for randomizer IRandomGenerator solved problem with testing post-condition. Now it is time to write tests for Randomizer class. Writing tests for contracted code is not easy. The main problem is still ContractException that we are not able to access. Still it is the main exception we get as soon as contracts fail. Although pre-conditions are able to throw exceptions with type we want we cannot do much when post-conditions will fail. We have to use Contract.ContractFailed event and this event is called for every contract failure. This way we find ourselves in situation where supporting well input interface makes it impossible to support output interface well and vice versa. ContractFailed is nasty hack and it works pretty weird way. Although documentation sais that ContractFailed is good choice for testing contracts it is still pretty painful. As a last chance I got tests working almost normally when I wrapped them up. Can you remember similar solution from the times of Visual Studio 2008 unit tests? Cannot understand how Microsoft was able to mess up testing again. [TestClass] public class RandomizerTest { private Mock<IRandomGenerator> _randomMock; private Randomizer _randomizer; private string _lastContractError; public TestContext TestContext { get; set; } public RandomizerTest() { Contract.ContractFailed += (sender, e) => { e.SetHandled(); e.SetUnwind(); throw new Exception(e.FailureKind + ": " + e.Message); }; } [TestInitialize()] public void RandomizerTestInitialize() { _randomMock = new Mock<IRandomGenerator>(); _randomizer = new Randomizer(_randomMock.Object); _lastContractError = string.Empty; } #region InputInterfaceTests [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))] public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_min_is_not_less_than_max() { try { _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(100, 10); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex); } } [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))] public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_min_is_equal_to_max() { try { _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(10, 10); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex); } } [TestMethod] public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_work_when_min_is_less_than_max() { int minValue = 10; int maxValue = 100; int returnValue = 50; _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(minValue, maxValue)) .Returns(returnValue) .Verifiable(); var result = _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue); _randomMock.Verify(); Assert.AreEqual<int>(returnValue, result); } #endregion #region OutputInterfaceTests [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))] public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_return_value_is_less_than_min() { int minValue = 10; int maxValue = 100; int returnValue = 7; _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(10, 100)) .Returns(returnValue) .Verifiable(); try { _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex); } _randomMock.Verify(); } [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))] public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_return_value_is_more_than_max() { int minValue = 10; int maxValue = 100; int returnValue = 102; _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(10, 100)) .Returns(returnValue) .Verifiable(); try { _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex); } _randomMock.Verify(); } #endregion } Although these tests are pretty awful and contain hacks we are at least able now to make sure that our code works as expected. Here is the test list after running these tests. Conclusion Code contracts are very new stuff in Visual Studio world and as young technology it has some problems – like all other new bits and bytes in the world. As you saw then making our contracted code testable is easy only to the point when pre-conditions are considered. When we start dealing with post-conditions we will end up with hacked tests. I hope that future versions of code contracts will solve error handling issues the way that testing of contracted code will be easier than it is right now.

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How to Organize a Programming Language Club

