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• Wisdom of merging 100s of Oracle instances into one instance

  - by hoytster

  Our application runs on the web, is mostly an inquiry tool, does some transactions. We host the Oracle database. The app has always had a different instance of Oracle for each customer. A customer is a company which pays us to provide our service to the company's employees, typically 10,000-25,000 employees per customer. We do a major release every few years, and migrating to that new release is challenging: we might have a team at the customer site for a couple weeks, explaining new functionality and setting up the driving data to suit that customer. We're considering going multi-client, putting all our customers into a single shared Oracle 11g instance on a big honkin' Windows Server 2008 server -- in order to reduce costs. I'm wondering if that's advisable. There are some advantages to having separate instances for each customer. Tell me if these are bogus, please. In my rough guess about decreasing importance: Our customers MyCorp and YourCo can be migrated separately when breaking changes are made to the schema. (With multi-client, we'd be migrating 300+ customers overnight!?!) MyCorp's data can be easily backed up and (!!!) restored, without affecting other customers. MyCorp's data is securely separated from their competitor YourCo's data, without depending on developers to get the code right and/or DBAs getting the configuration right. Performance is better because the database is smaller (5,000 vs 2,000,000 rows in ~50 tables). If MyCorp's offices are (mostly) in just one region, then the MyCorp's instance can be geographically co-located there, so network lag doesn't hurt performance. We can provide better service to global clients, for the same reason. In MyCorp wants to take their database in-house, then we can easily export their instance, to get MyCorp their data. Load-balancing is easier because instances can be placed on different servers (this is with a web farm). When a DEV or QA instance is needed, it's easier to clone the real instance and anonymize the data, because there's much less data. Because they're small enough, developers can have their own instance running locally, so they can work on code while waiting at the airport and while in-flight, without fighting VPN hassles. Q1: What are other advantages of separate instances? We are contemplating changing the database schema and merging all of our customers into one Oracle instance, running on one hefty server. Here are advantages of the multi-client instance approach, most important first (my WAG). Please snipe if these are bogus: Less work for the DBAs, since they only need to maintain one instance instead of hundreds. Less DBA work translates to cheaper, our main motive for this change. With just one instance, the DBAs can do a better job of optimizing performance. They'll have time to add appropriate indexes and review our SQL. It will be easier for developers to debug & enhance the application, because there is only one schema and one app (there might be dozens of schema versions if there are hundreds of instances, with a different version of the app for each version of the schema). This reduces costs too. The alternative is having to start every debug session with (1) What version is this customer running and (2) Let's struggle to recreate the corresponding development environment, code and database. (We need a Virtual Machine that includes the code AND database instance for each patch and release!) Licensing Oracle is cheaper because it's priced per server irrespective of heft (or something -- I don't know anything about the subject). The database becomes a viable persistent store for web session data, because there is just one instance. Some database operations are easier with one multi-client instance, like finding a participant when they're hazy about which customer they (or their spouse, maybe) works for: all the names are in one table. Reporting across customers is straightforward. Q2: What are other advantages of having multiple clients in one instance? Q3: Which approach do you think is better (why)? Instance per customer, or all customers in one instance? I'm concerned that having one multi-client instance makes migration near-impossible, and that's a deal killer... ... unless there is a compromise solution like having two multi-client instances, the old and the new. In that case case, we would design cross-instance solutions for finding participants, reporting, etc. so customers could go from one multi-client instance to the next without anything breaking. THANKS SO MUCH for your collective advice! This issue is beyond me -- but not beyond the collective you. :) Hoytster

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• [ebp + 6] instead of +8 in a JIT compiler

  - by David Titarenco

  I'm implementing a simplistic JIT compiler in a VM I'm writing for fun (mostly to learn more about language design) and I'm getting some weird behavior, maybe someone can tell me why. First I define a JIT "prototype" both for C and C++: #ifdef __cplusplus typedef void* (*_JIT_METHOD) (...); #else typedef (*_JIT_METHOD) (); #endif I have a compile() function that will compile stuff into ASM and stick it somewhere in memory: void* compile (void* something) { // grab some memory unsigned char* buffer = (unsigned char*) malloc (1024); // xor eax, eax // inc eax // inc eax // inc eax // ret -> eax should be 3 /* WORKS! buffer[0] = 0x67; buffer[1] = 0x31; buffer[2] = 0xC0; buffer[3] = 0x67; buffer[4] = 0x40; buffer[5] = 0x67; buffer[6] = 0x40; buffer[7] = 0x67; buffer[8] = 0x40; buffer[9] = 0xC3; */ // xor eax, eax // mov eax, 9 // ret 4 -> eax should be 9 /* WORKS! buffer[0] = 0x67; buffer[1] = 0x31; buffer[2] = 0xC0; buffer[3] = 0x67; buffer[4] = 0xB8; buffer[5] = 0x09; buffer[6] = 0x00; buffer[7] = 0x00; buffer[8] = 0x00; buffer[9] = 0xC3; */ // push ebp // mov ebp, esp // mov eax, [ebp + 6] ; wtf? shouldn't this be [ebp + 8]!? // mov esp, ebp // pop ebp // ret -> eax should be the first value sent to the function /* WORKS! */ buffer[0] = 0x66; buffer[1] = 0x55; buffer[2] = 0x66; buffer[3] = 0x89; buffer[4] = 0xE5; buffer[5] = 0x66; buffer[6] = 0x66; buffer[7] = 0x8B; buffer[8] = 0x45; buffer[9] = 0x06; buffer[10] = 0x66; buffer[11] = 0x89; buffer[12] = 0xEC; buffer[13] = 0x66; buffer[14] = 0x5D; buffer[15] = 0xC3; // mov eax, 5 // add eax, ecx // ret -> eax should be 50 /* WORKS! buffer[0] = 0x67; buffer[1] = 0xB8; buffer[2] = 0x05; buffer[3] = 0x00; buffer[4] = 0x00; buffer[5] = 0x00; buffer[6] = 0x66; buffer[7] = 0x01; buffer[8] = 0xC8; buffer[9] = 0xC3; */ return buffer; } And finally I have the main chunk of the program: void main (int argc, char **args) { DWORD oldProtect = (DWORD) NULL; int i = 667, j = 1, k = 5, l = 0; // generate some arbitrary function _JIT_METHOD someFunc = (_JIT_METHOD) compile(NULL); // windows only #if defined _WIN64 || defined _WIN32 // set memory permissions and flush CPU code cache VirtualProtect(someFunc,1024,PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE, &oldProtect); FlushInstructionCache(GetCurrentProcess(), someFunc, 1024); #endif // this asm just for some debugging/testing purposes __asm mov ecx, i // run compiled function (from wherever *someFunc is pointing to) l = (int)someFunc(i, k); // did it work? printf("result: %d", l); free (someFunc); _getch(); } As you can see, the compile() function has a couple of tests I ran to make sure I get expected results, and pretty much everything works but I have a question... On most tutorials or documentation resources, to get the first value of a function passed (in the case of ints) you do [ebp+8], the second [ebp+12] and so forth. For some reason, I have to do [ebp+6] then [ebp+10] and so forth. Could anyone tell me why?

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• Implementation question involving implementing an interface

  - by Vivin Paliath

  I'm writing a set of collection classes for different types of Trees. I'm doing this as a learning exercise and I'm also hoping it turns out to be something useful. I really want to do this the right way and so I've been reading Effective Java and I've also been looking at the way Joshua Bloch implemented the collection classes by looking at the source. I seem to have a fair idea of what is being done, but I still have a few things to sort out. I have a Node<T> interface and an AbstractNode<T> class that implements the Node interface. I then created a GenericNode<T> (a node that can have 0 to n children, and that is part of an n-ary tree) class that extends AbstractNode<T> and implements Node<T>. This part was easy. Next, I created a Tree<T> interface and an AbstractTree<T> class that implements the Tree<T> interface. After that, I started writing a GenericTree<T> class that extends AbstractTree<T> and implements Tree<T>. This is where I started having problems. As far as the design is concerned, a GenericTree<T> can only consist of nodes of type GenericTreeNode<T>. This includes the root. In my Tree<T> interface I have: public interface Tree<T> { void setRoot(Node<T> root); Node<T> getRoot(); List<Node<T>> postOrder(); ... rest omitted ... } And, AbstractTree<T> implements this interface: public abstract class AbstractTree<T> implements Tree<T> { protected Node<T> root; protected AbstractTree() { } protected AbstractTree(Node<T> root) { this.root = root; } public void setRoot(Node<T> root) { this.root = root; } public Node<T> getRoot() { return this.root; } ... rest omitted ... } In GenericTree<T>, I can have: public GenericTree(Node<T> root) { super(root); } But what this means is that you can create a generic tree using any subtype of Node<T>. You can also set the root of a tree to any subtype of Node<T>. I want to be able to restrict the type of the node to the type of the tree that it can represent. To fix this, I can do this: public GenericTree(GenericNode<T> root) { super(root); } However, setRoot still accepts a parameter of type Node<T>. Which means a user can still create a tree with the wrong type of root node. How do I enforce this constraint? The only way I can think of doing is either: Do an instanceof which limits the check to runtime. I'm not a huge fan of this. Remove setRoot from the interface and have the base class implement this method. This means that it is not part of the contract and anyone who wants to make a new type of tree needs to remember to implement this method. Is there a better way? The second question I have concerns the return type of postOrder which is List<Node<T>>. This means that if a user is operating on a GenericTree<T> object and calls postOrder, he or she receives a list that consists of Node<T> objects. This means when iterating through (using a foreach construct) they would have perform an explicit cast to GenericNode<T> if they want to use methods that are only defined in that class. I don't like having to place this burden on the user. What are my options in this case? I can only think of removing the method from the interface and have the subclass implement this method making sure that it returns a list of appropriate subtype of Node<T>. However, this once again removes it from the contract and it's anyone who wants to create a new type of tree has to remember to implement this method. Is there a better way?

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• Cascading updates with business key equality: Hibernate best practices?

  - by Traphicone

  I'm new to Hibernate, and while there are literally tons of examples to look at, there seems to be so much flexibility here that it's sometimes very hard to narrow all the options down the best way of doing things. I've been working on a project for a little while now, and despite reading through a lot of books, articles, and forums, I'm still left with a bit of a head scratcher. Any veteran advice would be very appreciated. So, I have a model involving two classes with a one-to-many relationship from parent to child. Each class has a surrogate primary key and a uniquely constrained composite business key. <class name="Container"> <id name="id" type="java.lang.Long"> <generator class="identity"/> </id> <properties name="containerBusinessKey" unique="true" update="false"> <property name="name" not-null="true"/> <property name="owner" not-null="true"/> </properties> <set name="items" inverse="true" cascade="all-delete-orphan"> <key column="container" not-null="true"/> <one-to-many class="Item"/> </set> </class> <class name="Item"> <id name="id" type="java.lang.Long"> <generator class="identity"/> </id> <properties name="itemBusinessKey" unique="true" update="false"> <property name="type" not-null="true"/> <property name="color" not-null="true"/> </properties> <many-to-one name="container" not-null="true" update="false" class="Container"/> </class> The beans behind these mappings are as boring as you can possibly imagine--nothing fancy going on. With that in mind, consider the following code: Container c = new Container("Things", "Me"); c.addItem(new Item("String", "Blue")); c.addItem(new Item("Wax", "Red")); Transaction t = session.beginTransaction(); session.saveOrUpdate(c); t.commit(); Everything works fine the first time, and both the Container and its Items are persisted. If the above code block is executed again, however, Hibernate throws a ConstraintViolationException--duplicate values for the "name" and "owner" columns. Because the new Container instance has a null identifier, Hibernate assumes it is an unsaved transient instance. This is expected but not desired. Since the persistent and transient Container objects have the same business key values, what we really want is to issue an update. It is easy enough to convince Hibernate that our new Container instance is the same as our old one. With a quick query we can get the identifier of the Container we'd like to update, and set our transient object's identifier to match. Container c = new Container("Things", "Me"); c.addItem(new Item("String", "Blue")); c.addItem(new Item("Wax", "Red")); Query query = session.createSQLQuery("SELECT id FROM Container" + "WHERE name = ? AND owner = ?"); query.setString(0, c.getName()); query.setString(1, c.getOwner()); BigInteger id = (BigInteger)query.uniqueResult(); if (id != null) { c.setId(id.longValue()); } Transaction t = session.beginTransaction(); session.saveOrUpdate(c); t.commit(); This almost satisfies Hibernate, but because the one-to-many relationship from Container to Item cascades, the same ConstraintViolationException is also thrown for the child Item objects. My question is: what is the best practice in this situation? It is highly recommended to use surrogate primary keys, and it is also recommended to use business key equality. When you put these two recommendations in to practice together, however, two of the greatest conveniences of Hibernate--saveOrUpdate and cascading operations--seem to be rendered almost completely useless. As I see it, I have only two options: Manually fetch and set the identifier for each object in the mapping. This clearly works, but for even a moderately sized schema this is a lot of extra work which it seems Hibernate could easily be doing. Write a custom interceptor to fetch and set object identifiers on each operation. This looks cleaner than the first option but is rather heavy-handed, and it seems wrong to me that you should be expected to write a plug-in which overrides Hibernate's default behavior for a mapping which follows the recommended design. Is there a better way? Am I making completely the wrong assumptions? I'm hoping that I'm just missing something. Thanks.

