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• What web platform is right for me?

  - by egervari

  I've been looking at web frameworks like Rails, Grails, etc. I'm used to doing applications in Spring Framework with Hibernate... and I want something more productive. One of the things I realized is that while some of the things in Grails is sexy, there are some serious problems with it. Grails' controllers: 1) are implemented awfully. They don't seem to be able to extend from super classes at runtime. I tried this to add base actions and helper methods, and this seems to cause grails to blow up. 2) are based on an obsolete request parameters model (rather than form backing objects, which are much nicer). 3) are hard to test. Command objects are treated totally differently... and it's actually MUCH harder to write the test than it is to write the controller code. 4) Command objects operate totally differently. They are pre-validated and bound, which causes a lot of inconsistencies than basic parameter model. 5) Command objects are not reusable, and it's a pain in the rear to reuse most of the stuff from the domain classes, like constraints and fields. This is TRIVIAL to do in basic Spring. Why the hell was it not trivial to do in Grails? 6) The scaffolding that is generated is pure crap. It doesn't generalize inserts and updates... and it actually copy/pastes a pile of code in two views: create.gsp and edit.gsp. The views themselves are gargantuan piles of doggie do-do. This is further compounded by the fact that it uses low-level parameters and not objects. Integration tests are 30x slower than a Spring integration test. It is disgusting. Some mocking tests are so hard to write and aren't guaranteed to work when it's deployed, that I think it discourages fast, tdd test cycles. Most things seem to screw up grails while it's running, like adding a taglib, or anything really. The server restart problem wasn't solved at all. I'm starting to think going with Spring/Hibernate/Java is the only way to go. While there is a pretty big cost at startup, I know it'll eventually smooth out. It sucks I can't use a language like Scala... because idiomatically, it is so incompatible with Hibernate. This app is also not a run-of-the-mill UI over a database. It's got some of that, but it's not going to be a slouch. I am deathly scared of Grails now because of how crap it is in the Controller layer. Suggestions on what I can do?

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• Attribute vector emptying itself

  - by ravloony

  Hello, I have two classes, derived from a common class. The common class has a pure virtual function called execute(), which is implemented in both derived classes. In the inherited class I have an attribute which is a vector. In both execute() methods I overwrite this vector with a result. I access both classes from a vector of pointers to their objects. The problem is when I try to access the result vector form outside the objects. In one case I can get the elements (which are simply pointers), in the other I cannot, the vector is empty. Code: class E; class A{ protected: vector<E*> _result; public: virtual void execute()=0; vector<E*> get_result(); }; vector<E*> A::get_result() { return _result; } class B : public A { public: virtual void execute(); }; B::execute() { //... _result = tempVec; return; } class C : public A { public: virtual void execute(); }; C::execute() { //different stuff to B _result = tempvec; return; } main() { B* b = new B(); C* c = new C(); b->execute(); c->execute(); b->get_result();//returns full vector c->get_result(); //returns empty vector!! } I have no idea what is going on here... I have tried filling _result by hand from a temp vector in the offending class, doing the same with vector::assign(), nothing works. And the other object works perfectly. I must be missing something.... Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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• What's the best way to handle modules that use each other?

  - by Axeman

  What's the best way to handle modules that use each other? Let's say I have a module which has functions for hashes: # Really::Useful::Functions::On::Hash.pm use base qw<Exporter>; use strict; use warnings; use Really::Useful::Functions::On::List qw<transform_list>; our @EXPORT_OK = qw<transform_hash transform_hash_as_list ...>; #... sub transform_hash { ... } #... sub transform_hash_as_list { return transform_list( %{ shift() } ); } #... 1 And another module has been segmented out for lists: # Really::Useful::Functions::On::List.pm use base qw<Exporter>; use strict; use warnings; use Really::Useful::Functions::On::Hash qw<transform_hash>; our @EXPORT_OK = qw<transform_list some_func ...>; #... sub transform_list { ... } #... sub some_func { my %params = transform_hash @_; #... } #... 1 Suppose that enough of these utility functions are handy enough that I'll want to use them in BEGIN statements and import functions to process parameter lists or configuration data. I have been putting sub definitions into BEGIN blocks to make sure they are ready to use whenever somebody includes the module. But I have gotten into hairy race conditions where a definition is not completed in a BEGIN block. I put evolving code idioms into modules so that I can reuse any idiom I find myself coding over and over again. For instance: sub list_if { my $condition = shift; return unless $condition; my $more_args = scalar @_; my $arg_list = @_ > 1 ? \@_ : @_ ? shift : $condition; if (( reftype( $arg_list ) || '' ) eq 'ARRAY' ) { return wantarray ? @$arg_list : $arg_list; } elsif ( $more_args ) { return $arg_list; } return; } captures two idioms that I'm kind of tired of typing: @{ func_I_hope_returns_a_listref() || [] } and ( $condition ? LIST : ()) The more I define functions in BEGIN blocks, the more likely I'll use these idiom bricks to express the logic the more likely that bricks are needed in BEGIN blocks. Do people have standard ways of dealing with this sort of language-idiom-brick model? I've been doing mostly Pure-Perl; will XS alleviate some of this?