- by Ben Griswold

I previously noted that we started a language club at work. You know, I searched around but I couldn’t find a copy of the How to Organize a Programming Language Club Handbook. Maybe it’s sold out? Yes, Stack Overflow has quite a bit of information on how to learn and teach new languages and there’s also a good number of online tutorials which provide language introductions but I was interested in group learning. After two months of meetings, I present to you the Unofficial How to Organize a Programming Language Club Handbook. 1. Gauge interest. Start by surveying prospects. “Excuse me, smart-developer-whom-I-work-with-and-I-think-might-be-interested-in-learning-a-new-coding-language-with-me. Are you interested in learning a new language with me?” If you’re lucky, you work with a bunch of really smart folks who aren’t shy about teaching/learning in a group setting and you’ll have a collective interest in no time. Simply suggesting the idea is the only effort required. If you don’t work in this type of environment, maybe you should consider a new place of employment. 2. Make it official. Send out a “Welcome to the Club” email: There’s been talk of folks itching to learn new languages – Python, Scala, F# and Haskell to name a few. Rather than taking on new languages alone, let’s learn in the open. That’s right. Let’s start a languages club. We’ll have everything a real club needs – secret handshake, goofy motto and a high-and-mighty sense that we’re better than everybody else. T-shirts? Hell YES! Anyway, I’ve thrown this idea around the office and no one has laughed at me yet so please consider this your very official invitation to be in THE club. [Insert your ideas about how the club might be run, solicit feedback and suggestions, ask what other folks would like to get out the club, comment about club hazing practices and talk up the T-shirts even more. Finally, call out the languages you are interested in learning and ask the group for their list.] 3. Send out invitations to the first meeting. Don’t skimp! Hallmark greeting cards for everyone. Personalized. Hearts over the I’s and everything. Oh, and be sure to include the list of suggested languages with vote count. Here the list of languages we are interested in: Python 5 Ruby 4 Objective-C 3 F# 2 Haskell 2 Scala 2 Ada 1 Boo 1 C# 1 Clojure 1 Erlang 1 Go 1 Pi 1 Prolog 1 Qt 1 4. At the first meeting, there must be cake. Lots of cake. And you should tackle some very important questions: Which language should we start with? You can immediately go with the top vote getter or you could do as we did and designate each person to provide a high-level review of each of the proposed languages over the next two weeks. After all presentations are completed, vote on the language. Our high-level review consisted of answers to a series of questions. Decide how often and where the group will meet. We, for example, meet for a brown bag lunch every Wednesday. Decide how you’re going to learn. We determined that the best way to learn is to just dive in and write code. After choosing our first language (Python), we talked about building an application, or performing coding katas, but we ultimately choose to complete a series of Project Euler problems. We kept it simple – each member works out the same two problems each week in preparation of a code review the following Wednesday. 5. Code, Review, Learn. Prior to the weekly meeting, everyone uploads their solutions to our internal wiki. Each Project Euler problem has a dedicated page. In the meeting, we use a really fancy HD projector to show off each member’s solution. It is very important to use an HD projector. Again, don’t skimp! Each code author speaks to their solution, everyone else comments, applauds, points fingers and laughs, etc. As much as I’ve learned from solving the problems on my own, I’ve learned at least twice as much at the group code review. 6. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. We’ve hosted the language club for 7 weeks now. The first meeting just set the stage. The next two meetings provided a review of the languages followed by a first language selection. The remaining meetings focused on Python and Project Euler problems. Today we took a vote as to whether or not we’re ready to switch to another language and/or another problem set. Pretty much everyone wants to stay the course for a few more weeks at least. Until then, we’ll continue to code the next two solutions, review and learn. Again, we’ve been having a good time with the programming language club. I’m glad it got off the ground. What do you think? Would you be interested in a language club? Any suggestions on what we might do better?