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• Having trouble on mouse over tabs

  - by user225269

  I downloaded a webpage template from the internet because I don't know how to design webpage on photoshop. This was the one I downloaded: http://www.freewebtemplates.com/download/templates/9839 And modified it. And I have this code for mouse over tabs from dynamic drive. But doesn't seem to be working with the template that I downloaded. Here is my current code: <script src="mouseovertabs.js" type="text/javascript"> </script> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Designed by Web Page Templates</title> <meta name="keywords" content="" /> <meta name="description" content="" /> <link href="default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <table border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="bg1"> <tr> <td class="text1" style="height: 50px;">xd627 information management system</td> </tr> <tr> <div id="mytabsmenu" class="tabsmenuclass"> <td class="bg5"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="height: 62px; padding-top: 15px;"> <tr align="center"> <td><ul><li><a href="index.html" class="link1">Homepage</a></li></td> <td><li><a href="RegStuds.php" class="link1">Database</a></li></td> <td><li><a href="#" class="link1">About</a></li> </ul></td> <a href="submenucontents.htm" style="visibility:hidden">Sub Menu contents</a> <div id="mysubmenuarea" class="tabsmenucontentclass"> <!--1st link within submenu container should point to the external submenu contents file--> <a href="submenucontents.htm" style="visibility:hidden">Sub Menu contents</a> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> //mouseovertabsmenu.init("tabs_container_id", "submenu_container_id", "bool_hidecontentsmouseout") mouseovertabsmenu.init("mytabsmenu", "mysubmenuarea", true) </script> </div> What might be wrong here,its working perfectly with my previous one, but with no layout at all: <script src="mouseovertabs.js" type="text/javascript"> /*********************************************** * Mouseover Tabs Menu- (c) Dynamic Drive DHTML code library (www.dynamicdrive.com) * This notice MUST stay intact for legal use * Visit Dynamic Drive at http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ for this script and 100s more ***********************************************/ </script> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Untitled Document</title> </head> <body> <div id="mytabsmenu" class="tabsmenuclass"> <ul> <li><a href="" rel="gotsubmenu[selected]">Database Manipulation</a></li> <li><a href="" rel="gotsubmenu" >Register User</a></li> <li><a href="loginform2.php" rel="gotsubmenu" >Logout</a></li> <li><a href=""></a></li> </ul> </div> <div id="mysubmenuarea" class="tabsmenucontentclass"> <!--1st link within submenu container should point to the external submenu contents file--> <a href="submenucontents.htm" style="visibility:hidden">Sub Menu contents</a> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> //mouseovertabsmenu.init("tabs_container_id", "submenu_container_id", "bool_hidecontentsmouseout") mouseovertabsmenu.init("mytabsmenu", "mysubmenuarea", true) </script> </body> </html>

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• jQuery templates - Load another template within a template (composite)

  - by Saxman

  I'm following this post by Dave Ward (http://encosia.com/2010/12/02/jquery-templates-composite-rendering-and-remote-loading/) to load a composite templates for a Blog, where I have a total of 3 small templates (all in one file) for a blog post. In the template file, I have these 3 templates: blogTemplate, where I render the "postTemplate" Inside the "postTemplate", I would like to render another template that displays comments, I called this "commentsTemplate" the "commentsTemplate" Here's the structure of my json data: blog Title Content PostedDate Comments (a collection of comments) CommentContents CommentedBy CommentedDate For now, I was able to render the Post content using the code below: Javascript $(document).ready(function () { $.get('/GetPost', function (data) { $.get('/Content/Templates/_postWithComments.tmpl.htm', function (templates) { $('body').append(templates); $('#blogTemplate').tmpl(data).appendTo('#blogPost'); }); }); }); Templates <!--Blog Container Templates--> <script id="blogTemplate" type="x-jquery-tmpl"> <div class="latestPost"> {{tmpl() '#postTemplate'}} </div> </script> <!--Post Item Container--> <script id="postTemplate" type="x-jquery-tmpl"> <h2> ${Title}</h2> <div class="entryHead"> Posted in <a class="category" rel="#">Design</a> on ${PostedDateString} <a class="comments" rel="#">${NumberOfComments} Comments</a></div> ${Content} <div class="tags"> {{if Tags.length}} <strong>Tags:</strong> {{each(i, tag) Tags}} <a class="tag" href="/blog/tags/{{= tag.Name}}"> {{= tag.Name}}</a> {{/each}} <a class="share" rel="#"><strong>TELL A FRIEND</strong></a> <a class="share twitter" rel="#">Twitter</a> <a class="share facebook" rel="#">Facebook</a> {{/if}} </div> <!-- close .tags --> <!-- end Entry 01 --> {{if Comments.length}} {{each(i, comment) Comments}} {{tmpl() '#commentTemplate'}} {{/each}} {{/if}} <div class="lineHor"> </div> </script> <!--Comment Items Container--> <script id="commentTemplate" type="x-jquery-tmpl"> <h4> Comments</h4> &nbsp; <!-- COMMENT --> <div id="authorComment1"> <div id="gravatar1" class="grid_2"> <!--<img src="images/gravatar.png" alt="" />--> </div> <!-- close #gravatar --> <div id="commentText1"> <span class="replyHead">by<a class="author" rel="#">${= comment.CommentedBy}</a>on today</span> <p> {{= comment.CommentContents}}</p> </div> <!-- close #commentText --> <div id="quote1"> <a class="quote" rel="#"><strong>Quote this Comment</strong></a> </div> <!-- close #quote --> </div> <!-- close #authorComment --> <!-- END COMMENT --> </script> Where I'm having problem is at the {{each(i, comment) Comments}} {{tmpl() '#commentTemplate'}} {{/each}} Update - Example Json data when GetPost method is called { Id: 1, Title: "Test Blog", Content: "This is a test post asdf asdf asdf asdf asdf", PostedDateString: "2010-12-20", - Comments: [ - { Id: 1, PostId: 1, CommentContents: "Test comments # 1, asdf asdf asdf", PostedBy: "User 1", CommentedDate: "2010-12-20" }, - { Id: 2, PostId: 1, CommentContents: "Test comments # 2, ghjk gjjk gjkk", PostedBy: "User 2", CommentedDate: "2010-12-21" } ] } I've tried passing in {{tmpl(comment) ..., {{tmpl(Comments) ..., or leave {{tmpl() ... but none seems to work. I don't know how to iterate over the Comments collection and pass that object into the commentsTemplate. Any suggestions? Thank you very much.

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• PHP - not returning a count number for filled array...

  - by Phil Jackson

  Morning, this is eating me alive so Im hoping it's not something stupid, lol. $arrg = array(); if( str_word_count( $str ) > 1 ) { $input_arr = explode(' ', $str); die(print_r($input_arr)); $count = count($input_arr); die($count); above is part of a function. when i run i get; > Array ( > [0] => luke > [1] => snowden > [2] => create > [3] => develop > [4] => web > [5] => applications > [6] => sites > [7] => alse > [8] => dab > [9] => hand > [10] => design > [11] => love > [12] => helping > [13] => business > [14] => thrive > [15] => latest > [16] => industry > [17] => developer > [18] => act > [19] => designs > [20] => php > [21] => mysql > [22] => jquery > [23] => ajax > [24] => xhtml > [25] => css > [26] => de > [27] => montfont > [28] => award > [29] => advanced > [30] => programming > [31] => taught > [32] => development > [33] => years > [34] => experience > [35] => topic > [36] => fully > [37] => qualified > [38] => electrician > [39] => city > [40] => amp > [41] => guilds > [42] => level ) Which im expecting; run this however and nothing is returned!?!?! $arrg = array(); if( str_word_count( $str ) > 1 ) { $input_arr = explode(' ', $str); //die(print_r($input_arr)); $count = count($input_arr); die($count); can anyone see anything that my eyes cant?? regards, Phil

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• How to replace a div container with javascript

  - by Kovu

  Hi, I must have a little design in javascript. I have a menu with 5 entrys and only 1 HTML-page. So I will have a content-div and enabled and disabled different static content in it, each menu-entry is another content. I tried with 5 divs and disable 4 of them and enable 1, but the element under each other means every div is like a - enabled or not, so the "content" is moving then. Hope its understandable. Here is the code so far: <html><head><title>Des Einsame-Katerchen's kleine Homepage</title> <style type="text/css"> a:link { font-weight:bold; color:blue; text-decoration:none; } a:visited { font-weight:bold; color:blue; text-decoration:none; } a:focus { font-weight:bold; color:blue; text-decoration:none; } a:hover { font-weight:bold; color:blue; text-decoration:line-through; } a:active { font-weight:bold; color:blue; text-decoration:none; } h1:focus { background-color:red; } h1:hover { background-color:silver; } h1:active { background-color:green; } </style> <script> function an(id) { document.getElementById('start').style.visibility = 'hidden'; document.getElementById('start').style.height = '0px'; document.getElementById('me').style.visibility = 'hidden'; document.getElementById('me').style.height = '0px'; document.getElementById('rpg').style.visibility = 'hidden'; document.getElementById('rpg').style.height = '0px'; document.getElementById('musik').style.visibility = 'hidden'; document.getElementById('musik').style.height = '0px'; document.getElementById('screens').style.visibility = 'hidden'; document.getElementById('screens').style.height = '0px'; document.getElementById(id).style.visibility = 'visible'; document.getElementById(id).style.height = '500px'; } </script> </head> <body style=" " > <div style="width=100%; text-align:center; border: 1px red solid; height:40px;"> <div style="float:left; width:100px;"><a href="#" OnClick="an('start')" >Startseite</a></div> <div style="float:left; width:100px;"><a href="#" OnClick="an('me')" >Über mich</a></div> <div style="float:left; width:100px;"><a href="#" OnClick="an('rpg')" >RPG-Chars</a></div> <div style="float:left; width:100px;"><a href="#" OnClick="an('musik')" >Musik</a></div> <div style="float:left; width:150px;"><a href="#" OnClick="an('screens')" >Knuddels-Screens</a></div> </div> <br> <div id="start" style="border:1px red solid; width:500px; height:500px; overflow: visible; " > a </div> <div id="me" style="border:1px red solid; width:500px; height:0px; overflow: visible; visibility: hidden; " > b </div> <div id="rpg" style="border:1px red solid; width:500px; height:0px; overflow: visible; visibility: hidden; " > c </div> <div id="musik" style="border:1px red solid; width:500px; height:0px; overflow: visible; visibility: hidden; " > d </div> <div id="screens" style="border:1px red solid; width:500px; height:0px; overflow: visible; visibility: hidden; " > e </div> </body>

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• New hire expectations... (Am I being unreasonable?)

  - by user295841

  I work for a very small custom software shop. We currently consist me and my boss. My boss is an old FoxPro DOS developer and OOP makes him uncomfortable. He is planning on taking a back seat in the next few years to hopefully enjoy a “partial retirement”. I will be taking over the day to day operations and we are now desperately looking for more help. We tried Monster.com, Dice.com, and others a few years ago when we started our search. We had no success. We have tried outsourcing overseas (total disaster), hiring kids right out of college (mostly a disaster but that’s where I came from), interns (good for them, not so good for us) and hiring laid off “experienced” developers (there was a reason they were laid off). I have heard hiring practices discussed on podcasts, blogs, etc... and have tried a few. The “Fizz Buzz” test was a good one. One kid looked physically ill before he finally gave up. I think my problem is that I have grown so much as a developer since I started here that I now have a high standard. I hear/read very intelligent people podcasts and blogs and I know that there are lots of people out there that can do the job. I don’t want to settle for less than a “good” developer. Perhaps my expectations are unreasonable. I expect any good developer (entry level or experienced) to be billable (at least paying their own wage) in under one month. I expect any good developer to be able to be productive (at least dangerous) in any language or technology with only a few days of research/training. I expect any good developer to be able to take a project from initial customer request to completion with little or no help from others. Am I being unreasonable? What constitutes a valuable developer? What should be expected of an entry level developer? What should be expected of an experienced developer? I realize that everyone is different but there has to be some sort of expectations standard, right? I have been giving the test project below to potential canidates to weed them out. Good idea? Too much? Too little? Please let me know what you think. Thanks. Project ID: T00001 Description: Order Entry System Deadline: 1 Week Scope The scope of this project is to develop a fully function order entry system. Screen/Form design must be user friendly and promote efficient data entry and modification. User experience (Navigation, Screen/Form layouts, Look and Feel…) is at the developer’s discretion. System may be developed using any technologies that conform to the technical and system requirements. Deliverables Complete source code Database setup instructions (Scripts or restorable backup) Application installation instructions (Installer or installation procedure) Any necessary documentation Technical Requirements Server Platform – Windows XP / Windows Server 2003 / SBS Client Platform – Windows XP Web Browser (If applicable) – IE 8 Database – At developer’s discretion (Must be a relational SQL database.) Language – At developer’s discretion All data must be normalized. (+) All data must maintain referential integrity. (++) All data must be indexed for optimal performance. System must handle concurrency. System Requirements Customer Maintenance Customer records must have unique ID. Customer data will include Name, Address, Phone, etc. User must be able to perform all CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations on the Customer table. User must be able to enter a specific Customer ID to edit. User must be able to pull up a sortable/queryable search grid/utility to find a customer to edit. Validation must be performed prior to database commit. Customer record cannot be deleted if the customer has an order in the system. (++) Inventory Maintenance Part records must have unique ID. Part data will include Description, Price, UOM (Unit of Measure), etc. User must be able to perform all CRUD operations on the part table. User must be able to enter a specific Part ID to edit. User must be able to pull up a sortable/queryable search grid/utility to find a part to edit. Validation must be performed prior to database commit. Part record cannot be deleted if the part has been used in an order. (++) Order Entry Order records must have a unique auto-incrementing key (Order Number). Order data must be split into a header/detail structure. (+) Order can contain an infinite number of detail records. Order header data will include Order Number, Customer ID (++), Order Date, Order Status (Open/Closed), etc. Order detail data will include Part Number (++), Quantity, Price, etc. User must be able to perform all CRUD operations on the order tables. User must be able to enter a specific Order Number to edit. User must be able to pull up a sortable/queryable search grid/utility to find an order to edit. User must be able to print an order form from within the order entry form. Validation must be performed prior to database commit. Reports Customer Listing – All Customers in the system. Inventory Listing – All parts in the system. Open Order Listing – All open orders in system. Customer Order Listing – All orders for specific customer. All reports must include sorts and filter functions where applicable. Ex. Customer Listing by range of Customer IDs. Open Order Listing by date range.

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• Netbeans Java SE GUI Builder: private initComponents() problem

  - by maSnun

  When I build a GUI for my Java SE app with Netbeans GUI builder, it puts all the codes in the initComponents() method which is private. I could not change it to public. So, all the components are accessible only to the class containing the UI. I want to access those components from another class so that I can write custom event handlers and everything. Most importantly I want to separate my GUI code and non-GUI from each other. I can copy paste the GUI code and later make them public by hand to achieve what I want. But thats a pain. I have to handcraft a portion whenever I need to re-design the UI. What I tried to do: I used the variable identifier to make the text box public. Now how can I access the text box from the Main class? I think I need the component generated in a public method as well. I am new to Java. Any helps? Here's the sample classes: The UI (uiFrame.java) /* * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates * and open the template in the editor. */ /* * uiFrame.java * * Created on Jun 3, 2010, 9:33:15 PM */ package barcode; import java.util.logging.Level; import java.util.logging.Logger; import javax.swing.JFileChooser; import javax.swing.UIManager; import javax.swing.UnsupportedLookAndFeelException; import net.sourceforge.barbecue.output.OutputException; /** * * @author masnun */ public class uiFrame extends javax.swing.JFrame { /** Creates new form uiFrame */ public uiFrame() { try { try { // Set cross-platform Java L&F (also called "Metal") UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName()); } catch (ClassNotFoundException ex) { Logger.getLogger(uiFrame.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } catch (InstantiationException ex) { Logger.getLogger(uiFrame.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } catch (IllegalAccessException ex) { Logger.getLogger(uiFrame.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } catch (UnsupportedLookAndFeelException ex) { Logger.getLogger(uiFrame.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } } finally { } initComponents(); } /** This method is called from within the constructor to * initialize the form. * WARNING: Do NOT modify this code. The content of this method is * always regenerated by the Form Editor. */ @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Generated Code"> private void initComponents() { label1 = new javax.swing.JLabel(); textBox = new javax.swing.JTextField(); saveButton = new javax.swing.JButton(); setDefaultCloseOperation(javax.swing.WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); label1.setFont(label1.getFont().deriveFont(label1.getFont().getStyle() | java.awt.Font.BOLD, 13)); label1.setText("Type a text:"); label1.setName("label1"); // NOI18N saveButton.setText("Save"); saveButton.addMouseListener(new java.awt.event.MouseAdapter() { public void mousePressed(java.awt.event.MouseEvent evt) { saveButtonMousePressed(evt); } }); javax.swing.GroupLayout layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(getContentPane()); getContentPane().setLayout(layout); layout.setHorizontalGroup( layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addGap(56, 56, 56) .addComponent(textBox, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, 272, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addContainerGap(72, Short.MAX_VALUE)) .addGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.TRAILING, layout.createSequentialGroup() .addContainerGap(154, Short.MAX_VALUE) .addComponent(saveButton, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, 102, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addGap(144, 144, 144)) .addGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.TRAILING, layout.createSequentialGroup() .addContainerGap(140, Short.MAX_VALUE) .addComponent(label1, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, 133, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addGap(127, 127, 127)) ); layout.setVerticalGroup( layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(layout.createSequentialGroup() .addContainerGap() .addComponent(label1, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, 25, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addPreferredGap(javax.swing.LayoutStyle.ComponentPlacement.RELATED) .addComponent(textBox, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.DEFAULT_SIZE, javax.swing.GroupLayout.PREFERRED_SIZE) .addPreferredGap(javax.swing.LayoutStyle.ComponentPlacement.UNRELATED) .addComponent(saveButton) .addContainerGap(193, Short.MAX_VALUE)) ); pack(); }// </editor-fold> @SuppressWarnings("static-access") private void saveButtonMousePressed(java.awt.event.MouseEvent evt) { JFileChooser file = new JFileChooser(); file.showSaveDialog(null); String data = file.getSelectedFile().getAbsolutePath(); String text = textBox.getText(); BarcodeGenerator barcodeFactory = new BarcodeGenerator(); try { barcodeFactory.generateBarcode(text, data); } catch (OutputException ex) { Logger.getLogger(uiFrame.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } } /** * @param args the command line arguments */ // Variables declaration - do not modify private javax.swing.JLabel label1; private javax.swing.JButton saveButton; public javax.swing.JTextField textBox; // End of variables declaration } The Main Class (Main.java) package barcode; import javax.swing.JFrame; public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { JFrame ui = new uiFrame(); ui.pack(); ui.show(); } }

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• How to Deserialize this Xml file?