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• The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot easier with the introduction of dynamic type support in .NET. One of the biggest problems with COM interop has been that it’s been really difficult to pass dynamic objects from FoxPro to .NET and get them properly typed. The only way that any strong typing can occur in .NET for FoxPro components is via COM type library exports of Visual FoxPro components. Due to limitations in Visual FoxPro’s type library support as well as the dynamic nature of the Visual FoxPro language where few things are or can be described in the form of a COM type library, a lot of useful interaction between FoxPro and .NET required the use of messy Reflection code in .NET. Reflection is .NET’s base interface to runtime type discovery and dynamic execution of code without requiring strong typing. In FoxPro terms it’s similar to EVALUATE() functionality albeit with a much more complex API and corresponiding syntax. The Reflection APIs are fairly powerful, but they are rather awkward to use and require a lot of code. Even with the creation of wrapper utility classes for common EVAL() style Reflection functionality dynamically access COM objects passed to .NET often is pretty tedious and ugly. Let’s look at a simple example. In the following code I use some FoxPro code to dynamically create an object in code and then pass this object to .NET. An alternative to this might also be to create a new object on the fly by using SCATTER NAME on a database record. How the object is created is inconsequential, other than the fact that it’s not defined as a COM object – it’s a pure FoxPro object that is passed to .NET. Here’s the code: *** Create .NET COM InstanceloNet = CREATEOBJECT('DotNetCom.DotNetComPublisher') *** Create a Customer Object Instance (factory method) loCustomer = GetCustomer() loCustomer.Name = "Rick Strahl" loCustomer.Company = "West Wind Technologies" loCustomer.creditLimit = 9999999999.99 loCustomer.Address.StreetAddress = "32 Kaiea Place" loCustomer.Address.Phone = "808 579-8342" loCustomer.Address.Email = "[email protected]" *** Pass Fox Object and echo back values ? loNet.PassRecordObject(loObject) RETURN FUNCTION GetCustomer LOCAL loCustomer, loAddress loCustomer = CREATEOBJECT("EMPTY") ADDPROPERTY(loCustomer,"Name","") ADDPROPERTY(loCustomer,"Company","") ADDPROPERTY(loCUstomer,"CreditLimit",0.00) ADDPROPERTY(loCustomer,"Entered",DATETIME()) loAddress = CREATEOBJECT("Empty") ADDPROPERTY(loAddress,"StreetAddress","") ADDPROPERTY(loAddress,"Phone","") ADDPROPERTY(loAddress,"Email","") ADDPROPERTY(loCustomer,"Address",loAddress) RETURN loCustomer ENDFUNC Now prior to .NET 4.0 you’d have to access this object passed to .NET via Reflection and the method code to do this would looks something like this in the .NET component: public string PassRecordObject(object FoxObject) { // *** using raw Reflection string Company = (string) FoxObject.GetType().InvokeMember( "Company", BindingFlags.GetProperty,null, FoxObject,null); // using the easier ComUtils wrappers string Name = (string) ComUtils.GetProperty(FoxObject,"Name"); // Getting Address object – then getting child properties object Address = ComUtils.GetProperty(FoxObject,"Address");    string Street = (string) ComUtils.GetProperty(FoxObject,"StreetAddress"); // using ComUtils 'Ex' functions you can use . Syntax     string StreetAddress = (string) ComUtils.GetPropertyEx(FoxObject,"AddressStreetAddress"); return Name + Environment.NewLine + Company + Environment.NewLine + StreetAddress + Environment.NewLine + " FOX"; } Note that the FoxObject is passed in as type object which has no specific type. Since the object doesn’t exist in .NET as a type signature the object is passed without any specific type information as plain non-descript object. To retrieve a property the Reflection APIs like Type.InvokeMember or Type.GetProperty().GetValue() etc. need to be used. I made this code a little simpler by using the Reflection Wrappers I mentioned earlier but even with those ComUtils calls the code is pretty ugly requiring passing the objects for each call and casting each element. Using .NET 4.0 Dynamic Typing makes this Code a lot cleaner Enter .NET 4.0 and the dynamic type. Replacing the input parameter to the .NET method from type object to dynamic makes the code to access the FoxPro component inside of .NET much more natural: public string PassRecordObjectDynamic(dynamic FoxObject) { // *** using raw Reflection string Company = FoxObject.Company; // *** using the easier ComUtils class string Name = FoxObject.Name; // *** using ComUtils 'ex' functions to use . Syntax string Address = FoxObject.Address.StreetAddress; return Name + Environment.NewLine + Company + Environment.NewLine + Address + Environment.NewLine + " FOX"; } As you can see the parameter is of type dynamic which as the name implies performs Reflection lookups and evaluation on the fly so all the Reflection code in the last example goes away. The code can use regular object ‘.’ syntax to reference each of the members of the object. You can access properties and call methods this way using natural object language. Also note that all the type casts that were required in the Reflection code go away – dynamic types like var can infer the type to cast to based on the target assignment. As long as the type can be inferred by the compiler at compile time (ie. the left side of the expression is strongly typed) no explicit casts are required. Note that although you get to use plain object syntax in the code above you don’t get Intellisense in Visual Studio because the type is dynamic and thus has no hard type definition in .NET . The above example calls a .NET Component from VFP, but it also works the other way around. Another frequent scenario is an .NET code calling into a FoxPro COM object that returns a dynamic result. Assume you have a FoxPro COM object returns a FoxPro Cursor Record as an object: DEFINE CLASS FoxData AS SESSION OlePublic cAppStartPath = "" FUNCTION INIT THIS.cAppStartPath = ADDBS( JustPath(Application.ServerName) ) SET PATH TO ( THIS.cAppStartpath ) ENDFUNC FUNCTION GetRecord(lnPk) LOCAL loCustomer SELECT * FROM tt_Cust WHERE pk = lnPk ; INTO CURSOR TCustomer IF _TALLY < 1 RETURN NULL ENDIF SCATTER NAME loCustomer MEMO RETURN loCustomer ENDFUNC ENDDEFINE If you call this from a .NET application you can now retrieve this data via COM Interop and cast the result as dynamic to simplify the data access of the dynamic FoxPro type that was created on the fly: int pk = 0; int.TryParse(Request.QueryString["id"],out pk); // Create Fox COM Object with Com Callable Wrapper FoxData foxData = new FoxData(); dynamic foxRecord = foxData.GetRecord(pk); string company = foxRecord.Company; DateTime entered = foxRecord.Entered; This code looks simple and natural as it should be – heck you could write code like this in days long gone by in scripting languages like ASP classic for example. Compared to the Reflection code that previously was necessary to run similar code this is much easier to write, understand and maintain. For COM interop and Visual FoxPro operation dynamic type support in .NET 4.0 is a huge improvement and certainly makes it much easier to deal with FoxPro code that calls into .NET. Regardless of whether you’re using COM for calling Visual FoxPro objects from .NET (ASP.NET calling a COM component and getting a dynamic result returned) or whether FoxPro code is calling into a .NET COM component from a FoxPro desktop application. At one point or another FoxPro likely ends up passing complex dynamic data to .NET and for this the dynamic typing makes coding much cleaner and more readable without having to create custom Reflection wrappers. As a bonus the dynamic runtime that underlies the dynamic type is fairly efficient in terms of making Reflection calls especially if members are repeatedly accessed. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in COM  FoxPro  .NET  CSharp  