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jQuery Templates - XHTML Validation

- by hajan

Many developers have already asked me about this. How to make XHTML valid the web page which uses jQuery Templates. Maybe you have already tried, and I don't know what are your results but here is my opinion regarding this. By default, Visual Studio.NET adds the xhtml1-transitional.dtd schema <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> So, if you try to validate your page which has jQuery Templates against this schema, your page won't be XHTML valid. Why? It's because when creating templates, we use HTML tags inside <script> ... </script> block. Yes, I know that the script block has type="text/html" but it's not supported in this schema, thus it's not valid. Let's try validate the following code Code <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> $(function () { var attendees = [ { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] }, { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] } ]; $("#myTemplate").tmpl(attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); </script> <script id="myTemplate" type="text/html"> <li> ${Name} ${Surname} {{if speaker}} (<font color="red">speaks</font>) {{else}} (attendee) {{/if}} </li> </script> </head> <body> <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> To validate it, go to http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input and copy paste the code rendered on client-side browser (it’s almost the same, only the template is rendered inside OL so LI tags are created for each item). Press CHECK and you will get: Result: 1 Errors, 2 warning(s) The error message says: Validation Output: 1 Error Line 21, Column 13: document type does not allow element "li" here <li> Yes, the <li> HTML element is not allowed inside the <script>, so how to make it valid? FIRST: Using <![CDATA][…]]> The first thing that came in my mind was the CDATA. So, by wrapping any HTML tag which is in script blog, inside <![CDATA[ ........ ]]> it will make our code valid. However, the problem is that the template won't render since the template tags {} cannot get evaluated if they are inside CDATA. Ok, lets try with another approach. SECOND: HTML5 validation Well, if we just remove the strikethrough part bellow of the !DOPCTYPE <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> our template is going to be checked as HTML5 and will be valid. Ok, there is another approach I've also tried: THIRD: Separate template to an external file We can separate the template to external file. I didn’t show how to do this previously, so here is the example. 1. Add HTML file with name Template.html in your ASPX website. 2. Place your defined template there without <script> tag Content inside Template.html <li> ${Name} ${Surname} {{if speaker}} (<font color="red">speaks</font>) {{else}} (attendee) {{/if}} </li> 3. Call the HTML file using $.get() jQuery ajax method and render the template with data using $.tmpl() function. $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) { $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); So the complete code is: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> $(function () { var attendees = [ { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] }, { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] } ]; $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) { $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); }); </script> </head> <body> <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> This document was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Result: Passed If you have any additional methods for XHTML validation, you can share it :). Thanks,Hajan