  - by Robin-Hood

  Hello experts, I have this Xml file, and I need to Deserialize it back to a class. The problem is: what is the right structure/design of this class considering that the count of the Xml element (RowInfo) is not constant? The Xml File: <?xml version="1.0"?> <SomeObject xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" > <Layers> <Layer Id="0"> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,0,0,1</RowInfo> <RowInfo>1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,1,1,1</RowInfo> </Layer> </Layers> </SomeObject> Appreciate your help. Thanks. Edit1:also considering that (Layers) may contains more than one layer.

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• How can I simulate the effects of an observable collection in this situation?

  - by MGSoto

  I am making a configuration editor for another application and am using reflection to pull editable fields from the configuration class. The following class is the base class for my various "DataTypeViewModels" and shows how I get and set the appropriate properties. public abstract class DataTypeViewModel<T> : ViewModelBase { Func<T> getFunction; Action<T> setAction; public const string ValuePropertyName = "Value"; public string Label { get; set; } public T Value { get { return getFunction.Invoke(); } set { if (getFunction.Invoke().Equals(value)) { return; } setAction.Invoke(value); // Update bindings, no broadcast RaisePropertyChanged(ValuePropertyName); } } /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the StringViewModel class. /// </summary> public DataTypeViewModel(string sectionName, string label) { if (IsInDesignMode) { // Code runs in Blend --> create design time data. } else { Label = label; getFunction = new Func<T>(() => { return (T)Settings.Instance.GetType().GetProperty(sectionName).PropertyType. GetProperty(label).GetValue(Settings.Instance.GetType().GetProperty(sectionName).GetValue(Settings.Instance, null), null); }); setAction = new Action<T>(value => { Settings.Instance.GetType().GetProperty(sectionName).PropertyType.GetProperty(label). SetValue(Settings.Instance.GetType().GetProperty(sectionName).GetValue(Settings.Instance, null), value, null); }); } } } This part works the way I want it to, the next part is a sample DataTypeViewModel on a list of strings. public class StringListViewModel : DataTypeViewModel<ICollection<string>> { /// <summary> /// The <see cref="RemoveItemCommand" /> property's name. /// </summary> public const string RemoveItemCommandPropertyName = "RemoveItemCommand"; private RelayCommand<string> _removeItemCommand = null; public ObservableCollection<string> ObservableValue { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets the RemoveItemCommand property. /// TODO Update documentation: /// Changes to that property's value raise the PropertyChanged event. /// This property's value is broadcasted by the Messenger's default instance when it changes. /// </summary> public RelayCommand<string> RemoveItemCommand { get { return _removeItemCommand; } set { if (_removeItemCommand == value) { return; } var oldValue = _removeItemCommand; _removeItemCommand = value; // Update bindings, no broadcast RaisePropertyChanged(RemoveItemCommandPropertyName); } } /// <summary> /// The <see cref="AddItemCommand" /> property's name. /// </summary> public const string AddItemCommandPropertyName = "AddItemCommand"; private RelayCommand<string> _addItemCommand = null; /// <summary> /// Gets the AddItemCommand property. /// TODO Update documentation: /// Changes to that property's value raise the PropertyChanged event. /// This property's value is broadcasted by the Messenger's default instance when it changes. /// </summary> public RelayCommand<string> AddItemCommand { get { return _addItemCommand; } set { if (_addItemCommand == value) { return; } var oldValue = _addItemCommand; _addItemCommand = value; // Update bindings, no broadcast RaisePropertyChanged(AddItemCommandPropertyName); } } /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the StringListViewModel class. /// </summary> public StringListViewModel(string sectionName, string label) : base(sectionName, label) { ObservableValue = new ObservableCollection<string>(Value); AddItemCommand = new RelayCommand<string>(param => { if (param != string.Empty) { Value.Add(param); ObservableValue.Add(param); } }); RemoveItemCommand = new RelayCommand<string>(param => { if (param != null) { Value.Remove(param); ObservableValue.Remove(param); } }); } } As you can see in the constructor, I currently have "Value" mirrored into a new ObservableCollection called "ObservableValue", which is then bound to by a ListView in the XAML. It works well this way, but cloning the List seems like such a hacky way to do this. While bound to Value, I've tried adding: RaisePropertyChanged("Value"); to the AddItemCommand and RemoveItemCommand, but this doesn't work, the ListView won't get updated. What is the proper way to do this?

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• I just don't know what it is, tried everything, IE 7 bug

  - by Emmy

  Has anyone seen this bug? I have a sidebar with a ul nav background image for the hover state, floated right, looks great in all browsers. Then...I added another div underneath it for ad space. inside, there's an anchored image. That image tucks underneath the background image of the nav, but only in IE7 (i abandoned trying to please ie6). So I took it out of the sidebar, played with float, display,height hacks, but nothing works I can declare a large top margin with some more top padding do get it to clear but it breaks the design. i even tried creating a div called clear and put a top margin there. so it displays with this huge gap in chrome, FF, safari but this tiny space between in IE. i even tried creating a div called clear and put a top margin there. I have spent hours trying to find someone with the same problem but to no avail. Any suggestions? Here's a code snippet: <div id="leftsidebar"> <div id="leftnav"> <ul class="slidenav" id="sidenav"> <li id="overview" class="inactive"> <a href="expat.html">expat lifestyle</a> </li> <li id="tips" class="inactive"> <a href="traveltips.html">travel tips</a> </li> <li id="bts" class="inactive"> <a href="bts-mrt.html">bts/mrt</a> </li> <li id="bus" class="inactive"> <a href="bus.html">bus system</a> </li> <li id="van" class="inactive"> <a href="taxi.html">vans/taxis</a> </li> <li id="boat" class="inactive"> <a href="klong.html">boats/klong</a> </li> <li id="boat" class="inactive"> <a href="klong.html">boats/klong</a> </li> <li id="tuk" class="inactive"> <a href="tuk.html">tuk-tuks</a> </li> <li id="train" class="inactive"> <a href="train.html">trains</a> </li> <li id="airport" class="inactive"> <a href="airport.html">int'l airport</a> </li> <li id="dangers" class="inactive"> <a href="dangers.html">dangers</a> </li> <li id="fun" class="inactive"> <a href="fun.html">fun places</a> </li> <li id="shopping" class="inactive"> <a href="shopping.html">shopping</a> </li> </ul> </div> </div> <div id="store"> <a href="astore.amazon.com/ten044-20"; title="Shop WIB store"> <img src="images/WIBstore.png" height="70" width="200" border="none"/> </a> </div> the corresponding CSS: #leftsidebar { float:right; width: 210px; margin: 40px 0 0 0; padding: 0; height:1%; } #store { margin: 20px 0px 0 0px; padding: 0 10px 0 0; float: right; height: 1%; display: inline; } And an image:

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• rowupdating not giving new values.

  - by pankaj

  Hi, I am working on a application where i am using rowupdating event of the gridview. I am using templatefield in my columns so i am not able to get the new values from the textboxws that i am having in the gridview. How can i get the new values from the textboxes. Following is my code in rowupdating: protected void gviewTemplate_RowUpdating(object sender, GridViewUpdateEventArgs e) { gviewTemplate.EditIndex = -1; string rowNum = ViewState["ID"].ToString(); Label lbl2 = (Label)gviewTemplate.Rows[e.RowIndex].FindControl("lblTemplateName"); Label lbl1 = (Label)gviewTemplate.Rows[e.RowIndex].FindControl("lblUploaded"); TextBox txtTempName = (TextBox)gviewTemplate.Rows[e.RowIndex].FindControl("txtTemplateName"); TextBox txtHeading = (TextBox)gviewTemplate.Rows[e.RowIndex].FindControl("txtHeading"); TextBox txtCoupon = (TextBox)gviewTemplate.Rows[e.RowIndex].FindControl("txtCouponText"); TextBox txtBrand = (TextBox)gviewTemplate.Rows[e.RowIndex].FindControl("txtBrandName"); TextBox txtSearchText = (TextBox)gviewTemplate.Rows[e.RowIndex].FindControl("txtSearch"); TextBox txtDiscount = (TextBox)gviewTemplate.Rows[e.RowIndex].FindControl("txtDiscount"); TextBox txtStartDt = (TextBox)gviewTemplate.Rows[e.RowIndex].FindControl("txtStartDt"); } i want to get the new values form these textboxes but it is always giving me old values. and yes, e.Newvalues is not giving me anything. It is always empty. This is small extract from my gridview design: <asp:GridView runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False" ID="gviewTemplate" onrowdatabound="gviewTemplate_RowDataBound" DataKeyNames="F1" onrowcommand="gviewTemplate_RowCommand" onrowediting="gviewTemplate_RowEditing" onrowcancelingedit="gviewTemplate_RowCancelingEdit" onrowupdating="gviewTemplate_RowUpdating" onrowdeleting="gviewTemplate_RowDeleting" onrowupdated="gviewTemplate_RowUpdated"> <Columns> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Uploaded Image"> <EditItemTemplate> <asp:LinkButton Text="Reload" runat="server" OnClick="lbtnReloadImage_Click" CommandName="reload" ID="lbtnReloadImage"></asp:LinkButton> </EditItemTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <table id="Table2" runat="server" width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"> <tr> <td> <asp:Label Runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("Uploaded") %>' ID="lblUploaded"></asp:Label> </td> </tr> </table> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Template Name"> <ItemStyle VerticalAlign="Top" HorizontalAlign="Center" /> <EditItemTemplate> <asp:TextBox ID="txtTemplateName" Width="60" Runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("F1") %>'></asp:TextBox> <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator1" Runat="server" ErrorMessage="You must provide a Product Name." ControlToValidate="txtTemplateName">*</asp:RequiredFieldValidator> </EditItemTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <table id="Table3" runat="server" width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="lblTemplateName" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("F1") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> </table> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Heading"> <ItemStyle VerticalAlign="Top" HorizontalAlign="Center" /> <EditItemTemplate> <asp:TextBox ID="txtHeading" Runat="server" Width="60" Text='<%# Eval("F2") %>'></asp:TextBox> <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator2" Runat="server" ErrorMessage="You must provide a Product Name." ControlToValidate="txtHeading">*</asp:RequiredFieldValidator> </EditItemTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <table id="Table4" runat="server" width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"> <tr> <td> <asp:Label ID="lblHeading" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("F2") %>'></asp:Label> </td> </tr> </table> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Coupon Text"> <ItemStyle VerticalAlign="Top" HorizontalAlign="Center" /> <EditItemTemplate> <asp:TextBox ID="txtCouponText" Runat="server" Width="80" Text='<%# Bind("F3") %>'></asp:TextBox> <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator3" Runat="server" ErrorMessage="You must provide a Product Name." ControlToValidate="txtCouponText">*</asp:RequiredFieldValidator> </EditItemTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <table id="Table5" runat="server" width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"> <tr> <td> <asp:Label Runat="server" Text='<%# Bind("F3") %>' ID="lblCouponText"></asp:Label> </td> </tr> </table> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> Can anyone please tell me how to get the new values from these textboxes?

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• Designing an API with compile-time option to remove first parameter to most functions and use a glob

  - by tomlogic

  I'm trying to design a portable API in ANSI C89/ISO C90 to access a wireless networking device on a serial interface. The library will have multiple network layers, and various versions need to run on embedded devices as small as an 8-bit micro with 32K of code and 2K of data, on up to embedded devices with a megabyte or more of code and data. In most cases, the target processor will have a single network interface and I'll want to use a single global structure with all state information for that device. I don't want to pass a pointer to that structure through the network layers. In a few cases (e.g., device with more resources that needs to live on two networks) I will interface to multiple devices, each with their own global state, and will need to pass a pointer to that state (or an index to a state array) through the layers. I came up with two possible solutions, but neither one is particularly pretty. Keep in mind that the full driver will potentially be 20,000 lines or more, cover multiple files, and contain hundreds of functions. The first solution requires a macro that discards the first parameter for every function that needs to access the global state: // network.h typedef struct dev_t { int var; long othervar; char name[20]; } dev_t; #ifdef IF_MULTI #define foo_function( x, a, b, c) _foo_function( x, a, b, c) #define bar_function( x) _bar_function( x) #else extern dev_t DEV; #define IFACE (&DEV) #define foo_function( x, a, b, c) _foo_function( a, b, c) #define bar_function( x) _bar_function( ) #endif int bar_function( dev_t *IFACE); int foo_function( dev_t *IFACE, int a, long b, char *c); // network.c #ifndef IF_MULTI dev_t DEV; #endif int bar_function( dev_t *IFACE) { memset( IFACE, 0, sizeof *IFACE); return 0; } int foo_function( dev_t *IFACE, int a, long b, char *c) { bar_function( IFACE); IFACE->var = a; IFACE->othervar = b; strcpy( IFACE->name, c); return 0; } The second solution defines macros to use in the function declarations: // network.h typedef struct dev_t { int var; long othervar; char name[20]; } dev_t; #ifdef IF_MULTI #define DEV_PARAM_ONLY dev_t *IFACE #define DEV_PARAM DEV_PARAM_ONLY, #else extern dev_t DEV; #define IFACE (&DEV) #define DEV_PARAM_ONLY void #define DEV_PARAM #endif int bar_function( DEV_PARAM_ONLY); // I don't like the missing comma between DEV_PARAM and arg2... int foo_function( DEV_PARAM int a, long b, char *c); // network.c #ifndef IF_MULTI dev_t DEV; #endif int bar_function( DEV_PARAM_ONLY) { memset( IFACE, 0, sizeof *IFACE); return 0; } int foo_function( DEV_PARAM int a, long b, char *c) { bar_function( IFACE); IFACE->var = a; IFACE->othervar = b; strcpy( IFACE->name, c); return 0; } The C code to access either method remains the same: // multi.c - example of multiple interfaces #define IF_MULTI #include "network.h" dev_t if0, if1; int main() { foo_function( &if0, -1, 3.1415926, "public"); foo_function( &if1, 42, 3.1415926, "private"); return 0; } // single.c - example of a single interface #include "network.h" int main() { foo_function( 11, 1.0, "network"); return 0; } Is there a cleaner method that I haven't figured out? I lean toward the second since it should be easier to maintain, and it's clearer that there's some macro magic in the parameters to the function. Also, the first method requires prefixing the function names with "_" when I want to use them as function pointers. I really do want to remove the parameter in the "single interface" case to eliminate unnecessary code to push the parameter onto the stack, and to allow the function to access the first "real" parameter in a register instead of loading it from the stack. And, if at all possible, I don't want to have to maintain two separate codebases. Thoughts? Ideas? Examples of something similar in existing code? (Note that using C++ isn't an option, since some of the planned targets don't have a C++ compiler available.)