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• Error on 64 Bit Install of IIS &ndash; LoadLibraryEx failed on aspnet_filter.dll

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve been having a few problems with my Windows 7 install and trying to get IIS applications to run properly in 64 bit. After installing IIS and creating virtual directories for several of my applications and firing them up I was left with the following error message from IIS: Calling LoadLibraryEx on ISAPI filter “c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_filter.dll” failed This is on Windows 7 64 bit and running on an ASP.NET 4.0 Application configured for running 64 bit (32 bit disabled). It’s also on what is essentially a brand new installation of IIS and Windows 7. So it failed right out of the box. The problem here is that IIS is trying to loading this ISAPI filter from the 32 bit folder – it should be loading from Framework64 folder note the Framework folder. The aspnet_filter.dll component is a small Win32 ISAPI filter used to back up the cookieless session state for ASP.NET on IIS 7 applications. It’s not terribly important because of this focus, but it’s a default loaded component. After a lot of fiddling I ended up with two solutions (with the help and support of some Twitter folks): Switch IIS to run in 32 bit mode Fix the filter listing in ApplicationHost.config Switching IIS to allow 32 Bit Code This is a quick fix for the problem above which enables 32 bit code in the Application Pool. The problem above is that IIS is trying to load a 32 bit ISAPI filter and enabling 32 bit code gets you around this problem. To configure your Application Pool, open the Application Pool in IIS Manager bring up Advanced Options and Enable 32 Bit Applications: And voila the error message above goes away. Fix Filters Enabling 32 bit code is a quick fix solution to this problem, but not an ideal one. If you’re running a pure .NET application that doesn’t need to do COM or pInvoke Interop with 32 bit apps there’s usually no need for enabling 32 bit code in an Application Pool as you can run in native 64 bit code. So trying to get 64 bit working natively is a pretty key feature in my opinion :-) So what’s the problem – why is IIS trying to load a 32 bit DLL in a 64 bit install, especially if the application pool is configured to not allow 32 bit code at all? The problem lies in the server configuration and the fact that 32 bit and 64 bit configuration settings exist side by side in IIS. If I open my Default Web Site (or any other root Web Site) and go to the ISAPI filter list here’s what I see: Notice that there are 3 entries for ASP.NET 4.0 in this list. Only two of them however are specifically scoped to the specifically to 32 bit or 64 bit. As you can see the 64 bit filter correctly points at the Framework64 folder to load the dll, while both the 32 bit and the ‘generic’ entry point at the plain Framework 32 bit folder. Aha! Hence lies our problem. You can edit ApplicationHost.config manually, but I ran into the nasty issue of not being able to easily edit that file with the 32 bit editor (who ever thought that was a good idea???? WTF). You have to open ApplicationHost.Config in a 64 bit native text editor – which Visual Studio is not. Or my favorite editor: EditPad Pro. Since I don’t have a native 64 bit editor handy Notepad was my only choice. Or as an alternative you can use the IIS 7.5 Configuration Editor which lets you interactively browse and edit most ApplicationHost settings. You can drill into the configuration hierarchy visually to find your keys and edit attributes and sub values in property editor type interface. I had no idea this tool existed prior to today and it’s pretty cool as it gives you some visual clues to options available – especially in absence of an Intellisense scheme you’d get in Visual Studio (which doesn’t work). To use the Configuration Editor go the Web Site root and use the Configuration Editor option in the Management Group. Drill into System.webServer/isapiFilters and then click on the Collection’s … button on the right. You should now see a display like this: which shows all the same attributes you’d see in ApplicationHost.config (cool!). These entries correspond to these raw ApplicationHost.config entries: <filter name="ASP.Net_4.0" path="C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_filter.dll" enableCache="true" preCondition="runtimeVersionv4.0" /> <filter name="ASP.Net_4.0_64bit" path="C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_filter.dll" enableCache="true" preCondition="runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness64" /> <filter name="ASP.Net_4.0_32bit" path="C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_filter.dll" enableCache="true" preCondition="runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness32" /> The key attribute we’re concerned with here is the preCondition and the bitness subvalue. Notice that the ‘generic’ version – which comes first in the filter list – has no bitness assigned to it, so it defaults to 32 bit and the 32 bit dll path. And this is where our problem comes from. The simple solution to fix the startup problem is to remove the generic entry from this list here or in the filters list shown earlier and leave only the bitness specific versions active. The preCondition attribute acts as a filter and as you can see here it filters the list by runtime version and bitness value. This is something to keep an eye out in general – if a bitness values are missing it’s easy to run into conflicts like this with any settings that are global and especially those that load modules and handlers and other executable code. On 64 bit systems it’s a good idea to explicitly set the bitness of all entries or remove the non-specific versions and add bit specific entries. So how did this get misconfigured? I installed IIS before everything else was installed on this machine and then went ahead and installed Visual Studio. I suspect the Visual Studio install munged this up as I never saw a similar problem on my live server where everything just worked right out of the box. In searching about this problem a lot of solutions pointed at using aspnet_regiis –r from the Framework64 directory, but that did not fix this extra entry in the filters list – it adds the required 32 bit and 64 bit entries, but it doesn’t remove the errand un-bitness set entry. Hopefully this post will help out anybody who runs into a similar situation without having to trouble shoot all the way down into the configuration settings and noticing the bitness settings. It’s a good lesson learned for me – this is my first desktop install of a 64 bit OS and things like this are what I was reluctant to find. Now that I ran into this I have a good idea what to look for with 32/64 bit misconfigurations in IIS at least.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7   ASP.NET  

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• ActiveX component can't create Object Error? Check 64 bit Status