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Robotic Arm – Hardware

- by Szymon Kobalczyk

This is first in series of articles about project I've been building in my spare time since last Summer. Actually it all began when I was researching a topic of modeling human motion kinematics in order to create gesture recognition library for Kinect. This ties heavily into motion theory of robotic manipulators so I also glanced at some designs of robotic arms. Somehow I stumbled upon this cool looking open source robotic arm: It was featured on Thingiverse and published by user jjshortcut (Jan-Jaap). Since for some time I got hooked on toying with microcontrollers, robots and other electronics, I decided to give it a try and build it myself. In this post I will describe the hardware build of the arm and in later posts I will be writing about the software to control it. Another reason to build the arm myself was the cost factor. Even small commercial robotic arms are quite expensive – products from Lynxmotion and Dagu look great but both cost around USD $300 (actually there is one cheap arm available but it looks more like a toy to me). In comparison this design is quite cheap. It uses seven hobby grade servos and even the cheapest ones should work fine. The structure is build from a set of laser cut parts connected with few metal spacers (15mm and 47mm) and lots of M3 screws. Other than that you’d only need a microcontroller board to drive the servos. So in total it comes a lot cheaper to build it yourself than buy an of the shelf robotic arm. Oh, and if you don’t like this one there are few more robotic arm projects at Thingiverse (including one by oomlout). Laser cut parts Some time ago I’ve build another robot using laser cut parts so I knew the process already. You can grab the design files in both DXF and EPS format from Thingiverse, and there are also 3D models of each part in STL. Actually the design is split into a second project for the mini servo gripper (there is also a standard servo version available but it won’t fit this arm). I wanted to make some small adjustments, layout, and add measurements to the parts before sending it for cutting. I’ve looked at some free 2D CAD programs, and finally did all this work using QCad 3 Beta with worked great for me (I also tried LibreCAD but it didn’t work that well). All parts are cut from 4 mm thick material. Because I was worried that acrylic is too fragile and might break, I also ordered another set cut from plywood. In the end I build it from plywood because it was easier to glue (I was told acrylic requires a special glue). Btw. I found a great laser cutter service in Kraków and highly recommend it (www.ebbox.com.pl). It cost me only USD $26 for both sets ($16 acrylic + $10 plywood). Metal parts I bought all the M3 screws and nuts at local hardware store. Make sure to look for nylon lock (nyloc) nuts for the gripper because otherwise it unscrews and comes apart quickly. I couldn’t find local store with metal spacers and had to order them online (you’d need 11 x 47mm and 3 x 15mm). I think I paid less than USD $10 for all metal parts. Servos This arm uses five standards size servos to drive the arm itself, and two micro servos are used on the gripper. Author of the project used Modelcraft RS-2 Servo and Modelcraft ES-05 HT Servo. I had two Futaba S3001 servos laying around, and ordered additional TowerPro SG-5010 standard size servos and TowerPro SG90 micro servos. However it turned out that the SG90 won’t fit in the gripper so I had to replace it with a slightly smaller E-Sky EK2-0508 micro servo. Later it also turned out that Futaba servos make some strange noise while working so I swapped one with TowerPro SG-5010 which has higher torque (8kg / cm). I’ve also bought three servo extension cables. All servos cost me USD $45. Assembly The build process is not difficult but you need to think carefully about order of assembling it. You can do the base and upper arm first. Because two servos in the base are close together you need to put first with one piece of lower arm already connected before you put the second servo. Then you connect the upper arm and finally put the second piece of lower arm to hold it together. Gripper and base require some gluing so think it through too. Make sure to look closely at all the photos on Thingiverse (also other people copies) and read additional posts on jjshortcust’s blog: My mini servo grippers and completed robotic arm Multiply the robotic arm and electronics Here is also Rob’s copy cut from aluminum My assembled arm looks like this – I think it turned out really nice: Servo controller board The last piece of hardware I needed was an electronic board that would take command from PC and drive all seven servos. I could probably use Arduino for this task, and in fact there are several Arduino servo shields available (for example from Adafruit or Renbotics). However one problem is that most support only up to six servos, and second that their accuracy is limited by Arduino’s timer frequency. So instead I looked for dedicated servo controller and found a series of Maestro boards from Pololu. I picked the Pololu Mini Maestro 12-Channel USB Servo Controller. It has many nice features including native USB connection, high resolution pulses (0.25µs) with no jitter, built-in speed and acceleration control, and even scripting capability. Another cool feature is that besides servo control, each channel can be configured as either general input or output. So far I’m using seven channels so I still have five available to connect some sensors (for example distance sensor mounted on gripper might be useful). And last but important factor was that they have SDK in .NET – what more I could wish for! The board itself is very small – half of the size of Tic-Tac box. I picked one for about USD $35 in this store. Perhaps another good alternative would be the Phidgets Advanced Servo 8-Motor – but it is significantly more expensive at USD $87.30. The Maestro Controller Driver and Software package includes Maestro Control Center program with lets you immediately configure the board. For each servo I first figured out their move range and set the min/max limits. I played with setting the speed an acceleration values as well. Big issue for me was that there are two servos that control position of lower arm (shoulder joint), and both have to be moved at the same time. This is where the scripting feature of Pololu board turned out very helpful. I wrote a script that synchronizes position of second servo with first one – so now I only need to move one servo and other will follow automatically. This turned out tricky because I couldn’t find simple offset mapping of the move range for each servo – I had to divide it into several sub-ranges and map each individually. The scripting language is bit assembler-like but gets the job done. And there is even a runtime debugging and stack view available. Altogether I’m very happy with the Pololu Mini Maestro Servo Controller, and with this final piece I completed the build and was able to move my arm from the Meastro Control program. The total cost of my robotic arm was: $10 laser cut parts $10 metal parts $45 servos $35 servo controller ----------------------- $100 total So here you have all the information about the hardware. In next post I’ll start talking about the software that I wrote in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. Stay tuned!