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• Why are items being placed below?

  - by Adam DePolo

  This is really confusing and I have never had this occur. For my computer, it is fine. But for anyone else's computer I have tried, it screws up. So on my site, designatease.com , the second bar down, it places the fifth item down below the first four. I am not sure why it is doing this. I want them to span across the bar but the stop at about half way. Help me out SOF. HTML <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" /> <title>Design At Ease - Home</title> </head> <body> <div id="header"> <div id="logo"><a class="logoclass">DesignAtEase.com</a></div> <ul id="headerlinks"> <li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li> <li><a href="coding.html">Coding</a></li> <li><a href="graphics.html">Graphics</a></li> <li><a href="database.html">Database</a></li> <li><a href="support.html">Support</a></li> <li><a href="more.html">More</a></li> </ul> </div> <ul id="quicklinks"> <li><a href="quickstart.html">Quick Start</a></li> <li><a href="tagsmain.html">Tag Helper</a></li> <li><a href="html.html">HTML</a></li> <li><a href="css.html">CSS</a></li> <li><a href="photoshop.html">Photoshop</a></li> <li><a href="quickstart.html">Quick Start</a></li> <li><a href="tagsmain.html">Tag Helper</a></li> </ul> </body> </html> CSS body{ background:#fffffc; margin: auto auto; } #header{ background:#e5e5e5; height:35px; width:100%; border-bottom: 1px #c9c9c9 solid; } #headerlinks{ position:relative; display:inline; float:right; margin-right:5%; bottom:37px; } #headerlinks li{ display:inline; padding-left:25px; } #headerlinks li a{ color:#777777; display:inline; font-size:18px; font-family: sans-serif; text-decoration:none; } #headerlinks li a:hover{ color:#a3a3a3; display:inline; font-size:18px; font-family: sans-serif; text-decoration:none; } #logo{ position:relative; color:black; margin-left:5%; top:5px; } .logoclass{ color:#212121; display:inline; font-size:24px; font-family: sans-serif; text-decoration:none; } #quicklinks{ width:90%; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;; height:25px; background:#e5e5e5; border-bottom: 1px #c9c9c9 solid; border-left: 1px #c9c9c9 solid; border-right: 1px #c9c9c9 solid; top:-16px; position:relative; } #quicklinks li{ display:inline; } #quicklinks li a{ } #quicklinks li a:hover{ } #wrapper{ width:80%; height:100%; }

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• Can anyone help me with this VHDL code (currently malfunctioning)?

  - by xx77aBs

  This code should be (and is) very simple, and I don't know what I am doing wrong. Here is description of what it should do: It should display a number on one 7-segment display. That number should be increased by one every time someone presses the push button. There is also reset button which sets the number to 0. That's it. Here is VHDL code: library IEEE; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_1164.ALL; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_ARITH.ALL; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_UNSIGNED.ALL; entity PWM is Port ( cp_in : in STD_LOGIC; inc : in STD_LOGIC; rst: in std_logic; AN : out STD_LOGIC_VECTOR (3 downto 0); segments : out STD_LOGIC_VECTOR (6 downto 0)); end PWM; architecture Behavioral of PWM is signal cp: std_logic; signal CurrentPWMState: integer range 0 to 10; signal inco: std_logic; signal temp: std_logic_vector (3 downto 0); begin --cp = 100 Hz counter: entity djelitelj generic map (CountTo => 250000) port map (cp_in, cp); debounce: entity debounce port map (inc, cp, inco); temp <= conv_std_logic_vector(CurrentPWMState, 4); ss: entity decoder7seg port map (temp, segments); process (inco, rst) begin if inco = '1' then CurrentPWMState <= CurrentPWMState + 1; elsif rst='1' then CurrentPWMState <= 0; end if; end process; AN <= "1110"; end Behavioral; Entity djelitelj (the counter used to divide 50MHz clock): library IEEE; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_1164.ALL; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_ARITH.ALL; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_UNSIGNED.ALL; entity PWM is Port ( cp_in : in STD_LOGIC; inc : in STD_LOGIC; rst: in std_logic; AN : out STD_LOGIC_VECTOR (3 downto 0); segments : out STD_LOGIC_VECTOR (6 downto 0)); end PWM; architecture Behavioral of PWM is signal cp: std_logic; signal CurrentPWMState: integer range 0 to 10; signal inco: std_logic; signal temp: std_logic_vector (3 downto 0); begin --cp = 100 Hz counter: entity djelitelj generic map (CountTo => 250000) port map (cp_in, cp); debounce: entity debounce port map (inc, cp, inco); temp <= conv_std_logic_vector(CurrentPWMState, 4); ss: entity decoder7seg port map (temp, segments); process (inco, rst) begin if inco = '1' then CurrentPWMState <= CurrentPWMState + 1; elsif rst='1' then CurrentPWMState <= 0; end if; end process; AN <= "1110"; end Behavioral; Debouncing entity: library IEEE; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_1164.all; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_ARITH.all; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_UNSIGNED.all; ENTITY debounce IS PORT(pb, clock_100Hz : IN STD_LOGIC; pb_debounced : OUT STD_LOGIC); END debounce; ARCHITECTURE a OF debounce IS SIGNAL SHIFT_PB : STD_LOGIC_VECTOR(3 DOWNTO 0); BEGIN -- Debounce Button: Filters out mechanical switch bounce for around 40Ms. -- Debounce clock should be approximately 10ms process begin wait until (clock_100Hz'EVENT) AND (clock_100Hz = '1'); SHIFT_PB(2 Downto 0) <= SHIFT_PB(3 Downto 1); SHIFT_PB(3) <= NOT PB; If SHIFT_PB(3 Downto 0)="0000" THEN PB_DEBOUNCED <= '1'; ELSE PB_DEBOUNCED <= '0'; End if; end process; end a; And here is BCD to 7-segment decoder: library IEEE; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_1164.ALL; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_ARITH.ALL; use IEEE.STD_LOGIC_UNSIGNED.ALL; entity decoder7seg is port ( bcd: in std_logic_vector (3 downto 0); segm: out std_logic_vector (6 downto 0)); end decoder7seg; architecture Behavioral of decoder7seg is begin with bcd select segm<= "0000001" when "0000", -- 0 "1001111" when "0001", -- 1 "0010010" when "0010", -- 2 "0000110" when "0011", -- 3 "1001100" when "0100", -- 4 "0100100" when "0101", -- 5 "0100000" when "0110", -- 6 "0001111" when "0111", -- 7 "0000000" when "1000", -- 8 "0000100" when "1001", -- 9 "1111110" when others; -- just - character end Behavioral; Does anyone see where I made my mistake(s) ? I've tried that design on Spartan-3 Started board and it isn't working ... Every time I press the push button, I get crazy (random) values. The reset button is working properly. Thanks !!!!

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• Windows Phone 7: Making ListBox items change dynamically

  - by Chad La Guardia

  I am working on creating a Windows Phone app that will play a series of sound clips selected from a list. I am using the MVVM (Model View View-Model) Design pattern and have designed a model for my data, along with a view model for my page. Here is what the XAML for the ListBox looks like: <ListBox x:Name="MediaListBox" Margin="0,0,-12,0" ItemsSource="{Binding Media}" SelectionChanged="MediaListBox_SelectionChanged" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" VerticalContentAlignment="Stretch"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate > <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Margin="0,0,0,17" Width="432" Orientation="Horizontal"> <Image Source="../Media/Images/play.png" /> <StackPanel > <TextBlock Text="{Binding Title}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextExtraLargeStyle}"/> <TextBlock Text="{Binding ShortDescription}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="12,-6,12,0" Visibility="{Binding ShortDescriptionVisibility}" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextSubtleStyle}"/> <TextBlock Text="{Binding LongDescription}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Visibility="{Binding LongDescriptionVisibility}" /> <StackPanel> <Slider HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" VerticalContentAlignment="Stretch" Visibility="{Binding LongDescriptionVisibility}" ValueChanged="Slider_ValueChanged" LargeChange="0.25" SmallChange="0.05" /> </StackPanel> </StackPanel> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> My question is this: I want to be able to expand and collapse part of the items in the ListBox. As you can see, I have a binding for the visibility. That binding is coming from the MediaModel. However, when I change this property in the ObservableCollection, the page is not updated to reflect this. The ViewModel for this page looks like this: public class ListenPageViewModel : INotifyPropertyChanged { public ListenPageViewModel() { this.Media = new ObservableCollection<MediaModel>; } /// <summary> /// A collection for MediaModel objects. /// </summary> public ObservableCollection<MediaModel> Media { get; private set; } public bool IsDataLoaded { get; private set; } /// <summary> /// Creates and adds the media to their respective collections. /// </summary> public void LoadData() { this.Media.Clear(); this.Media.Add(new MediaModel() { Title = "Media 1", ShortDescription = "Short here.", LongDescription = "Long here.", MediaSource = "/Media/test.mp3", LongDescriptionVisibility = Visibility.Collapsed, ShortDescriptionVisibility = Visibility.Visible }); this.Media.Add(new MediaModel() { Title = "Media 2", ShortDescription = "Short here.", LongDescription = "Long here.", MediaSource = "/Media/test2.mp3", LongDescriptionVisibility = Visibility.Collapsed, ShortDescriptionVisibility = Visibility.Visible }); this.IsDataLoaded = true; } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void NotifyPropertyChanged(String propertyName) { PropertyChangedEventHandler handler = PropertyChanged; if (null != handler) { handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } } The bindings work correctly and I am seeing the data displayed; however, when I change the properties, the list does not update. I believe that this may be because when I change things inside the observable collection, the property changed event is not firing. What can I do to remedy this? I have poked around for some info on this, but many of the tutorials don't cover this kind of behavior. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks Edit: As requested, I have added the MediaModel code: public class MediaModel : INotifyPropertyChanged { public string Title { get; set; } public string ShortDescription { get; set; } public string LongDescription { get; set; } public string MediaSource { get; set; } public Visibility LongDescriptionVisibility { get; set; } public Visibility ShortDescriptionVisibility { get; set; } public MediaModel() { } public MediaModel(string Title, string ShortDescription, string LongDescription, string MediaSource, Visibility LongDescriptionVisibility, Visibility ShortDescriptionVisibility) { this.Title = Title; this.ShortDescription = ShortDescription; this.LongDescription = LongDescription; this.MediaSource = MediaSource; this.LongDescriptionVisibility = LongDescriptionVisibility; this.ShortDescriptionVisibility = ShortDescriptionVisibility; } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void NotifyPropertyChanged(String propertyName) { PropertyChangedEventHandler handler = PropertyChanged; if (null != handler) { handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } } Originally, I did not have this class implement the INotifyPropertyChanged. I did this to see if it would solve the problem. I was hoping this could just be a data object.

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• Adapting non-iterable containers to be iterated via custom templatized iterator

  - by DAldridge

  I have some classes, which for various reasons out of scope of this discussion, I cannot modify (irrelevant implementation details omitted): class Foo { /* ... irrelevant public interface ... */ }; class Bar { public: Foo& get_foo(size_t index) { /* whatever */ } size_t size_foo() { /* whatever */ } }; (There are many similar 'Foo' and 'Bar' classes I'm dealing with, and it's all generated code from elsewhere and stuff I don't want to subclass, etc.) [Edit: clarification - although there are many similar 'Foo' and 'Bar' classes, it is guaranteed that each "outer" class will have the getter and size methods. Only the getter method name and return type will differ for each "outer", based on whatever it's "inner" contained type is. So, if I have Baz which contains Quux instances, there will be Quux& Baz::get_quux(size_t index), and size_t Baz::size_quux().] Given the design of the Bar class, you cannot easily use it in STL algorithms (e.g. for_each, find_if, etc.), and must do imperative loops rather than taking a functional approach (reasons why I prefer the latter is also out of scope for this discussion): Bar b; size_t numFoo = b.size_foo(); for (int fooIdx = 0; fooIdx < numFoo; ++fooIdx) { Foo& f = b.get_foo(fooIdx); /* ... do stuff with 'f' ... */ } So... I've never created a custom iterator, and after reading various questions/answers on S.O. about iterator_traits and the like, I came up with this (currently half-baked) "solution": First, the custom iterator mechanism (NOTE: all uses of 'function' and 'bind' are from std::tr1 in MSVC9): // Iterator mechanism... template <typename TOuter, typename TInner> class ContainerIterator : public std::iterator<std::input_iterator_tag, TInner> { public: typedef function<TInner& (size_t)> func_type; ContainerIterator(const ContainerIterator& other) : mFunc(other.mFunc), mIndex(other.mIndex) {} ContainerIterator& operator++() { ++mIndex; return *this; } bool operator==(const ContainerIterator& other) { return ((mFunc.target<TOuter>() == other.mFunc.target<TOuter>()) && (mIndex == other.mIndex)); } bool operator!=(const ContainerIterator& other) { return !(*this == other); } TInner& operator*() { return mFunc(mIndex); } private: template<typename TOuter, typename TInner> friend class ContainerProxy; ContainerIterator(func_type func, size_t index = 0) : mFunc(func), mIndex(index) {} function<TInner& (size_t)> mFunc; size_t mIndex; }; Next, the mechanism by which I get valid iterators representing begin and end of the inner container: // Proxy(?) to the outer class instance, providing a way to get begin() and end() // iterators to the inner contained instances... template <typename TOuter, typename TInner> class ContainerProxy { public: typedef function<TInner& (size_t)> access_func_type; typedef function<size_t ()> size_func_type; typedef ContainerIterator<TOuter, TInner> iter_type; ContainerProxy(access_func_type accessFunc, size_func_type sizeFunc) : mAccessFunc(accessFunc), mSizeFunc(sizeFunc) {} iter_type begin() const { size_t numItems = mSizeFunc(); if (0 == numItems) return end(); else return ContainerIterator<TOuter, TInner>(mAccessFunc, 0); } iter_type end() const { size_t numItems = mSizeFunc(); return ContainerIterator<TOuter, TInner>(mAccessFunc, numItems); } private: access_func_type mAccessFunc; size_func_type mSizeFunc; }; I can use these classes in the following manner: // Sample function object for taking action on an LMX inner class instance yielded // by iteration... template <typename TInner> class SomeTInnerFunctor { public: void operator()(const TInner& inner) { /* ... whatever ... */ } }; // Example of iterating over an outer class instance's inner container... Bar b; /* assume populated which contained items ... */ ContainerProxy<Bar, Foo> bProxy( bind(&Bar::get_foo, b, _1), bind(&Bar::size_foo, b)); for_each(bProxy.begin(), bProxy.end(), SomeTInnerFunctor<Foo>()); Empirically, this solution functions correctly (minus any copy/paste or typos I may have introduced when editing the above for brevity). So, finally, the actual question: I don't like requiring the use of bind() and _1 placeholders, etcetera by the caller. All they really care about is: outer type, inner type, outer type's method to fetch inner instances, outer type's method to fetch count inner instances. Is there any way to "hide" the bind in the body of the template classes somehow? I've been unable to find a way to separately supply template parameters for the types and inner methods separately... Thanks! David

