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• Flashing your Windows Phone Dummies

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  The rate at which vendors release new updates for the HD2 is ridiculously slow. You have to wait for Microsoft to release the new OS, then you wait for HTC to build it into a ROM, and then you have to wait up to 6 months for your operator to badly customise it for their network. Once Windows Phone 7 is released this problem should go away as Microsoft is likely to be able to update the phone over the air, but what do we do until then? I want Windows Mobile 6.5.5 now!   I’m an early adopter. If there is a new version of something then that’s the version I want. As long as you accept that you are using something on a “let the early adopter beware” and accept that there may be bugs, sometimes serious crippling bugs the go for it. Note that I won't be responsible if you end up bricking your phone, unlocking or flashing your radio or ROM can be risky. If you follow the instructions then you should be fine, I've flashed my phones (SPV, M300, M1000, M2000, M3100, TyTN, TyTN 2, HD2) hundreds of times without any problems! I have been using Windows Mobile 6.5.5 before it was called 6.5.5 and for long enough that I don’t even remember when I first started using it. I was using it on my HTC TyTN 2 before I got an HD2 a couple of months before Christmas, and the first custom ROM’s for the HD2 were a couple of months after that. I always update to the latest ROM that I like, and occasionally I go back to the stock ROM’s to have a look see, but I am always disappointed. Terms: Soft Reset: Same as pulling out the battery, but is like a reboot for your phone Hard Reset: Reinstalls the Operating system from the Image that is stored on it ROM: This is Image that is loaded onto your phone and it is used to reinstall your phone whenever you do a “hard reset”. Stock ROM: A ROM from the original vendor… So HTC Cook a ROM: Referring to Cooking a ROM is the process a ROM developer goes through to take all of the parts (OS, Drivers and Applications) that make up a running phone and compiling them into a ROM. ROM Kitchen: A place where you get an SDK and all the component parts of the phone: OD, Drivers and Application. There are usually lots of Tools for making it easier to compile and build the image. Flashing: The process of updating one of the layers of your phone with a new layer Bricked: This is what happens when flashing goes wrong. Your phone is now good for only one thing… stopping paper blowing away in a windy place. You can “cook” you own ROM using one of the many good “ROM Kitchens” or you can use a ROM built and tested by someone else. I have cooked my own ROM before, and while the tutorials are good, it is a lot of hassle. You can only Flash new ROM’s that are specifically for your phone only so find a ROM for your phone and XDA Developers is the best place to look. It has a forum based structure and you can find your phone quite easily. XDA Developer Forum Installing a new ROM does have its risks. In the past there have been stories about phones being “bricked” but I have not heard of a bricked phone for quite some years. if you follow the instructions carefully you should not have any problems. note: Most of the tools are written by people for whom English is not their first language to you will need concentrate hard to understand some of the instructions. Have you ever read a manual that was just literally translated from another language? Enough said… There are a number of layers on your phone that you will need to know about: SPL: This is the lowest level, like a BIOS on a PC and is the Operating Systems gateway to the hardware Radio: I think of this as the hardware drivers, and you will need a different Radio for CDMA than GSM networks ROM: This is like your Windows CD, but it is stored internally to the Phone. Flashing your phone consists of replacing one Image with another and then wiping your phone and automatically reinstall from the Image. Sometimes when you download an Image wither it is for a Radio or for ROM you only get a file called *.nbh. What do you do with this? Well you need an RUU application to push that Image to your phone. The RUU’s are different per phone, but there is a CustomRUU for the HD2 that will update your phone with any *.nbh placed in the same directory. Download and Instructions for CustomRUU #1 Flash HardSPL An SPL is kind of like a BIOS, and the default one has checks to make sure that you are only installing a signed ROM. This would prevent you from installing one that comes from any other source but the vendor. NOTE: Installing a HARD SPL invalidates your warranty so remember to Flash your phone with a “stock” vendor ROM before trying to send your phone in for repairs. Is the warranty reinstated when you go back to a stock ROM? I don’t know… Updating your SPL to a HardSPL effectively unlocks your phone so you can install anything you like. I would recommend the HardSPL2. Download and Instructions for HardSPL2 #2 Task29 One of the problems that has been seen on the HD2 when flashing new ROM’s is that things are left over from the old ROM. For a while the recommendation was to Flash a stock ROM first, but some clever cookies have come up with “Task29” which formats your phone first. After running this your phone will be blank and will only boot to the white HTC logo and no further. You should follow the instructions and reboot (remove battery) and hold down the “volume down” button while turning you HD2 on to enter the bootloader. From here you can run CustomRUU once the USB message appears. Download and Instructions for Task29 #2 Flash Radio You may need to play around with this one, there is no good and bad version and the latest is not always the best. You know that annoying thing when you hit “end call” on your phone and nothing happens? Well that's down to the Radio. Get this version right for you and you may even be able to make calls. From a Windows Mobile as well Download There are no instructions here, but they are the same as th ROM, but you use this *.nbh file. #3 Flash ROM If you have gotten this far then you are probably a pro by now Just download the latest ROM below and Flash to your phone. I have been really impressed by the Artemis line of ROM’s but it is no way the only choice. I like this one as the developer builds them as close to the stock ROM as possible while updating to the latest of everything. Download and Instructions for  Artemis HD2 vXX Conclusion While updating your ROM is not for the faint hearted it provides more options than the Stock ROM’s and quicker feature updates than waiting… Technorati Tags: WM6

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 27, 2010New ProjectsBinding Navigator: Clone of WinForms BindingNavigator that is able to work with any type of DataSource. For full functionality it requires the DataSource to implement...DEWD: DEWD is an Umbraco 4.0 extension used to edit sequential data such as rows in a SQL server database table. It's meant to allow developers to quickl...Eletronic Invoice Extensions: A simple DLL to use against XSD and validate a XML.EssionCalendar: EssionCal EssionCalExpression Encoder Batch Processor: Importing your videotapes into Windows is easy with the built-in utilities, but if your importer does not encode to your desired format, you need t...Feedback Form: Feedback application makes it easier for attendees who attend an seminar/event and event organizers. Organizers of the event will no longer need to...Find in Start Menu: Find in Start MenuIE8 Web Slices Pack: IE8 Web Slices Pack is a package of 5 types of web slices ready to be customized via a mini-CMS for your web site or for your custom IE8 installer....KafTK: Iskakov AzamatMicrosoft Dynamics NAV text export splitter: Utility for splitting Microsoft Dynamics NAV object exports (in text format) into files that each contain a single object. MultiPoint Vote: Voting is more innovative and catchy through this MultiPoint application. Using MultiPoint SDK 1.5 and Visual C#, this prototype emphasizes the cap...NebDotNet: NebDotNetnsim: Some simulation issues.OpenLight Group Common Lib: This project is a set of classes commonly used across OpenLight Group projects.pstsdk.net: .NET port of PST File Format SDK: pstsdk.net makes it easier for .NET developers to access the PST file format. This is a direct C# port of the PST File Format SDK project which is ...RavenMVC: A NoSQL Demo App using RavenDB and ASP.NET MVC 2.Remics: Remics is a toolkit for reverse engineering tools. Open source (MIT license). The goal of Remics is enabling developers (or researchers) quickly...RIA Services to Legacy DAL Integration Library: RIA Services to Legacy DAL Integration LibrarySharePoint List Adapters for SSIS: SSIS source and destination components to access SharePoint lists using basic authenticationSql Query Modelling Language: This project library creates simple Sql queries.Thumb nail creator and image resizer: a user control to create thubnails and resize images for displayTK: study projectViperWorks Ignition: Ignition is application framework for WinForms and WPF business applications. Built in webservice generation, reporting and rapid application devel...XNA Image Reflector: XNA Image Reflector allows you to add Web 2.0-like reflections to images in a few clicksXNArkanoid: XNArkanoid is a Windows Phone 7 remake of the classic Taito´s Arkanoid. It´s developed in C#, using XNA Framework v4.0.New ReleasesAcies: Acies - Alpha Build 0.0.5: First alpha release. Requires Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 3.1 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867a2a-e249...Ajax Toolkit for ASP.NET MVC: Ajax Toolkit for ASP.NET MVC v20100527: change array datasource to json datasource allow lowercaseAttribute Builder: Attribute Builder 1.0: Attribute Builder 1.0Support for parameter-less constructors, constructors with parameters and object initialization with field and property assign...Binding Navigator: TTBindingNavigator preview: First binary release. Only control without samples.Bojinx: Bojinx Core V4.5.15: Bugs fixed: Clean up in the event handler Added more disposal features to better clean up contexts on unload. Optimized command processing fur...CBM-Command: Version 1.0 - 2010-05-26: Release Notes - 2010-05-26 - Version 1.0New Features None Changes Fixed bug where you could move to an unopened panel Fixed bug where you could ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V03: This is the second release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V04: This is the second release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V05: This is the second release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V06: This is the second release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. ...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V07: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open sourcen NNTP Bridge. This release solves...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V08: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release solves ...Dot Game: Dot Game Network version: Now, you can play over network.EpsiRisk: EPSI RISK V1: First Stable Version of EpsiRISK ! Enjoy !Event Scavenger: Viewer 3.3.0: Added grouping functionality to Viewer. Group expanding/collapsing only supported under Windows Vista/7 and onwards. Viewer version set to 3.3.0.FAST for Sharepoint MOSS 2010 Query Tool: Version 1.0: Full Release Added sorting Added custom trim duplicates Added UI improvements Added ignore certificate errorsFoursquare for Windows Phone 7: Foursquare 2010.05.26.01: Foursquare 2010.05.26.01 Updates: Corrected issue with isPrivate, sendToTwitter, and sendToFacebookHobbyBrew Mobile: Beta 3: ATTENZIONE notifica nuove versioni via email disponibile (leggi in fondo)! Supporto alla rotazione dello schermo: Malti e Luppoli si affiancano or...IE8 Web Slices Pack: IE8 Web Slices Pack v2.0: This release of the Web Slices Pack supports 5 different Web Slices and a mini CMS to administer the info in the Web Slices.manx: manx data 1.0: Initial dump of data. This is a raw SQL dump script that deletes all existing data and inserts the initial dataset as received from Paul Williams....Microsoft Web Protection Library: WPL May CTP: This preview of the Web Protection Library includes AntiXSS - an updated Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library removes some bugs and is now usable in ...MultiPoint Vote: MultiPoint Vote v.1: MultiPoint Vote v1 Features This accepts user inputs: number of participants, poll/survey title and the list of options A text file containing th...NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.05.26.001: Changes since the last build:2010-05-25 19:21:49 Jarek Kowalski Reordered parameters of AsynchronousAction<T> 2010-05-25 19:16:02 Jarek Kowalski N...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Class Libraries, version 1.0.1.124: The NodeXL class libraries can be used to display network graphs in .NET applications. To include a NodeXL network graph in a WPF desktop or Windo...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel 2007 Template, version 1.0.1.124: The NodeXL Excel 2007 template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 workbook. What's NewThis is a minor re...OpenExpressApp let business people build application: OpenExpressApp for .Net4: 从.Net3.5 SP1 升级到.Net4 ,升级主要内容: 1. 解决了一些内存泄露问题 2. 修改了一些bug 3. 进行了部分代码重构 4. 使用MEF替代了PrismRavenMVC: RavenMVC 0.1: A NoSQL demo app in ASP.NET MVC using RavenDB.SharePoint List Adapters for SSIS: Initial Release: Contains the raw assemblies necessary to use the SharePoint list adapters with basic authentication. See the read me file for details on using in ...Sql Query Modelling Language: Sql Qml V1: This is first versionThumb nail creator and image resizer: ThumbnailCreator 1.0: This is the very first release I built it for my self so it a bit rough but i thought others might fint it usefulluptime.exe: uptime.exe v1.1: Changed the calculation of the uptime. It's now based on the LastbootUpTime value obtained from WMI.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30526.0: Automatic drop of latest buildViperWorks Ignition: Test: TestXmlCodeEditor: Release 0.91 Alpha: Release 0.91 AlphaXNA Image Reflector: XNA Image Reflector v 1.1: This release has been compiled with XNA Game Studio 3.1, so you will need to download the XNA Runtime 3.1 in order to run it.Xna.Extend: Xna Extend (Ver 0.0.1 beta): This is the betas, betas, beta, test version (Version 0.0.1 beta). It includes only the input and audio components. If you experience any errors, o...XNArkanoid: XNArkanoid v 0.2b: XNArkanoid v 0.2. Initial beta releaseMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active ProjectsAStar.netpatterns & practices – Enterprise Librarypatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceSqlServerExtensionsMono.AddinsBlogEngine.NETCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMRawrCodeReviewGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & Presentation

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• Company Review: Google Products

  Google, Inc offers an array of products and services to all of its end-users. However their search capabilities are the foundation for Google’s current success and their primary business focus. Currently, Google offers over twenty different search applications that allow users to search the internet for books, maps, videos, images, products and much more. Their product decisions have allowed users demands to be met while focusing on the free based model. This allows users to access Google data free of charge and indirectly gives Google a strong competitive advantage of other competitors along with the accuracy of the search results. According to Google, Inc, they offer the following types of searching capabilities: Alerts Get email updates on the topics of your choice Blog Search Find blogs on your favorite topics  Books Search the full text of books  Custom Search Create a customized search experience for your community  Desktop Search and personalize your computer  Dictionary Search for definitions of words and phrases Directory Search the web, organized by topic or category Earth Explore the world from your computer Finance Business info, news and interactive charts GOOG-411 Find and connect for free with businesses from your phone  Images Search for images on the web Maps View maps and directions News Search thousands of news stories Patent Search Search the full text of US Patents Product Search Search for stuff to buy Scholar Search scholarly papers Toolbar Add a search box to your browser Trends Explore past and present search trends Videos Search for videos on the web Web Search Search billions of web pages Web Search Features Find movies, music, stocks, books and more mapping Google’s free based business model is only one way it differentiates itself from its competition. There is also a strong focus on the accuracy of search results and the speed in which they are returned to the end-user. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a structured method used to help connect user needs to the design features of a project proposed to address those needs. This method is particularly useful in accounting for needs that are not easily articulated or precisely defined according to the U. S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration. Due to the fact that QFD is so customer driven Google is always in a constant state of change in attempt to reengineer its search algorithms, and other dependant systems so that end-users requirements are constantly being met. Value engineering is a key example of this, Google is constantly trying to improve all aspects of its products, improve system maintainability, and system interoperability. Bridgefield Group defines value engineering as an organized methodology that identifies and selects the lowest lifecycle cost options in design, materials and processes that achieves the desired level of performance, reliability and customer satisfaction. In addition, it seeks to remove unnecessary costs in the above areas and is often a joint effort with cross-functional internal teams and relevant suppliers. Common issues that appear when developing large scale systems like Google’s search applications include modular design of a product and/or service and providing accurate value analysis. A design approach that adheres to four fundamental tenets of cohesiveness, encapsulation, self-containment, and high binding to design a system component as an independently operable unit subject to change is how the Open System Joint Task Force defines modular design. More specifically M. S. Schmaltz defines modular software design as having a large collection of statements strung together in one partition of in-line code; we segment or divide the statements into logical groups called modules. Each module performs one or two tasks, and then passes control to another module. By breaking up the code into "bite-sized chunks", so to speak, we are able to better control the flow of data and control. This is especially true in large software systems. Value analysis is a process to evaluate products and services based on effectiveness, safety, and cost. Value analysis involves assessing the quality as well as the cost of a product or service as defined by the Healthcare Financial Management Association.  “Operations Management deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains. It considers the acquisition, development, and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their clients want.” (MIT,2010) Google, Inc encourages an open environment between all employees, also known as Googlers. This is reinforced by a cross-section team or cross-functional teams comprised from multiple departments assigned to every project so that every department like marketing, finance, and quality assurance has input on every project. In addition, Google is known for their openness to new ideas regardless of the status or seniority of an employee. In fact, Google allows for 20% of an employee’s time can be devoted to developing new ideas and/or pet projects. HumTech.com defines a cross-functional team as a collection of people with varied levels of skills and experience brought together to accomplish a task. As the name implies, Cross-Functional Team members come from different organizational units. Cross-Functional Teams may be permanent or ad hoc. Google’s search application product strategy primarily focuses on mass customization. This is allows Google to create a base search application and allows results to be returned to the end-users quickly based on specific parameters and search settings. In addition, they also store the data that is returned in case other desire the same results based on other end-users supplying the same customized settings. This allows Google to appear to render search results in virtually real-time to the user while allowing for complete customization of the searching criteria. Greg Vogl, a professor at Uganda Martyrs University, defines mass customization as when a business gives its customers the opportunity to tailor its products or services to the customer's specifications. The IT staff at Google play a key role in ensuring that the search application’s product strategy is maintained simply because the IT staff designs, develops, and maintains all of their proprietary applications. In fact, they also maintain all network infrastructure to ensure that it is available to all end-users. References: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/publications/ftat_user_guide/sec5.htm http://www.bridgefieldgroup.com/bridgefieldgroup/glos9.htm#V http://www.acq.osd.mil/osjtf/termsdef.html http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~mssz/Pascal-CGS2462/prog-dsn.html http://www.hfma.org/publications/business_caring_newsletter/exclusives/Supply+and+Inventory+Terms+Defined.htm http://mitsloan.mit.edu/omg/om-definition.php http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/ols/ols3.cfm http://www.gregvogl.net/courses/mis1/glossary.htm

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• Is Berkeley DB a NoSQL solution?