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Blogging tips for SQL Server professionals

- by jamiet

For some time now I have been intending to put some material together relating my blogging experiences since I began blogging in 2004 and that led to me submitting a session for SQLBits recently where I intended to do just that. That didn’t get enough votes to allow me to present however so instead I resolved to write a blog post about it and Simon Sabin’s recent post Blogging – how do you do it? has prompted me to get around to completing it. So, here I present a compendium of tips that I’ve picked up from authoring a fair few blog posts over the past 6 years. Feedburner Feedburner.com is a service that can consume your blog’s default RSS feed and provide another, replacement, feed that has exactly the same content. You can then supply that replacement feed on your blog site for other people to consume in their RSS readers. Why would you want to do this? Well, two reasons actually: It makes your blog portable. If you ever want to move your blog to a different URL you don’t have to tell your subscribers to move to a different feed. The feedburner feed is a pointer to your blog content rather than being a copy of it. Feedburner will collect stats telling you how many people are subscribed to your feed, which RSS readers they use, stuff like that. Here’s a sample screenshot for http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/: It also tells you what your most viewed posts are: Web stats like these are notoriously inaccurate but then again the method of measurement here is not important, what IS important is that it gives you a trustworthy ranking of your blog posts and (in my opinion) knowing which are your most popular posts is more important than knowing exactly how many views each post has had. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Feedburner provides and I recommend every new blogger to try it! Monitor subscribers using Google Reader If for some reason Feedburner is not to your taste or (more likely) you already have an established RSS feed that you do not want to change then Google provide another way in which you can monitor your readership in the shape of their online RSS reader, Google Reader. It provides, for every RSS feed, a collection of stats including the number of Google Reader users that have subscribed to that RSS feed. This is really valuable information and in fact I have been recording this statistic for mine and a number of other blogs for a few years now and as such I can produce the following chart that indicates how readership is trending for those blogs over time: [Good news for my fellow SQLBlog bloggers.] As Stephen Few readily points out, its not the numbers that are important but the trend. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) SEO (or “How do I get my blog to show up in Google”) is a massive area of expertise which I don’t want (and am unable) to cover in much detail here but there are some simple rules of thumb that will help: Tags – If your blog engine offers the ability to add tags to your blog post, use them. Invariably those tags go into the meta section of the page HTML and search engines lap that stuff up. For example, from my recent post Microsoft publish Visual Studio 2010 Database Project Guidance: Title – Search engines take notice of web page titles as well so make them specific and descriptive (e.g. “Configuring dtsConfig connection strings”) rather than esoteric and meaningless in a vain attempt to be humorous (e.g. “Last night a DJ saved my ETL batch”)! Title(2) – Make your title even more search engine friendly by mentioning high level subject areas, not dissimilar to Twitter hashtags. For example, if you look at all of my posts related to SSIS you will notice that nearly all contain the word “SSIS” in the title even if I had to shoehorn it in there by putting it in square brackets or similar. Another tip, if you ARE putting words into your titles in this artificial manner then put them at the end so that they’re not that prominent in search engine results; they’re there for the search engines to consume, not for human beings. Images – Always add titles and alternate text (ALT attribute) to images in your blog post. If you use Windows 7 or Windows Vista then you can use Live Writer (which Simon recommended) makes this easy for you. Headings – If you want to highlight section headings use heading tags (e.g. <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc…) rather than just formatting the text appropriately – again, Live makes this easy. These tags give your blog posts structure that is understood by search engines and RSS readers alike. (I believe it makes them more amenable to CSS as well – though that’s not something I know too much about). If you check the HTML source for the blog post you’re reading right now you’ll be able to scan through and see where I have used heading tags. Microsoft provide a free tool called the SEO Toolkit that will analyse your blog site (for free) and tell you what things you should change to improve SEO. Go read more and download for free at Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Did I mention that it was free? Miscellaneous Tips If you are including code in your blog post then ensure it is formatted correctly. Use SQL Server Central’s T-SQL prettifier for formatting T-SQL code. Use images and videos. Personally speaking there’s nothing I like less when reading a blog than paragraph after paragraph of text. Images make your blog more appealing which means people are more likely to read what you have written. Be original. Don’t plagiarise other people’s content and don’t simply rewrite the contents of Books Online. Every time you publish a blog post tweet a link to it. Include hashtags in your tweet that are more likely to grab people’s attention. That’s probably enough for now - I hope this blog post proves useful to someone out there. If you would appreciate a related session at a forthcoming SQLBits conference then please let me know. This will likely be my last blog post for 2010 so I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has commented on, linked to or read any of my blog posts in that time. 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting for SQL Server observers with the impending release of SQL Server code-named Denali and I promise I’ll have lots more content on that as the year progresses. Happy New Year. @Jamiet

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What to Do When Windows Won’t Boot