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• Microsoft and jQuery

  - by Rick Strahl

  The jQuery JavaScript library has been steadily getting more popular and with recent developments from Microsoft, jQuery is also getting ever more exposure on the ASP.NET platform including now directly from Microsoft. jQuery is a light weight, open source DOM manipulation library for JavaScript that has changed how many developers think about JavaScript. You can download it and find more information on jQuery on www.jquery.com. For me jQuery has had a huge impact on how I develop Web applications and was probably the main reason I went from dreading to do JavaScript development to actually looking forward to implementing client side JavaScript functionality. It has also had a profound impact on my JavaScript skill level for me by seeing how the library accomplishes things (and often reviewing the terse but excellent source code). jQuery made an uncomfortable development platform (JavaScript + DOM) a joy to work on. Although jQuery is by no means the only JavaScript library out there, its ease of use, small size, huge community of plug-ins and pure usefulness has made it easily the most popular JavaScript library available today. As a long time jQuery user, I’ve been excited to see the developments from Microsoft that are bringing jQuery to more ASP.NET developers and providing more integration with jQuery for ASP.NET’s core features rather than relying on the ASP.NET AJAX library. Microsoft and jQuery – making Friends jQuery is an open source project but in the last couple of years Microsoft has really thrown its weight behind supporting this open source library as a supported component on the Microsoft platform. When I say supported I literally mean supported: Microsoft now offers actual tech support for jQuery as part of their Product Support Services (PSS) as jQuery integration has become part of several of the ASP.NET toolkits and ships in several of the default Web project templates in Visual Studio 2010. The ASP.NET MVC 3 framework (still in Beta) also uses jQuery for a variety of client side support features including client side validation and we can look forward toward more integration of client side functionality via jQuery in both MVC and WebForms in the future. In other words jQuery is becoming an optional but included component of the ASP.NET platform. PSS support means that support staff will answer jQuery related support questions as part of any support incidents related to ASP.NET which provides some piece of mind to some corporate development shops that require end to end support from Microsoft. In addition to including jQuery and supporting it, Microsoft has also been getting involved in providing development resources for extending jQuery’s functionality via plug-ins. Microsoft’s last version of the Microsoft Ajax Library – which is the successor to the native ASP.NET AJAX Library – included some really cool functionality for client templates, databinding and localization. As it turns out Microsoft has rebuilt most of that functionality using jQuery as the base API and provided jQuery plug-ins of these components. Very recently these three plug-ins were submitted and have been approved for inclusion in the official jQuery plug-in repository and been taken over by the jQuery team for further improvements and maintenance. Even more surprising: The jQuery-templates component has actually been approved for inclusion in the next major update of the jQuery core in jQuery V1.5, which means it will become a native feature that doesn’t require additional script files to be loaded. Imagine this – an open source contribution from Microsoft that has been accepted into a major open source project for a core feature improvement. Microsoft has come a long way indeed! What the Microsoft Involvement with jQuery means to you For Microsoft jQuery support is a strategic decision that affects their direction in client side development, but nothing stopped you from using jQuery in your applications prior to Microsoft’s official backing and in fact a large chunk of developers did so readily prior to Microsoft’s announcement. Official support from Microsoft brings a few benefits to developers however. jQuery support in Visual Studio 2010 means built-in support for jQuery IntelliSense, automatically added jQuery scripts in many projects types and a common base for client side functionality that actually uses what most developers are already using. If you have already been using jQuery and were worried about straying from the Microsoft line and their internal Microsoft Ajax Library – worry no more. With official support and the change in direction towards jQuery Microsoft is now following along what most in the ASP.NET community had already been doing by using jQuery, which is likely the reason for Microsoft’s shift in direction in the first place. ASP.NET AJAX and the Microsoft AJAX Library weren’t bad technology – there was tons of useful functionality buried in these libraries. However, these libraries never got off the ground, mainly because early incarnations were squarely aimed at control/component developers rather than application developers. For all the functionality that these controls provided for control developers they lacked in useful and easily usable application developer functionality that was easily accessible in day to day client side development. The result was that even though Microsoft shipped support for these tools in the box (in .NET 3.5 and 4.0), other than for the internal support in ASP.NET for things like the UpdatePanel and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit as well as some third party vendors, the Microsoft client libraries were largely ignored by the developer community opening the door for other client side solutions. Microsoft seems to be acknowledging developer choice in this case: Many more developers were going down the jQuery path rather than using the Microsoft built libraries and there seems to be little sense in continuing development of a technology that largely goes unused by the majority of developers. Kudos for Microsoft for recognizing this and gracefully changing directions. Note that even though there will be no further development in the Microsoft client libraries they will continue to be supported so if you’re using them in your applications there’s no reason to start running for the exit in a panic and start re-writing everything with jQuery. Although that might be a reasonable choice in some cases, jQuery and the Microsoft libraries work well side by side so that you can leave existing solutions untouched even as you enhance them with jQuery. The Microsoft jQuery Plug-ins – Solid Core Features One of the most interesting developments in Microsoft’s embracing of jQuery is that Microsoft has started contributing to jQuery via standard mechanism set for jQuery developers: By submitting plug-ins. Microsoft took some of the nicest new features of the unpublished Microsoft Ajax Client Library and re-wrote these components for jQuery and then submitted them as plug-ins to the jQuery plug-in repository. Accepted plug-ins get taken over by the jQuery team and that’s exactly what happened with the three plug-ins submitted by Microsoft with the templating plug-in even getting slated to be published as part of the jQuery core in the next major release (1.5). The following plug-ins are provided by Microsoft: jQuery Templates – a client side template rendering engine jQuery Data Link – a client side databinder that can synchronize changes without code jQuery Globalization – provides formatting and conversion features for dates and numbers The first two are ports of functionality that was slated for the Microsoft Ajax Library while functionality for the globalization library provides functionality that was already found in the original ASP.NET AJAX library. To me all three plug-ins address a pressing need in client side applications and provide functionality I’ve previously used in other incarnations, but with more complete implementations. Let’s take a close look at these plug-ins. jQuery Templates http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/ Client side templating is a key component for building rich JavaScript applications in the browser. Templating on the client lets you avoid from manually creating markup by creating DOM nodes and injecting them individually into the document via code. Rather you can create markup templates – similar to the way you create classic ASP server markup – and merge data into these templates to render HTML which you can then inject into the document or replace existing content with. Output from templates are rendered as a jQuery matched set and can then be easily inserted into the document as needed. Templating is key to minimize client side code and reduce repeated code for rendering logic. Instead a single template can be used in many places for updating and adding content to existing pages. Further if you build pure AJAX interfaces that rely entirely on client rendering of the initial page content, templates allow you to a use a single markup template to handle all rendering of each specific HTML section/element. I’ve used a number of different client rendering template engines with jQuery in the past including jTemplates (a PHP style templating engine) and a modified version of John Resig’s MicroTemplating engine which I built into my own set of libraries because it’s such a commonly used feature in my client side applications. jQuery templates adds a much richer templating model that allows for sub-templates and access to the data items. Like John Resig’s original Micro Template engine, the core basics of the templating engine create JavaScript code which means that templates can include JavaScript code. To give you a basic idea of how templates work imagine I have an application that downloads a set of stock quotes based on a symbol list then displays them in the document. To do this you can create an ‘item’ template that describes how each of the quotes is renderd as a template inside of the document: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div><div>${LastPrice}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div><div>${LastQuoteTimeString}</div> </div> </script> The ‘template’ is little more than HTML with some markup expressions inside of it that define the template language. Notice the embedded ${} expressions which reference data from the quote objects returned from an AJAX call on the server. You can embed any JavaScript or value expression in these template expressions. There are also a number of structural commands like {{if}} and {{each}} that provide for rudimentary logic inside of your templates as well as commands ({{tmpl}} and {{wrap}}) for nesting templates. You can find more about the full set of markup expressions available in the documentation. To load up this data you can use code like the following: <script type="text/javascript"> //var Proxy = new ServiceProxy("../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/"); $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnGetQuotes").click(GetQuotes); }); function GetQuotes() { var symbols = $("#txtSymbols").val().split(","); $.ajax({ url: "../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/GetStockQuotes", data: JSON.stringify({ symbols: symbols }), // parameter map type: "POST", // data has to be POSTed contentType: "application/json", timeout: 10000, dataType: "json", success: function (result) { var quotes = result.d; var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); $("#quoteDisplay").empty().append(jEl); }, error: function (xhr, status) { alert(status + "\r\n" + xhr.responseText); } }); }; </script> In this case an ASMX AJAX service is called to retrieve the stock quotes. The service returns an array of quote objects. The result is returned as an object with the .d property (in Microsoft service style) that returns the actual array of quotes. The template is applied with: var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); which selects the template script tag and uses the .tmpl() function to apply the data to it. The result is a jQuery matched set of elements that can then be appended to the quote display element in the page. The template is merged against an array in this example. When the result is an array the template is automatically applied to each each array item. If you pass a single data item – like say a stock quote – the template works exactly the same way but is applied only once. Templates also have access to a $data item which provides the current data item and information about the tempalte that is currently executing. This makes it possible to keep context within the context of the template itself and also to pass context from a parent template to a child template which is very powerful. Templates can be evaluated by using the template selector and calling the .tmpl() function on the jQuery matched set as shown above or you can use the static $.tmpl() function to provide a template as a string. This allows you to dynamically create templates in code or – more likely – to load templates from the server via AJAX calls. In short there are options The above shows off some of the basics, but there’s much for functionality available in the template engine. Check the documentation link for more information and links to additional examples. The plug-in download also comes with a number of examples that demonstrate functionality. jQuery templates will become a native component in jQuery Core 1.5, so it’s definitely worthwhile checking out the engine today and get familiar with this interface. As much as I’m stoked about templating becoming part of the jQuery core because it’s such an integral part of many applications, there are also a couple shortcomings in the current incarnation: Lack of Error Handling Currently if you embed an expression that is invalid it’s simply not rendered. There’s no error rendered into the template nor do the various  template functions throw errors which leaves finding of bugs as a runtime exercise. I would like some mechanism – optional if possible – to be able to get error info of what is failing in a template when it’s rendered. No String Output Templates are always rendered into a jQuery matched set and there’s no way that I can see to directly render to a string. String output can be useful for debugging as well as opening up templating for creating non-HTML string output. Limited JavaScript Access Unlike John Resig’s original MicroTemplating Engine which was entirely based on JavaScript code generation these templates are limited to a few structured commands that can ‘execute’. There’s no code execution inside of script code which means you’re limited to calling expressions available in global objects or the data item passed in. This may or may not be a big deal depending on the complexity of your template logic. Error handling has been discussed quite a bit and it’s likely there will be some solution to that particualar issue by the time jQuery templates ship. The others are relatively minor issues but something to think about anyway. jQuery Data Link http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/data-link/ jQuery Data Link provides the ability to do two-way data binding between input controls and an underlying object’s properties. The typical scenario is linking a textbox to a property of an object and have the object updated when the text in the textbox is changed and have the textbox change when the value in the object or the entire object changes. The plug-in also supports converter functions that can be applied to provide the conversion logic from string to some other value typically necessary for mapping things like textbox string input to say a number property and potentially applying additional formatting and calculations. In theory this sounds great, however in reality this plug-in has some serious usability issues. Using the plug-in you can do things like the following to bind data: person = { firstName: "rick", lastName: "strahl"}; $(document).ready( function() { // provide for two-way linking of inputs $("form").link(person); // bind to non-input elements explicitly $("#objFirst").link(person, { firstName: { name: "objFirst", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); $("#objLast").link(person, { lastName: { name: "objLast", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); }); This code hooks up two-way linking between a couple of textboxes on the page and the person object. The first line in the .ready() handler provides mapping of object to form field with the same field names as properties on the object. Note that .link() does NOT bind items into the textboxes when you call .link() – changes are mapped only when values change and you move out of the field. Strike one. The two following commands allow manual binding of values to specific DOM elements which is effectively a one-way bind. You specify the object and a then an explicit mapping where name is an ID in the document. The converter is required to explicitly assign the value to the element. Strike two. You can also detect changes to the underlying object and cause updates to the input elements bound. Unfortunately the syntax to do this is not very natural as you have to rely on the jQuery data object. To update an object’s properties and get change notification looks like this: function updateFirstName() { $(person).data("firstName", person.firstName + " (code updated)"); } This works fine in causing any linked fields to be updated. In the bindings above both the firstName input field and objFirst DOM element gets updated. But the syntax requires you to use a jQuery .data() call for each property change to ensure that the changes are tracked properly. Really? Sure you’re binding through multiple layers of abstraction now but how is that better than just manually assigning values? The code savings (if any) are going to be minimal. As much as I would like to have a WPF/Silverlight/Observable-like binding mechanism in client script, this plug-in doesn’t help much towards that goal in its current incarnation. While you can bind values, the ‘binder’ is too limited to be really useful. If initial values can’t be assigned from the mappings you’re going to end up duplicating work loading the data using some other mechanism. There’s no easy way to re-bind data with a different object altogether since updates trigger only through the .data members. Finally, any non-input elements have to be bound via code that’s fairly verbose and frankly may be more voluminous than what you might write by hand for manual binding and unbinding. Two way binding can be very useful but it has to be easy and most importantly natural. If it’s more work to hook up a binding than writing a couple of lines to do binding/unbinding this sort of thing helps very little in most scenarios. In talking to some of the developers the feature set for Data Link is not complete and they are still soliciting input for features and functionality. If you have ideas on how you want this feature to be more useful get involved and post your recommendations. As it stands, it looks to me like this component needs a lot of love to become useful. For this component to really provide value, bindings need to be able to be refreshed easily and work at the object level, not just the property level. It seems to me we would be much better served by a model binder object that can perform these binding/unbinding tasks in bulk rather than a tool where each link has to be mapped first. I also find the choice of creating a jQuery plug-in questionable – it seems a standalone object – albeit one that relies on the jQuery library – would provide a more intuitive interface than the current forcing of options onto a plug-in style interface. Out of the three Microsoft created components this is by far the least useful and least polished implementation at this point. jQuery Globalization http://github.com/jquery/jquery-global Globalization in JavaScript applications often gets short shrift and part of the reason for this is that natively in JavaScript there’s little support for formatting and parsing of numbers and dates. There are a number of JavaScript libraries out there that provide some support for globalization, but most are limited to a particular portion of globalization. As .NET developers we’re fairly spoiled by the richness of APIs provided in the framework and when dealing with client development one really notices the lack of these features. While you may not necessarily need to localize your application the globalization plug-in also helps with some basic tasks for non-localized applications: Dealing with formatting and parsing of dates and time values. Dates in particular are problematic in JavaScript as there are no formatters whatsoever except the .toString() method which outputs a verbose and next to useless long string. With the globalization plug-in you get a good chunk of the formatting and parsing functionality that the .NET framework provides on the server. You can write code like the following for example to format numbers and dates: var date = new Date(); var output = $.format(date, "MMM. dd, yy") + "\r\n" + $.format(date, "d") + "\r\n" + // 10/25/2010 $.format(1222.32213, "N2") + "\r\n" + $.format(1222.33, "c") + "\r\n"; alert(output); This becomes even more useful if you combine it with templates which can also include any JavaScript expressions. Assuming the globalization plug-in is loaded you can create template expressions that use the $.format function. Here’s the template I used earlier for the stock quote again with a couple of formats applied: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div> <div>${$.format(LastPrice,"N2")}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div> <div>${$.format(LastQuoteTime,"MMM dd, yyyy")}</div> </div> </script> There are also parsing methods that can parse dates and numbers from strings into numbers easily: alert($.parseDate("25.10.2010")); alert($.parseInt("12.222")); // de-DE uses . for thousands separators As you can see culture specific options are taken into account when parsing. The globalization plugin provides rich support for a variety of locales: Get a list of all available cultures Query cultures for culture items (like currency symbol, separators etc.) Localized string names for all calendar related items (days of week, months) Generated off of .NET’s supported locales In short you get much of the same functionality that you already might be using in .NET on the server side. The plugin includes a huge number of locales and an Globalization.all.min.js file that contains the text defaults for each of these locales as well as small locale specific script files that define each of the locale specific settings. It’s highly recommended that you NOT use the huge globalization file that includes all locales, but rather add script references to only those languages you explicitly care about. Overall this plug-in is a welcome helper. Even if you use it with a single locale (like en-US) and do no other localization, you’ll gain solid support for number and date formatting which is a vital feature of many applications. Changes for Microsoft It’s good to see Microsoft coming out of its shell and away from the ‘not-built-here’ mentality that has been so pervasive in the past. It’s especially good to see it applied to jQuery – a technology that has stood in drastic contrast to Microsoft’s own internal efforts in terms of design, usage model and… popularity. It’s great to see that Microsoft is paying attention to what customers prefer to use and supporting the customer sentiment – even if it meant drastically changing course of policy and moving into a more open and sharing environment in the process. The additional jQuery support that has been introduced in the last two years certainly has made lives easier for many developers on the ASP.NET platform. It’s also nice to see Microsoft submitting proposals through the standard jQuery process of plug-ins and getting accepted for various very useful projects. Certainly the jQuery Templates plug-in is going to be very useful to many especially since it will be baked into the jQuery core in jQuery 1.5. I hope we see more of this type of involvement from Microsoft in the future. Kudos!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  ASP.NET  