  - by Rick Strahl

  If you're running on IIS 7 and a 64 bit operating system you might run into the following error using ASP classic or ASP.NET with COM interop. In classic ASP applications the error will show up as: ActiveX component can't create object   (Error 429) (actually without error handling the error just shows up as 500 error page) In my case the code that's been giving me problems has been a FoxPro COM object I'd been using to serve banner ads to some of my pages. The code basically looks up banners from a database table and displays them at random. The ASP classic code that uses it looks like this: <% Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" Response.Write(banner.GetBanner(-1)) %> Originally this code had no specific error checking as above so the ASP pages just failed with 500 error pages from the Web server. To find out what the problem is this code is more useful at least for debugging: <% ON ERROR RESUME NEXT Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") Response.Write(err.Number & " - " & err.Description) banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" Response.Write(banner.GetBanner(-1)) %> which results in: 429 - ActiveX component can't create object which at least gives you a slight clue. In ASP.NET invoking the same COM object with code like this: <% dynamic banner = wwUtils.CreateComInstance("wwBanner.aspBanner") as dynamic; banner.cBANNERFILE = "wwsitebanners"; Response.Write(banner.getBanner(-1)); %> results in: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {B5DCBB81-D5F5-11D2-B85E-00600889F23B} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)). The class is in fact registered though and the COM server loads fine from a command prompt or other COM client. This error can be caused by a COM server that doesn't load. It looks like a COM registration error. There are a number of traditional reasons why this error can crop up of course. The server isn't registered (run regserver32 to register a DLL server or /regserver on an EXE server) Access permissions aren't set on the COM server (Web account has to be able to read the DLL ie. Network service) The COM server fails to load during initialization ie. failing during startup One thing I always do to check for COM errors fire up the server in a COM client outside of IIS and ensure that it works there first - it's almost always easier to debug a server outside of the Web environment. In my case I tried the server in Visual FoxPro on the server with: loBanners = CREATEOBJECT("wwBanner.aspBanner") loBanners.cBannerFile = "wwsitebanners" ? loBanners.GetBanner(-1) and it worked just fine. If you don't have a full dev environment on the server you can also use VBScript do the same thing and run the .vbs file from the command prompt: Set banner = Server.CreateObject("wwBanner.aspBanner") banner.BannerFile = "wwsitebanners" MsgBox(banner.getBanner(-1)) Since this both works it tells me the server is registered and working properly. This leaves startup failures or permissions as the problem. I double checked permissions for the Application Pool and the permissions of the folder where the DLL lives and both are properly set to allow access by the Application Pool impersonated user. Just to be sure I assigned an Admin user to the Application Pool but still no go. So now what? 64 bit Servers Ahoy A couple of weeks back I had set up a few of my Application pools to 64 bit mode. My server is Server 2008 64 bit and by default Application Pools run 64 bit. Originally when I installed the server I set up most of my Application Pools to 32 bit mainly for backwards compatibility. But as more of my code migrates to 64 bit OS's I figured it'd be a good idea to see how well code runs under 64 bit code. The transition has been mostly painless. Until today when I noticed the problem with the code above when scrolling to my IIS logs and noticing a lot of 500 errors on many of my ASP classic pages. The code in question in most of these pages deals with this single simple COM object. It took a while to figure out that the problem is caused by the Application Pool running in 64 bit mode. The issue is that 32 bit COM objects (ie. my old Visual FoxPro COM component) cannot be loaded in a 64 bit Application Pool. The ASP pages using this COM component broke on the day I switched my main Application Pool into 64 bit mode but I didn't find the problem until I searched my logs for errors by pure chance. To fix this is easy enough once you know what the problem is by switching the Application Pool to Enable 32-bit Applications: Once this is done the COM objects started working correctly again. 64 bit ASP and ASP.NET with DCOM Servers This is kind of off topic, but incidentally it's possible to load 32 bit DCOM (out of process) servers from ASP.NET and ASP classic even if those applications run in 64 bit application pools. In fact, in West Wind Web Connection I use this capability to run a 64 bit ASP.NET handler that talks to a 32 bit FoxPro COM server which allows West Wind Web Connection to run in native 64 bit mode without custom configuration (which is actually quite useful). It's probably not a common usage scenario but it's good to know that you can actually access 32 bit COM objects this way from ASP.NET. For West Wind Web Connection this works out well as the DCOM interface only makes one non-chatty call to the backend server that handles all the rest of the request processing. Application Pool Isolation is your Friend For me the recent incident of failure in the classic ASP pages has just been another reminder to be very careful with moving applications to 64 bit operation. There are many little traps when switching to 64 bit that are very difficult to track and test for. I described one issue I had a couple of months ago where one of the default ASP.NET filters was loading the wrong version (32bit instead of 64bit) which was extremely difficult to track down and was caused by a very sneaky configuration switch error (basically 3 different entries for the same ISAPI filter all with different bitness settings). It took me almost a full day to track this down). Recently I've been taken to isolate individual applications into separate Application Pools rather than my past practice of combining many apps into shared AppPools. This is a good practice assuming you have enough memory to make this work. Application Pool isolate provides more modularity and allows me to selectively move applications to 64 bit. The error above came about precisely because I moved one of my most populous app pools to 64 bit and forgot about the minimal COM object use in some of my old pages. It's easy to forget. To 64bit or Not Is it worth it to move to 64 bit? Currently I'd say -not really. In my - admittedly limited - testing I don't see any significant performance increases. In fact 64 bit apps just seem to consume considerably more memory (30-50% more in my pools on average) and performance is minimally improved (less than 5% at the very best) in the load testing I've performed on a couple of sites in both modes. The only real incentive for 64 bit would be applications that require huge data spaces that exceed the 32 bit 4 gigabyte memory limit. However I have a hard time imagining an application that needs 4 gigs of memory in a single Application Pool :-). Curious to hear other opinions on benefits of 64 bit operation. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in COM   ASP.NET  FoxPro  

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• Ajax Control Toolkit Now Supports jQuery