- by Chris Hoffman

You turn on your computer one day and Windows refuses to boot — what do you do? “Windows won’t boot” is a common symptom with a variety of causes, so you’ll need to perform some troubleshooting. Modern versions of Windows are better at recovering from this sort of thing. Where Windows XP might have stopped in its tracks when faced with this problem, modern versions of Windows will try to automatically run Startup Repair. First Things First Be sure to think about changes you’ve made recently — did you recently install a new hardware driver, connect a new hardware component to your computer, or open your computer’s case and do something? It’s possible the hardware driver is buggy, the new hardware is incompatible, or that you accidentally unplugged something while working inside your computer. The Computer Won’t Power On At All If your computer won’t power on at all, ensure it’s plugged into a power outlet and that the power connector isn’t loose. If it’s a desktop PC, ensure the power switch on the back of its case — on the power supply — is set to the On position. If it still won’t power on at all, it’s possible you disconnected a power cable inside its case. If you haven’t been messing around inside the case, it’s possible the power supply is dead. In this case, you’ll have to get your computer’s hardware fixed or get a new computer. Be sure to check your computer monitor — if your computer seems to power on but your screen stays black, ensure your monitor is powered on and that the cable connecting it to your computer’s case is plugged in securely at both ends. The Computer Powers On And Says No Bootable Device If your computer is powering on but you get a black screen that says something like “no bootable device” or another sort of “disk error” message, your computer can’t seem to boot from the hard drive that Windows was installed on. Enter your computer’s BIOS or UEFI firmware setup screen and check its boot order setting, ensuring that it’s set to boot from its hard drive. If the hard drive doesn’t appear in the list at all, it’s possible your hard drive has failed and can no longer be booted from. In this case, you may want to insert Windows installation or recovery media and run the Startup Repair operation. This will attempt to make Windows bootable again. For example, if something overwrote your Windows drive’s boot sector, this will repair the boot sector. If the recovery environment won’t load or doesn’t see your hard drive, you likely have a hardware problem. Be sure to check your BIOS or UEFI’s boot order first if the recovery environment won’t load. You can also attempt to manually fix Windows boot loader problems using the fixmbr and fixboot commands. Modern versions of Windows should be able to fix this problem for you with the Startup Repair wizard, so you shouldn’t actually have to run these commands yourself. Windows Freezes or Crashes During Boot If Windows seems to start booting but fails partway through, you may be facing either a software or hardware problem. If it’s a software problem, you may be able to fix it by performing a Startup Repair operation. If you can’t do this from the boot menu, insert a Windows installation disc or recovery disk and use the startup repair tool from there. If this doesn’t help at all, you may want to reinstall Windows or perform a Refresh or Reset on Windows 8. If the computer encounters errors while attempting to perform startup repair or reinstall Windows, or the reinstall process works properly and you encounter the same errors afterwards, you likely have a hardware problem. Windows Starts and Blue Screens or Freezes If Windows crashes or blue-screens on you every time it boots, you may be facing a hardware or software problem. For example, malware or a buggy driver may be loading at boot and causing the crash, or your computer’s hardware may be malfunctioning. To test this, boot your Windows computer in safe mode. In safe mode, Windows won’t load typical hardware drivers or any software that starts automatically at startup. If the computer is stable in safe mode, try uninstalling any recently installed hardware drivers, performing a system restore, and scanning for malware. If you’re lucky, one of these steps may fix your software problem and allow you to boot Windows normally. If your problem isn’t fixed, try reinstalling Windows or performing a Refresh or Reset on Windows 8. This will reset your computer back to its clean, factory-default state. If you’re still experiencing crashes, your computer likely has a hardware problem. Recover Files When Windows Won’t Boot If you have important files that will be lost and want to back them up before reinstalling Windows, you can use a Windows installer disc or Linux live media to recover the files. These run entirely from a CD, DVD, or USB drive and allow you to copy your files to another external media, such as another USB stick or an external hard drive. If you’re incapable of booting a Windows installer disc or Linux live CD, you may need to go into your BIOS or UEFI and change the boot order setting. If even this doesn’t work — or if you can boot from the devices and your computer freezes or you can’t access your hard drive — you likely have a hardware problem. You can try pulling the computer’s hard drive, inserting it into another computer, and recovering your files that way. Following these steps should fix the vast majority of Windows boot issues — at least the ones that are actually fixable. The dark cloud that always hangs over such issues is the possibility that the hard drive or another component in the computer may be failing. Image Credit: Karl-Ludwig G. Poggemann on Flickr, Tzuhsun Hsu on Flickr

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Command line mode only -- successful login only brings me back to login screen