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• Integrating HTML into Silverlight Applications

  - by dwahlin

  Looking for a way to display HTML content within a Silverlight application? If you haven’t tried doing that before it can be challenging at first until you know a few tricks of the trade.  Being able to display HTML is especially handy when you’re required to display RSS feeds (with embedded HTML), SQL Server Reporting Services reports, PDF files (not actually HTML – but the techniques discussed will work), or other HTML content.  In this post I'll discuss three options for displaying HTML content in Silverlight applications and describe how my company is using these techniques in client applications. Displaying HTML Overlays If you need to display HTML over a Silverlight application (such as an RSS feed containing HTML data in it) you’ll need to set the Silverlight control’s windowless parameter to true. This can be done using the object tag as shown next: <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <param name="source" value="ClientBin/HTMLAndSilverlight.xap"/> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50401.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <param name="windowless" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50401.0" style="text-decoration:none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> </a> </object> By setting the control to “windowless” you can overlay HTML objects by using absolute positioning and other CSS techniques. Keep in mind that on Windows machines the windowless setting can result in a performance hit when complex animations or HD video are running since the plug-in content is displayed directly by the browser window. It goes without saying that you should only set windowless to true when you really need the functionality it offers. For example, if I want to display my blog’s RSS content on top of a Silverlight application I could set windowless to true and create a user control that grabbed the content and output it using a DataList control: <style type="text/css"> a {text-decoration:none;font-weight:bold;font-size:14pt;} </style> <div style="margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px;margin-right:5px;"> <asp:DataList ID="RSSDataList" runat="server" DataSourceID="RSSDataSource"> <ItemTemplate> <a href='<%# XPath("link") %>'><%# XPath("title") %></a> <br /> <%# XPath("description") %> <br /> </ItemTemplate> </asp:DataList> <asp:XmlDataSource ID="RSSDataSource" DataFile="http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/rss.aspx" XPath="rss/channel/item" CacheDuration="60" runat="server" /> </div> The user control can then be placed in the page hosting the Silverlight control as shown below. This example adds a Close button, additional content to display in the overlay window and the HTML generated from the user control. <div id="RSSDiv"> <div style="background-color:#484848;border:1px solid black;height:35px;width:100%;"> <img alt="Close Button" align="right" src="Images/Close.png" onclick="HideOverlay();" style="cursor:pointer;" /> </div> <div style="overflow:auto;width:800px;height:565px;"> <div style="float:left;width:100px;height:103px;margin-left:10px;margin-top:5px;"> <img src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/dwahlin/dan2008.jpg" style="border:1px solid Gray" /> </div> <div style="float:left;width:300px;height:103px;margin-top:5px;"> <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin" style="margin-left:10px;font-size:20pt;">Dan Wahlin's Blog</a> </div> <br /><br /><br /> <div style="clear:both;margin-top:20px;"> <uc:BlogRoller ID="BlogRoller" runat="server" /> </div> </div> </div> Of course, we wouldn’t want the RSS HTML content to be shown until requested. Once it’s requested the absolute position of where it should show above the Silverlight control can be set using standard CSS styles. The following ID selector named #RSSDiv handles hiding the overlay div shown above and determines where it will be display on the screen. #RSSDiv { background-color:White; position:absolute; top:100px; left:300px; width:800px; height:600px; border:1px solid black; display:none; } Now that the HTML content to display above the Silverlight control is set, how can we show it as a user clicks a HyperlinkButton or other control in the application? Fortunately, Silverlight provides an excellent HTML bridge that allows direct access to content hosted within a page. The following code shows two JavaScript functions that can be called from Siverlight to handle showing or hiding HTML overlay content. The two functions rely on jQuery (http://www.jQuery.com) to make it easy to select HTML objects and manipulate their properties: function ShowOverlay() { rssDiv.css('display', 'block'); } function HideOverlay() { rssDiv.css('display', 'none'); } Calling the ShowOverlay function is as simple as adding the following code into the Silverlight application within a button’s Click event handler: private void OverlayHyperlinkButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("ShowOverlay"); } The result of setting the Silverlight control’s windowless parameter to true and showing the HTML overlay content is shown in the following screenshot:   Thinking Outside the Box to Show HTML Content Setting the windowless parameter to true may not be a viable option for some Silverlight applications or you may simply want to go about showing HTML content a different way. The next technique I’ll show takes advantage of simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript code to handle showing HTML content while a Silverlight application is running in the browser. Keep in mind that with Silverlight’s HTML bridge feature you can always pop-up HTML content in a new browser window using code similar to the following: System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.Window.Navigate( new Uri("http://silverlight.net"), "_blank"); For this example I’ll demonstrate how to hide the Silverlight application while maximizing a container div containing the HTML content to show. This allows HTML content to take up the full screen area of the browser without having to set windowless to true and when done right can make the user feel like they never left the Silverlight application. The following HTML shows several div elements that are used to display HTML within the same browser window as the Silverlight application: <div id="JobPlanDiv"> <div style="vertical-align:middle"> <img alt="Close Button" align="right" src="Images/Close.png" onclick="HideJobPlanIFrame();" style="cursor:pointer;" /> </div> <div id="JobPlan_IFrame_Container" style="height:95%;width:100%;margin-top:37px;"></div> </div> The JobPlanDiv element acts as a container for two other divs that handle showing a close button and hosting an iframe that will be added dynamically at runtime. JobPlanDiv isn’t visible when the Silverlight application loads due to the following ID selector added into the page: #JobPlanDiv { position:absolute; background-color:#484848; overflow:hidden; left:0; top:0; height:100%; width:100%; display:none; } When the HTML content needs to be shown or hidden the JavaScript functions shown next can be used: var jobPlanIFrameID = 'JobPlan_IFrame'; var slHost = null; var jobPlanContainer = null; var jobPlanIFrameContainer = null; var rssDiv = null; $(document).ready(function () { slHost = $('#silverlightControlHost'); jobPlanContainer = $('#JobPlanDiv'); jobPlanIFrameContainer = $('#JobPlan_IFrame_Container'); rssDiv = $('#RSSDiv'); }); function ShowJobPlanIFrame(url) { jobPlanContainer.css('display', 'block'); $('<iframe id="' + jobPlanIFrameID + '" src="' + url + '" style="height:100%;width:100%;" />') .appendTo(jobPlanIFrameContainer); slHost.css('width', '0%'); } function HideJobPlanIFrame() { jobPlanContainer.css('display', 'none'); $('#' + jobPlanIFrameID).remove(); slHost.css('width', '100%'); } ShowJobPlanIFrame() handles showing the JobPlanDiv div and adding an iframe into it dynamically. Once JobPlanDiv is shown, the Silverlight control host has its width set to a value of 0% to allow the control to stay alive while making it invisible to the user. I found that this technique works better across multiple browsers as opposed to manipulating the Silverlight control host div’s display or visibility properties. Now that you’ve seen the code to handle showing and hiding the HTML content area, let’s switch focus to the Silverlight application. As a user clicks on a link such as “View Report” the ShowJobPlanIFrame() JavaScript function needs to be called. The following code handles that task: private void ReportHyperlinkButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { ShowBrowser(_BaseUrl + "/Report.aspx"); } public void ShowBrowser(string url) { HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("ShowJobPlanIFrame", url); } Any URL can be passed into the ShowBrowser() method which handles invoking the JavaScript function. This includes standard web pages or even PDF files. We’ve used this technique frequently with our SmartPrint control (http://www.smartwebcontrols.com) which converts Silverlight screens into PDF documents and displays them. Here’s an example of the content generated:   Silverlight 4’s WebBrowser Control Both techniques shown to this point work well when Silverlight is running in-browser but not so well when it’s running out-of-browser since there’s no host page that you can access using the HTML bridge. Fortunately, Silverlight 4 provides a WebBrowser control that can be used to perform the same functionality quite easily. We’re currently using it in client applications to display PDF documents, SSRS reports and standard HTML content. Using the WebBrowser control simplifies the application quite a bit since no JavaScript is required if the application only runs out-of-browser. Here’s a simple example of defining the WebBrowser control in XAML. I typically define it in MainPage.xaml when a Silverlight Navigation template is used to create the project so that I can re-use the functionality across multiple screens. <Grid x:Name="WebBrowserGrid" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Visibility="Collapsed"> <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch"> <Border Background="#484848" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Height="40"> <Image x:Name="WebBrowserImage" Width="100" Height="33" Cursor="Hand" HorizontalAlignment="Right" Source="/HTMLAndSilverlight;component/Assets/Images/Close.png" MouseLeftButtonDown="WebBrowserImage_MouseLeftButtonDown" /> </Border> <WebBrowser x:Name="JobPlanReportWebBrowser" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> Looking through the XAML you can see that a close image is defined along with the WebBrowser control. Because the URL that the WebBrowser should navigate to isn’t known at design time no value is assigned to the control’s Source property. If the XAML shown above is left “as is” you’ll find that any HTML content assigned to the WebBrowser doesn’t display properly. This is due to no height or width being set on the control. To handle this issue the following code is added into the XAML’s code-behind file to dynamically determine the height and width of the page and assign it to the WebBrowser. This is done by handling the SizeChanged event. void MainPage_SizeChanged(object sender, SizeChangedEventArgs e) { WebBrowserGrid.Height = JobPlanReportWebBrowser.Height = ActualHeight; WebBrowserGrid.Width = JobPlanReportWebBrowser.Width = ActualWidth; } When the user wants to view HTML content they click a button which executes the code shown in next: public void ShowBrowser(string url) { if (Application.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser) { JobPlanReportWebBrowser.NavigateToString("<html><body><iframe src='" + url + "' style='width:100%;height:97%;' /></body></html>"); WebBrowserGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; } else { HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("ShowJobPlanIFrame", url); } } private void WebBrowserImage_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { WebBrowserGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed; }   Looking through the code you’ll see that it checks to see if the Silverlight application is running out-of-browser and then either displays the WebBrowser control or runs the JavaScript function discussed earlier. Although the WebBrowser control’s Source property could be assigned the URI of the page to navigate to, by assigning HTML content using the NavigateToString() method and adding an iframe, content can be shown from any site including cross-domain sites. This is especially handy when you need to grab a page from a reporting site that’s in a different domain than the Silverlight application. Here’s an example of viewing  PDF file inside of an out-of-browser application. The first image shows the application running out-of-browser before the user clicks a PDF HyperlinkButton.  The second image shows the PDF being displayed.   While there are certainly other techniques that can be used, the ones shown here have worked well for us in different applications and provide the ability to display HTML content in-browser or out-of-browser. Feel free to add a comment if you have another tip or trick you like to use when working with HTML content in Silverlight applications.   Download Code Sample   For more information about onsite, online and video training, mentoring and consulting solutions for .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.thewahlingroup.com.