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I’m excited to announce the September 2013 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, which now supports building new Ajax Control Toolkit controls with jQuery. You can download the latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit from http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com or you can install the Ajax Control Toolkit directly within Visual Studio by executing the following NuGet command: The New jQuery Extender Base Class This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit introduces a new jQueryExtender base class. This new base class enables you to create Ajax Control Toolkit controls with jQuery instead of the Microsoft Ajax Library. Currently, only one control in the Ajax Control Toolkit has been rewritten to use the new jQueryExtender base class (only one control has been jQueryized). The ToggleButton control is the first of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls to undergo this dramatic transformation. All of the other controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit are written using the Microsoft Ajax Library. We hope to gradually rewrite these controls as jQuery controls over time. You can view the new jQuery ToggleButton live at the Ajax Control Toolkit sample site: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/ToggleButton/ToggleButton.aspx Why are we rewriting Ajax Control Toolkits with jQuery? There are very few developers actively working with the Microsoft Ajax Library while there are thousands of developers actively working with jQuery. Because we want talented developers in the community to continue to contribute to the Ajax Control Toolkit, and because almost all JavaScript developers are familiar with jQuery, it makes sense to support jQuery with the Ajax Control Toolkit. Also, we believe that the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great framework for Web Forms developers who want to build new ASP.NET controls that use JavaScript. The Ajax Control Toolkit has great features such as automatic bundling, minification, caching, and compression. We want to make it easy for ASP.NET developers to build new controls that take advantage of these features. Instantiating Controls with data-* Attributes We took advantage of the new JQueryExtender base class to change the way that Ajax Control Toolkit controls are instantiated. In the past, adding an Ajax Control Toolkit to a page resulted in inline JavaScript being injected into the page. For example, adding the ToggleButton control to a page injected the following HTML and script: <input id="ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1" name="ctl00$SampleContent$CheckBox1" type="checkbox" checked="checked" /> <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ Sys.Application.add_init(function() { $create(Sys.Extended.UI.ToggleButtonBehavior, {"CheckedImageAlternateText":"Check", "CheckedImageUrl":"ToggleButton_Checked.gif", "ImageHeight":19, "ImageWidth":19, "UncheckedImageAlternateText":"UnCheck", "UncheckedImageUrl":"ToggleButton_Unchecked.gif", "id":"ctl00_SampleContent_ToggleButtonExtender1"}, null, null, $get("ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1")); }); //]]> </script> Notice the call to the JavaScript $create() method at the bottom of the page. When using the Microsoft Ajax Library, this call to the $create() method is necessary to create the Ajax Control Toolkit control. This inline script looks pretty ugly to a modern JavaScript developer. Inline script! Horrible! The jQuery version of the ToggleButton injects the following HTML and script into the page: <input id="ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1" name="ctl00$SampleContent$CheckBox1" type="checkbox" checked="checked" data-act-togglebuttonextender="imageWidth:19, imageHeight:19, uncheckedImageUrl:'ToggleButton_Unchecked.gif', checkedImageUrl:'ToggleButton_Checked.gif', uncheckedImageAlternateText:'I don&#39;t understand why you don&#39;t like ASP.NET', checkedImageAlternateText:'It&#39;s really nice to hear from you that you like ASP.NET'" /> Notice that there is no script! There is no call to the $create() method. In fact, there is no inline JavaScript at all. The jQuery version of the ToggleButton uses an HTML5 data-* attribute instead of an inline script. The ToggleButton control is instantiated with a data-act-togglebuttonextender attribute. Using data-* attributes results in much cleaner markup (You don’t need to feel embarrassed when selecting View Source in your browser). Ajax Control Toolkit versus jQuery So in a jQuery world why is the Ajax Control Toolkit needed at all? Why not just use jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit? For example, there are lots of jQuery ToggleButton plugins floating around the Internet. Why not just use one of these jQuery plugins instead of using the Ajax Control Toolkit ToggleButton control? There are three main reasons why the Ajax Control Toolkit continues to be valuable in a jQuery world: Ajax Control Toolkit controls run on both the server and client jQuery plugins are client only. A jQuery plugin does not include any server-side code. If you need to perform any work on the server – think of the AjaxFileUpload control – then you can’t use a pure jQuery solution. Ajax Control Toolkit controls provide a better Visual Studio experience You don’t get any design time experience when you use jQuery plugins within Visual Studio. Ajax Control Toolkit controls, on the other hand, are designed to work with Visual Studio. For example, you can use the Visual Studio Properties window to set Ajax Control Toolkit control properties. Ajax Control Toolkit controls shield you from working with JavaScript I like writing code in JavaScript. However, not all developers like JavaScript and some developers want to completely avoid writing any JavaScript code at all. The Ajax Control Toolkit enables you to take advantage of JavaScript (and the latest features of HTML5) in your ASP.NET Web Forms websites without writing a single line of JavaScript. Better ToolkitScriptManager Documentation With this release, we have added more detailed documentation for using the ToolkitScriptManager. In particular, we added documentation that describes how to take advantage of the new bundling, minification, compression, and caching features of the Ajax Control Toolkit. The ToolkitScriptManager documentation is part of the Ajax Control Toolkit sample site and it can be read here: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/ToolkitScriptManager/ToolkitScriptManager.aspx Other Fixes This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit includes several important bug fixes. For example, the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control was completely rewritten with this release. Twitter is in the process of retiring the first version of their API. You can read about their plans here: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/planning-for-api-v1-retirement We completely rewrote the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control to use the new Twitter API. To take advantage of the new Twitter API, you must get a key and access token from Twitter and add the key and token to your web.config file. Detailed instructions for using the new version of the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control can be found here: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/Twitter/Twitter.aspx   Summary We’ve made some really great changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit over the last two releases to modernize the toolkit. In the previous release, we updated the Ajax Control Toolkit to use a better bundling, minification, compression, and caching system. With this release, we updated the Ajax Control Toolkit to support jQuery. We also continue to update the Ajax Control Toolkit with important bug fixes. I hope you like these changes and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

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• BNF – how to read syntax?