- by seth

whenever I log in the screen goes black, I see a glimpse of terminal-esque text, and then it brings me back to the log in screen (Ubuntu 12.04). I can enter and log in via the command line. The guest account works find. I think this happened because I edited some Xorg related file trying to make an external monitor work with my laptop. I copy pasted from a forum post so I dont recall the file or what i put in the file. Can't find the forum post again and my bash history wasn't recorded from that session. I tried reinstalling Xorg and ubuntu-desktop, nvidia, resetting any configs I could find... I'm really at a loss of what to do. Here's my /.xsession-errors: /usr/sbin/lightdm-session: 11: /home/seth/.profile: -s: not found Backend : gconf Integration : true Profile : unity Adding plugins Initializing core options...done Initializing composite options...done Initializing opengl options...done Initializing decor options...done Initializing vpswitch options...done Initializing snap options...done Initializing mousepoll options...done Initializing resize options...done Initializing place options...done Initializing move options...done Initializing wall options...done Initializing grid options...done I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/home/seth/.compiz/session/108fa6ea48f8a973b9133850948930576700000017740033" Initializing session options...done Initializing gnomecompat options...done ** Message: applet now removed from the notification area Initializing animation options...done Initializing fade options...done Initializing unitymtgrabhandles options...done Initializing workarounds options...done Initializing scale options...done compiz (expo) - Warn: failed to bind image to texture Initializing expo options...done Initializing ezoom options...done ** Message: using fallback from indicator to GtkStatusIcon (compiz:1846): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_client_add_dir: assertion `gconf_valid_key (dirname, NULL)' failed Initializing unityshell options...done Nautilus-Share-Message: Called "net usershare info" but it failed: 'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare: cannot open usershare directory /var/lib/samba/usershares. Error No such file or directory Please ask your system administrator to enable user sharing. Setting Update "main_menu_key" Setting Update "run_key" Setting Update "launcher_hide_mode" Setting Update "edge_responsiveness" Setting Update "launcher_capture_mouse" ** Message: moving back from GtkStatusIcon to indicator compiz (decor) - Warn: failed to bind pixmap to texture ** (zeitgeist-datahub:2128): WARNING **: zeitgeist-datahub.vala:227: Unable to get name "org.gnome.zeitgeist.datahub" on the bus! failed to create drawable compiz (core) - Warn: glXCreatePixmap failed compiz (core) - Warn: Couldn't bind background pixmap 0x1e00001 to texture compiz (decor) - Warn: failed to bind pixmap to texture ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. compiz (decor) - Warn: failed to bind pixmap to texture compiz (decor) - Warn: failed to bind pixmap to texture ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. ** Message: No keyring secrets found for Sonic.net_356/802-11-wireless-security; asking user. [2348:2352:12678840568:ERROR:gpu_watchdog_thread.cc(231)] The GPU process hung. Terminating after 10000 ms. [2256:2283:14450711755:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14450726175:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14450746028:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14464521342:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14464541249:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14690775186:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14690795231:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14704543843:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14704566717:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14766138587:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14857232694:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14930901403:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14930965542:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14944566814:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:14944592215:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15170929788:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15170947382:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15184585015:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15184605475:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15366189036:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15410983381:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15411569689:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15431632431:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15431674438:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15457304356:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15656020938:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15656042383:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15674651268:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:15674671786:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16052544301:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16057387653:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157122849:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157123851:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157125473:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157126544:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 [2256:2283:16157129682:ERROR:ssl_client_socket_nss.cc(1542)] handshake with server mail.google.com:443 failed; NSS error code -5938, net_error -107 If anyone can help me out, I'd be forever grateful

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LightDM will not start after stopping it