  - by Gregory Burd

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

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• TechEd 2010 Day One – How I Travel

  - by BuckWoody

  Normally when I blog on the first day of a conference, well, there hasn’t been a first day yet. So I talk about the value of a conference or some other facet. And normally in my (non-conference) blogs, I show you how I have learned to be a data professional – things I’ve learned how to do over the years. But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a big part of my job – traveling. I’ve traveled a lot throughout the years, when I’ve taught, gone to conferences, consulted and in my current role assisting Microsoft customers with large-scale database system designs.  So I’ll share a few thoughts about what I do. Keep in mind that I travel for short durations, just a day or so, and sometimes I travel internationally. For those I prepare differently – what I’m talking about here is what I do for a multi-day, same-country trip. Hopefully you find it useful. I’ll tag a few other travelers I know to add their thoughts.  Preparing for Travel   When I’m notified of a trip, I begin researching the location. I find the flights, hotel and (if I have to) a car to use while I’m away. We have an in-house system we use to book the travel, but when I travel not-for-Microsoft I use Expedia and Kayak to find what I need.  Traveling on Sunday and Friday is the worst. I have to do it sometimes (like this week) and it’s always a bad idea. But you can blunt the impact by booking as early as you can stand it. That means I have to be up super-early, but the flights are normally on time. I stay flexible, and always have a backup plan in case the flights are delayed or canceled.  For the hotel, I tend to go on the cheaper side, and I look for older hotels that have been renovated, or quirky ones. For instance, in Boise, ID recently I stayed at a 60’s-themed (think Mad-Men) hotel that was very cool. Always I go on the less expensive side – I find the “luxury” hotels nail me for Internet, food, everything. The cheaper places include all kinds of things, and even have breakfasts, shuttles and all kinds of things that start to add up. I even call ahead to make sure there’s an iron and ironing board available, since I’ll need those when I get there.  I find any way I can not to get a car. I use mass-transit wherever possible, and try to make friends and pay their gas to take me places. In a pinch, I’ll use a taxi. It ends up being cheaper, faster, and less stressful all around.  Packing  Over the years I’ve learned never to check luggage whenever I can. To do that, I lay out everything I want to take with me on the bed, and then try and make sure I’m really going to use it. I wear a dark wool set of pants, which I can clean and wear in hot and cold climates. I bring undies and socks of course, and for most places I have to wear “dress up” shirts. I bring at least two print T-Shirts in case I want to dress down for something while I’m gone, but I only bring one set of shoes. All the  clothes are rolled as tightly as possible as I learned in the military. Then I use those to cushion the electronics I take.  For toiletries I bring a shaver, toothpaste and toothbrush, D/O and a small brush. Everything else the hotel will provide.  For entertainment, I take a small Zune, a full PC-Headset (so I can make IP calls on the road) and my laptop. I don’t take books or anything else – everything is electronic. I use E-books (downloaded from our Library), Audio-Books (on the Zune) and I also bring along a Kaossilator (more here) to play music in the hotel room or even on the plane without being heard.  If I can, I pack into one roll-on bag. There’s not a lot better than this one, but I also have a Bag I was given as a prize for something or other here at Microsoft. Either way, I like something with less pockets and more big, open compartments. Everything gets rolled up and packed in, with all of the wires and charges in small bags my wife made for me. The laptop (and anything I don’t want gate-checked) goes on top or in an outside pouch so I can grab it quickly if I have to gate-check the bag. As much as I can, I try to go in one bag. When I can’t (like this week) I use this bag since it can expand, roll up, crush and even be put away later. It’s super-heavy canvas and worth the price. This allows me to not check a bag.  Journey Logistics The day of the trip, I have everything ready since I’m getting up early. I pack a few small snacks inside a plastic large-mouth water bottle, which protects the snacks and lets me get water in the terminal. I bring along those little powdered drink mixes to add to the water.  At the airport, I make a beeline for the power-outlets. I charge up my laptop and phone, and download all my e-mails so I can work on them off-line in the air. I don’t travel as often as I used to – just every month or so now, so I don’t have a membership to an airline club. If I travel much more, I’ll invest in one again – they are WELL worth the money, for the wifi, food and quiet if for nothing else.  I print out my logistics on paper and put that in my pocket – flight numbers, hotel addresses and phones for everything. That way if I have to make a change, I don’t have to boot up anything or even have power to be able to roll with the punches if things change.  Working While Away  While I’m away I realize I’m going to be swamped with things at the conference or with my clients. So I turn on Out-Of-Office notifications to let people know I won’t be as responsive, and I keep my Outlook calendar up to date so my co-workers know what I’m up to. I even update it with hotel and phone info in case they really need to reach me. I share my calendar with my wife so my family knows what I’m doing as well.  I check my e-mail during breaks, but I only respond to them in the evening or early morning at the hotel. I tweet during conferences. The point is to be as present as possible during the event or when I’m at the clients. Both deserve it.  So those are my initial thoughts. I’ll tag Brent Ozar, Brad McGeHee and Paul Randal, and they can tag whomever they wish. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 03, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 03, 2010New Projects.radiko: エアログラス採用のシンプルなradiko(http://radiko.jp/)クライアントです。タスクトレイのアイコンからラジオ局の切り替えができます。7Scale: EmptyB2C MVC Plattform: The B2C MVC Plattform aims to be pluggable site framework to help small busisness accomplish basic tasks between business and customers.ElValWeb: The goal of the project to create full featured implementation of ModelValidatorProvider for Enterprise Library Application Validation Block, wich ...esatis yazilimi: asp.net yazılımı ile satış magazasi websitesi kur.IEnumerable.It sample code: IEnumerable.It sample codejQuery MicroAjax for ASP.NET: MicroAjax is a set of jQuery plugins and .NET components designed to provide simple, powerful and efficient Ajax centric web application design pat...Karbon VOS: Karbon VOS is an advanced Virtual Operating System Template for Visual Basic Express. It's developed in Visual Basic. Karbon VOS hopes to one day b...LINQ Mapper: LINQ Mapper translates simple LINQ queries between different sources. It allows you to write queries against your domain model, but have them run ...Meccano Silverlight Framework: Meccano is a new generation of frameworks for creation of LOB Silverlight applications based on MEF, RX, WCF, ADO.NET Data Services etc. It is inte...Multiuse Model View (MMV) Library: This project is an open source library for the Multiuse Model View (MMV) pattern for building robust WPF and ASP.Net applications. Visit my blog ht...Process Affinity Control: Process Affinity Control allows to set the affinity masks of processes based on rules.SilverSpatial: This project helps bridge the gap between Silverlight and Geo-Spatial data type (such as SQL Spatial). It implements the Well-Known-Binary (WKB) fo...StageAssets: Application for storing data about "things" and people in theatre. For example equipment, actors and so on.Stratosphere: Mono compatible library with set of primitives to work with scalable table, queue and block containers with corresponding implementations for Amazo...TRX Web-Viewer: A simple web-based application to upload and view VSTS 2008 and VSTS 2010 test result files with some basic lookup and feature-wise management of r...WDT2: WDT 2 is the school project to begin learning .NET enviroment, The main focus is on learning the use of almost all the componenets.WPF Behavior Library: WPF Behavior Library is a set of additional actions for WPF that allow you to add extra behaviors to a control quickly and easily. Currently the on...YouTubeEmbeddedVideo WebControl for ASP.NET: A Control to embed YouTube videos in ASP.NET pages. Works in C# and VB.NETNew Releases.radiko: beta: 東京局のみ対応 あとは手抜きActiveWorlds Managed .NET SDK: AwManaged Technology Preview - WIN32 (Alpha): This WIN32 release contains the Server Console Application. The Setup executable should be run as administrator on O.S. using UAC (Vista/Win7)AJAX Control Framework: v1.0.1.0: v1.0.1.0 - Contains a Bing Maps sample project, a number of bug fixes and a few performance improvements. - AJAX enable ANY custom control that der...App_Code (and Usercontrol) Editor (ACE): v1.0.0 alpha: The first alpha release of the AppCode Editor for Umbraco 4.0.3 is now available to download! Tested to work with usercontrols - pre-compilation wi...ElValWeb: ElValWeb 0.0.1.0: Version 0.0.1.0 contains client validation support forAndCompositeValidator ContainsCharactersValidator DomainValidator NotNullValidator Or...esatis yazilimi: magaza: magazanın yazılımları ve veri tabanının yazılımlarıGrunty OS: Grunty OS USB: Download Grunty OS for USBGrunty OS: Grunty OS.ISO: Grunty OS ISOKarbon VOS: Milestone 1 (Kaptua): Milestone 1...Live Meeting API Wrapper: LiveMeetingAPIWrapperV1.2: Added get meeting and update meeting.Multiuse Model View (MMV) Library: v0.3: first alpha release. Medium amount of functionality and some use cases tested.MVC Foolproof Validation: Beta 0.9.3774: Adds resource provided error messages, regular expression operators and a new RegularExpressionIf attribute.Process Affinity Control: Version 1.0.0: This is the first release. Planned features for the next release: No administrative privileges needed to run the manager Select the active scena...SharePoint 2010 Service Manager: SharePoint 2010 Service Manager 1.1: Added support to run under UAC with automatic security elevationSharePoint Event Handler Manager: Event Handler Manager 2.0: Please download the application here: http://www.ackermantech.com/registerevents.aspxSkyDrive Synchronizer: SkyDrive Sync Beta 0.1: Beta release includes: Upload and download Synchronize updated files Delete files on web/locally if not in source Split larger files into sma...Stratosphere: Stratosphere 1.0.0.0: Initial beta releaseSuggested Resources for .NET Developers: 0.8.0.0 VS2010 - focus on displaying content: This is the first release of Suggested Resources that can be downloaded from the internet. While there is still a lot of work to be done this rele...TRX Web-Viewer: TRX Web-Viewer V1.0: First working versionVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30502.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.04.00: !Whats New New Tag Mode: Search Referrers (Shows Search Tags From Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo and the Dnn Site Search) Taxonomy Tags now contains L...Web/Cloud Applications Development Framework | Visual WebGui: 6.4 Beta 2e: Fully featured beta version of Visual WebGui Web/Cloud Applicaiton Development FrameworkWPF Behavior Library: WPF Behavior Library 0.1 Release: First alpha release of the WPF Behavior Library. It should be stable but doesn't have all of the features it will have in the future and the API ma...xvanneste: Sharepoint Social Network Client: Client permettant d'avoir accés au social network de sharepoint a l'exterieur du navigateur.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)iTuner - The iTunes CompanionASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsIonics Isapi Rewrite Filterpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ServerAJAX Control Frameworkpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceTinyProjectBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleDambach Linear Algebra Framework

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 27, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 27, 2011Popular ReleasesAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...Facebook C# SDK: 5.3.1: This is a BETA release which adds new features and bug fixes to v5.2.1. removed dependency from Code Contracts enabled Task Parallel Support in .NET 4.0+ added support for early preview for .NET 4.5 added additional method overloads for .NET 4.5 to support IProgress<T> for upload progress added new CS-WinForms-AsyncAwait.sln sample demonstrating the use of async/await, upload progress report using IProgress<T> and cancellation support Query/QueryAsync methods uses graph api instead...SQL Backup Helper: SQL Backup Helper v1.0: Version 1.0 Changes Description added to settings table Automatic LOG files truncation added to BACKUP stored procedure Only database in status ONLINE will be backed upFlowton: Release 0.2: This release is the first official release of Flowton along with Source. Printpreview/Print is enabled with minor bug fixes from 0.1 alpha release locally.MySemanticSearch Sample: MySemanticSearch Installer (CTP3): Note: This release of the MySemanticSearch Sample works with SQL Server 2012 CTP3. Installation InstructionsDownload this self-extracting archive to your computer Execute the self-extracting archive Accept the licensing agreement Choose a target directory on your computer and extract the files Open Windows PowerShell command prompt with elevated priveleges Execute the following command: Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Close the Windows PowerShell command prompt Run C:\MySema...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.33: Add JSParser.ParseExpression method to parse JavaScript expressions rather than source-elements. Add -strict switch (CodeSettings.StrictMode) to force input code to ECMA5 Strict-mode (extra error-checking, "use strict" at top). Fixed bug when MinifyCode setting was set to false but RemoveUnneededCode was left it's default value of true.Path Copy Copy: 8.0: New version that mostly adds lots of requested features: 11340 11339 11338 11337 This version also features a more elaborate Settings UI that has several tabs. I tried to add some notes to better explain the use and purpose of the various options. The Path Copy Copy documentation is also on the way, both to explain how to develop custom plugins and to explain how to pre-configure options if you're a network admin. Stay tuned.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Fixed: Issue with partial thrust Client handling of conditional attributes Bug in TreeView node moves that sometimes were not reflected on the server An issue in the Mvc3 Nuget package that wasn't able to uninstall properly ...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngDevForce Application Framework: DevForce AF 2.0.3 RTW: PrerequisitesWPF 4.0 Silverlight 4.0 DevForce 2010 6.1.3.1 Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies API Documentation Source code License.txt Requirements.txt Release HighlightsNew: EventAggregator event forwarding New: EntityManagerInterceptor<T> to intercept EntityManger events New: IHarnessAware to allow for ViewModel setup when executed inside of the Development Harness New: Improved design time stability New: Support for add-in development New: CoroutineFns.To...NicAudio: NicAudio 2.0.5: Minor change to accept special DTS stereo modes (LtRt, AB,...)Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.5 – September 2011 Upgraded the tools tools to support the Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW Update SQL Azure only scenarios to use ASP.NET Universal Providers (through the System.Web.Providers v1.0.1 NuGet package) Changed Shared Access Signature service interface to support more operations Refactored Blobs API to have a similar interface and usage to that provided by the Windows Azure SDK Stor...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib-resharper 0.4.4 (dotCover): xunitcontrib release 0.4.4 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 6.0 RTM, targetting all versions of xUnit.net. (See the xUnit.net project to download xUnit.net itself.) This release addresses the following issues:Support for dotCover code coverage 4132 Note that this build work against ALL VERSIONS of xunit. The files are compiled against xunit.dll 1.8 - DO NOT REPLACE THIS FILE. Thanks to xunit's version independent runner system, this package can r...BookShop: BookShop: BookShop WP7 clientRibbon Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Editor (0.1.2122.266): Added CodePlex and PayPal links New icon Bug fix: can't connect to an IFD deployment when the discovery service url has been customizedSiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.0.921.340): Added CodePlex and PayPal links New iconDotNet.Framework.Common: DotNet.Framework.Common 4.0: ??????????，????????????XML Explorer: XML Explorer 4.0.5: Changes in 4.0.5: Added 'Copy Attribute XPath to Address Bar' feature. Added methods for decoding node text and value from Base64 encoded strings, and copying them to the clipboard. Added 'ChildNodeDefinitions' to the options, which allows for easier navigation of parent-child and ID-IDREF relationships. Discovery happens on-demand, as nodes are expanded and child nodes are added. Nodes can now have 'virtual' child nodes, defined by an xpath to select an identifier (usually relative to ...CODE Framework: 4.0.11021.0: This build adds a lot of our WPF components, including our MVVC and MVC components as well as a "Metro" and "Battleship" style.WiX Toolset: WiX v3.6 Beta: First beta release of WiX v3.6. The primary focus is on Burn but there are also many small bug fixes to the core toolset. For more information see: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2011/10/24/WiX-v3.6-Beta-releasedNew Projects5by5by4 Tic Tac Toe Project: 5by5by4 Tic Tac Toe project for CS 3420.ASP.Net Membership provider for MongoDb: A role and membership provider for ASP.Net with MongoDb as the database. Makes use of the Norm Linq provider for MongoDb.Bazookabird TFS Dashboard: Just a simple TFS dashboard. Show build results, tfs queries of your choice and display availability of build machines. Only a feature-lacking proof of concept yet, will hopefully be useful in the end. BestWebApp: Web service and web application.Code Made Simple: A group of projects to make coding life simple.DefenseXna: ??xna??Digibib.NET: Digibib.NET ist eine Portierung der Lesesoftware Digibux für die Digitale Bibliothek der Directmedia Publishing.FaceComparerDistributed: project of face compare distributed versionFMSSolution: FMSISO Analyzer: ISO Analyzer is a tool that makes it easier to analyze ISO 8583 financial transactions and also provides a platform to create a host simulator, capable of receiving requests and sending back the responses. It’s a WinForms application and it’s developed using C#.ITU Project: ITU Projekt - Víc než len klávesové skratky (navigace mezi bežicími aplikacemi)Maintenance Province Data: Help people find your project. Write a concise, reader-focused summary. Example: <project name> makes it easier for <target user group> to <activity>. You'll no longer have to <activity>. It's developed in <programming language>.m?ng chia s? công vi?c: m?ng chia s? công vi?cMetroTask: MetroTask, An example Metro based application using C#MyHomeFinance: Helps to add and keep a record of financeMySemanticSearch Sample: MySemanticSearch is a sample content management application that demonstrates semantic search capabilities introduced in SQL Server 2012. MySemanticSearch allows you to visualize tag clouds for content stored in FileTables and find similar content using semantic search.NetBlocks: This project is an implementation of the Unit-of-Work and Repository patterns using Entity Framework 4.1 and Unity. The project also includes code that can be used to initialize an application’s run-time environment from a set of components. The project includes example components for typed configuration settings, caching and a factory component based on Unity. Also included is an example of how to represent a database command with a C# class that transforms the results to typed objects.Online shopping website in ASP.NET- Open Source Project: asp.net,C#,shopping cart,college project,visual studio 2010,visual web developer 2010Pak Master: Pak Explorer for the fourth coming four.Pizza Service: A mvc3 project which aims to host both a backend webservice and a frontend page for ordering pizza and managing orders, customers and provide a drivermapScadaEveryWhere: ScadaEveryWhereSilverTwitterSearch: SilverTwitterSearch is a Siliverlight library for the Twitter Search API.Snst Salix: Salix is codename for custom solution of time management and task assignment software.SolutionManagementKit: SolutionManagementKit This product will try to combine several monitoring / support tools available right now. the primary focus will be on (T) SQL / MDX parsing for SQL 2008 R2 SSAS 2008 R2 as well as cube maintance Development in C# / VB .NETTarget: Blank Orchard Module: If enabled, outgoing links open in new window (just like with the deprecated target="_blank" attribute)WPPersonality: Psychological tests for windows phoneXrmLibrary: A base library to be used for rapid integration with one or more Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 environments. The XrmLibrary contains thread-safe singleton implementations of both the CRM IOrganizationService (1 or many instances) and a tracer/logger that utilizes Apache's log4net.

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• SQL Monitor’s data repository