  - by Piotr Rodak

  A few days ago I read post of Jen McCown (blog) about her idea of blogging about random articles from Books Online. I think this is a great idea, even if Jen says that it’s not exciting or sexy. I noticed that many of the questions that appear on forums and other media arise from pure fact that people asking questions didn’t bother to read and understand the manual – Books Online. Jen came up with a brilliant, concise acronym that describes very well the category of posts about Books Online – RTFM365. I take liberty of tagging this post with the same acronym. I often come across questions of type – ‘Hey, i am trying to create a table, but I am getting an error’. The error often says that the syntax is invalid. 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT DEFAULT Guid_Default NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); 5 The answer is usually(1), ‘Ok, let me check it out.. Ah yes – you have to put name of the DEFAULT constraint before the type of constraint: 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT Guid_Default DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); Why many people stumble on syntax errors? Is the syntax poorly documented? No, the issue is, that correct syntax of the CREATE TABLE statement is documented very well in Books Online and is.. intimidating. Many people can be taken aback by the rather complex block of code that describes all intricacies of the statement. However, I don’t know better way of defining syntax of the statement or command. The notation that is used to describe syntax in Books Online is a form of Backus-Naur notatiion, called BNF for short sometimes. This is a notation that was invented around 50 years ago, and some say that even earlier, around 400 BC – would you believe? Originally it was used to define syntax of, rather ancient now, ALGOL programming language (in 1950’s, not in ancient India). If you look closer at the definition of the BNF, it turns out that the principles of this syntax are pretty simple. Here are a few bullet points: italic_text is a placeholder for your identifier <italic_text_in_angle_brackets> is a definition which is described further. [everything in square brackets] is optional {everything in curly brackets} is obligatory everything | separated | by | operator is an alternative ::= “assigns” definition to an identifier Yes, it looks like these six simple points give you the key to understand even the most complicated syntax definitions in Books Online. Books Online contain an article about syntax conventions – have you ever read it? Let’s have a look at fragment of the CREATE TABLE statement: 1 CREATE TABLE 2 [ database_name . [ schema_name ] . | schema_name . ] table_name 3 ( { <column_definition> | <computed_column_definition> 4 | <column_set_definition> } 5 [ <table_constraint> ] [ ,...n ] ) 6 [ ON { partition_scheme_name ( partition_column_name ) | filegroup 7 | "default" } ] 8 [ { TEXTIMAGE_ON { filegroup | "default" } ] 9 [ FILESTREAM_ON { partition_scheme_name | filegroup 10 | "default" } ] 11 [ WITH ( <table_option> [ ,...n ] ) ] 12 [ ; ] Let’s look at line 2 of the above snippet: This line uses rules 3 and 5 from the list. So you know that you can create table which has specified one of the following. just name – table will be created in default user schema schema name and table name – table will be created in specified schema database name, schema name and table name – table will be created in specified database, in specified schema database name, .., table name – table will be created in specified database, in default schema of the user. Note that this single line of the notation describes each of the naming schemes in deterministic way. The ‘optionality’ of the schema_name element is nested within database_name.. section. You can use either database_name and optional schema name, or just schema name – this is specified by the pipe character ‘|’. The error that user gets with execution of the first script fragment in this post is as follows: Msg 156, Level 15, State 1, Line 2 Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'DEFAULT'. Ok, let’s have a look how to find out the correct syntax. Line number 3 of the BNF fragment above contains reference to <column_definition>. Since column_definition is in angle brackets, we know that this is a reference to notion described further in the code. And indeed, the very next fragment of BNF contains syntax of the column definition. 1 <column_definition> ::= 2 column_name <data_type> 3 [ FILESTREAM ] 4 [ COLLATE collation_name ] 5 [ NULL | NOT NULL ] 6 [ 7 [ CONSTRAINT constraint_name ] DEFAULT constant_expression ] 8 | [ IDENTITY [ ( seed ,increment ) ] [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] 9 ] 10 [ ROWGUIDCOL ] [ <column_constraint> [ ...n ] ] 11 [ SPARSE ] Look at line 7 in the above fragment. It says, that the column can have a DEFAULT constraint which, if you want to name it, has to be prepended with [CONSTRAINT constraint_name] sequence. The name of the constraint is optional, but I strongly recommend you to make the effort of coming up with some meaningful name yourself. So the correct syntax of the CREATE TABLE statement from the beginning of the article is like this: 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT Guid_Default DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); That is practically everything you should know about BNF. I encourage you to study the syntax definitions for various statements and commands in Books Online, you can find really interesting things hidden there. Technorati Tags: SQL Server,t-sql,BNF,syntax   (1) No, my answer usually is a question – ‘What error message? What does it say?’. You’d be surprised to know how many people think I can go through time and space and look at their screen at the moment they received the error.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 07, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 07, 2012Popular ReleasesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.9.0: Whats newThe media section has been overhauled to support HTML5 uploads, just drag and drop files in, even multiple files are supported on any HTML5 capable browser. The folder content overview is also much improved allowing you to filter it and perform common actions on your media items. The Rich Text Editor’s “Media” button now uses an embedder based on the open oEmbed standard (if you’re upgrading, enable the media button in the Rich Text Editor datatype settings and set TidyEditorConten...menu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.1: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...iPDC - Free Phasor Data Concentrator: iPDC-v1.3.1: iPDC suite version-1.3.1, Modifications and Bug Fixed (from v 1.3.0) New User Manual for iPDC-v1.3.1 available on websites. Bug resolved : PMU Simulator TCP connection error and hang connection for client (PDC). Now PMU Simulator (server) can communicate more than one PDCs (clients) over TCP and UDP parallely. PMU Simulator is now sending the exact data frames as mentioned in data rate by user. PMU Simulator data rate has been verified by iPDC database entries and PMU Connection Tes...