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• Using an alternate JSON Serializer in ASP.NET Web API

  - by Rick Strahl

  The new ASP.NET Web API that Microsoft released alongside MVC 4.0 Beta last week is a great framework for building REST and AJAX APIs. I've been working with it for quite a while now and I really like the way it works and the complete set of features it provides 'in the box'. It's about time that Microsoft gets a decent API for building generic HTTP endpoints into the framework. DataContractJsonSerializer sucks As nice as Web API's overall design is one thing still sucks: The built-in JSON Serialization uses the DataContractJsonSerializer which is just too limiting for many scenarios. The biggest issues I have with it are: No support for untyped values (object, dynamic, Anonymous Types) MS AJAX style Date Formatting Ugly serialization formats for types like Dictionaries To me the most serious issue is dealing with serialization of untyped objects. I have number of applications with AJAX front ends that dynamically reformat data from business objects to fit a specific message format that certain UI components require. The most common scenario I have there are IEnumerable query results from a database with fields from the result set rearranged to fit the sometimes unconventional formats required for the UI components (like jqGrid for example). Creating custom types to fit these messages seems like overkill and projections using Linq makes this much easier to code up. Alas DataContractJsonSerializer doesn't support it. Neither does DataContractSerializer for XML output for that matter. What this means is that you can't do stuff like this in Web API out of the box:public object GetAnonymousType() { return new { name = "Rick", company = "West Wind", entered= DateTime.Now }; } Basically anything that doesn't have an explicit type DataContractJsonSerializer will not let you return. FWIW, the same is true for XmlSerializer which also doesn't work with non-typed values for serialization. The example above is obviously contrived with a hardcoded object graph, but it's not uncommon to get dynamic values returned from queries that have anonymous types for their result projections. Apparently there's a good possibility that Microsoft will ship Json.NET as part of Web API RTM release.  Scott Hanselman confirmed this as a footnote in his JSON Dates post a few days ago. I've heard several other people from Microsoft confirm that Json.NET will be included and be the default JSON serializer, but no details yet in what capacity it will show up. Let's hope it ends up as the default in the box. Meanwhile this post will show you how you can use it today with the beta and get JSON that matches what you should see in the RTM version. What about JsonValue? To be fair Web API DOES include a new JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray type that allow you to address some of these scenarios. JsonValue is a new type in the System.Json assembly that can be used to build up an object graph based on a dictionary. It's actually a really cool implementation of a dynamic type that allows you to create an object graph and spit it out to JSON without having to create .NET type first. JsonValue can also receive a JSON string and parse it without having to actually load it into a .NET type (which is something that's been missing in the core framework). This is really useful if you get a JSON result from an arbitrary service and you don't want to explicitly create a mapping type for the data returned. For serialization you can create an object structure on the fly and pass it back as part of an Web API action method like this:public JsonValue GetJsonValue() { dynamic json = new JsonObject(); json.name = "Rick"; json.company = "West Wind"; json.entered = DateTime.Now; dynamic address = new JsonObject(); address.street = "32 Kaiea"; address.zip = "96779"; json.address = address; dynamic phones = new JsonArray(); json.phoneNumbers = phones; dynamic phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); //var jsonString = json.ToString(); return json; } which produces the following output (formatted here for easier reading):{ name: "rick", company: "West Wind", entered: "2012-03-08T15:33:19.673-10:00", address: { street: "32 Kaiea", zip: "96779" }, phoneNumbers: [ { type: "Home", number: "808 123-1233" }, { type: "Mobile", number: "808 123-1234" }] } If you need to build a simple JSON type on the fly these types work great. But if you have an existing type - or worse a query result/list that's already formatted JsonValue et al. become a pain to work with. As far as I can see there's no way to just throw an object instance at JsonValue and have it convert into JsonValue dictionary. It's a manual process. Using alternate Serializers in Web API So, currently the default serializer in WebAPI is DataContractJsonSeriaizer and I don't like it. You may not either, but luckily you can swap the serializer fairly easily. If you'd rather use the JavaScriptSerializer built into System.Web.Extensions or Json.NET today, it's not too difficult to create a custom MediaTypeFormatter that uses these serializers and can replace or partially replace the native serializer. Here's a MediaTypeFormatter implementation using the ASP.NET JavaScriptSerializer:using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using System.IO; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JavaScriptSerializerFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JavaScriptSerializerFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type== typeof(JsonArray) ) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); string json; using (var sr = new StreamReader(stream)) { json = sr.ReadToEnd(); sr.Close(); } object val = ser.Deserialize(json,type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); var json = ser.Serialize(value); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } Formatter implementation is pretty simple: You override 4 methods to tell which types you can handle and then handle the input or output streams to create/parse the JSON data. Note that when creating output you want to take care to still allow JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray types to be handled by the default serializer so those objects serialize properly - if you let either JavaScriptSerializer or JSON.NET handle them they'd try to render the dictionaries which is very undesirable. If you'd rather use Json.NET here's the JSON.NET version of the formatter:// this code requires a reference to JSON.NET in your project #if true using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using Newtonsoft.Json; using System.IO; using Newtonsoft.Json.Converters; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JsonNetFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JsonNetFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type == typeof(JsonArray)) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; var sr = new StreamReader(stream); var jreader = new JsonTextReader(sr); var ser = new JsonSerializer(); ser.Converters.Add(new IsoDateTimeConverter()); object val = ser.Deserialize(jreader, type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(value, Formatting.Indented, new JsonConverter[1] { new IsoDateTimeConverter() } ); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } #endif   One advantage of the Json.NET serializer is that you can specify a few options on how things are formatted and handled. You get null value handling and you can plug in the IsoDateTimeConverter which is nice to product proper ISO dates that I would expect any Json serializer to output these days. Hooking up the Formatters Once you've created the custom formatters you need to enable them for your Web API application. To do this use the GlobalConfiguration.Configuration object and add the formatter to the Formatters collection. Here's what this looks like hooked up from Application_Start in a Web project:protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Action based routing (used for RPC calls) RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "StockApi", routeTemplate: "stocks/{action}/{symbol}", defaults: new { symbol = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "StockApi" } ); // WebApi Configuration to hook up formatters and message handlers // optional RegisterApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration); } public static void RegisterApis(HttpConfiguration config) { // Add JavaScriptSerializer formatter instead - add at top to make default //config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JavaScriptSerializerFormatter()); // Add Json.net formatter - add at the top so it fires first! // This leaves the old one in place so JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray still are handled config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonNetFormatter()); } One thing to remember here is the GlobalConfiguration object which is Web API's static configuration instance. I think this thing is seriously misnamed given that GlobalConfiguration could stand for anything and so is hard to discover if you don't know what you're looking for. How about WebApiConfiguration or something more descriptive? Anyway, once you know what it is you can use the Formatters collection to insert your custom formatter. Note that I insert my formatter at the top of the list so it takes precedence over the default formatter. I also am not removing the old formatter because I still want JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray to be handled by the default serialization mechanism. Since they process in sequence and I exclude processing for these types JsonValue et al. still get properly serialized/deserialized. Summary Currently DataContractJsonSerializer in Web API is a pain, but at least we have the ability with relatively limited effort to replace the MediaTypeFormatter and plug in our own JSON serializer. This is useful for many scenarios - if you have existing client applications that used MVC JsonResult or ASP.NET AJAX results from ASMX AJAX services you can plug in the JavaScript serializer and get exactly the same serializer you used in the past so your results will be the same and don't potentially break clients. JSON serializers do vary a bit in how they serialize some of the more complex types (like Dictionaries and dates for example) and so if you're migrating it might be helpful to ensure your client code doesn't break when you switch to ASP.NET Web API. Going forward it looks like Microsoft is planning on plugging in Json.Net into Web API and make that the default. I think that's an awesome choice since Json.net has been around forever, is fast and easy to use and provides a ton of functionality as part of this great library. I just wish Microsoft would have figured this out sooner instead of now at the last minute integrating with it especially given that Json.Net has a similar set of lower level JSON objects JsonValue/JsonObject etc. which now will end up being duplicated by the native System.Json stuff. It's not like we don't already have enough confusion regarding which JSON serializer to use (JavaScriptSerializer, DataContractJsonSerializer, JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray and now Json.net). For years I've been using my own JSON serializer because the built in choices are both limited. However, with an official encorsement of Json.Net I'm happily moving on to use that in my applications. Let's see and hope Microsoft gets this right before ASP.NET Web API goes gold.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api  AJAX  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

  - by mbcrump

  Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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• WCF WS-Security and WSE Nonce Authentication

  - by Rick Strahl

  WCF makes it fairly easy to access WS-* Web Services, except when you run into a service format that it doesn't support. Even then WCF provides a huge amount of flexibility to make the service clients work, however finding the proper interfaces to make that happen is not easy to discover and for the most part undocumented unless you're lucky enough to run into a blog, forum or StackOverflow post on the matter. This is definitely true for the Password Nonce as part of the WS-Security/WSE protocol, which is not natively supported in WCF. Specifically I had a need to create a WCF message on the client that includes a WS-Security header that looks like this from their spec document:<soapenv:Header> <wsse:Security soapenv:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:UsernameToken wsu:Id="UsernameToken-8" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:Username>TeStUsErNaMe1</wsse:Username> <wsse:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >TeStPaSsWoRd1</wsse:Password> <wsse:Nonce EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" >f8nUe3YupTU5ISdCy3X9Gg==</wsse:Nonce> <wsu:Created>2011-05-04T19:01:40.981Z</wsu:Created> </wsse:UsernameToken> </wsse:Security> </soapenv:Header> Specifically, the Nonce and Created keys are what WCF doesn't create or have a built in formatting for. Why is there a nonce? My first thought here was WTF? The username and password are there in clear text, what does the Nonce accomplish? The Nonce and created keys are are part of WSE Security specification and are meant to allow the server to detect and prevent replay attacks. The hashed nonce should be unique per request which the server can store and check for before running another request thus ensuring that a request is not replayed with exactly the same values. Basic ServiceUtl Import - not much Luck The first thing I did when I imported this service with a service reference was to simply import it as a Service Reference. The Add Service Reference import automatically detects that WS-Security is required and appropariately adds the WS-Security to the basicHttpBinding in the config file:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding"> <security mode="Transport" /> </binding> <binding name="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding1" /> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://notarealurl.com:443/services/RealTimeOnline" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding" contract="RealTimeOnline.RealTimeOnline" name="RealTimeOnline" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> If if I run this as is using code like this:var client = new RealTimeOnlineClient(); client.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = "TheUsername"; client.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = "ThePassword"; … I get nothing in terms of WS-Security headers. The request is sent, but the the binding expects transport level security to be applied, rather than message level security. To fix this so that a WS-Security message header is sent the security mode can be changed to: <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential" /> Now if I re-run I at least get a WS-Security header which looks like this:<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:u="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <u:Timestamp u:Id="_0"> <u:Created>2012-11-24T02:55:18.011Z</u:Created> <u:Expires>2012-11-24T03:00:18.011Z</u:Expires> </u:Timestamp> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-18c215d4-1106-40a5-8dd1-c81fdddf19d3-1"> <o:Username>TheUserName</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >ThePassword</o:Password> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> Closer! Now the WS-Security header is there along with a timestamp field (which might not be accepted by some WS-Security expecting services), but there's no Nonce or created timestamp as required by my original service. Using a CustomBinding instead My next try was to go with a CustomBinding instead of basicHttpBinding as it allows a bit more control over the protocol and transport configurations for the binding. Specifically I can explicitly specify the message protocol(s) used. Using configuration file settings here's what the config file looks like:<?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="CustomSoapBinding"> <security includeTimestamp="false" authenticationMode="UserNameOverTransport" defaultAlgorithmSuite="Basic256" requireDerivedKeys="false" messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10"> </security> <textMessageEncoding messageVersion="Soap11"></textMessageEncoding> <httpsTransport maxReceivedMessageSize="2000000000"/> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://notrealurl.com:443/services/RealTimeOnline" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomSoapBinding" contract="RealTimeOnline.RealTimeOnline" name="RealTimeOnline" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> <startup> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> </startup> </configuration> This ends up creating a cleaner header that's missing the timestamp field which can cause some services problems. The WS-Security header output generated with the above looks like this:<s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-291622ca-4c11-460f-9886-ac1c78813b24-1"> <o:Username>TheUsername</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >ThePassword</o:Password> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> This is closer as it includes only the username and password. The key here is the protocol for WS-Security:messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10" which explicitly specifies the protocol version. There are several variants of this specification but none of them seem to support the nonce unfortunately. This protocol does allow for optional omission of the Nonce and created timestamp provided (which effectively makes those keys optional). With some services I tried that requested a Nonce just using this protocol actually worked where the default basicHttpBinding failed to connect, so this is a possible solution for access to some services. Unfortunately for my target service that was not an option. The nonce has to be there. Creating Custom ClientCredentials As it turns out WCF doesn't have support for the Digest Nonce as part of WS-Security, and so as far as I can tell there's no way to do it just with configuration settings. I did a bunch of research on this trying to find workarounds for this, and I did find a couple of entries on StackOverflow as well as on the MSDN forums. However, none of these are particularily clear and I ended up using bits and pieces of several of them to arrive at a working solution in the end. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/896901/wcf-adding-nonce-to-usernametoken http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/4df3354f-0627-42d9-b5fb-6e880b60f8ee The latter forum message is the more useful of the two (the last message on the thread in particular) and it has most of the information required to make this work. But it took some experimentation for me to get this right so I'll recount the process here maybe a bit more comprehensively. In order for this to work a number of classes have to be overridden: ClientCredentials ClientCredentialsSecurityTokenManager WSSecurityTokenizer The idea is that we need to create a custom ClientCredential class to hold the custom properties so they can be set from the UI or via configuration settings. The TokenManager and Tokenizer are mainly required to allow the custom credentials class to flow through the WCF pipeline and eventually provide custom serialization. Here are the three classes required and their full implementations:public class CustomCredentials : ClientCredentials { public CustomCredentials() { } protected CustomCredentials(CustomCredentials cc) : base(cc) { } public override System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenManager CreateSecurityTokenManager() { return new CustomSecurityTokenManager(this); } protected override ClientCredentials CloneCore() { return new CustomCredentials(this); } } public class CustomSecurityTokenManager : ClientCredentialsSecurityTokenManager { public CustomSecurityTokenManager(CustomCredentials cred) : base(cred) { } public override System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenSerializer CreateSecurityTokenSerializer(System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenVersion version) { return new CustomTokenSerializer(System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityVersion.WSSecurity11); } } public class CustomTokenSerializer : WSSecurityTokenSerializer { public CustomTokenSerializer(SecurityVersion sv) : base(sv) { } protected override void WriteTokenCore(System.Xml.XmlWriter writer, System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityToken token) { UserNameSecurityToken userToken = token as UserNameSecurityToken; string tokennamespace = "o"; DateTime created = DateTime.Now; string createdStr = created.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss.fffZ"); // unique Nonce value - encode with SHA-1 for 'randomness' // in theory the nonce could just be the GUID by itself string phrase = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); var nonce = GetSHA1String(phrase); // in this case password is plain text // for digest mode password needs to be encoded as: // PasswordAsDigest = Base64(SHA-1(Nonce + Created + Password)) // and profile needs to change to //string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); string password = userToken.Password; writer.WriteRaw(string.Format( "<{0}:UsernameToken u:Id=\"" + token.Id + "\" xmlns:u=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd\">" + "<{0}:Username>" + userToken.UserName + "</{0}:Username>" + "<{0}:Password Type=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText\">" + password + "</{0}:Password>" + "<{0}:Nonce EncodingType=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary\">" + nonce + "</{0}:Nonce>" + "<u:Created>" + createdStr + "</u:Created></{0}:UsernameToken>", tokennamespace)); } protected string GetSHA1String(string phrase) { SHA1CryptoServiceProvider sha1Hasher = new SHA1CryptoServiceProvider(); byte[] hashedDataBytes = sha1Hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(phrase)); return Convert.ToBase64String(hashedDataBytes); } } Realistically only the CustomTokenSerializer has any significant code in. The code there deals with actually serializing the custom credentials using low level XML semantics by writing output into an XML writer. I can't take credit for this code - most of the code comes from the MSDN forum post mentioned earlier - I made a few adjustments to simplify the nonce generation and also added some notes to allow for PasswordDigest generation. Per spec the nonce is nothing more than a unique value that's supposed to be 'random'. I'm thinking that this value can be any string that's unique and a GUID on its own probably would have sufficed. Comments on other posts that GUIDs can be potentially guessed are highly exaggerated to say the least IMHO. To satisfy even that aspect though I added the SHA1 encryption and binary decoding to give a more random value that would be impossible to 'guess'. The original example from the forum post used another level of encoding and decoding to string in between - but that really didn't accomplish anything but extra overhead. The header output generated from this looks like this:<s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-f43d8b0d-0ebb-482e-998d-f544401a3c91-1" xmlns:u="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <o:Username>TheUsername</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText">ThePassword</o:Password> <o:Nonce EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" >PjVE24TC6HtdAnsf3U9c5WMsECY=</o:Nonce> <u:Created>2012-11-23T07:10:04.670Z</u:Created> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> which is exactly as it should be. Password Digest? In my case the password is passed in plain text over an SSL connection, so there's no digest required so I was done with the code above. Since I don't have a service handy that requires a password digest,  I had no way of testing the code for the digest implementation, but here is how this is likely to work. If you need to pass a digest encoded password things are a little bit trickier. The password type namespace needs to change to: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#Digest and then the password value needs to be encoded. The format for password digest encoding is this: Base64(SHA-1(Nonce + Created + Password)) and it can be handled in the code above with this code (that's commented in the snippet above): string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); The entire WriteTokenCore method for digest code looks like this:protected override void WriteTokenCore(System.Xml.XmlWriter writer, System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityToken token) { UserNameSecurityToken userToken = token as UserNameSecurityToken; string tokennamespace = "o"; DateTime created = DateTime.Now; string createdStr = created.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss.fffZ"); // unique Nonce value - encode with SHA-1 for 'randomness' // in theory the nonce could just be the GUID by itself string phrase = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); var nonce = GetSHA1String(phrase); string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); writer.WriteRaw(string.Format( "<{0}:UsernameToken u:Id=\"" + token.Id + "\" xmlns:u=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd\">" + "<{0}:Username>" + userToken.UserName + "</{0}:Username>" + "<{0}:Password Type=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#Digest\">" + password + "</{0}:Password>" + "<{0}:Nonce EncodingType=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary\">" + nonce + "</{0}:Nonce>" + "<u:Created>" + createdStr + "</u:Created></{0}:UsernameToken>", tokennamespace)); } I had no service to connect to to try out Digest auth - if you end up needing it and get it to work please drop a comment… How to use the custom Credentials The easiest way to use the custom credentials is to create the client in code. Here's a factory method I use to create an instance of my service client:  public static RealTimeOnlineClient CreateRealTimeOnlineProxy(string url, string username, string password) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(url)) url = "https://notrealurl.com:443/cows/services/RealTimeOnline"; CustomBinding binding = new CustomBinding(); var security = TransportSecurityBindingElement.CreateUserNameOverTransportBindingElement(); security.IncludeTimestamp = false; security.DefaultAlgorithmSuite = SecurityAlgorithmSuite.Basic256; security.MessageSecurityVersion = MessageSecurityVersion.WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10; var encoding = new TextMessageEncodingBindingElement(); encoding.MessageVersion = MessageVersion.Soap11; var transport = new HttpsTransportBindingElement(); transport.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 20000000; // 20 megs binding.Elements.Add(security); binding.Elements.Add(encoding); binding.Elements.Add(transport); RealTimeOnlineClient client = new RealTimeOnlineClient(binding, new EndpointAddress(url)); // to use full client credential with Nonce uncomment this code: // it looks like this might not be required - the service seems to work without it client.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Remove<System.ServiceModel.Description.ClientCredentials>(); client.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add(new CustomCredentials()); client.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = username; client.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = password; return client; } This returns a service client that's ready to call other service methods. The key item in this code is the ChannelFactory endpoint behavior modification that that first removes the original ClientCredentials and then adds the new one. The ClientCredentials property on the client is read only and this is the way it has to be added.   Summary It's a bummer that WCF doesn't suport WSE Security authentication with nonce values out of the box. From reading the comments in posts/articles while I was trying to find a solution, I found that this feature was omitted by design as this protocol is considered unsecure. While I agree that plain text passwords are rarely a good idea even if they go over secured SSL connection as WSE Security does, there are unfortunately quite a few services (mosly Java services I suspect) that use this protocol. I've run into this twice now and trying to find a solution online I can see that this is not an isolated problem - many others seem to have struggled with this. It seems there are about a dozen questions about this on StackOverflow all with varying incomplete answers. Hopefully this post provides a little more coherent content in one place. Again I marvel at WCF and its breadth of support for protocol features it has in a single tool. And even when it can't handle something there are ways to get it working via extensibility. But at the same time I marvel at how freaking difficult it is to arrive at these solutions. I mean there's no way I could have ever figured this out on my own. It takes somebody working on the WCF team or at least being very, very intricately involved in the innards of WCF to figure out the interconnection of the various objects to do this from scratch. Luckily this is an older problem that has been discussed extensively online and I was able to cobble together a solution from the online content. I'm glad it worked out that way, but it feels dirty and incomplete in that there's a whole learning path that was omitted to get here… Man am I glad I'm not dealing with SOAP services much anymore. REST service security - even when using some sort of federation is a piece of cake by comparison :-) I'm sure once standards bodies gets involved we'll be right back in security standard hell…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in WCF  Web Services   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• jQuery Globalization Plugin from Microsoft