  - by Chris Lambrou

  As one of the developers of SQL Monitor, I often get requests passed on by our support people from customers who are looking to dip into SQL Monitor’s own data repository, in order to pull out bits of information that they’re interested in. Since there’s clearly interest out there in playing around directly with the data repository, I thought I’d write some blog posts to start to describe how it all works. The hardest part for me is knowing where to begin, since the schema of the data repository is pretty big. Hmmm… I guess it’s tricky for anyone to write anything but the most trivial of queries against the data repository without understanding the hierarchy of monitored objects, so perhaps my first post should start there. I always imagine that whenever a customer fires up SSMS and starts to explore their SQL Monitor data repository database, they become immediately bewildered by the schema – that was certainly my experience when I did so for the first time. The following query shows the number of different object types in the data repository schema: SELECT type_desc, COUNT(*) AS [count] FROM sys.objects GROUP BY type_desc ORDER BY type_desc;  type_desccount 1DEFAULT_CONSTRAINT63 2FOREIGN_KEY_CONSTRAINT181 3INTERNAL_TABLE3 4PRIMARY_KEY_CONSTRAINT190 5SERVICE_QUEUE3 6SQL_INLINE_TABLE_VALUED_FUNCTION381 7SQL_SCALAR_FUNCTION2 8SQL_STORED_PROCEDURE100 9SYSTEM_TABLE41 10UNIQUE_CONSTRAINT54 11USER_TABLE193 12VIEW124 With 193 tables, 124 views, 100 stored procedures and 381 table valued functions, that’s quite a hefty schema, and when you browse through it using SSMS, it can be a bit daunting at first. So, where to begin? Well, let’s narrow things down a bit and only look at the tables belonging to the data schema. That’s where all of the collected monitoring data is stored by SQL Monitor. The following query gives us the names of those tables: SELECT sch.name + '.' + obj.name AS [name] FROM sys.objects obj JOIN sys.schemas sch ON sch.schema_id = obj.schema_id WHERE obj.type_desc = 'USER_TABLE' AND sch.name = 'data' ORDER BY sch.name, obj.name; This query still returns 110 tables. I won’t show them all here, but let’s have a look at the first few of them:  name 1data.Cluster_Keys 2data.Cluster_Machine_ClockSkew_UnstableSamples 3data.Cluster_Machine_Cluster_StableSamples 4data.Cluster_Machine_Keys 5data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Capacity_StableSamples 6data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Keys 7data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Sightings 8data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_UnstableSamples 9data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Volume_StableSamples 10data.Cluster_Machine_Memory_Capacity_StableSamples 11data.Cluster_Machine_Memory_UnstableSamples 12data.Cluster_Machine_Network_Capacity_StableSamples 13data.Cluster_Machine_Network_Keys 14data.Cluster_Machine_Network_Sightings 15data.Cluster_Machine_Network_UnstableSamples 16data.Cluster_Machine_OperatingSystem_StableSamples 17data.Cluster_Machine_Ping_UnstableSamples 18data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Instances 19data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Keys 20data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Owner_Instances 21data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Sightings 22data.Cluster_Machine_Process_UnstableSamples 23… There are two things I want to draw your attention to: The table names describe a hierarchy of the different types of object that are monitored by SQL Monitor (e.g. clusters, machines and disks). For each object type in the hierarchy, there are multiple tables, ending in the suffixes _Keys, _Sightings, _StableSamples and _UnstableSamples. Not every object type has a table for every suffix, but the _Keys suffix is especially important and a _Keys table does indeed exist for every object type. In fact, if we limit the query to return only those tables ending in _Keys, we reveal the full object hierarchy: SELECT sch.name + '.' + obj.name AS [name] FROM sys.objects obj JOIN sys.schemas sch ON sch.schema_id = obj.schema_id WHERE obj.type_desc = 'USER_TABLE' AND sch.name = 'data' AND obj.name LIKE '%_Keys' ORDER BY sch.name, obj.name;  name 1data.Cluster_Keys 2data.Cluster_Machine_Keys 3data.Cluster_Machine_LogicalDisk_Keys 4data.Cluster_Machine_Network_Keys 5data.Cluster_Machine_Process_Keys 6data.Cluster_Machine_Services_Keys 7data.Cluster_ResourceGroup_Keys 8data.Cluster_ResourceGroup_Resource_Keys 9data.Cluster_SqlServer_Agent_Job_History_Keys 10data.Cluster_SqlServer_Agent_Job_Keys 11data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_BackupType_Backup_Keys 12data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_BackupType_Keys 13data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_CustomMetric_Keys 14data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_File_Keys 15data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_Keys 16data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_Table_Index_Keys 17data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_Table_Keys 18data.Cluster_SqlServer_Error_Keys 19data.Cluster_SqlServer_Keys 20data.Cluster_SqlServer_Services_Keys 21data.Cluster_SqlServer_SqlProcess_Keys 22data.Cluster_SqlServer_TopQueries_Keys 23data.Cluster_SqlServer_Trace_Keys 24data.Group_Keys The full object type hierarchy looks like this: Cluster Machine LogicalDisk Network Process Services ResourceGroup Resource SqlServer Agent Job History Database BackupType Backup CustomMetric File Table Index Error Services SqlProcess TopQueries Trace Group Okay, but what about the individual objects themselves represented at each level in this hierarchy? Well that’s what the _Keys tables are for. This is probably best illustrated by way of a simple example – how can I query my own data repository to find the databases on my own PC for which monitoring data has been collected? Like this: SELECT clstr._Name AS cluster_name, srvr._Name AS instance_name, db._Name AS database_name FROM data.Cluster_SqlServer_Database_Keys db JOIN data.Cluster_SqlServer_Keys srvr ON db.ParentId = srvr.Id -- Note here how the parent of a Database is a Server JOIN data.Cluster_Keys clstr ON srvr.ParentId = clstr.Id -- Note here how the parent of a Server is a Cluster WHERE clstr._Name = 'dev-chrisl2' -- This is the hostname of my own PC ORDER BY clstr._Name, srvr._Name, db._Name;  cluster_nameinstance_namedatabase_name 1dev-chrisl2SqlMonitorData 2dev-chrisl2master 3dev-chrisl2model 4dev-chrisl2msdb 5dev-chrisl2mssqlsystemresource 6dev-chrisl2tempdb 7dev-chrisl2sql2005SqlMonitorData 8dev-chrisl2sql2005TestDatabase 9dev-chrisl2sql2005master 10dev-chrisl2sql2005model 11dev-chrisl2sql2005msdb 12dev-chrisl2sql2005mssqlsystemresource 13dev-chrisl2sql2005tempdb 14dev-chrisl2sql2008SqlMonitorData 15dev-chrisl2sql2008master 16dev-chrisl2sql2008model 17dev-chrisl2sql2008msdb 18dev-chrisl2sql2008mssqlsystemresource 19dev-chrisl2sql2008tempdb These results show that I have three SQL Server instances on my machine (a default instance, one named sql2005 and one named sql2008), and each instance has the usual set of system databases, along with a database named SqlMonitorData. Basically, this is where I test SQL Monitor on different versions of SQL Server, when I’m developing. There are a few important things we can learn from this query: Each _Keys table has a column named Id. This is the primary key. Each _Keys table has a column named ParentId. A foreign key relationship is defined between each _Keys table and its parent _Keys table in the hierarchy. There are two exceptions to this, Cluster_Keys and Group_Keys, because clusters and groups live at the root level of the object hierarchy. Each _Keys table has a column named _Name. This is used to uniquely identify objects in the table within the scope of the same shared parent object. Actually, that last item isn’t always true. In some cases, the _Name column is actually called something else. For example, the data.Cluster_Machine_Services_Keys table has a column named _ServiceName instead of _Name (sorry for the inconsistency). In other cases, a name isn’t sufficient to uniquely identify an object. For example, right now my PC has multiple processes running, all sharing the same name, Chrome (one for each tab open in my web-browser). In such cases, multiple columns are used to uniquely identify an object within the scope of the same shared parent object. Well, that’s it for now. I’ve given you enough information for you to explore the _Keys tables to see how objects are stored in your own data repositories. In a future post, I’ll try to explain how monitoring data is stored for each object, using the _StableSamples and _UnstableSamples tables. If you have any questions about this post, or suggestions for future posts, just submit them in the comments section below.

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• Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore

  - by sathya

  Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days. On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions. This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track. It had sessions on the following 5 topics :   Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam This was one of the superb sessions i have attended. He explained all the concepts in detail with a demo. The important thing in this is there is something called Data-Tier application project which is newly introduced in this VS2010 with which we can manage all our data along with our application inside our VS itself. We can create DB,Tables,Procs,Views etc. here itself and once we deploy it creates a compressed file called .dacpac which stores all the changes in Table Schema,Created procs, etc. on to that single file which reduces our (developer's) effort in preparing the deployment scripts and giving it to the DBA. It also has some policy configurations which can be managed easily by checking some rules like in outlook. For Ex : IF the SQL Server Version > 10 then deploy else dont. This rule specifies that even if we try to deploy on SQL Server DB with version less than 10 It will not do it. And if we deploy some .dacpac to SQL server production db with the option upgrade DB with this dacpac once everything completes successfully it will say success else it rollsback to the prior version. Even if it gets deployed successfully and later @ a point of time you wish to revert it back to the prior version, you can go ahead and delete the existing dacpac version so that it reverts to the older version of the db changes. And for the good questions that were asked in the session T-Shirts were given. SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar M This one too was the best session. The speaker Vinod explained everything very much clearly. This was really useful session and you dont believe, as per my knowledge, in the total 3 days in the TechEd except the Keynote, for this session seats were full (House FULL)  People were even standing out to attend this session. Such a great one it was. The speaker did a deep dive in to the Query Plan section and showed which actually causes the problem. Its all about the thing that we need to understand about the execution of SQL server Queries. We think in a way and SQL Server never executes in that way. We need to understand that first. He also told about there might be two plans generated for a single query at a point of time because of parallel processors in the system. The Key is here in every query. There is something called Estimated Row Count and Actual Row Count in the query plan. If the estimated row count by SQL server tallies with the actual row count your performance will be awesome. He said some tweaks to achieve the same. After this as usual we had lunch SQL Server Utility - Its about more than 1 SQL Server - by Vinod Kumar Jagannathan This was more of a DBA's session. Am really sorry I was totally blank and I was not interested to attend this session and walked out to attend Migrating to the cloud by Harish Ranganathan (My favorite Speaker) but unfortunately that was some other persons session. There the speaker was telling about how to configure the connection strings in such a way that we can connect to the SQL Azure platform from our VS and also showed us how to deploy the same in to Windows Azure. In between there were lot of technical problems like laptop hang, user locked and he was switching between systems, also i came in the half so i wasnt able to listen that fully. In between, Since I got an MCTS certification they gave me T-Shirt with the lines 'Iam Certified. Are you?' and they asked me to wear that. If we wear that we might get spotted and they would give us some goodies  So on the 3rd day I was wearing that T-Shirt. I got spotted by the person Tarun who was coordinating things about the certification, and he was accompanied with a cameraman and they interviewed me about the certification and I was shown live in the Teched and was seen by 60000 live viewers of the TechEd. I was really happy on that. Data Recovery / Consistency with CheckDB - by Vinod Kumar M This was one of the best sessions too in the TechEd. This guy is really amazing. In front of us he crashed a DB and showed how to recover the same in 6 different ways for different no of failures. Showed about Different types of error msgs like : 823,824,825 msdb..suspect_pages DBCC CheckDB (different parameters to it) I am really waiting for his session to get uploaded live in the Teched Website. Here is his contact info If you wish to connect to him : Twitter : @vinodk_sql Website : www.ExtremeExperts.com Blog : http://blogs.sqlxml.org/vinodkumar Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep dive into Spatial Indexing - by Pinal Dave Pinal Dave is a King in SQL and he is a SQL MVP and he is the owner of SQLAuthority.com He took the session on Spatial Databases from the start. Showed about the different types of Spatial : Geometric and Geographic Geometric : x and y axis its a planar surface Geographic : Spherical surface with 3600  as the maximum which is used to represent the geographic points on the earth and easy to draw maps of different kinds. He had a lot of obstacles during his session like rain coming inside the hall, mic wires got bursted due to rain, Videos off on the display screens. In spite of that he asked the audience to come in the front rows and managed to take a good session without ppts and finally we got the displays on and he was showing demos on the same what he explained orally. That was really a fun filled informative session. He gave some books for the persons who asked good questions and answered well for his questions and I got one too  (It was a book on Data Mining - Wrox Publishers) And finally after all these things there was Keynote session for close of the TechEd. and we all assembled in a big hall where Mr.Ashok Soota, a man of age around 70  co-founder of Mindtree was called to give some lecture on his successes. He was explaining about his past and what all companies he switched and for what reasons and what are all his successes and what are all his failures and the learnings of him from his past failures. and his success and failures on his partnerships with the other concern. And there were some questions for him like What is your suggestion on young entrepreneur? How did you learn from past failures? What is reiterating your success? What is your suggestion on partnerships? How to choose partnerships? etc. And they said @ 7.30 Pm there would be a party night, but unfortunately i was not able to attend that because I had to catch my train and before that i had to pack things, so I started @ 7 itself. Thats it about the TechED!!! Stay tuned for further Technology updates.

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• Standards Corner: OAuth WG Client Registration Problem

  - by Tanu Sood

  Phil Hunt is an active member of multiple industry standards groups and committees (see brief bio at the end of the post) and has spearheaded discussions, creation and ratifications of  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} industry standards including the Kantara Identity Governance Framework, among others. Being an active voice in the industry standards development world, we have invited him to share his discussions, thoughts, news & updates, and discuss use cases, implementation success stories (and even failures) around industry standards on this monthly column. Author: Phil Hunt This afternoon, the OAuth Working Group will meet at IETF88 in Vancouver to discuss some important topics important to the maturation of OAuth. One of them is the OAuth client registration problem.OAuth (RFC6749) was initially developed with a simple deployment model where there is only monopoly or singleton cloud instance of a web API (e.g. there is one Facebook, one Google, on LinkedIn, and so on). When the API publisher and API deployer are the same monolithic entity, it easy for developers to contact the provider and register their app to obtain a client_id and credential.But what happens when the API is for an open source project where there may be 1000s of deployed copies of the API (e.g. such as wordpress). In these cases, the authors of the API are not the people running the API. In these scenarios, how does the developer obtain a client_id? An example of an "open deployed" API is OpenID Connect. Connect defines an OAuth protected resource API that can provide personal information about an authenticated user -- in effect creating a potentially common API for potential identity providers like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, or Oracle. In Oracle's case, Fusion applications will soon have RESTful APIs that are deployed in many different ways in many different environments. How will developers write apps that can work against an openly deployed API with whom the developer can have no prior relationship?At present, the OAuth Working Group has two proposals two consider: Dynamic RegistrationDynamic Registration was originally developed for OpenID Connect and UMA. It defines a RESTful API in which a prospective client application with no client_id creates a new client registration record with a service provider and is issued a client_id and credential along with a registration token that can be used to update registration over time.As proof of success, the OIDC community has done substantial implementation of this spec and feels committed to its use. Why not approve?Well, the answer is that some of us had some concerns, namely: Recognizing instances of software - dynamic registration treats all clients as unique. It has no defined way to recognize that multiple copies of the same client are being registered other then assuming if the registration parameters are similar it might be the same client. Versioning and Policy Approval of open APIs and clients - many service providers have to worry about change management. They expect to have approval cycles that approve versions of server and client software for use in their environment. In some cases approval might be wide open, but in many cases, approval might be down to the specific class of software and version. Registration updates - when does a client actually need to update its registration? Shouldn't it be never? Is there some characteristic of deployed code that would cause it to change? Options lead to complexity - because each client is treated as unique, it becomes unclear how the clients and servers will agree on what credentials forms are acceptable and what OAuth features are allowed and disallowed. Yet the reality is, developers will write their application to work in a limited number of ways. They can't implement all the permutations and combinations that potential service providers might choose. Stateful registration - if the primary motivation for registration is to obtain a client_id and credential, why can't this be done in a stateless fashion using assertions? Denial of service - With so much stateful registration and the need for multiple tokens to be issued, will this not lead to a denial of service attack / risk of resource depletion? At the very least, because of the information gathered, it would difficult for service providers to clean up "failed" registrations and determine active from inactive or false clients. There has yet to be much wide-scale "production" use of dynamic registration other than in small closed communities. Client Association A second proposal, Client Association, has been put forward by Tony Nadalin of Microsoft and myself. We took at look at existing use patterns to come up with a new proposal. At the Berlin meeting, we considered how WS-STS systems work. More recently, I took a review of how mobile messaging clients work. I looked at how Apple, Google, and Microsoft each handle registration with APNS, GCM, and WNS, and a similar pattern emerges. This pattern is to use an existing credential (mutual TLS auth), or client bearer assertion and swap for a device specific bearer assertion.In the client association proposal, the developer's registration with the API publisher is handled by having the developer register with an API publisher (as opposed to the party deploying the API) and obtaining a software "statement". Or, if there is no "publisher" that can sign a statement, the developer may include their own self-asserted software statement.A software statement is a special type of assertion that serves to lock application registration profile information in a signed assertion. The statement is included with the client application and can then be used by the client to swap for an instance specific client assertion as defined by section 4.2 of the OAuth Assertion draft and profiled in the Client Association draft. The software statement provides a way for service provider to recognize and configure policy to approve classes of software clients, and simplifies the actual registration to a simple assertion swap. Because the registration is an assertion swap, registration is no longer "stateful" - meaning the service provider does not need to store any information to support the client (unless it wants to). Has this been implemented yet? Not directly. We've only delivered draft 00 as an alternate way of solving the problem using well-known patterns whose security characteristics and scale characteristics are well understood. Dynamic Take II At roughly the same time that Client Association and Software Statement were published, the authors of Dynamic Registration published a "split" version of the Dynamic Registration (draft-richer-oauth-dyn-reg-core and draft-richer-oauth-dyn-reg-management). While some of the concerns above are addressed, some differences remain. Registration is now a simple POST request. However it defines a new method for issuing client tokens where as Client Association uses RFC6749's existing extension point. The concern here is whether future client access token formats would be addressed properly. Finally, Dyn-reg-core does not yet support software statements. Conclusion The WG has some interesting discussion to bring this back to a single set of specifications. Dynamic Registration has significant implementation, but Client Association could be a much improved way to simplify implementation of the overall OpenID Connect specification and improve adoption. In fairness, the existing editors have already come a long way. Yet there are those with significant investment in the current draft. There are many that have expressed they don't care. They just want a standard. There is lots of pressure on the working group to reach consensus quickly.And that folks is how the sausage is made.Note: John Bradley and Justin Richer recently published draft-bradley-stateless-oauth-client-00 which on first look are getting closer. Some of the details seem less well defined, but the same could be said of client-assoc and software-statement. I hope we can merge these specs this week. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} About the Writer: Phil Hunt joined Oracle as part of the November 2005 acquisition of OctetString Inc. where he headed software development for what is now Oracle Virtual Directory. Since joining Oracle, Phil works as CMTS in the Identity Standards group at Oracle where he developed the Kantara Identity Governance Framework and provided significant input to JSR 351. Phil participates in several standards development organizations such as IETF and OASIS working on federation, authorization (OAuth), and provisioning (SCIM) standards.  Phil blogs at www.independentid.com and a Twitter handle of @independentid.

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• Using the HTML5 &lt;input type=&quot;file&quot; multiple=&quot;multiple&quot;&gt; Tag in ASP.NET