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks OData Feed: The AdventureWorks OData service exposes resources based on specific SQL views. The SQL views are a limited subset of the AdventureWorks database that results in several consuming scenarios: CompanySales Documents ManufacturingInstructions ProductCatalog TerritorySalesDrilldown WorkOrderRouting How to install the sample You can consume the AdventureWorks OData feed from http://services.odata.org/AdventureWorksV3/AdventureWorks.svc. You can also consume the AdventureWorks OData fe...Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.6: Sorting feeds alphabetical is now optional (see preferences window)DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.03: Major Highlights Fixed issue where mailto: links were not working when sending bulk email Fixed issue where uses did not see friendship relationships Problem is in 6.2, which does not show in the Versions Affected list above. Fixed the issue with cascade deletes in comments in CoreMessaging_Notification Fixed UI issue when using a date fields as a required profile property during user registration Fixed error when running the product in debug mode Fixed visibility issue when...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.65: Fixed null-reference error in the build task constructor.B INI Sharp Library: B INI Sharp Library v1.0.0.0 Final Realsed: The frist realsedActive Social Migrator: ActiveSocialMigrator 1.0.0 Beta: Beta release for the Active Social Migration tool.EntLib.com????????: ??????demo??-For SQL 2005-2008: EntLibShopping ???v3.0 - ??????demo??，?????SQL SERVER 2005/2008/2008 R2/2012 ??????。 ??（??）??????。 THANKS.Sistem LPK Pemkot Semarang: Panduan Penggunaan Sistem LPK: Panduan cara menggunakan Aplikasi Sistem LPK Bagian Pembangunan Kota SemarangActive Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 5.0.0 RC: RC release of Active Forums 5.0.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.7 Beta: Bug in the display icon for apk's, will fix with next release Added fallback icon if unable to get the image/icon from the Cloud Service Removed some stale plugins that were either out dated or incomplete. Added handler for *.ab files for restoring backups Added plugin to create device backups Backups stored in %USERPROFILE%\Android Backups\%DEVICE_ID%\ Added custom folder icon for the android backups directory better error handling for installing an apk bug fixes for the Runn...The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: Version 1: --Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.5: Version 8.5 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine. New features include: Built-in search engine using Lucene.NET Flood control improvements Notifications improvements: sync option and mail body View Roadmap for more details webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 961aff884a9187b6e8a86d68913cdd31f8deaf83WiX Toolset: WiX Toolset v3.6: WiX Toolset v3.6 introduces the Burn bootstrapper/chaining engine and support for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5. Other minor functionality includes: WixDependencyExtension supports dependency checking among MSI packages. WixFirewallExtension supports more features of Windows Firewall. WixTagExtension supports Software Id Tagging. WixUtilExtension now supports recursive directory deletion. Melt simplifies pure-WiX patching by extracting .msi package content and updating .w...Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.2.0）: ????ISE?0.1.0??，?????，ISE?0.2.0?????????，???????，????????20???follow?ISE，????，??ISE??????????，??????????，?????????，?????????0.2.0??????，??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”，??????，?????????，???????，???????????????????，????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????： 1. ??“????” ??。??????????，?????????，???????????????????。??：????????，????????????，??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????，???????，???????????????，?????????????，????????，?0.2.0?，???????...GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.New ProjectsAdding 2013 Jewish Holidays for Outlook2003: Instruction: Copy the outlook.hol file to your compuer where Outlook2003 is installed. Double click the file, choose "Israel" and continue. That's it Agilcont System: Sistema de contabilidad para empresas privadas de preferencia para cajas que trabajan con efectivo en soles, dolares y con el material oroARB (A Request Broker): The idea is something like a Request Broker, but with some additional functionality.BATTLE.NET - SDK: This SDK provides the ability to use the Battle.net (Blizzard) Services for all supported Games such Diablo 3, World of Warcraft. Container Terminal System: SummaryDeclarative UX Streaming Data Language for the Cloud: Bringing a better communication paradigm for media and data..Get User Profile Information from SharePoint UserProfile Service: Used SharePoint object model to get the user profile information from the User Profile Service.Guess The City & State Windows 8 Source Code: Source code for Guess The City & State in Malaysia Windows 8 AppJquery Tree: This project is to demonstrate tree basic functionality.MCEBuddy 2.x: Convert and Remove Commercials for your Windows Media CenterMvcDesign: MvcDesign engine implementation projectMy Task Manager: This is a task manager module for DotNetNuke. I am using it to get started developing modules.MyAppwithbranches: MyAppwithbranchesProjecte prova: rpyGEO: pyGEO is a python package capable of parsing microarray data files. It also has a primitive plotting function.Scarlet Road: Scarlet Road is a top-down shooter. It's you against an unending horde of monsters.simplecounter: A simple counter, cick and counter.SiteEmpires: ????????Soundcloud Loader: Simple Tool for downloading Tracks from Soundcloud.Windows Phone Samples: Windows Phone code samples.