  - by ScottGu

  Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is starting to make code contributions to jQuery, and about some of the first code contributions we were working on: jQuery Templates and Data Linking support. Today, we released a prototype of a new jQuery Globalization Plugin that enables you to add globalization support to your JavaScript applications. This plugin includes globalization information for over 350 cultures ranging from Scottish Gaelic, Frisian, Hungarian, Japanese, to Canadian English.  We will be releasing this plugin to the community as open-source. You can download our prototype for the jQuery Globalization plugin from our Github repository: http://github.com/nje/jquery-glob You can also download a set of samples that demonstrate some simple use-cases with it here. Understanding Globalization The jQuery Globalization plugin enables you to easily parse and format numbers, currencies, and dates for different cultures in JavaScript. For example, you can use the Globalization plugin to display the proper currency symbol for a culture: You also can use the Globalization plugin to format dates so that the day and month appear in the right order and the day and month names are correctly translated: Notice above how the Arabic year is displayed as 1431. This is because the year has been converted to use the Arabic calendar. Some cultural differences, such as different currency or different month names, are obvious. Other cultural differences are surprising and subtle. For example, in some cultures, the grouping of numbers is done unevenly. In the "te-IN" culture (Telugu in India), groups have 3 digits and then 2 digits. The number 1000000 (one million) is written as "10,00,000". Some cultures do not group numbers at all. All of these subtle cultural differences are handled by the jQuery Globalization plugin automatically. Getting dates right can be especially tricky. Different cultures have different calendars such as the Gregorian and UmAlQura calendars. A single culture can even have multiple calendars. For example, the Japanese culture uses both the Gregorian calendar and a Japanese calendar that has eras named after Japanese emperors. The Globalization Plugin includes methods for converting dates between all of these different calendars. Using Language Tags The jQuery Globalization plugin uses the language tags defined in the RFC 4646 and RFC 5646 standards to identity cultures (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646). A language tag is composed out of one or more subtags separated by hyphens. For example: Language Tag Language Name (in English) en-AU English (Australia) en-BZ English (Belize) en-CA English (Canada) Id Indonesian zh-CHS Chinese (Simplified) Legacy Zu isiZulu Notice that a single language, such as English, can have several language tags. Speakers of English in Canada format numbers, currencies, and dates using different conventions than speakers of English in Australia or the United States. You can find the language tag for a particular culture by using the Language Subtag Lookup tool located here:  http://rishida.net/utils/subtags/ The jQuery Globalization plugin download includes a folder named globinfo that contains the information for each of the 350 cultures. Actually, this folder contains more than 700 files because the folder includes both minified and un-minified versions of each file. For example, the globinfo folder includes JavaScript files named jQuery.glob.en-AU.js for English Australia, jQuery.glob.id.js for Indonesia, and jQuery.glob.zh-CHS for Chinese (Simplified) Legacy. Example: Setting a Particular Culture Imagine that you have been asked to create a German website and want to format all of the dates, currencies, and numbers using German formatting conventions correctly in JavaScript on the client. The HTML for the page might look like this: Notice the span tags above. They mark the areas of the page that we want to format with the Globalization plugin. We want to format the product price, the date the product is available, and the units of the product in stock. To use the jQuery Globalization plugin, we’ll add three JavaScript files to the page: the jQuery library, the jQuery Globalization plugin, and the culture information for a particular language: In this case, I’ve statically added the jQuery.glob.de-DE.js JavaScript file that contains the culture information for German. The language tag “de-DE” is used for German as spoken in Germany. Now that I have all of the necessary scripts, I can use the Globalization plugin to format the product price, date available, and units in stock values using the following client-side JavaScript: The jQuery Globalization plugin extends the jQuery library with new methods - including new methods named preferCulture() and format(). The preferCulture() method enables you to set the default culture used by the jQuery Globalization plugin methods. Notice that the preferCulture() method accepts a language tag. The method will find the closest culture that matches the language tag. The $.format() method is used to actually format the currencies, dates, and numbers. The second parameter passed to the $.format() method is a format specifier. For example, passing “c” causes the value to be formatted as a currency. The ReadMe file at github details the meaning of all of the various format specifiers: http://github.com/nje/jquery-glob When we open the page in a browser, everything is formatted correctly according to German language conventions. A euro symbol is used for the currency symbol. The date is formatted using German day and month names. Finally, a period instead of a comma is used a number separator: You can see a running example of the above approach with the 3_GermanSite.htm file in this samples download. Example: Enabling a User to Dynamically Select a Culture In the previous example we explicitly said that we wanted to globalize in German (by referencing the jQuery.glob.de-DE.js file). Let’s now look at the first of a few examples that demonstrate how to dynamically set the globalization culture to use. Imagine that you want to display a dropdown list of all of the 350 cultures in a page. When someone selects a culture from the dropdown list, you want all of the dates in the page to be formatted using the selected culture. Here’s the HTML for the page: Notice that all of the dates are contained in a <span> tag with a data-date attribute (data-* attributes are a new feature of HTML 5 that conveniently also still work with older browsers). We’ll format the date represented by the data-date attribute when a user selects a culture from the dropdown list. In order to display dates for any possible culture, we’ll include the jQuery.glob.all.js file like this: The jQuery Globalization plugin includes a JavaScript file named jQuery.glob.all.js. This file contains globalization information for all of the more than 350 cultures supported by the Globalization plugin.  At 367KB minified, this file is not small. Because of the size of this file, unless you really need to use all of these cultures at the same time, we recommend that you add the individual JavaScript files for particular cultures that you intend to support instead of the combined jQuery.glob.all.js to a page. In the next sample I’ll show how to dynamically load just the language files you need. Next, we’ll populate the dropdown list with all of the available cultures. We can use the $.cultures property to get all of the loaded cultures: Finally, we’ll write jQuery code that grabs every span element with a data-date attribute and format the date: The jQuery Globalization plugin’s parseDate() method is used to convert a string representation of a date into a JavaScript date. The plugin’s format() method is used to format the date. The “D” format specifier causes the date to be formatted using the long date format. And now the content will be globalized correctly regardless of which of the 350 languages a user visiting the page selects.  You can see a running example of the above approach with the 4_SelectCulture.htm file in this samples download. Example: Loading Globalization Files Dynamically As mentioned in the previous section, you should avoid adding the jQuery.glob.all.js file to a page whenever possible because the file is so large. A better alternative is to load the globalization information that you need dynamically. For example, imagine that you have created a dropdown list that displays a list of languages: The following jQuery code executes whenever a user selects a new language from the dropdown list. The code checks whether the globalization file associated with the selected language has already been loaded. If the globalization file has not been loaded then the globalization file is loaded dynamically by taking advantage of the jQuery $.getScript() method. The globalizePage() method is called after the requested globalization file has been loaded, and contains the client-side code to perform the globalization. The advantage of this approach is that it enables you to avoid loading the entire jQuery.glob.all.js file. Instead you only need to load the files that you need and you don’t need to load the files more than once. The 5_Dynamic.htm file in this samples download demonstrates how to implement this approach. Example: Setting the User Preferred Language Automatically Many websites detect a user’s preferred language from their browser settings and automatically use it when globalizing content. A user can set a preferred language for their browser. Then, whenever the user requests a page, this language preference is included in the request in the Accept-Language header. When using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can set your preferred language by following these steps: Select the menu option Tools, Internet Options. Select the General tab. Click the Languages button in the Appearance section. Click the Add button to add a new language to the list of languages. Move your preferred language to the top of the list. Notice that you can list multiple languages in the Language Preference dialog. All of these languages are sent in the order that you listed them in the Accept-Language header: Accept-Language: fr-FR,id-ID;q=0.7,en-US;q=0.3 Strangely, you cannot retrieve the value of the Accept-Language header from client JavaScript. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox support a bevy of language related properties exposed by the window.navigator object, such as windows.navigator.browserLanguage and window.navigator.language, but these properties represent either the language set for the operating system or the language edition of the browser. These properties don’t enable you to retrieve the language that the user set as his or her preferred language. The only reliable way to get a user’s preferred language (the value of the Accept-Language header) is to write server code. For example, the following ASP.NET page takes advantage of the server Request.UserLanguages property to assign the user’s preferred language to a client JavaScript variable named acceptLanguage (which then allows you to access the value using client-side JavaScript): In order for this code to work, the culture information associated with the value of acceptLanguage must be included in the page. For example, if someone’s preferred culture is fr-FR (French in France) then you need to include either the jQuery.glob.fr-FR.js or the jQuery.glob.all.js JavaScript file in the page or the culture information won’t be available.  The “6_AcceptLanguages.aspx” sample in this samples download demonstrates how to implement this approach. If the culture information for the user’s preferred language is not included in the page then the $.preferCulture() method will fall back to using the neutral culture (for example, using jQuery.glob.fr.js instead of jQuery.glob.fr-FR.js). If the neutral culture information is not available then the $.preferCulture() method falls back to the default culture (English). Example: Using the Globalization Plugin with the jQuery UI DatePicker One of the goals of the Globalization plugin is to make it easier to build jQuery widgets that can be used with different cultures. We wanted to make sure that the jQuery Globalization plugin could work with existing jQuery UI plugins such as the DatePicker plugin. To that end, we created a patched version of the DatePicker plugin that can take advantage of the Globalization plugin when rendering a calendar. For example, the following figure illustrates what happens when you add the jQuery Globalization and the patched jQuery UI DatePicker plugin to a page and select Indonesian as the preferred culture: Notice that the headers for the days of the week are displayed using Indonesian day name abbreviations. Furthermore, the month names are displayed in Indonesian. You can download the patched version of the jQuery UI DatePicker from our github website. Or you can use the version included in this samples download and used by the 7_DatePicker.htm sample file. Summary I’m excited about our continuing participation in the jQuery community. This Globalization plugin is the third jQuery plugin that we’ve released. We’ve really appreciated all of the great feedback and design suggestions on the jQuery templating and data-linking prototypes that we released earlier this year.  We also want to thank the jQuery and jQuery UI teams for working with us to create these plugins. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. You can follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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