  - by Rick Strahl

  Per HTML5 spec the <input type="file" /> tag allows for multiple files to be picked from a single File upload button. This is actually a very subtle change that's very useful as it makes it much easier to send multiple files to the server without using complex uploader controls. Please understand though, that even though you can send multiple files using the <input type="file" /> tag, the process of how those files are sent hasn't really changed - there's still no progress information or other hooks that allow you to automatically make for a nicer upload experience without additional libraries or code. For that you will still need some sort of library (I'll post an example in my next blog post using plUpload). All the new features allow for is to make it easier to select multiple images from disk in one operation. Where you might have required many file upload controls before to upload several files, one File control can potentially do the job. How it works To create a file input box that allows with multiple file support you can simply do:<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <label>Upload Images:</label> <input type="file" multiple="multiple" name="File1" id="File1" accept="image/*" /> <hr /> <input type="submit" id="btnUpload" value="Upload Images" /> </form> Now when the file open dialog pops up - depending on the browser and whether the browser supports it - you can pick multiple files. Here I'm using Firefox using the thumbnail preview I can easily pick images to upload on a form: Note that I can select multiple images in the dialog all of which get stored in the file textbox. The UI for this can be different in some browsers. For example Chrome displays 3 files selected as text next to the Browse… button when I choose three rather than showing any files in the textbox. Most other browsers display the standard file input box and display the multiple filenames as a comma delimited list in the textbox. Note that you can also specify the accept attribute in the <input> tag, which specifies a mime-type to specify what type of content to allow.Here I'm only allowing images (image/*) and the browser complies by just showing me image files to display. Likewise I could use text/* for all text formats registered on the machine or text/xml to only show XML files (which would include xml,xst,xsd etc.). Capturing Files on the Server with ASP.NET When you upload files to an ASP.NET server there are a couple of things to be aware of. When multiple files are uploaded from a single file control, they are assigned the same name. In other words if I select 3 files to upload on the File1 control shown above I get three file form variables named File1. This means I can't easily retrieve files by their name:HttpPostedFileBase file = Request.Files["File1"]; because there will be multiple files for a given name. The above only selects the first file. Instead you can only reliably retrieve files by their index. Below is an example I use in app to capture a number of images uploaded and store them into a database using a business object and EF 4.2.for (int i = 0; i < Request.Files.Count; i++) { HttpPostedFileBase file = Request.Files[i]; if (file.ContentLength == 0) continue; if (file.ContentLength > App.Configuration.MaxImageUploadSize) { ErrorDisplay.ShowError("File " + file.FileName + " is too large. Max upload size is: " + App.Configuration.MaxImageUploadSize); return View("UploadClassic",model); } var image = new ClassifiedsBusiness.Image(); var ms = new MemoryStream(16498); file.InputStream.CopyTo(ms); image.Entered = DateTime.Now; image.EntryId = model.Entry.Id; image.ContentType = "image/jpeg"; image.ImageData = ms.ToArray(); ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); // resize image if necessary and turn into jpeg Bitmap bmp = Imaging.ResizeImage(ms.ToArray(), App.Configuration.MaxImageWidth, App.Configuration.MaxImageHeight); ms.Close(); ms = new MemoryStream(); bmp.Save(ms,ImageFormat.Jpeg); image.ImageData = ms.ToArray(); bmp.Dispose(); ms.Close(); model.Entry.Images.Add(image); } This works great and also allows you to capture input from multiple input controls if you are dealing with browsers that don't support multiple file selections in the file upload control. The important thing here is that I iterate over the files by index, rather than using a foreach loop over the Request.Files collection. The files collection returns key name strings, rather than the actual files (who thought that was good idea at Microsoft?), and so that isn't going to work since you end up getting multiple keys with the same name. Instead a plain for loop has to be used to loop over all files. Another Option in ASP.NET MVC If you're using ASP.NET MVC you can use the code above as well, but you have yet another option to capture multiple uploaded files by using a parameter for your post action method.public ActionResult Save(HttpPostedFileBase[] file1) { foreach (var file in file1) { if (file.ContentLength < 0) continue; // do something with the file }} Note that in order for this to work you have to specify each posted file variable individually in the parameter list. This works great if you have a single file upload to deal with. You can also pass this in addition to your main model to separate out a ViewModel and a set of uploaded files:public ActionResult Edit(EntryViewModel model,HttpPostedFileBase[] uploadedFile) You can also make the uploaded files part of the ViewModel itself - just make sure you use the appropriate naming for the variable name in the HTML document (since there's Html.FileFor() extension). Browser Support You knew this was coming, right? The feature is really nice, but unfortunately not supported universally yet. Once again Internet Explorer is the problem: No shipping version of Internet Explorer supports multiple file uploads. IE10 supposedly will, but even IE9 does not. All other major browsers - Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera - support multi-file uploads in their latest versions. So how can you handle this? If you need to provide multiple file uploads you can simply add multiple file selection boxes and let people either select multiple files with a single upload file box or use multiples. Alternately you can do some browser detection and if IE is used simply show the extra file upload boxes. It's not ideal, but either one of these approaches makes life easier for folks that use a decent browser and leaves you with a functional interface for those that don't. Here's a UI I recently built as an alternate uploader with multiple file upload buttons: I say this is my 'alternate' uploader - for my primary uploader I continue to use an add-in solution. Specifically I use plUpload and I'll discuss how that's implemented in my next post. Although I think that plUpload (and many of the other packaged JavaScript upload solutions) are a better choice especially for large uploads, for simple one file uploads input boxes work well enough. The advantage of this solution is that it's very easy to handle on the server side. Any of the JavaScript controls require special handling for uploads which I'll also discuss in my next post.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML5  ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 22, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 22, 2010New ProjectsAllegiance Modulus: - Display a list of all mods (installed/not installed/downloadable) - Allow user to install a mod - Allow a user to uninstall a mod - Keep backups ...Chatterbot JBot: PL: Program sieciowy JBot jest chatterbotem. EN: Network program JBot is chatterbot.Composite WPF Extensions: Extensions to Composite Client Application Library for WPFDwarrowdelf: Game concept in progressEntourage FrameG: Entourage lets users quickly and easily edit and create text . You will no longer have to download and install huge files and Entourage is 0% overw...FMon: file monGeckoBrowser: GeckoBrowser is a plugin for the great HTPC software MediaPortal. GeckoBrowser is a integrated WebBrowser for MediaPortal. It uses the Firefox (Gec...General Watcher: Watches things from the config file.GeoUtility Library: GeoUtility is an easy to use coordinate conversion library. It can be used for desktop/web development in CLI implementations like .NET, MONO. Supp...HidLib C++/CLR: HibLib is a USB Hid Communications Library written in C++/CLR IJW for the closest library you can get to a native USB Hid library. The project curr...HTML Shot: Server side component that generates a png/jpg image from arbitrary html code sent from the browser. Provides a quick way to enable printing arbit...MetaTagger: Core: MetaTagger: Core is a core set of meta data tagging libraries for use with .Net applicationsMUD--: MUD-- is a remake of MUD++ which never left devolution. MUD-- is a OOP oriented C++ MUD library, it is still in the planning stage. OpenLigaDB-Databrowser: A Silverlight 4-based Databrowser for the Community-Sportsdata-Webservice www.OpenLigaDB.deReduce Image to Specified Black Pixel Count: Takes in a picure path and an int n, and saves a white bitmap with the darkest n pixels from the image black. Posting this so that I can referen...Salient.MachineKeyUtils: Wraps encryption and password related functions from MachineKey, CookieProtectionHelper and MembershipProvider for use in other scenarios.Silverlight WebRequestHelper: WebRequestHelper is a very simple helper project, created for using HttWebRequest in Silverlight in a very simple and easiest way.Splinger FrameXi: Splinger FrameXi makes spelling a doddle with a huge and getting larger directory with LOADS of people contributing to make it the best in its field!SQL Server and SQL Azure Performance Testing: Enzo SQL Baseline: Run SQL statements in SQL Azure (or SQL Server) and capture performance metrics of your SQL statements (reads, writes, CPU...) against multiple dat...Sql Utils: A series of Java-based SQL import/export utilsSuggested Resources for .NET Developers: Suggested Resources is a proof of concept in aggregation of online content inside Visual Studio and analysis of a developers work, in order to sugg...SupportRoot: SupportRoot is a minimal helpdesk ticketing system focusing on speed and efficiency.Translate !t: Translate !t translates Image/Text containing English, German, French & Spanish to many different languages using Bing Translator. WCF Lab: To demonstrate different connectivity scenarios using WCF servicesWebAPP - Automated Perl Portal: Web portal system written in Perl. Full featured and multilingual.WIM4LAB: Laboratory Information Management System. ASP.NET C# MSSQL2005New Releases3D TagCloud for SharePoint 2010: 3D TagCloud v1.0: This realease contains the webpart itself.Bluetooth Radar: Version 2.1: Fix - "Right Click Crashes the application" bug Change OBX to push send Add current bluetooth device information + change device radiomode Ad...DirectQ: Release 1.8.3b: Contains updates and improvements to 1.8.3a. This should really be 1.8.4 given the extent of the changes, but I don't want to confuse a version nu...DotNetNuke® Store: 02.01.32 RC: What's New in this release? New Features: - A new setting 'Secure Cookie' in the Store Admin module allow to encrypt cookie values. Only the curren...Entourage FrameG: entourage frameg 1.0: Complete starter for entourageframeg.html enclosed as startentouragehtml.html and here you can find test CSS files and more! EXTRACT ALL FILES FROM...Entourage FrameG: FIMYID PRO: fimyid- find-my-id. YOU MUST download hidden.js and have the web server .pl file ready!Event Scavenger: Viewer version 3.0.1: Fixed an issue with the Viewer with highlighting not working properly (due to code rearranging from old version to new one for CodePlex). Viewer ve...FMon: First Edition: First EditionFolder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.5.6: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.5.6), with the new Quick Add feature and bug fixes. It has an installer that will create a direct...GameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0.6: Bug fixes for bugs found in 1.0.5 and earlier. Fixes the crashing bug when a membership number of more than 6 digits is entered. Changes the dat...GeckoBrowser: GeckoBrowser v0.1 - RAR Package: GeckoBrowser Release v0.1.0.2 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.HTML Shot: Initial Source Code Release: Zip file includes a VS 2008 solution with two projects HTMLShot DLL project HTMLShot sample websiteMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi April 21: This version includes the latest bug fixes. This also includes the beginnings of some fixes that update the projection library to return NaN value...METAR.NET Decoder: Release 0.5.x (replacement of 0.4.x): Release 0.4.x was upgraded to 0.5.x due to major error issue included in previous one. Release Notes First public release. Main of the application...MongoMvc - A NoSQL Demo App with ASP.NET MVC: MongoMVC: A NoSql demo app using MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVCPanBrowser: 1.2.1: updated to FSharp 2.0.0.0PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: Chat Sample of PokeIn CS2010: C# Sample of PokeIn. You need to download the latest PokeIn Library and add to project as a reference to run this samplePokeIn Comet Ajax Library: Chat Sample VB 2010: VB.NET Sample of PokeIn. You need to download the latest PokeIn Library and add to project as a reference to run this sampleProject Santa: Project Santa v1.1: fixed some errors created from last minute adjustments. progress bar is now completely functional. added much more error checking. cleaned up some...RoTwee: RoTwee (11.0.0.1): Version for update to .NET Framework 4.0Sem.GenericTools.ProjectSettings: 2010-04-21 ProjectSettings Ex-Importer: Exports and imports project settings from/to CSV files. This release does fix the issue of missing/misordered build types in project files. Also th...Sharepoint Permissions Manager: Version 0.2: Added support of both WSS3.0 and MOSS2007Silverlight WebRequestHelper: WebRequestHelper 1.0: The usage of this project is so simple. all you need to do is following: WebRequest webRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://api.twitte...SilverlightFTP: SilverlightFTP Beta ENG: English version, fixed copy-paste.sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.8b (Alpha): + Added: support for version 5 (will be imported and saved as version 10) + Fixed: order of chinese week days in event section (week starts with su...Splinger FrameXi: Splinger FrameXi 1.0: DOWNLOAD ALLLL FILES and start in Splinger FrameXi.html . EXTRACT ALL FILES FROM .ZIP ARCHIVE!!!!SQL Server and SQL Azure Performance Testing: Enzo SQL Baseline: Enzo SQL Baseline 1.0: Use this download to install and deploy the sample application and its source code. The installer gives you the option to install the Windows appli...StoreManagement: v1: First (and probably final) version. Should be stable.TFS WitAdminUI: some bug fixed: When project name includes empty space, error fire. So i fix. Download zip file and unzip to TFS2010 or TFS2008. And Excute WitAdminUI.exe. Becaus...TFTP Server: TFTP Server 1.1 Installer: Release 1.1 of the Managed TFTP Server. New Features: Runs as windows service. Supports multiple TFTP servers on different endpoints, each servi...Thinktecture.IdentityModel: Thinktecture.IdentityModel v0.8: Updated version - includes the plumbing for REST/OData Services and UI authorization.Translate !t: Translate !t[Setup]: Translate !tSetupTranslate !t: Translate !t[Source Code]: Translate !tSource CodeWatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.10.02: BETA small fixesWeb Service Software Factory: Web Service Software Factory 2010 Beta: To use the Web Service Software Factory 2010, you need the following software installed on your computer: • Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (Ultima...Windows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: WF ADO.NET Activity Pack CTP 1: WF ADO.NET Activity Pack CTP 1 The Microsoft WF ADO.NET Activity Pack CTP 1 is the first community technology preview (CTP) release of ADO.NET acti...Windows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP 1: WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP 1The Microsoft WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP 1 is the first community technology preview (CTP) release of a...WPF Inspirational Quote Management System: Release 1.2.0: - Fixed non-working delete quote button. - Changed layout of quote edit page, font and colour. - Lightened background colour of settings page.WPF Inspirational Quote Management System: Release 1.2.1: - Only display an underline under Author links if a Reference URL is present.xlVBADevTools: 0.1 Two mostly inadequate tools...: Since I was blogging about it (), it seemed appropriate to upload LOCutus, in all its 2002 "glory" (hah!) and make it available for download.XP-More: 0.9.5: Added support for saved state files (.vsv) Added version updates check Added a check to make sure the assumed VM folder exists (this will be do...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineDotNetZip LibraryNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModulePHPExcelGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterEsferatec.Text.RegularExpressions

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• T-SQL Tuesday #33: Trick Shots: Undocumented, Underdocumented, and Unknown Conspiracies!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Mike Fal (b | t) is hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday on Trick Shots.  I love this choice because I've been preoccupied with sneaky/tricky/evil SQL Server stuff for a long time and have been presenting on it for the past year.  Mike's directives were "Show us a cool trick or process you developed…It doesn’t have to be useful", which most of my blogging definitely fits, and "Tell us what you learned from this trick…tell us how it gave you insight in to how SQL Server works", which is definitely a new concept.  I've done a lot of reading and watching on SQL Server Internals and even attended training, but sometimes I need to go explore on my own, using my own tools and techniques.  It's an itch I get every few months, and, well, it sure beats workin'. I've found some people to be intimidated by SQL Server's internals, and I'll admit there are A LOT of internals to keep track of, but there are tons of excellent resources that clearly document most of them, and show how knowing even the basics of internals can dramatically improve your database's performance.  It may seem like rocket science, or even brain surgery, but you don't have to be a genius to understand it. Although being an "evil genius" can help you learn some things they haven't told you about. ;) This blog post isn't a traditional "deep dive" into internals, it's more of an approach to find out how a program works.  It utilizes an extremely handy tool from an even more extremely handy suite of tools, Sysinternals.  I'm not the only one who finds Sysinternals useful for SQL Server: Argenis Fernandez (b | t), Microsoft employee and former T-SQL Tuesday host, has an excellent presentation on how to troubleshoot SQL Server using Sysinternals, and I highly recommend it.  Argenis didn't cover the Strings.exe utility, but I'll be using it to "hack" the SQL Server executable (DLL and EXE) files. Please note that I'm not promoting software piracy or applying these techniques to attack SQL Server via internal knowledge. This is strictly educational and doesn't reveal any proprietary Microsoft information.  And since Argenis works for Microsoft and demonstrated Sysinternals with SQL Server, I'll just let him take the blame for it. :P (The truth is I've used Strings.exe on SQL Server before I ever met Argenis.) Once you download and install Strings.exe you can run it from the command line.  For our purposes we'll want to run this in the Binn folder of your SQL Server instance (I'm referencing SQL Server 2012 RTM): cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn" C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.dll > sqldll.txt C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.exe > sqlexe.txt   I've limited myself to DLLs and EXEs that have "sql" in their names.  There are quite a few more but I haven't examined them in any detail. (Homework assignment for you!) If you run this yourself you'll get 2 text files, one with all the extracted strings from every SQL DLL file, and the other with the SQL EXE strings.  You can open these in Notepad, but you're better off using Notepad++, EditPad, Emacs, Vim or another more powerful text editor, as these will be several megabytes in size. And when you do open it…you'll find…a TON of gibberish.  (If you think that's bad, just try opening the raw DLL or EXE file in Notepad.  And by the way, don't do this in production, or even on a running instance of SQL Server.)  Even if you don't clean up the file, you can still use your editor's search function to find a keyword like "SELECT" or some other item you expect to be there.  As dumb as this sounds, I sometimes spend my lunch break just scanning the raw text for anything interesting.  I'm boring like that. Sometimes though, having these files available can lead to some incredible learning experiences.  For me the most recent time was after reading Joe Sack's post on non-parallel plan reasons.  He mentions a new SQL Server 2012 execution plan element called NonParallelPlanReason, and demonstrates a query that generates "MaxDOPSetToOne".  Joe (formerly on the Microsoft SQL Server product team, so he knows this stuff) mentioned that this new element was not currently documented and tried a few more examples to see what other reasons could be generated. Since I'd already run Strings.exe on the SQL Server DLLs and EXE files, it was easy to run grep/find/findstr for MaxDOPSetToOne on those extracts.  Once I found which files it belonged to (sqlmin.dll) I opened the text to see if the other reasons were listed.  As you can see in my comment on Joe's blog, there were about 20 additional non-parallel reasons.  And while it's not "documentation" of this underdocumented feature, the names are pretty self-explanatory about what can prevent parallel processing. I especially like the ones about cursors – more ammo! - and am curious about the PDW compilation and Cloud DB replication reasons. One reason completely stumped me: NoParallelHekatonPlan.  What the heck is a hekaton?  Google and Wikipedia were vague, and the top results were not in English.  I found one reference to Greek, stating "hekaton" can be translated as "hundredfold"; with a little more Wikipedia-ing this leads to hecto, the prefix for "one hundred" as a unit of measure.  I'm not sure why Microsoft chose hekaton for such a plan name, but having already learned some Greek I figured I might as well dig some more in the DLL text for hekaton.  Here's what I found: hekaton_slow_param_passing Occurs when a Hekaton procedure call dispatch goes to slow parameter passing code path The reason why Hekaton parameter passing code took the slow code path hekaton_slow_param_pass_reason sp_deploy_hekaton_database sp_undeploy_hekaton_database sp_drop_hekaton_database sp_checkpoint_hekaton_database sp_restore_hekaton_database e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\hkproc.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matgen.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matquery.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\sqlmeta.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\resultset.cpp Interesting!  The first 4 entries (in red) mention parameters and "slow code".  Could this be the foundation of the mythical DBCC RUNFASTER command?  Have I been passing my parameters the slow way all this time? And what about those sp_xxxx_hekaton_database procedures (in blue)? Could THEY be the secret to a faster SQL Server? Could they promise a "hundredfold" improvement in performance?  Are these special, super-undocumented DIB (databases in black)? I decided to look in the SQL Server system views for any objects with hekaton in the name, or references to them, in hopes of discovering some new code that would answer all my questions: SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE name LIKE '%hekaton%' SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%hekaton%' Which revealed: name ------------------------ (0 row(s) affected) name ------------------------ sp_createstats sp_recompile sp_updatestats (3 row(s) affected)   Hmm.  Well that didn't find much.  Looks like these procedures are seriously undocumented, unknown, perhaps forbidden knowledge. Maybe a part of some unspeakable evil? (No, I'm not paranoid, I just like mysteries and thought that punching this up with that kind of thing might keep you reading.  I know I'd fall asleep without it.) OK, so let's check out those 3 procedures and see what they reveal when I search for "Hekaton": sp_createstats: -- filter out local temp tables, Hekaton tables, and tables for which current user has no permissions -- Note that OBJECTPROPERTY returns NULL on type="IT" tables, thus we only call it on type='U' tables   OK, that's interesting, let's go looking down a little further: ((@table_type<>'U') or (0 = OBJECTPROPERTY(@table_id, 'TableIsInMemory'))) and -- Hekaton table   Wellllll, that tells us a few new things: There's such a thing as Hekaton tables (UPDATE: I'm not the only one to have found them!) They are not standard user tables and probably not in memory UPDATE: I misinterpreted this because I didn't read all the code when I wrote this blog post. The OBJECTPROPERTY function has an undocumented TableIsInMemory option Let's check out sp_recompile: -- (3) Must not be a Hekaton procedure.   And once again go a little further: if (ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsExecuted') <> 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsInlineFunction') = 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsView') = 0 AND -- Hekaton procedure cannot be recompiled -- Make them go through schema version bumping branch, which will fail ObjectProperty(@objid, 'ExecIsCompiledProc') = 0)   And now we learn that hekaton procedures also exist, they can't be recompiled, there's a "schema version bumping branch" somewhere, and OBJECTPROPERTY has another undocumented option, ExecIsCompiledProc.  (If you experiment with this you'll find this option returns null, I think it only works when called from a system object.) This is neat! Sadly sp_updatestats doesn't reveal anything new, the comments about hekaton are the same as sp_createstats.  But we've ALSO discovered undocumented features for the OBJECTPROPERTY function, which we can now search for: SELECT name, object_definition(OBJECT_ID) FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%OBJECTPROPERTY(%'   I'll leave that to you as more homework.  I should add that searching the system procedures was recommended long ago by the late, great Ken Henderson, in his Guru's Guide books, as a great way to find undocumented features.  That seems to be really good advice! Now if you're a programmer/hacker, you've probably been drooling over the last 5 entries for hekaton (in green), because these are the names of source code files for SQL Server!  Does this mean we can access the source code for SQL Server?  As The Oracle suggested to Neo, can we return to The Source??? Actually, no. Well, maybe a little bit.  While you won't get the actual source code from the compiled DLL and EXE files, you'll get references to source files, debugging symbols, variables and module names, error messages, and even the startup flags for SQL Server.  And if you search for "DBCC" or "CHECKDB" you'll find a really nice section listing all the DBCC commands, including the undocumented ones.  Granted those are pretty easy to find online, but you may be surprised what those web sites DIDN'T tell you! (And neither will I, go look for yourself!)  And as we saw earlier, you'll also find execution plan elements, query processing rules, and who knows what else.  It's also instructive to see how Microsoft organizes their source directories, how various components (storage engine, query processor, Full Text, AlwaysOn/HADR) are split into smaller modules. There are over 2000 source file references, go do some exploring! So what did we learn?  We can pull strings out of executable files, search them for known items, browse them for unknown items, and use the results to examine internal code to learn even more things about SQL Server.  We've even learned how to use command-line utilities!  We are now 1337 h4X0rz!  (Not really.  I hate that leetspeak crap.) Although, I must confess I might've gone too far with the "conspiracy" part of this post.  I apologize for that, it's just my overactive imagination.  There's really no hidden agenda or conspiracy regarding SQL Server internals.  It's not The Matrix.  It's not like you'd find anything like that in there: Attach Matrix Database DM_MATRIX_COMM_PIPELINES MATRIXXACTPARTICIPANTS dm_matrix_agents   Alright, enough of this paranoid ranting!  Microsoft are not really evil!  It's not like they're The Borg from Star Trek: ALTER FEDERATION DROP ALTER FEDERATION SPLIT DROP FEDERATION   #tsql2sday