- by Sweeters

I am running Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot", and in trying to install the nvidia CUDA developer drivers I switched to a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F5) and stopped lightdm (installation required that no X server instance be running) through sudo service lightdm stop. Re-starting lightdm with sudo service lightdm start did not work: A couple of * Starting [...] lines where displayed, but the process hanged. (I do not remember at which point, but I think it was * Starting System V runlevel compatibility. I manually rebooted my laptop, and ever since booting seems to hang, usually around the * Starting anac(h)ronistic cron [OK] log line (not consistently at that point, though). From that point on, I seem to be able to interact with my system only through a tty session (Ctrl-Alt-F1). I've tried purging and reinstalling both lightdm and gdm, as well as selecting both as the default display managers (through sudo dpkg-reconfigure [lightdm / gdm] or by manually editing /etc/X11/default-display-manager) through both apt-get and aptitude (that shouldn't make a difference anyway) after updating the packages, but the problem persists. Some of the responses I'm getting are the following: After running sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm (but not ... gdm) I get the following message: dpkg-maintscript-helper:warning: environment variable DPKG_MATINSCRIPT_NAME missing dpkg-maintscript-helper:warning: environment variable DPKG_MATINSCRIPT_PACKAGE missing After trying sudo service lightdm start or sudo start lightdm I get to see the boot loading screen again but nothing changes. If I go back to the tty shell I see lightdm start/running, process <num> but ps -e | grep lightdm gives no output. After trying sudo service gdm start or sudo starg gdm I get the gdm start/running, process <num> message, and gdm-binary is supposedly an active process, but all that happens is that the screen blinks a couple of times and nothing else. Other candidate solutions that I'd found on the web included running startx but when I try that I get an error output [...] Fatal server error: no screens found [...]. Moreover, I made sure that lightdm-gtk-greeter is installed but that did not help either. Please excuse my not including complete outputs/logs; I am writing this post from another computer and it's hard to manually copy the complete logs. Also, I've seen several posts that had to do with similar problems, but either there was no fix, or the one suggested did not work for me. In closing: Please help! I very much hope to avoid re-installing Ubuntu from scratch! :) Alex @mosi I did not manage to fix the NVIDIA kernel driver as per your instructions. I should perhaps mention that I'm on a Dell XPS15 laptop with an NVIDIA Optimus graphics card, and that I have bumblebee installed (which installs nvidia drivers during its installation, I believe). Issuing the mentioned commands I get the following: ~$uname -r 3.0.0-12-generic ~$lsmod | grep -i nvidia nvidia 11713772 0 ~$dmesg | grep -i nvidia [ 8.980041] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel. [ 9.354860] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: power state changed by ACPI to D0 [ 9.354864] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: power state changed by ACPI to D0 [ 9.354868] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: enabling device (0006 -> 0007) [ 9.354873] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [ 9.354879] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [ 9.355052] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 280.13 Wed Jul 27 16:53:56 PDT 2011 Also, running aptitude search nvidia gives me the following: p nvidia-173 - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-173-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file p nvidia-173-updates - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-173-updates-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file p nvidia-96 - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-96-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file p nvidia-96-updates - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-96-updates-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file p nvidia-cg-toolkit - Cg Toolkit - GPU Shader Authoring Language p nvidia-common - Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers i nvidia-current - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-current-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file c nvidia-current-updates - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module a p nvidia-current-updates-dev - NVIDIA binary Xorg driver development file i nvidia-settings - Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics dr p nvidia-settings-updates - Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics dr v nvidia-va-driver - v nvidia-va-driver - I've tried manually installing (sudo aptitude install <package>) packages nvidia-common and nvidia-settings-updates but to no avail. For example, sudo aptitude install nvidia-settings-updates returns the following log: Reading package lists... Building dependency tree... Reading state information... Reading extended state information... Initializing package states... Writing extended state information... No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed. 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 83 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used. Writing extended state information... Reading package lists... Building dependency tree... Reading state information... Reading extended state information... Initializing package states... Writing extended state information... The same happens with the Linux headers (i.e. I cannot seem to be able to install linux-headers-3.0.0-12-generic). The output of aptitude search linux-headers is as follows: v linux-headers - v linux-headers - v linux-headers-2.6 - i linux-headers-2.6.38-11 - Header files related to Linux kernel versi i linux-headers-2.6.38-11-generic - Linux kernel headers for version 2.6.38 on i A linux-headers-2.6.38-8 - Header files related to Linux kernel versi i A linux-headers-2.6.38-8-generic - Linux kernel headers for version 2.6.38 on v linux-headers-3 - v linux-headers-3.0 - v linux-headers-3.0 - i A linux-headers-3.0.0-12 - Header files related to Linux kernel versi p linux-headers-3.0.0-12-generic - Linux kernel headers for version 3.0.0 on p linux-headers-3.0.0-12-generic- - Linux kernel headers for version 3.0.0 on p linux-headers-3.0.0-12-server - Linux kernel headers for version 3.0.0 on p linux-headers-3.0.0-12-virtual - Linux kernel headers for version 3.0.0 on p linux-headers-generic - Generic Linux kernel headers p linux-headers-generic-pae - Generic Linux kernel headers v linux-headers-lbm - v linux-headers-lbm - v linux-headers-lbm-2.6 - v linux-headers-lbm-2.6 - p linux-headers-lbm-3.0.0-12-gene - Header files related to linux-backports-mo p linux-headers-lbm-3.0.0-12-gene - Header files related to linux-backports-mo p linux-headers-lbm-3.0.0-12-serv - Header files related to linux-backports-mo p linux-headers-server - Linux kernel headers on Server Equipment. p linux-headers-virtual - Linux kernel headers for virtual machines @heartsmagic I did try purging and reinstalling any nvidia driver packages, but it did not seem to make a difference, My xorg.conf file contains the following: # nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig # nvidia-xconfig: version 280.13 ([email protected]) Wed Jul 27 17:15:58 PDT 2011 Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" EndSection Section "Files" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Keyboard0" Driver "kbd" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Unknown" HorizSync 28.0 - 33.0 VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection

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