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 13, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 13, 2010New ProjectsC# 4.0: VS 2010Collaborative Rich Text Edit Prototype Silverlight on Windows Azure: Working like Google Doc but based on Silverlight/Windows Azure. Multiple users can edit one rich text document simultaneously. This is a POC and my...Consulting Assigment: Proyecto de consultoría para el curso Gestión de proyectos de la UCRCS 105 MP Splitter: Simple program to help with splitting up MPs for grading.DipEngine - graphic engine written on Xen for XNA: DIPEngine makes it easier for developers to use it in your game. It's developed in C# and using Xen for XNADotNetAgent: Agent FrameworkExtending C# editor - Outlining, classification: Extensions to VS C# editor current feautereset. Outlining for switch, for(each), if etc. statements. Classification types for method parameters and...Floe IRC Client: Floe is an IRC client written entirely in C#, using the .NET 4.0 framework with WPF technology. It is inspired largely by both XChat and mIRC, and ...Gestalt.Net: Gestalt.Net is a simple to use library for application configuration. It allows for more flexibility, easier to use, and more powerful than the app...GIM.OnlineChess: An implementation of online long-term chessGoogleTrail: Create and Export using the google map to develop the Trek Trails and Export Those Trails as Garmin Custom Map Compatible MapsGrassidi: What could Grassidi be?HodsAudio: Personal web based music library.Hospital Manage System: Free Hospital Manage SystemHtml Reader: Html Reader makes it easier for WPF WebBrowser users to access the Document property, and retrieve information from HTML pages. You'll no longer ha...Intellitouch.BackOffice: This project is a control for a menu.Jank: JankKooBoo Image Galery: It's a Module for kooboo that implements an image galery admin and view Developed for kooboo 2.1.1.0MoonyDesk (windows desktop widgets): Windows desktop plugin based widgets system written on WPFMSNSharp Application with Video Conferencing Feature: In MSN World, users don’t communicate directly each other.I examined P2P open source video/audio conference systems . After researching, I found Vi...mysample: study sample siteNoteFlyBot: An Intelligent Note Program is: - a 'Post-it' note that accept sNatural Language command to Upload content to EMC Repositories - Start Workflow...OpenGraphNET: A OpenGraphNET is a simple parser for the Open Graph protocol created by Facebook. More information on this can be found at opengraphprotocol.org.POCO - ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.0: The sample shows how to retrieve the data using POCO using EDM 4.0. Database used: Northwind (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa...sqlmx: sqlmxUpgrade Log Parser for SharePoint 2010: This is a simple Upgrade Log Parser for SharePoint 2010. It will add a node in the upgrade section of the central administration and deploy a pag...New ReleasesAMP (Adamo Media Player): AMP (Adamo Media Player): First Release version 0.1.0 Installation Instructions Unzip the package Run Setup.exe Follow Setup instructions File includes .NET Framework ...BeanProxy: BeanProxy 2.8: BeanProxy is a C# (.NET 3.5) library housing classes that facilitates unit testing. Any non-static, public interface/class/or abstract class can be...Begtostudy-Test: Test V1: Download to testCBM-Command: 2010-05-13: Release Notes - 2010-05-13New Features Configuration Manager is complete Changes Had to put CBM-Command on a big-time diet. Ran out of room on the...CS 105 MP Splitter: CS 105 MP Splitter: Uses SharpZipLib for unzipping (http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/) Uses ILMerge to merge it all into a single executable (http://w...DipEngine - graphic engine written on Xen for XNA: DipGUI: Provides simple controls for use itEvent Scavenger: Collector service update - version 3.2.3: Added additional functionality to check if host/machine is available on the network before trying to open Event log. Also added code to try to use ...ExcelExportLib: ExcelExportLib 1.4.0.0: Solution converted to Visual Studio 2010 - Added support for formulas in cells - Added support for cell naming - Added support for cell's comments...F# Project Extender: V0.9.1.0 (VS2008,VS2010): F# project extender for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. What's new : Now supports both Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2008 Fixed...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05: Initial release. Note: The .NET Framework v4.0 is required to run this app. It can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details....Fluent Assertions: Release 1.2.1: This is small release with two improvements: You can now use the Enumeration() extension method on a Func<IEnumerable> before calling ShouldThrow<T...Gestalt.Net: Gestalt.Net 1.0: Initial release of Gestalt.Net, a simple to use library for application configuration. It allows for more flexibility, easier to use, and more powe...GPdotNET - Tree Based Genetic Programming Tool: GPdotNETv0.9: This is the same version as previous, but compiled with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. You no longer need CTP of ParallelFX.HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201005122025): New features: (None) Bug fix: (None) Improvements: HKGolden Express now parse JSON data rather than XML document from HKGolden API. This shoul...Jobping Url Shortener: Deploy Code 0.3: Contains only the files for running 0.3 version of the code.Jobping Url Shortener: Source Code 0.3: Feature added: Restriction placed on the domains that the shortener will shorten. Our installation will only shorten www.jobping.com urls. Bug Fix...KooBoo Image Galery: Beta 1: This is the first release and it is divided in some parts Module Install - Is the admin module and an default view Plugin - returns the galery as...LinkedIn® for Windows Mobile: LinkedIn for Windows Mobile v0.8.5: Changes in release 0.8.5 Allow for multiple updatetypes. Add search by Company. Show profiles of all people in an update .MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.13.58780: Fixed Uploading.com dead links detection; Fixed links detection at pages and in FilesTube results; Fixed RSS channel checking; Enabled by def...Microsoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V0.8 - N-Layer DDD Sample App (VS.2010 RTM compat): Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Unity Applic...MoonyDesk (windows desktop widgets): MoonyDesk: MoonyDesk alpha releaseMSNSharp Application with Video Conferencing Feature: MSNVideoChat: Msn Video Chat Application's exe and screenshot is attached.NazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Binary: FxCop compliant codebaseNazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Signed Binary: Signed binaryNazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Signed Source: Signed sourceNazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Source: FxCop compliant codebasepatterns & practices Web Client Developer Guidance: Web Client Software Factory 2010 Guide: If the right-side pane of the chm file is not displayed correctly, do the following: 1) Download WCSF2010Guide.chm file. 2) Start the windows explo...Powershell Scripts for Admins: BizTalk PowerShell Module: BizTalk PowerShell Module Available commands : Get-Applications Start-Application Stop-Application Get-HostInstances Start-HostInstance Stop-Hos...Reusable Library: V1.0.8: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerReusable Library Demo: V1.0.6: A demonstration of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerRobot Shootans: Robot Shootans 0.9: This is the second public release of the game. All instructions for play are in the game itself. Known issues: Bullet collision is still a little...Rx Contrib: V1.2: - Bug fix - API changes public static ReactiveQueue<T> CreateConcurrentQueue( ConcurrentPublicationBehavior concurrentPublicationBeha...SqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data Sources: SqlDiffFramework 1.0.1.0: Maintenance Release An embedded user control inadvertently assumed US regional and language settings; with non-US settings the application crashed ...Transcriber: Transcriber V0.5.0: Pre-releaseUpgrade Log Parser for SharePoint 2010: Upgrade Log Parser for SharePoint 2010: Introduction I did an upgrade from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010 and SP2010 generated such a large log file and I really didn't feel like scrolling ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30512.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Leak Detector for Visual C++ 2008/2010: v2.0a: Renamed vld dll files. Problem with MSVC 2010 Unicode library fixed.VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 24 Beta: Build 24 (beta) New: Added "Open Modified File..." to Solution Explorer context menus. VsTortoise.SolutionExplorerSelectedItemsOpenModifiedFile com...WatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.05.00: Whats New Custom Tags: Tag Name and Tag Url can be localized New Option to set Start Date to grab Search Referrals from New Option to Choose th...Wavelet analysis: Wavelet analysis: Первая публичная версия проекта.XNA Shooter Engine: ModelViewer Alpha 1 Preview: ModelViewer is a utility for previewing HLSL shaders and XNA BasicEffects using the XSE rendering engine. It can also be used with the Microsoft XN...Yet another developer blog - Examples: XML and XSLT transformation in ASP.NET MVC example: This sample application shows how to perform XSL transformation of XML file in ASP.NET MVC (using dedicated HtmlHelper extensions or ActionResult)....Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMirror Testing SystemRawrBlogEngine.NETPHPExcelwhitejQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesMicrosoft Biology FoundationFarseer Physics EngineShake - C# Make

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• Now Available &ndash; Windows Azure SDK 1.6

  - by Shaun

  Microsoft has just announced the Windows Azure SDK 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.6. Now people can download the latest product through the WebPI. After you downloaded and installed the SDK you will find that The SDK 1.6 can be stayed side by side with the SDK 1.5, which means you can still using the 1.5 assemblies. But the Visual Studio Tools would be upgraded to 1.6. Different from the previous SDK, in this version it includes 4 components: Windows Azure Authoring Tools, Windows Azure Emulators, Windows Azure Libraries for .NET 1.6 and the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. There are some significant upgrades in this version, which are Publishing Enhancement: More easily connect to the Windows Azure when publish your application by retrieving a publish setting file. It will let you configure some settings of the deployment, without getting back to the developer portal. Multi-profiles: The publish settings, cloud configuration files, etc. will be stored in one or more MSBuild files. It will be much easier to switch the settings between vary build environments. MSBuild Command-line Build Support. In-Place Upgrade Support.   Publishing Enhancement So let’s have a look about the new features of the publishing. Just create a new Windows Azure project in Visual Studio 2010 with a MVC 3 Web Role, and right-click the Windows Azure project node in the solution explorer, then select Publish, we will find the new publish dialog. In this version the first thing we need to do is to connect to our Windows Azure subscription. Click the “Sign in to download credentials” link, we will be navigated to the login page to provide the Live ID. The Windows Azure Tool will generate a certificate file and uploaded to the subscriptions those belong to us. Then we will download a PUBLISHSETTINGS file, which contains the credentials and subscriptions information. The Visual Studio Tool will generate a certificate and deployed to the subscriptions you have as the Management Certificate. The VS Tool will use this certificate to connect to the subscription in the next step. In the next step, I would back to the Visual Studio (the publish dialog should be stilling opened) and click the Import button, select the PUBLISHSETTINGS file I had just downloaded. Then all my subscriptions will be shown in the dropdown list. Select a subscription that I want the application to be published and press the Next button, then we can select the hosted service, environment, build configuration and service configuration shown in the dialog. In this version we can create a new hosted service directly here rather than go back to the developer portal. Just select the <Create New …> item in the hosted service. What we need to do is to provide the hosted service name and the location. Once clicked the OK, after several seconds the hosted service will be established. If we went to the developer portal we will find the new hosted service in my subscription. a) Currently we cannot select the Affinity Group when create a new hosted service through the Visual Studio Publish dialog. b) Although we can specify the hosted service name and DNS prefixing through the developer portal, we cannot do so from the VS Tool, which means the DNS prefixing would be the same as what we specified for the hosted service name. For example, we specified our hosted service name as “Sdk16Demo”, so the public URL would be http://sdk16demo.cloudapp.net/. After created a new hosted service we can select the cloud environment (production or staging), the build configuration (release or debug), and the service configuration (cloud or local). And we can set the Remote Desktop by check the related checkbox as well. One thing should be note is that, in this version when we set the Remote Desktop settings we don’t need to specify a certificate by default. This is because the Visual Studio will generate a new certificate for us by default. But we can still specify an existing certificate for RDC, by clicking the “More Options” button. Visual Studio Tool will create another certificate for the Remote Desktop connection. It will NOT use the certificate that managing the subscription. We also can select the “Advanced Settings” page to specify the deployment label, storage account, IntelliTrace and .NET profiling information, etc.. Press Next button, the dialog will display all settings I had just specified and it will save them as a new profile. The last step is to click the Publish button. Since we enabled the Remote Desktop feature, the first step of publishing was uploading the certificate. And then it will verify the storage account we specified and upload the package, then finally created the website in Windows Azure.   Multi-Profiles After published, if we back to the Visual Studio we can find a AZUREPUBXML file under the Profiles folder in the Azure project. It includes all settings we specified before. If we publish this project again, we can just use the current settings (hosted service, environment, RDC, etc.) from this profile without input them again. And this is very useful when we have more than one deployment settings. For example it would be able to have one AZUREPUBXML profile for deploying to testing environment (debug building, less roles with RDC and IntelliTrace) and one for production (release building, more roles but without IntelliTrace).   In-Place Upgrade Support Let’s change some codes in the MVC pages and click the Publish menu from the azure project node. No need to specify any settings,  here we can use the pervious settings by loading the azure profile file (AZUREPUBXML). After clicked the Publish button the VS Tool brought a dialog to us to indicate that there’s a deployment available in the hosted service environment, and prompt to REPLACE it or not. Notice that in this version, the dialog tool said “replace” rather than “delete”, which means by default the VS Tool will use In-Place Upgrade when we deploy to a hosted service that has a deployment already exist. After click Yes the VS Tool will upload the package and perform the In-Place Upgrade. If we back to the developer portal we can find that the status of the hosted service was turned to “Updating…”. But in the previous SDK, it will try to delete the whole deployment and publish a new one.   Summary When the Microsoft announced the features that allows the changing VM size via In-Place Upgrade, they also mentioned that in the next few versions the user experience of publishing the azure application would be improved. The target was trying to accomplish the whole publish experience in Visual Studio, which means no need to touch developer portal any more. In the SDK 1.6 we can see from the new publish dialog, as a developer we can do the whole process, includes creating hosted service, specifying the environment, configuration, remote desktop, etc. values without going back the the developer portal.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Robotic Arm &ndash; Hardware

  - by Szymon Kobalczyk

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

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• Running a simple integration scenario using the Oracle Big Data Connectors on Hadoop/HDFS cluster

  - by hamsun

  Between the elephant ( the tradional image of the Hadoop framework) and the Oracle Iron Man (Big Data..) an english setter could be seen as the link to the right data Data, Data, Data, we are living in a world where data technology based on popular applications , search engines, Webservers, rich sms messages, email clients, weather forecasts and so on, have a predominant role in our life. More and more technologies are used to analyze/track our behavior, try to detect patterns, to propose us "the best/right user experience" from the Google Ad services, to Telco companies or large consumer sites (like Amazon:) ). The more we use all these technologies, the more we generate data, and thus there is a need of huge data marts and specific hardware/software servers (as the Exadata servers) in order to treat/analyze/understand the trends and offer new services to the users. Some of these "data feeds" are raw, unstructured data, and cannot be processed effectively by normal SQL queries. Large scale distributed processing was an emerging infrastructure need and the solution seemed to be the "collocation of compute nodes with the data", which in turn leaded to MapReduce parallel patterns and the development of the Hadoop framework, which is based on MapReduce and a distributed file system (HDFS) that runs on larger clusters of rather inexpensive servers. Several Oracle products are using the distributed / aggregation pattern for data calculation ( Coherence, NoSql, times ten ) so once that you are familiar with one of these technologies, lets says with coherence aggregators, you will find the whole Hadoop, MapReduce concept very similar. Oracle Big Data Appliance is based on the Cloudera Distribution (CDH), and the Oracle Big Data Connectors can be plugged on a Hadoop cluster running the CDH distribution or equivalent Hadoop clusters. In this paper, a "lab like" implementation of this concept is done on a single Linux X64 server, running an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0, and a single node Apache hadoop-1.2.1 HDFS cluster, using the SQL connector for HDFS. The whole setup is fairly simple: Install on a Linux x64 server ( or virtual box appliance) an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0 server Get the Apache Hadoop distribution from: http://mir2.ovh.net/ftp.apache.org/dist/hadoop/common/hadoop-1.2.1. Get the Oracle Big Data Connectors from: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/bdc/big-data-connectors/downloads/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen. Check the java version of your Linux server with the command: java -version java version "1.7.0_40" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_40-b43) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.0-b56, mixed mode) Decompress the hadoop hadoop-1.2.1.tar.gz file to /u01/hadoop-1.2.1 Modify your .bash_profile export HADOOP_HOME=/u01/hadoop-1.2.1 export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_HOME/bin export HIVE_HOME=/u01/hive-0.11.0 export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_HOME/bin:$HIVE_HOME/bin (also see my sample .bash_profile) Set up ssh trust for Hadoop process, this is a mandatory step, in our case we have to establish a "local trust" as will are using a single node configuration copy the new public keys to the list of authorized keys connect and test the ssh setup to your localhost: We will run a "pseudo-Hadoop cluster", in what is called "local standalone mode", all the Hadoop java components are running in one Java process, this is enough for our demo purposes. We need to "fine tune" some Hadoop configuration files, we have to go at our $HADOOP_HOME/conf, and modify the files: core-site.xml hdfs-site.xml mapred-site.xml check that the hadoop binaries are referenced correctly from the command line by executing: hadoop -version As Hadoop is managing our "clustered HDFS" file system we have to create "the mount point" and format it , the mount point will be declared to core-site.xml as: The layout under the /u01/hadoop-1.2.1/data will be created and used by other hadoop components (MapReduce = /mapred/...) HDFS is using the /dfs/... layout structure format the HDFS hadoop file system: Start the java components for the HDFS system As an additional check, you can use the GUI Hadoop browsers to check the content of your HDFS configurations: Once our HDFS Hadoop setup is done you can use the HDFS file system to store data ( big data : )), and plug them back and forth to Oracle Databases by the means of the Big Data Connectors ( which is the next configuration step). You can create / use a Hive db, but in our case we will make a simple integration of "raw data" , through the creation of an External Table to a local Oracle instance ( on the same Linux box, we run the Hadoop HDFS one node cluster and one Oracle DB). Download some public "big data", I use the site: http://france.meteofrance.com/france/observations, from where I can get *.csv files for my big data simulations :). Here is the data layout of my example file: Download the Big Data Connector from the OTN (oraosch-2.2.0.zip), unzip it to your local file system (see picture below) Modify your environment in order to access the connector libraries , and make the following test: [oracle@dg1 bin]$./hdfs_stream Usage: hdfs_stream locationFile [oracle@dg1 bin]$ Load the data to the Hadoop hdfs file system: hadoop fs -mkdir bgtest_data hadoop fs -put obsFrance.txt bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt hadoop fs -ls /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt [oracle@dg1 bg-data-raw]$ hadoop fs -ls /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Found 1 items -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle supergroup 54103 2013-10-22 06:10 /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt [oracle@dg1 bg-data-raw]$hadoop fs -ls hdfs:///user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Found 1 items -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle supergroup 54103 2013-10-22 06:10 /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Check the content of the HDFS with the browser UI: Start the Oracle database, and run the following script in order to create the Oracle database user, the Oracle directories for the Oracle Big Data Connector (dg1 it’s my own db id replace accordingly yours): #!/bin/bash export ORAENV_ASK=NO export ORACLE_SID=dg1 . oraenv sqlplus /nolog <<EOF CONNECT / AS sysdba; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY osch_bin_path AS '/u01/orahdfs-2.2.0/bin'; CREATE USER BGUSER IDENTIFIED BY oracle; GRANT CREATE SESSION, CREATE TABLE TO BGUSER; GRANT EXECUTE ON sys.utl_file TO BGUSER; GRANT READ, EXECUTE ON DIRECTORY osch_bin_path TO BGUSER; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY BGT_LOG_DIR as '/u01/BG_TEST/logs'; GRANT READ, WRITE ON DIRECTORY BGT_LOG_DIR to BGUSER; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY BGT_DATA_DIR as '/u01/BG_TEST/data'; GRANT READ, WRITE ON DIRECTORY BGT_DATA_DIR to BGUSER; EOF Put the following in a file named t3.sh and make it executable, hadoop jar $OSCH_HOME/jlib/orahdfs.jar \ oracle.hadoop.exttab.ExternalTable \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.tableName=BGTEST_DP_XTAB \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.defaultDirectory=BGT_DATA_DIR \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.dataPaths="hdfs:///user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt" \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.columnCount=7 \ -D oracle.hadoop.connection.url=jdbc:oracle:thin:@//localhost:1521/dg1 \ -D oracle.hadoop.connection.user=BGUSER \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.printStackTrace=true \ -createTable --noexecute then test the creation fo the external table with it: [oracle@dg1 samples]$ ./t3.sh ./t3.sh: line 2: /u01/orahdfs-2.2.0: Is a directory Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS Release 2.2.0 - Production Copyright (c) 2011, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Enter Database Password:] The create table command was not executed. The following table would be created. CREATE TABLE "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB" ( "C1" VARCHAR2(4000), "C2" VARCHAR2(4000), "C3" VARCHAR2(4000), "C4" VARCHAR2(4000), "C5" VARCHAR2(4000), "C6" VARCHAR2(4000), "C7" VARCHAR2(4000) ) ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL ( TYPE ORACLE_LOADER DEFAULT DIRECTORY "BGT_DATA_DIR" ACCESS PARAMETERS ( RECORDS DELIMITED BY 0X'0A' CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8 STRING SIZES ARE IN CHARACTERS PREPROCESSOR "OSCH_BIN_PATH":'hdfs_stream' FIELDS TERMINATED BY 0X'2C' MISSING FIELD VALUES ARE NULL ( "C1" CHAR(4000), "C2" CHAR(4000), "C3" CHAR(4000), "C4" CHAR(4000), "C5" CHAR(4000), "C6" CHAR(4000), "C7" CHAR(4000) ) ) LOCATION ( 'osch-20131022081035-74-1' ) ) PARALLEL REJECT LIMIT UNLIMITED; The following location files would be created. osch-20131022081035-74-1 contains 1 URI, 54103 bytes 54103 hdfs://localhost:19000/user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Then remove the --noexecute flag and create the external Oracle table for the Hadoop data. Check the results: The create table command succeeded. CREATE TABLE "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB" ( "C1" VARCHAR2(4000), "C2" VARCHAR2(4000), "C3" VARCHAR2(4000), "C4" VARCHAR2(4000), "C5" VARCHAR2(4000), "C6" VARCHAR2(4000), "C7" VARCHAR2(4000) ) ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL ( TYPE ORACLE_LOADER DEFAULT DIRECTORY "BGT_DATA_DIR" ACCESS PARAMETERS ( RECORDS DELIMITED BY 0X'0A' CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8 STRING SIZES ARE IN CHARACTERS PREPROCESSOR "OSCH_BIN_PATH":'hdfs_stream' FIELDS TERMINATED BY 0X'2C' MISSING FIELD VALUES ARE NULL ( "C1" CHAR(4000), "C2" CHAR(4000), "C3" CHAR(4000), "C4" CHAR(4000), "C5" CHAR(4000), "C6" CHAR(4000), "C7" CHAR(4000) ) ) LOCATION ( 'osch-20131022081719-3239-1' ) ) PARALLEL REJECT LIMIT UNLIMITED; The following location files were created. osch-20131022081719-3239-1 contains 1 URI, 54103 bytes 54103 hdfs://localhost:19000/user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt This is the view from the SQL Developer: and finally the number of lines in the oracle table, imported from our Hadoop HDFS cluster SQL select count(*) from "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB"; COUNT(*) ---------- 1151 In a next post we will integrate data from a Hive database, and try some ODI integrations with the ODI Big Data connector. Our simplistic approach is just a step to show you how these unstructured data world can be integrated to Oracle infrastructure. Hadoop, BigData, NoSql are great technologies, they are widely used and Oracle is offering a large integration infrastructure based on these services. Oracle University presents a complete curriculum on all the Oracle related technologies: NoSQL: Introduction to Oracle NoSQL Database Using Oracle NoSQL Database Big Data: Introduction to Big Data Oracle Big Data Essentials Oracle Big Data Overview Oracle Data Integrator: Oracle Data Integrator 12c: New Features Oracle Data Integrator 11g: Integration and Administration Oracle Data Integrator: Administration and Development Oracle Data Integrator 11g: Advanced Integration and Development Oracle Coherence 12c: Oracle Coherence 12c: New Features Oracle Coherence 12c: Share and Manage Data in Clusters Oracle Coherence 12c: Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Fundamentals for Oracle Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Fundamentals for SQL Server Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for Oracle Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for DB2 Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for Teradata Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for HP NonStop Oracle GoldenGate 11g Management Pack: Overview Oracle GoldenGate 11g Troubleshooting and Tuning Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Advanced Configuration for Oracle Other Resources: Apache Hadoop : http://hadoop.apache.org/ is the homepage for these technologies. "Hadoop Definitive Guide 3rdEdition" by Tom White is a classical lecture for people who want to know more about Hadoop , and some active "googling " will also give you some more references. About the author: Eugene Simos is based in France and joined Oracle through the BEA-Weblogic Acquisition, where he worked for the Professional Service, Support, end Education for major accounts across the EMEA Region. He worked in the banking sector, ATT, Telco companies giving him extensive experience on production environments. Eugen currently specializes in Oracle Fusion Middleware teaching an array of courses on Weblogic/Webcenter, Content,BPM /SOA/Identity-Security/GoldenGate/Virtualisation/Unified Comm Suite) throughout the EMEA region.

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• MSCC: Scripting - Administrator's­ toolbox of magic...

  Finally, we made it to have our April meetup - in May. The most obvious explanation is the increased amount of open source and IT activities that either the MSCC, the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM), or the University of Mauritius Student's Computer Club is organising. It's absolutely incredible to see the recent hype of events here on the island. And I'm loving it! Unfortunately, we also had to deal with arranging for a location this time. It was kind of an odyssey as my requests (and phone calls) haven't been answered, even though I tried it several times - well, kind of disappointing and I have to look into that for future gatherings. In my opinion, it is essential that two parameters of a community meeting are fixed as early as possible: Location, and Date and time You can't just change one or both on the very last minute. Well, this time we had to do it due to unforeseen reasons, and I apologise to any MSCC member which couldn't make it to our April meetup. Okay, lesson learned but now back to the actual meetup report ... Shortly after the meeting I placed the following statement as my first impression: "Spontaneous and improvised :) No, seriously, Ish and Dan had well prepared presentations on shell scripting, mainly focused towards Bourne Again Shell (bash), and the pros and cons of scripting versus actually writing something in a decent programming language. I thought that I could cut myself out of the equation but the demand for information about PowerShell was higher than expected..." Well, it turned out that the interest in Windows PowerShell was high, as I even got a couple of questions on it via social media networks during the evening. I also like to mention that the number of attendees went back to what I would call a "standard" number of participation. This time there were 12 craftsmen, but again a good number of First Timers. Reactions of other attendees Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Enjoyed the bash and powershell (linux / windows) presentations ..." -- Nadim on event comments "He [Daniel] also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code." -- Ish on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting   Glad to see a couple of first time attendees, especially students from the university itself. Some details on the presentations MSCC: First time visit at the University of Mauritius - Phase II Engineering Tower, room 2.9 Gimme some love ... bash and other shells Ish gave a great introduction into shell scripting as he spoke about existing shell environments and a little bit about their history. Furthermore, he talked about various built-in commands, the use of coreutils, the ability to daisy-chain multiple commands using pipes, the importance of the standard I/O streams and their file descriptors in advanced scripting techniques. Combined with a couple of sample statements in the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 14.04 machine it was a solid presentation. Have a closer look at his slides - published on his blog on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting. Oddities of scripting After the brief introduction into bash it was Daniel's turn to highlight a good number of oddities when working with shell scripts. First of all, it should be clear that scripting is not supposed for any kind of implementations in terms of software but simply to automate administrative procedures and to simplify routine jobs on a system. One of the cool oddities that he mentioned is that everything (!) in a shell is represented by strings; there are no other types like integer, float, date-time, etc. that you'd like to use in a full-fledged programming language. Let's have a look at his sample:  more to come... What's the output? As a conclusion, Daniel suggests that shell scripting should be limited but not restricted to automatic repetitive command stacks and batch jobs, startup wrapper for applications in order to set up the execution environment, and other not too sophisticated jobs. But as soon as it might involve a little bit more logic or you might rely on performance it's better to write an application in Ruby, Python, or Perl (among others of course). This is also enables the possibility to test your code properly. MSCC: Ish talking about Bourne Again Shell (bash) and shell scripting to automate regular tasks MSCC: Daniel gives an overview about the pros and cons of shell scripting versus programming MSCC: PowerShell as your scripting solution on Windows operating systems The path of the Enlightened is long ... and tough. Honestly, even though PowerShell was mentioned without any further details on the meetup's agenda, I didn't expect that there would be demand to give a presentation on Microsoft PowerShell after all. I already took this topic out of the announcement but the audience wanted to have some information. Okay, then let's see what I could do - improvised style. While my machine booted and got hooked up to the projector, I started to talk about the beginnings of PowerShell from back in 2006, and its predecessors MS DOS and Command Prompt. A throwback in history... always good for young people. As usual, Microsoft didn't get it at that time. Instead of listening to their client's needs and demands they ignored the feasibility to administrate Windows server farms without any UI tools. PowerShell is actually a result of this, and seeing that shell scripting is a common, reliable and fast way in an administrator's toolbox for decades, Microsoft had to adapt from their Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to a broader approach. It's not like shell scripting was something new; it is in daily use by alternative operating systems like AIX, HP UX, Solaris, and last but not least Linux. Most interestingly, Microsoft is very good at renovating existing architectures, and over the years PowerShell not only replaced their own combination of Command Prompt and Scripting Hosts (VBScript and CScript) but really turned into a challenging competitor on the market. The shell is easy to extend with cmdlets, and open to other Microsoft products like SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Third-party software applications. Similar to MMC PowerShell also offers the ability to administer other machine remotely - only without a graphical user interface and therefore it's easier to automate and schedule regular tasks. Following is a sample of a PowerShell script file (extension .ps1): $strComputer = "." $colItems = get-wmiobject -class Win32_BIOS -namespace root\CIMV2 -comp $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {write-host "BIOS Characteristics: " $objItem.BiosCharacteristicswrite-host "BIOS Version: " $objItem.BIOSVersionwrite-host "Build Number: " $objItem.BuildNumberwrite-host "Caption: " $objItem.Captionwrite-host "Code Set: " $objItem.CodeSetwrite-host "Current Language: " $objItem.CurrentLanguagewrite-host "Description: " $objItem.Descriptionwrite-host "Identification Code: " $objItem.IdentificationCodewrite-host "Installable Languages: " $objItem.InstallableLanguageswrite-host "Installation Date: " $objItem.InstallDatewrite-host "Language Edition: " $objItem.LanguageEditionwrite-host "List Of Languages: " $objItem.ListOfLanguageswrite-host "Manufacturer: " $objItem.Manufacturerwrite-host "Name: " $objItem.Namewrite-host "Other Target Operating System: " $objItem.OtherTargetOSwrite-host "Primary BIOS: " $objItem.PrimaryBIOSwrite-host "Release Date: " $objItem.ReleaseDatewrite-host "Serial Number: " $objItem.SerialNumberwrite-host "SMBIOS BIOS Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSBIOSVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Major Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMajorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Minor Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMinorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Present: " $objItem.SMBIOSPresentwrite-host "Software Element ID: " $objItem.SoftwareElementIDwrite-host "Software Element State: " $objItem.SoftwareElementStatewrite-host "Status: " $objItem.Statuswrite-host "Target Operating System: " $objItem.TargetOperatingSystemwrite-host "Version: " $objItem.Versionwrite-host} Which gives you information about your BIOS and Windows OS. Then change the computer name to another one on your network (NetBIOS based) and run the script again. There lots of samples and tutorials at the Microsoft Script Center, and I would advise you to pay a visit over there if you are more interested in PowerShell. The Script Center provides the download links, too. Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Hacking Defence (14. May 2014) WebCup Maurice (7. & 8. June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! My resume of the day Spontaneous and improvised :) The new location at the University of Mauritius turned out very well, there is plenty of space, and it could be a good choice for future meetings. Especially, having the ability to get more and more students into our IT community sounds like a great opportunity. Later during the day, I got some promising mails from Nadim regarding future sessions at the local branch of the Middlesex University. Well, we will see in the future... But for now this will be on hold until approximately October when students resume their regular studies. Anyway, it was a good experience at the university, and thanks again to the UoM Student's Computer Club that made the necessary arrangements for the MSCC!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 18, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 18, 2010New ProjectsBare Bones Email Trace Listener: Bare Bones Email Trace Listener is about the simplest email trace listener you can have. No bells, no whistles, and no good if you need authenticat...Cartellino: Scopo del progetto è la realizzazione di un software in grado di rilevare i dati dai rilevatori 3Tec (www.3tec.it) e stampare i cartellini presenza...Castle Windsor app.config Properties: The Castle Windsor app.config Properties library makes it possible for users of Castle Windsor to reference appSettings values in Windsor's XML pro...DeskD: This is a simple desktop dictionary application(something like WordWeb) created in Java using Netbeans IDE. Since i am new to codeplex all updates ...FunPokerMakerOnline: It is a play of poker online with a game editor. It is done with .net 4 and WPF and SOAP or WCF. KLOCS Team GIN Project: This is a Master's Degree program group project. It may have academic interest, but won't be maintained after June 2010KNN: This is KNN projectProject Santa: Program to organize teams using mysql databases and c# in a clean and robust task and group system. For more information see my blog post at http:/...ProjetoIntegradoJuridico: Sistema Integrado de Acompanhamento JurídicoRSSR for Windows Phone 7: This is a simple RSS reader application, the project aims to show people that it is easy to build application for windows phones. The applicatio...Simple Rcon: Simple Rcon is a simple lightweight rcon client for HL1/HL2 Servers. It is developed in C# and WPFTAB METHOD SQL Create a data dictionary from your Transact SQL code: TABMETHODSQL makes it easier for data/information workers to document their work. Create a data governance solution that maps sql data process, inc...TM BF Tournament: WPF software to manage Trackmania tournament with Battle France RulesviBlog: visinia plugin, this plugin is used to add blogging facility in visinia cmsviNews: visinia plugin, this plugin can be used to create a news portal like cnn.com nytimeVolumeMaster: VolumeMaster is an On Screen Display (OSD) that gets activated whenever the volume changes. It's written in WPF and uses Vista Core Audio API by Ra...WiiCIS.NET: This is a managed port of WiiCIS, which is a Nintendo Wiimote library originally created by TheOboeNerd and posted on Sourceforge.New ReleasesCastle Windsor app.config Properties: Version 1.0: Initial release.Code for Rapid C# Windows Development eBook: Enumerable Debugger Visualizer Version 1.1: Second release of the Enumerable Debugger Visualizer. There are more classes registered and it is more robust. The list of classes I have register...Convection Game Engine (Basic Edition): Convection Basic (40223): Compiled version of Convection Basic change set 40223.CycleMania Starter Kit EAP - ASP.NET 4 Problem - Design - Solution: Cyclemania 0.08.59: See Source Code tab for recent change history.DbEntry.Net (Lephone Framework): DbEntry.Net 3.9: DbEntry.Net is a lightweight Object Relational Mapping (ORM) database access compnent for .Net 3.5. It has clearly and easily programing interface ...Hash Calculator: HashCalculator 2.0: Upgraded to .NET Framework 4.0 Added support to calculate CRC32 hash function Added "Cancel" button in the Windows 7 taskbar thumbnailHKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201004172120): New features: Added jump links at top of page of message. Bug fix: Fixed page count bug. Improvements: HKGolden Express now uses DocumentBuild...HTML Ruby: 6.21.4: Styles added to override those on some sites for better rendering of ruby Fix regression on complex ruby annotation rendering Better spacingHTML Ruby: 6.21.5: Removed debug code in preference handling Status bar indicator now resets for each action Replace ruby in place without using document fragment...IceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 12.4 EXE Update: This is simply an update to the main IceChat program files and DLL. Simpply overwrite the ones in the place where IceChat 2009 is installed.IceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 12.4 Full Install: Build Alpha 12.4 - April 17 2010 Added IceChatScript.dll , needs to be added in same folder with EXE and IPluginIceChat.dll Added Self Notice in ...PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Library v05 x64: With this version, PokeIn library has become a stable. Numerous tests have completed. This is the first release candidate of PokeIn. Cheers!PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Library v05 x86: PokeIn Library version 0.5 (x86) With this version, PokeIn library has become a stable. Numerous tests have completed. This is the first release c...Project Santa: Project Santa V1.0: The first initial release of my project manager program, for more information see http://coderplex.blogspot.com/2010/04/project-manager-using-mysq...Salient: TestingWithVSDevServer v1: Using code from Salient, I have assembled a few strategies for programmatic contol of the Visual Studio Development Server (WebDev.WebServer.exe). ...SharePoint Navigation Menu: spNavigationMenu 1.1: Changed the CAML query so it will order by Link Order, then Title. Added the ability to override the On Hover event on the parent menu to use On ...Simple Rcon: Simple Rcon Version 1: Version 1TAB METHOD SQL Create a data dictionary from your Transact SQL code: RELEASE 1: TESTING THE RELEASE SYSTEMTribe.Cache: Tribe.Cache Beta 0.1: Beta release of Tribe.Cache - Now with cache expiration serviceviBlog: viBlog_beta: visinia plugin to add blogging facility in visinia cmsviNews: viNews_beta: visinia plugin.visinia: visinia_beta2: visinia beta 2 released with many new feature.Visual Studio DSite: Visual C++ 2008 Login Form: A simple login form made in visual c 2008. Source code only.WiiCIS.NET: WiiCIS.NET v0.11: 0.11 Removed an unnecessary function from the Wiimote class, and improved the demo. You will need the latest version of SlimDX to compile the sourc...WinControls TreeListView: TreeListView 1.5.1: -fixes issue #5837 -Preliminary feature #5874WoW Character Viewer: Viewer Setup: Finally, I've brought out the next setup of WoW Viewer. Most loose ends have been tied up. Loading and Saving of character files has been fixed.Most Popular ProjectsRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseMicrosoft SQL Server Community & Samplespatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelFacebook Developer ToolkitBlogEngine.NETMvcContrib: a Codeplex Foundation projectIronPythonMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryIndustrial DashboardFarseer Physics EnginejQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationProxi [Proxy Interface]BlogEngine.NETCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight

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• PeopleSoft Upgrades, Fusion, & BI for Leading European PeopleSoft Applications Customers

  - by Mark Rosenberg

  With so many industry-leading services firms around the globe managing their businesses with PeopleSoft, it’s always an adventure setting up times and meetings for us to keep in touch with them, especially those outside of North America who often do not get to join us at Oracle OpenWorld. Fortunately, during the first two weeks of May, Nigel Woodland (Oracle’s Service Industries Director for the EMEA region) and I successfully blocked off our calendars to visit seven different customers spanning four countries in Western Europe. We met executives and leaders at four Staffing industry firms, two Professional Services firms that engage in consulting and auditing, and a Financial Services firm. As we shared the latest information regarding product capabilities and plans, we also gained valuable insight into the hot technology topics facing these businesses. What we heard was both informative and inspiring, and I suspect other Oracle PeopleSoft applications customers can benefit from one or more of the following observations from our trip. Great IT Plans Get Executed When You Respect the Users Each of our visits followed roughly the same pattern. After introductions, Nigel outlined Oracle’s product and technology strategy, including a discussion of how we at Oracle invest in each layer of the “technology stack” to provide customers with unprecedented business management capabilities and choice. Then, I provided the specifics of the PeopleSoft product line’s investment strategy, detailing the dramatic number of rich usability and functionality enhancements added to release 9.1 since its general availability in 2009 and the game-changing capabilities slated for 9.2. What was most exciting about each of these discussions was that shortly after my talking about what customers can do with release 9.1 right now to drive up user productivity and satisfaction, I saw the wheels turning in the minds of our audiences. Business analyst and end user-configurable tools and technologies, such as WorkCenters and the Related Action Framework, that provide the ability to tailor a “central command center” to the exact needs of each recruiter, biller, and every other role in the organization were exactly what each of our customers had been looking for. Every one of our audiences agreed that these tools which demonstrate a respect for the user would finally help IT pole vault over the wall of resistance that users had often raised in the past. With these new user-focused capabilities, IT is positioned to definitively partner with the business, instead of drag the business along, to unlock the value of their investment in PeopleSoft. This topic of respecting the user emerged during our very first visit, which was at Vital Services Group at their Head Office “The Mill” in Manchester, England. (If you are a student of architecture and are ever in Manchester, you should stop in to see this amazingly renovated old mill building.) I had just finished explaining our PeopleSoft 9.2 roadmap, and Mike Code, PeopleSoft Systems Manager for this innovative staffing company, said, “Mark, the new features you’ve shown us in 9.1/9.2 are very relevant to our business. As we forge ahead with the 9.1 upgrade, the ability to configure a targeted user interface with WorkCenters, Related Actions, Pivot Grids, and Alerts will enable us to satisfy the business that this upgrade is for them and will deliver tangible benefits. In fact, you’ve highlighted that we need to start talking to the business to keep up the momentum to start reviewing the 9.2 upgrade after we get to 9.1, because as much as 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.52 offers, what you’ve shown us for 9.2 is what we’ve envisioned was ultimately possible with our investment in PeopleSoft applications.” We also received valuable feedback about our investment for the Staffing industry when we visited with Hans Wanders, CIO of Randstad (the second largest Staffing company in the world) in the Netherlands. After our visit, Hans noted, “It was very interesting to see how the PeopleSoft applications have developed. I was truly impressed by many of the new developments.” Hans and Mike, sincere thanks for the validation that our team’s hard work and dedication to “respecting the users” is worth the effort! Co-existence of PeopleSoft and Fusion Applications Just Makes Sense As a “product person,” one of the most rewarding things about visiting customers is that they actually want to talk to me. Sometimes, they want to discuss a product area that we need to enhance; other times, they are interested in learning how to extract more value from their applications; and still others, they want to tell me how they are using the applications to drive real value for the business. During this trip, I was very pleased to hear that several of our customers not only thought the co-existence of Fusion applications alongside PeopleSoft applications made sense in theory, but also that they were aggressively looking at how to deploy one or more Fusion applications alongside their PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM applications. The most common deployment plan in the works by three of the organizations is to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 or 9.2, and then adopt one of the new Fusion HCM applications, such as Fusion Performance Management or the full suite of  Fusion Talent Management. For example, during an applications upgrade planning discussion with the staffing company Hays plc., Mark Thomas, who is Hays’ UK IT Director, commented, “We are very excited about where we can go with the latest versions of the PeopleSoft applications in conjunction with Fusion Talent Management.” Needless to say, this news was very encouraging, because it reiterated that our applications investment strategy makes good business sense for our customers. Next Generation Business Intelligence Is the Key to the Future The third, and perhaps most exciting, lesson I learned during this journey is that our audiences already know that the latest generation of Business Intelligence technologies will be the “secret sauce” for organizations to transform business in radical ways. While a number of the organizations we visited on the trip have deployed or are deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the associated analytics applications to provide dashboards of easy-to-understand, user-configurable metrics that help optimize business performance according to current operating procedures, what’s most exciting to them is being able to use Business Intelligence to change the way an organization does business, grows revenue, and makes a profit. In particular, several executives we met asked whether we can help them minimize the need to have perfectly structured data and at the same time generate analytics that improve order fulfillment decision-making. To them, the path to future growth lies in having the ability to analyze unstructured data rapidly and intuitively and leveraging technology’s ability to detect patterns that a human cannot reasonably be expected to see. For illustrative purposes, here is a good example of a business problem where analyzing a combination of structured and unstructured data can produce better results. If you have a resource manager trying to decide which person would be the best fit for an assignment in terms of ensuring (a) client satisfaction, (b) the individual’s satisfaction with the work, (c) least travel distance, and (d) highest margin, you traditionally compare resource qualifications to assignment needs, calculate margins on past work with the client, and measure distances. To perform these comparisons, you are likely to need the organization to have profiles setup, people ranked against profiles, margin targets setup, margins measured, distances setup, distances measured, and more. As you can imagine, this requires organizations to plan and implement data setup, capture, and quality management initiatives to ensure that dependable information is available to support resourcing analysis and decisions. In the fast-paced, tight-budget world in which most organizations operate today, the effort and discipline required to maintain high-quality, structured data like those described in the above example are certainly not desirable and in some cases are not feasible. You can imagine how intrigued our audiences were when I informed them that we are ready to help them analyze volumes of unstructured data, detect trends, and produce recommendations. Our discussions delved into examples of how the firms could leverage Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search and Endeca technologies to keyword search against, compare, and learn from unstructured resource and assignment data. We also considered examples of how they could employ Oracle Real-Time Decisions to generate statistically significant recommendations based on similar resourcing scenarios that have produced the desired satisfaction and profit margin results. --- Although I had almost no time for sight-seeing during this trip to Europe, I have to say that it may have been one of the most energizing and engaging trips of my career. Showing these dedicated customers how they can give every user a uniquely tailored set of tools and address business problems in ways that have to date been impossible made the journey across the Atlantic more than worth it. If any of these three topics intrigue you, I’d recommend you contact your Oracle applications representative to arrange for more detailed discussions with the appropriate members of our organization.

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• Ubuntu 11.10, using wget/curl fails with ssl

  - by Greg Spiers

  Note: See edit 3 for solution On a completely new install of Ubuntu I'm getting the following errors when using wget: wget https://test.sagepay.com --2012-03-27 12:55:12-- https://test.sagepay.com/ Resolving test.sagepay.com... 195.170.169.8 Connecting to test.sagepay.com|195.170.169.8|:443... connected. ERROR: cannot verify test.sagepay.com's certificate, issued by `/C=US/O=VeriSign, Inc./OU=VeriSign Trust Network/OU=Terms of use at https://www.verisign.com/rpa (c)06/CN=VeriSign Class 3 Extended Validation SSL SGC CA': Unable to locally verify the issuer's authority. To connect to test.sagepay.com insecurely, use `--no-check-certificate'. I've tried installing ca-certificates and configuring the ca-certs and they appear to all be setup in /etc/ssl/certs. The same issue exists for cURL: curl https://test.sagepay.com curl: (60) SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed Which leads me to believe it's something wrong with openssl server wide. wget and curl both work correctly locally on OSX and I have confirmed with a few people that it's working on their servers so I suspect it's nothing to do with the server I'm attempting to connect to. Any ideas or suggestions on things to try to narrow it down? Thank you Edit As requested verbose output from curl curl -Iv https://test.sagepay.com * About to connect() to test.sagepay.com port 443 (#0) * Trying 195.170.169.8... connected * Connected to test.sagepay.com (195.170.169.8) port 443 (#0) * successfully set certificate verify locations: * CAfile: none CApath: /etc/ssl/certs * SSLv3, TLS handshake, Client hello (1): * SSLv3, TLS handshake, Server hello (2): * SSLv3, TLS handshake, CERT (11): * SSLv3, TLS alert, Server hello (2): * SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed * Closing connection #0 curl: (60) SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed More details here: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html Edit 2 Using the hash from your comment I see this: ubuntu@srv-tf6sq:/etc/ssl/certs$ ls -al 7651b327.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 59 2012-03-27 12:48 7651b327.0 -> Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.pem ubuntu@srv-tf6sq:/etc/ssl/certs$ ls -al Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.pem lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 94 2012-01-18 07:21 Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.pem -> /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt ubuntu@srv-tf6sq:/etc/ssl/certs$ ls -al /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 834 2011-09-28 14:53 /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt ubuntu@srv-tf6sq:/etc/ssl/certs$ more /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIICPDCCAaUCEDyRMcsf9tAbDpq40ES/Er4wDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEFBQAwXzELMAkG A1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNVBAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFz cyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmltYXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MB4XDTk2 MDEyOTAwMDAwMFoXDTI4MDgwMjIzNTk1OVowXzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNV BAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFzcyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmlt YXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GN ADCBiQKBgQDJXFme8huKARS0EN8EQNvjV69qRUCPhAwL0TPZ2RHP7gJYHyX3KqhE BarsAx94f56TuZoAqiN91qyFomNFx3InzPRMxnVx0jnvT0Lwdd8KkMaOIG+YD/is I19wKTakyYbnsZogy1Olhec9vn2a/iRFM9x2Fe0PonFkTGUugWhFpwIDAQABMA0G CSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAA4GBABByUqkFFBkyCEHwxWsKzH4PIRnN5GfcX6kb5sroc50i 2JhucwNhkcV8sEVAbkSdjbCxlnRhLQ2pRdKkkirWmnWXbj9T/UWZYB2oK0z5XqcJ 2HUw19JlYD1n1khVdWk/kfVIC0dpImmClr7JyDiGSnoscxlIaU5rfGW/D/xwzoiQ -----END CERTIFICATE----- But doing the steps myself I end up with a different hash: strace -o /tmp/foo.out curl -Iv https://test.sagepay.com and grep ssl /tmp/foo.out open("/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libssl.so.1.0.0", O_RDONLY) = 3 stat("/etc/ssl/certs/415660c1.0", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=834, ...}) = 0 open("/etc/ssl/certs/415660c1.0", O_RDONLY) = 4 stat("/etc/ssl/certs/415660c1.1", 0x7fff7dab07b0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) readlink -f /etc/ssl/certs/415660c1.0 /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt more /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority.crt -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIICPDCCAaUCEDyRMcsf9tAbDpq40ES/Er4wDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEFBQAwXzELMAkG A1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNVBAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFz cyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmltYXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MB4XDTk2 MDEyOTAwMDAwMFoXDTI4MDgwMjIzNTk1OVowXzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNV BAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFzcyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmlt YXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GN ADCBiQKBgQDJXFme8huKARS0EN8EQNvjV69qRUCPhAwL0TPZ2RHP7gJYHyX3KqhE BarsAx94f56TuZoAqiN91qyFomNFx3InzPRMxnVx0jnvT0Lwdd8KkMaOIG+YD/is I19wKTakyYbnsZogy1Olhec9vn2a/iRFM9x2Fe0PonFkTGUugWhFpwIDAQABMA0G CSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAA4GBABByUqkFFBkyCEHwxWsKzH4PIRnN5GfcX6kb5sroc50i 2JhucwNhkcV8sEVAbkSdjbCxlnRhLQ2pRdKkkirWmnWXbj9T/UWZYB2oK0z5XqcJ 2HUw19JlYD1n1khVdWk/kfVIC0dpImmClr7JyDiGSnoscxlIaU5rfGW/D/xwzoiQ -----END CERTIFICATE----- Any other ideas? Thank you for the help so far :) Edit 3 So it turns out that installing the ca-certificates package didn't install the one that I needed. I found this post about certificates being presented out of order. This seems to be the case with my request to sagepay. The solution ended up being to install another CA certificate from Verisign. I'm not sure why this fixes the issue with it being out of order but it does, but I suspect the out of order issue really isn't a problem at all and it was infact because I was missing a certificate all along. The additional certificate is available in that post but I didn't want to blindly trust it. I've looked at the list of CA certificates from cURL's site and it is listed there so I do trust it. The certificate: Verisign Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority ======================================================= -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- MIICPDCCAaUCEHC65B0Q2Sk0tjjKewPMur8wDQYJKoZIhvcNAQECBQAwXzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMx FzAVBgNVBAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFzcyAzIFB1YmxpYyBQcmltYXJ5 IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MB4XDTk2MDEyOTAwMDAwMFoXDTI4MDgwMTIzNTk1OVow XzELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxFzAVBgNVBAoTDlZlcmlTaWduLCBJbmMuMTcwNQYDVQQLEy5DbGFzcyAz IFB1YmxpYyBQcmltYXJ5IENlcnRpZmljYXRpb24gQXV0aG9yaXR5MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUA A4GNADCBiQKBgQDJXFme8huKARS0EN8EQNvjV69qRUCPhAwL0TPZ2RHP7gJYHyX3KqhEBarsAx94 f56TuZoAqiN91qyFomNFx3InzPRMxnVx0jnvT0Lwdd8KkMaOIG+YD/isI19wKTakyYbnsZogy1Ol hec9vn2a/iRFM9x2Fe0PonFkTGUugWhFpwIDAQABMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAgUAA4GBALtMEivPLCYA TxQT3ab7/AoRhIzzKBxnki98tsX63/Dolbwdj2wsqFHMc9ikwFPwTtYmwHYBV4GSXiHx0bH/59Ah WM1pF+NEHJwZRDmJXNycAA9WjQKZ7aKQRUzkuxCkPfAyAw7xzvjoyVGM5mKf5p/AfbdynMk2Omuf Tqj/ZA1k -----END CERTIFICATE----- I put this in a file in: /usr/share/ca-certificates/curl/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.crt I then modified the /etc/ca-certificates.conf and added the following line at the end: curl/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.crt After that I ran the command: sudo update-ca-certificates Looking into the /etc/ssl/certs directory I see it correctly linked: ls -al | grep cURL lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 69 2012-03-27 16:03 415660c1.0 -> Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.pem lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 69 2012-03-27 16:03 7651b327.0 -> Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.pem lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 101 2012-03-27 16:03 Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.pem -> /usr/share/ca-certificates/curl/Verisign_Class_3_Public_Primary_Certification_Authority-from_cURL.crt And everything works! curl -I https://test.sagepay.com HTTP/1.1 200 OK...

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 05, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, May 05, 2010New Projects2010微软精英大挑战Heritage of Dragon项目: 我们来自上海市同济大学，兴趣相投，集聚于此共同构建一个开放的网络平台。致力于运用构建在云端基于地图的服务，使用文字、图片、视频、互动动画等形式来展示全国各地的传统手工艺。并且充分发挥网络的优势，通过开放协作的维基平台人人都可以参与到内容的添加修改与完善中来。目的在于记录、展示、挖掘、传承中国古...AutoArchive: Auto archive your "my documents" to a remote machine. I'm writing this so my wife can put things in "my documents" and it'll automaticly archive i...BigDoor .NET Client: A .NET client for the BigDoor Media API. The API enables secured virtual transactions with support for any number of currencies, transactions, awar...bubujie: Dreamweaver LibraryGeckoGit: GeckoGit is a combination of TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN, but for Git repositories, and built on the GitSharp library.Global: global, config, mail, http, rest, xml, serialization, helper, path, ioIndustrial Dashboard Connected Grid webpart: This Sharepoint 2007/10 webpart provides a simple way to display grid based reports populated with data that comes from a SQL Server stored procedu...IpControls: "IpControls" contains IPv4 and IPv6 text boxes, both as Windows Forms and WPF version. The IPv6 control automatically detects the older hybrid for...LiteME: LiteME is short for LiteMapleStoryEmulator... it is v75, open-source, and still going through it's alpha stages. It is still in development!Meditel PHP Class: Une classe PHP qui vous permet de d'envoyer des SMS vers tous les numeros Meditel en utilisant leservice des SMS gratuits depuis le site Meditel.maMoneySafe: Help people.Mouse Zoom - Visual Studio Extension: Mouse Zoom is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that will cause the mouse zoom functionality to zoom at the mouse's cursor instead of at the top of th...Multi-Language Words Memorizer: This .net application is designed for learning words and help foreign language learners by lots of automatic features. After you select a list of ...Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms: Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms manages movement and data passing between aspx Pages in a unit testable manner. There is no Client-side logic, so ...NazTek.Extension.Clr4: CLR 4.0 extensions and utility APIOpalis Community Releases: Sample workflows, objects, code and other items related to System Center's Opalis Integration Server, published by the Opalis team.Power Video Player: Power Video Player is a slim feature-rich video/dvd player that meets everyday needs in video playback on PC with a bunch of advanced features on b...SchemeEditor: <WPF> <.NET> <Editor> <Silverlight> <Scheme> <Graphics> <simulink> <schematic>StyleCop+: StyleCop+ is a plug-in that extends original StyleCop features.timemanager2010: Just another work time managerTweetTunes: Updates Twitter with current song playing in iTunes - if your Twitter account is linked to Facebook - it will update that too The twittervb2 down...WCF Discovery Library: WCF Discovery Library is a small collection of utilities that makes it easy to add WCF 4.0 Discovery features into your projects.New ReleasesAjaxControlToolkit additional extenders: ControlToolkitExtended: this build contains web example with BreadCrumbsAnyCAD: AnyCAD Free Beta1: AnyCAD Free Beta1Baccarat: Single player practice baccarat: This is a simple baccarat game for Windows Mobile. It is single player and is only a practice version, which will help users familiarize themselve...BigDoor .NET Client: BigDoor .NET 2.0 Client (Alpha): Our first iteration of the .NET client. Please fork and or ask to be added if you want to make any contributions.CBM-Command: 2010-05-04: Release NotesNew Features Panel navigation now complete. Scroll up and down through directories using the up and down cursor keys. Switch between...Directory Linker: Directory Linker 2.1: This release introduces XP support, more information about all features can be found at http://www.humblecoder.co.uk/?p=141Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.015: added high low quizGoogle AJAX Search Services for jQuery: jquery.gss-0.1.3.js: First official release - use at your own discretion. Thanks, AndrewIndustrial Dashboard Connected Grid webpart: Filtered Industrial Grid: Filtered Industrial Grid web part for SharePoint 2007/2010, First Release.jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services: SPServices 0.5.5: IMPORTANT NOTE: This release is in an alpha state. You should only download it if you know what you are getting and are interested in testing it f...Meditel PHP Class: Meditel PHP Class: Zipped File : Example : exemplemeditel.php PHP Class : meditel.class.phpMulti-Language Words Memorizer: Memorizer 1.0: First release.mwNSPECT: mwNSPECT Plugin DLL: mwNSPECT Mapwindow plugin dll. Place in your MapWindow or BASINS plugins directory. Presently only for testing form functionality (not including...mwNSPECT: mwNSPECT Simple Installer: Simplistic mwNSPECT Mapwindow plugin installer using Inno setup. Installs all the files you'll need for NSPECT into the C:\NSPECT folder and insta...MyWSAT - ASP.NET Membership Administration Tool: MyWSAT v3.5.3: MyWSAT 3.5.3 Update Notes - May 4th 2010 1.) Added the user search box and a-z navigation menu to all relevant user gridviews. 2.) Added a membersh...Object/Relational Mapper & Code Generator in Net 2.0 for Relational & XML Schema: 2.7: Upgraded UI-generation templates for special case of associative tables (2-column primary keys). 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• User Experience Highlights in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools: Direct from Jeff Robbins

  - by mvaughan

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience  This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on the user experience (UX) highlights in various Oracle product families. The last posted interview was with Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy on upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite user experience highlights. You’ll see themes around productivity and efficiency, and get an early look at the latest mobile offerings coming through these product lines. Today’s post is on the user experience in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools. To learn more about what’s ahead, attend PeopleSoft or PeopleTools OpenWorld presentations.This interview is with Jeff Robbins, Senior Director, PeopleSoft Development. Jeff Robbins Q: How would you describe the vision you have for the user experience of PeopleSoft?A: Intuitive – Specifically, customers use PeopleSoft to help their employees do their day-to-day work, and the UI (user interface) has been helpful and assistive in that effort. If it’s not obvious what they need to do a task, then the UI isn’t working. So the application needs to make it simple for users to find information they need, complete a task, do all the things they are responsible for, and it really helps when the UI just makes sense. Productive – PeopleSoft is a tool used to support people to do their work, and a lot of users are measured by how much work they’re able to get done per hour, per day, etc. The UI needs to help them be as productive as possible, and can’t make them waste time or energy. The UI needs to reflect the type of work necessary for a task -- if it's data entry, the UI needs to assist the user to get information into the system. For analysts, the UI needs help users assess or analyze information in a particular way. Innovative – The concept of the UI being innovative is something we’ve been working on for years. It’s not just that we want to be seen as innovative, the fact is that companies are asking their employees to do more than they’ve ever asked before. More often companies want to roll out processes as employee or manager self-service, where an employee is responsible to review and maintain their own data. So we’ve had to reinvent, and ask,  “How can we modify the ways an employee interacts with our applications so that they can be more productive and efficient – even with tasks that are entirely unfamiliar?”  Our focus on innovation has forced us to design new ways for users to interact with the entire application.Q: How are the UX features you have delivered so far resonating with customers?  A: Resonating very well. We’re hearing tremendous responses from users, managers, decision-makers -- who are very happy with the improved user experience. Many of the individual features resonate well. Some have really hit home, others are better than they used to be but show us that there’s still room for improvement.A couple innovations really stand out; features that have a significant effect on how users interact with PeopleSoft.First, the deployment of PeopleSoft in a way that’s more like a consumer website with the PeopleSoft Home page and Dashboards.  This new approach is very web-centric, where users feel they’re coming to a website rather than logging into an enterprise application.  There’s lots of information from all around the organization collected in a way that feels very familiar to users. In order to do your job, you can come to this web site rather than having to learn how to log into an application and figure out a complicated menu. Companies can host these really rich web sites for employees that are home pages for accessing critical tasks and information. The UI elements of incorporating search into the whole navigation process is another hit. Rather than having to log in and choose a task from a menu, users come to the web site and begin a task by simply searching for data: themselves, another employee, a customer record, whatever.  The search results include the data along with a set of actions the user might take, completely eliminating the need to hunt through a complicated system menu. Search-centric navigation is really sitting well with customers who are trying to deploy an intuitive set of systems. Q: Are any UX highlights more popular than you expected them to be?  A: We introduced a feature called Pivot Grid in the last release, which is a combination of an interactive grid, like an Excel Pivot Table, along with a dynamic visual chart that automatically graphs the data. I wasn’t certain at first how extensively this would be used. It looked like an innovative tool, but it wasn’t clear how it would be incorporated in business process applications. The fact is that everyone who sees Pivot Grids is thrilled with that kind of interactivity.  It reflects the amount of analytical thinking customers are asking employees to do. Employees can’t just enter data any more. They must interact with it, analyze it, and make decisions. Pivot Grids fit into this way of working. Q: What can you tell us about PeopleSoft’s mobile offerings?A: A lot of customers are finding that mobile is the chief priority in their organization.  They tell us they want their employees to be able to access company information from their mobile devices.  Of course, not everyone has the same requirements, so we’re working to make sure we can help our customers accomplish what they’re trying to do.  We’ve already delivered a number of mobile features.  For instance, PeopleSoft home pages, dashboards and workcenters all work well on an iPad, straight out of the box.  We’ve delivered a number of key functions and tasks for mobile workers – those who are responsible for using a mobile device to manage inventory, for example.  Customers tell us they also need a holistic strategy, one that allows their employees to access nearly every task from a mobile device.  While we don’t expect users to do extensive data entry from their smartphone, it makes sense that they have access to company information and systems while away from their desk.  That’s where our strategy is going now.  We plan to unveil a number of new mobile offerings at OpenWorld.  Some will be available then, some shortly after. Q: What else are you working on now that you think is going to be exciting to customers at Oracle OpenWorld?A: Our next release -- the big thing is PeopleSoft 9.2, and we’ll be talking about the huge amount of work that’s gone into the next versions. A new toolset, 8.53, will be coming, and there’s a lot to talk about there, and the next generation of PeopleSoft 9.2.  We have a ton of new stuff coming.Q: What do you want PeopleSoft customers to know? A: We have been focusing on the user experience in PeopleSoft as a very high priority for the last 4 years, and it’s had interesting effects. One thing is that the application is better, more usable.  We’ve made visible improvements. Another aspect is that in customers’ minds, the PeopleSoft brand is being reinvigorated. Customers invested in PeopleSoft years ago, and then they weren’t sure where PeopleSoft was going.  This investment in the UI and overall user experience keeps PeopleSoft current, innovative and fresh.  Customers  are able to take advantage of a lot of new features, even on the older applications, simply by upgrading their PeopleTools. The interest in that ability has been tremendous. Knowing they have a lot of these features available -- right now, that’s pretty huge. There’s been a tremendous amount of positive response, just on the fact that we’re focusing on the user experience. Editor’s note: For more on PeopleSoft and PeopleTools user experience highlights, visit the Usable Apps web site.To find out more about these enhancements at Openworld, be sure to check out these sessions: GEN8928     General Session: PeopleSoft Update and Product RoadmapCON9183     PeopleSoft PeopleTools Technology Roadmap CON8932     New Functional PeopleSoft PeopleTools Capabilities for the Line-of-Business UserCON9196     PeopleSoft PeopleTools Roadmap: Mobile ApplicationsCON9186     Case Study: Delivering a Groundbreaking User Interface with PeopleSoft PeopleTools

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• Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths

  - by Renso

  Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths ASP.Net includes quite a plethora of properties to retrieve path information about the current request, control and application. There's a ton of information available about paths on the Request object, some of it appearing to overlap and some of it buried several levels down, and it can be confusing to find just the right path that you are looking for. To keep things straight I thought it a good idea to summarize the path options along with descriptions and example paths. I wrote a post about this a long time ago in 2004 and I find myself frequently going back to that page to quickly figure out which path I’m looking for in processing the current URL. Apparently a lot of people must be doing the same, because the original post is the second most visited even to this date on this blog to the tune of nearly 500 hits per day. So, I decided to update and expand a bit on the original post with a little more information and clarification based on the original comments. Request Object Paths Available Here's a list of the Path related properties on the Request object (and the Page object). Assume a path like http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx for the paths below where webstore is the name of the virtual. Request Property Description and Value ApplicationPath Returns the web root-relative logical path to the virtual root of this app. /webstore/ PhysicalApplicationPath Returns local file system path of the virtual root for this app. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore PhysicalPath Returns the local file system path to the current script or path. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore\admin\paths.aspx Path FilePath CurrentExecutionFilePath All of these return the full root relative logical path to the script page including path and scriptname. CurrentExcecutionFilePath will return the ‘current’ request path after a Transfer/Execute call while FilePath will always return the original request’s path. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath Returns an ASP.NET root relative virtual path to the script or path for the current request. If in  a Transfer/Execute call the transferred Path is returned. ~/admin/paths.aspx PathInfo Returns any extra path following the script name. If no extra path is provided returns the root-relative path (returns text in red below). string.Empty if no PathInfo is available. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx/ExtraPathInfo RawUrl Returns the full root relative URL including querystring and extra path as a string. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 Url Returns a fully qualified URL including querystring and extra path. Note this is a Uri instance rather than string. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 UrlReferrer The fully qualified URL of the page that sent the request. This is also a Uri instance and this value is null if the page was directly accessed by typing into the address bar or using an HttpClient based Referrer client Http header. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/default.aspx?Info Control.TemplateSourceDirectory Returns the logical path to the folder of the page, master or user control on which it is called. This is useful if you need to know the path only to a Page or control from within the control. For non-file controls this returns the Page path. /webstore/admin/ As you can see there’s a ton of information available there for each of the three common path formats: Physical Path is an OS type path that points to a path or file on disk. Logical Path is a Web path that is relative to the Web server’s root. It includes the virtual plus the application relative path. ~/ (Root-relative) Path is an ASP.NET specific path that includes ~/ to indicate the virtual root Web path. ASP.NET can convert virtual paths into either logical paths using Control.ResolveUrl(), or physical paths using Server.MapPath(). Root relative paths are useful for specifying portable URLs that don’t rely on relative directory structures and very useful from within control or component code. You should be able to get any necessary format from ASP.NET from just about any path or script using these mechanisms. ~/ Root Relative Paths and ResolveUrl() and ResolveClientUrl() ASP.NET supports root-relative virtual path syntax in most of its URL properties in Web Forms. So you can easily specify a root relative path in a control rather than a location relative path: <asp:Image runat="server" ID="imgHelp" ImageUrl="~/images/help.gif" /> ASP.NET internally resolves this URL by using ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif") to arrive at the root-relative URL of /webstore/images/help.gif which uses the Request.ApplicationPath as the basepath to replace the ~. By convention any custom Web controls also should use ResolveUrl() on URL properties to provide the same functionality. In your own code you can use Page.ResolveUrl() or Control.ResolveUrl() to accomplish the same thing: string imgPath = this.ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif"); imgHelp.ImageUrl = imgPath; Unfortunately ResolveUrl() is limited to WebForm pages, so if you’re in an HttpHandler or Module it’s not available. ASP.NET Mvc also has it’s own more generic version of ResolveUrl in Url.Decode: <script src="<%= Url.Content("~/scripts/new.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> which is part of the UrlHelper class. In ASP.NET MVC the above sort of syntax is actually even more crucial than in WebForms due to the fact that views are not referencing specific pages but rather are often path based which can lead to various variations on how a particular view is referenced. In a Module or Handler code Control.ResolveUrl() unfortunately is not available which in retrospect seems like an odd design choice – URL resolution really should happen on a Request basis not as part of the Page framework. Luckily you can also rely on the static VirtualPathUtility class: string path = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/admin/paths.aspx"); VirtualPathUtility also many other quite useful methods for dealing with paths and converting between the various kinds of paths supported. One thing to watch out for is that ToAbsolute() will throw an exception if a query string is provided and doesn’t work on fully qualified URLs. I wrote about this topic with a custom solution that works fully qualified URLs and query strings here (check comments for some interesting discussions too). Similar to ResolveUrl() is ResolveClientUrl() which creates a fully qualified HTTP path that includes the protocol and domain name. It’s rare that this full resolution is needed but can be useful in some scenarios. Mapping Virtual Paths to Physical Paths with Server.MapPath() If you need to map root relative or current folder relative URLs to physical URLs or you can use HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(). Inside of a Page you can do the following: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("~/scripts/ww.jquery.js")); MapPath is pretty flexible and it understands both ASP.NET style virtual paths as well as plain relative paths, so the following also works. string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("scripts/silverlight.js"); as well as dot relative syntax: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("../scripts/jquery.js"); Once you have the physical path you can perform standard System.IO Path and File operations on the file. Remember with physical paths and IO or copy operations you need to make sure you have permissions to access files and folders based on the Web server user account that is active (NETWORK SERVICE, ASPNET typically). Note the Server.MapPath will not map up beyond the virtual root of the application for security reasons. Server and Host Information Between these settings you can get all the information you may need to figure out where you are at and to build new Url if necessary. If you need to build a URL completely from scratch you can get access to information about the server you are accessing: Server Variable Function and Example SERVER_NAME The of the domain or IP Address wwww.west-wind.com or 127.0.0.1 SERVER_PORT The port that the request runs under. 80 SERVER_PORT_SECURE Determines whether https: was used. 0 or 1 APPL_MD_PATH ADSI DirectoryServices path to the virtual root directory. Note that LM typically doesn’t work for ADSI access so you should replace that with LOCALHOST or the machine’s NetBios name. /LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT/webstore Request.Url and Uri Parsing If you still need more control over the current request URL or  you need to create new URLs from an existing one, the current Request.Url Uri property offers a lot of control. Using the Uri class and UriBuilder makes it easy to retrieve parts of a URL and create new URLs based on existing URL. The UriBuilder class is the preferred way to create URLs – much preferable over creating URIs via string concatenation. Uri Property Function Scheme The URL scheme or protocol prefix. http or https Port The port if specifically specified. DnsSafeHost The domain name or local host NetBios machine name www.west-wind.com or rasnote LocalPath The full path of the URL including script name and extra PathInfo. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx Query The query string if any ?id=1 The Uri class itself is great for retrieving Uri parts, but most of the properties are read only if you need to modify a URL in order to change it you can use the UriBuilder class to load up an existing URL and modify it to create a new one. Here are a few common operations I’ve needed to do to get specific URLs: Convert the Request URL to an SSL/HTTPS link For example to take the current request URL and converted  it to a secure URL can be done like this: UriBuilder build = new UriBuilder(Request.Url); build.Scheme = "https"; build.Port = -1; // don't inject portUri newUri = build.Uri; string newUrl = build.ToString(); Retrieve the fully qualified URL without a QueryString AFAIK, there’s no native routine to retrieve the current request URL without the query string. It’s easy to do with UriBuilder however: UriBuilder builder = newUriBuilder(Request.Url); builder.Query = ""; stringlogicalPathWithoutQuery = builder.ToString();

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• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 2

  - by AjarnMark

  In Part 1, I started talking about using Red-Gate’s newest version of SQL Source Control and how I really like it as a viable method to source control your database development.  It looks like this is going to turn into a little series where I will explain how we have done things in the past, and how life is different with SQL Source Control.  I will also explain some of my philosophy and methodology around deployment with these tools.  But for now, let’s talk about some of the good and the bad of the tool itself. More Kudos and Features I mentioned previously how impressed I was with the responsiveness of Red-Gate’s team.  I have been having an ongoing email conversation with Gyorgy Pocsi, and as I have run into problems or requested things behave a little differently, it has not been more than a day or two before a new Build is ready for me to download and test.  Quite impressive! I’m sure much of the requests I put in were already in the plans, so I can’t really take credit for them, but throughout this conversation, Red-Gate has implemented several features that were not in the first Early Access version.  Those include: Honoring the Fortress configuration option to require Work Item (Bug) IDs on check-ins. Adding the check-in comment text as a comment to the Work Item. Adding the list of checked-in files, along with the Fortress links for automatic History and DIFF view Updating the status of a Work Item on check-in (e.g. setting the item to Complete or, in our case “Dev-Complete”) Support for the Fortress 2.0 API, and not just the Vault Pro 5.1 API.  (See later notes regarding support for Fortress 2.0). These were all features that I felt we really needed to have in-place before I could honestly consider converting my team to using SQL Source Control on a regular basis.  Now that I have those, my only excuse is not wanting to switch boats on the team mid-stream.  So when we wrap up our current release in a few weeks, we will make the jump.  In the meantime, I will continue to bang on it to make sure it is stable.  It passed one test for stability when I did a test load of one of our larger database schemas into Fortress with SQL Source Control.  That database has about 150 tables, 200 User-Defined Functions and nearly 900 Stored Procedures.  The initial load to source control went smoothly and took just a brief amount of time. Warnings Remember that this IS still in pre-release stage and while I have not had any problems after that first hiccup I wrote about last time, you still need to treat it with a healthy respect.  As I understand it, the RTM is targeted for February.  There are a couple more features that I hope make it into the final release version, but if not, they’ll probably be coming soon thereafter.  Those are: A Browse feature to let me lookup the Work Item ID instead of having to remember it or look back in my Item details.  This is just a matter of convenience. I normally have my Work Item list open anyway, so I can easily look it up, but hey, why not make it even easier. A multi-line comment area.  The current space for writing check-in comments is a single-line text box.  I would like to have a multi-line space as I sometimes write lengthy commentary.  But I recognize that it is a struggle to get most developers to put in more than the word “fixed” as their comment, so this meets the need of the majority as-is, and it’s not a show-stopper for us. Merge.  SQL Source Control currently does not have a Merge feature.  If two or more people make changes to the same database object, you will get a warning of the conflict and have to choose which one wins (and then manually edit to include the others’ changes).  I think it unlikely you will run into actual conflicts in Stored Procedures and Functions, but you might with Views or Tables.  This will be nice to have, but I’m not losing any sleep over it.  And I have multiple tools at my disposal to do merges manually, so really not a show-stopper for us. Automation has its limits.  As cool as this automation is, it has its limits and there are some changes that you will be better off scripting yourself.  For example, if you are refactoring table definitions, and want to change a column name, you can write that as a quick sp_rename command and preserve the data within that column.  But because this tool is looking just at a before and after picture, it cannot tell that you just renamed a column.  To the tool, it looks like you dropped one column and added another.  This is not a knock against Red-Gate.  All automated scripting tools have this issue, unless the are actively monitoring your every step to know exactly what you are doing.  This means that when you go to Deploy your changes, SQL Compare will script the change as a column drop and add, or will attempt to rebuild the entire table.  Unfortunately, neither of these approaches will preserve the existing data in that column the way an sp_rename will, and so you are better off scripting that change yourself.  Thankfully, SQL Compare will produce warnings about the potential loss of data before it does the actual synchronization and give you a chance to intercept the script and do it yourself. Also, please note that the current official word is that SQL Source Control supports Vault Professional 5.1 and later.  Vault Professional is the new name for what was previously known as Fortress.  (You can read about the name change on SourceGear’s site.)  The last version of Fortress was 2.x, and the API for Fortress 2.x is different from the API for Vault Pro.  At my company, we are currently running Fortress 2.0, with plans to upgrade to Vault Pro early next year.  Gyorgy was able to come up with a work-around for me to be able to use SQL Source Control with Fortress 2.0, even though it is not officially supported.  If you are using Fortress 2.0 and want to use SQL Source Control, be aware that this is not officially supported, but it is working for us, and you can probably get the work-around instructions from Red-Gate if you’re really, really nice to them. Upcoming Topics Some of the other topics I will likely cover in this series over the next few weeks are: How we used to do source control back in the old days (a few weeks ago) before SQL Source Control was available to Vault users What happens when you restore a database that is linked to source control Handling multiple development branches of source code Concurrent Development practices and handling Conflicts Deployment Tips and Best Practices A recap after using the tool for a while

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