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• SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Architecting Data Warehouse – Niraj Bhatt

  - by pinaldave

  Niraj Bhatt works as an Enterprise Architect for a Fortune 500 company and has an innate passion for building / studying software systems. He is a top rated speaker at various technical forums including Tech·Ed, MCT Summit, Developer Summit, and Virtual Tech Days, among others. Having run a successful startup for four years Niraj enjoys working on – IT innovations that can impact an enterprise bottom line, streamlining IT budgets through IT consolidation, architecture and integration of systems, performance tuning, and review of enterprise applications. He has received Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET, Connected Systems and most recently on Windows Azure. When he is away from his laptop, you will find him taking deep dives in automobiles, pottery, rafting, photography, cooking and financial statements though not necessarily in that order. He is also a manager/speaker at BDOTNET, Asia’s largest .NET user group. Here is the guest post by Niraj Bhatt. As data in your applications grows it’s the database that usually becomes a bottleneck. It’s hard to scale a relational DB and the preferred approach for large scale applications is to create separate databases for writes and reads. These databases are referred as transactional database and reporting database. Though there are tools / techniques which can allow you to create snapshot of your transactional database for reporting purpose, sometimes they don’t quite fit the reporting requirements of an enterprise. These requirements typically are data analytics, effective schema (for an Information worker to self-service herself), historical data, better performance (flat data, no joins) etc. This is where a need for data warehouse or an OLAP system arises. A Key point to remember is a data warehouse is mostly a relational database. It’s built on top of same concepts like Tables, Rows, Columns, Primary keys, Foreign Keys, etc. Before we talk about how data warehouses are typically structured let’s understand key components that can create a data flow between OLTP systems and OLAP systems. There are 3 major areas to it: a) OLTP system should be capable of tracking its changes as all these changes should go back to data warehouse for historical recording. For e.g. if an OLTP transaction moves a customer from silver to gold category, OLTP system needs to ensure that this change is tracked and send to data warehouse for reporting purpose. A report in context could be how many customers divided by geographies moved from sliver to gold category. In data warehouse terminology this process is called Change Data Capture. There are quite a few systems that leverage database triggers to move these changes to corresponding tracking tables. There are also out of box features provided by some databases e.g. SQL Server 2008 offers Change Data Capture and Change Tracking for addressing such requirements. b) After we make the OLTP system capable of tracking its changes we need to provision a batch process that can run periodically and takes these changes from OLTP system and dump them into data warehouse. There are many tools out there that can help you fill this gap – SQL Server Integration Services happens to be one of them. c) So we have an OLTP system that knows how to track its changes, we have jobs that run periodically to move these changes to warehouse. The question though remains is how warehouse will record these changes? This structural change in data warehouse arena is often covered under something called Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD). While we will talk about dimensions in a while, SCD can be applied to pure relational tables too. SCD enables a database structure to capture historical data. This would create multiple records for a given entity in relational database and data warehouses prefer having their own primary key, often known as surrogate key. As I mentioned a data warehouse is just a relational database but industry often attributes a specific schema style to data warehouses. These styles are Star Schema or Snowflake Schema. The motivation behind these styles is to create a flat database structure (as opposed to normalized one), which is easy to understand / use, easy to query and easy to slice / dice. Star schema is a database structure made up of dimensions and facts. Facts are generally the numbers (sales, quantity, etc.) that you want to slice and dice. Fact tables have these numbers and have references (foreign keys) to set of tables that provide context around those facts. E.g. if you have recorded 10,000 USD as sales that number would go in a sales fact table and could have foreign keys attached to it that refers to the sales agent responsible for sale and to time table which contains the dates between which that sale was made. These agent and time tables are called dimensions which provide context to the numbers stored in fact tables. This schema structure of fact being at center surrounded by dimensions is called Star schema. A similar structure with difference of dimension tables being normalized is called a Snowflake schema. This relational structure of facts and dimensions serves as an input for another analysis structure called Cube. Though physically Cube is a special structure supported by commercial databases like SQL Server Analysis Services, logically it’s a multidimensional structure where dimensions define the sides of cube and facts define the content. Facts are often called as Measures inside a cube. Dimensions often tend to form a hierarchy. E.g. Product may be broken into categories and categories in turn to individual items. Category and Items are often referred as Levels and their constituents as Members with their overall structure called as Hierarchy. Measures are rolled up as per dimensional hierarchy. These rolled up measures are called Aggregates. Now this may seem like an overwhelming vocabulary to deal with but don’t worry it will sink in as you start working with Cubes and others. Let’s see few other terms that we would run into while talking about data warehouses. ODS or an Operational Data Store is a frequently misused term. There would be few users in your organization that want to report on most current data and can’t afford to miss a single transaction for their report. Then there is another set of users that typically don’t care how current the data is. Mostly senior level executives who are interesting in trending, mining, forecasting, strategizing, etc. don’t care for that one specific transaction. This is where an ODS can come in handy. ODS can use the same star schema and the OLAP cubes we saw earlier. The only difference is that the data inside an ODS would be short lived, i.e. for few months and ODS would sync with OLTP system every few minutes. Data warehouse can periodically sync with ODS either daily or weekly depending on business drivers. Data marts are another frequently talked about topic in data warehousing. They are subject-specific data warehouse. Data warehouses that try to span over an enterprise are normally too big to scope, build, manage, track, etc. Hence they are often scaled down to something called Data mart that supports a specific segment of business like sales, marketing, or support. Data marts too, are often designed using star schema model discussed earlier. Industry is divided when it comes to use of data marts. Some experts prefer having data marts along with a central data warehouse. Data warehouse here acts as information staging and distribution hub with spokes being data marts connected via data feeds serving summarized data. Others eliminate the need for a centralized data warehouse citing that most users want to report on detailed data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Code excavations, wishful invocations, perimeters and domain specific unit test frameworks

  - by RoyOsherove

  One of the talks I did at QCON London was about a subject that I’ve come across fairly recently , when I was building SilverUnit – a “pure” unit test framework for silverlight objects that depend on the silverlight runtime to run. It is the concept of “cogs in the machine” – when your piece of code needs to run inside a host framework or runtime that you have little or no control over for testability related matters. Examples of such cogs and machines can be: your custom control running inside silverlight runtime in the browser your plug-in running inside an IDE your activity running inside a windows workflow your code running inside a java EE bean your code inheriting from a COM+ (enterprise services) component etc.. Not all of these are necessarily testability problems. The main testability problem usually comes when your code actually inherits form something inside the system. For example. one of the biggest problems with testing objects like silverlight controls is the way they depend on the silverlight runtime – they don’t implement some silverlight interface, they don’t just call external static methods against the framework runtime that surrounds them – they actually inherit parts of the framework: they all inherit (in this case) from the silverlight DependencyObject Wrapping it up? An inheritance dependency is uniquely challenging to bring under test, because “classic” methods such as wrapping the object under test with a framework wrapper will not work, and the only way to do manually is to create parallel testable objects that get delegated with all the possible actions from the dependencies.    In silverlight’s case, that would mean creating your own custom logic class that would be called directly from controls that inherit from silverlight, and would be tested independently of these controls. The pro side is that you get the benefit of understanding the “contract” and the “roles” your system plays against your logic, but unfortunately, more often than not, it can be very tedious to create, and may sometimes feel unnecessary or like code duplication. About perimeters A perimeter is that invisible line that your draw around your pieces of logic during a test, that separate the code under test from any dependencies that it uses. Most of the time, a test perimeter around an object will be the list of seams (dependencies that can be replaced such as interfaces, virtual methods etc.) that are actually replaced for that test or for all the tests. Role based perimeters In the case of creating a wrapper around an object – one really creates a “role based” perimeter around the logic that is being tested – that wrapper takes on roles that are required by the code under test, and also communicates with the host system to implement those roles and provide any inputs to the logic under test. in the image below – we have the code we want to test represented as a star. No perimeter is drawn yet (we haven’t wrapped it up in anything yet). in the image below is what happens when you wrap your logic with a role based wrapper – you get a role based perimeter anywhere your code interacts with the system: There’s another way to bring that code under test – using isolation frameworks like typemock, rhino mocks and MOQ (but if your code inherits from the system, Typemock might be the only way to isolate the code from the system interaction.   Ad-Hoc Isolation perimeters the image below shows what I call ad-hoc perimeter that might be vastly different between different tests: This perimeter’s surface is much smaller, because for that specific test, that is all the “change” that is required to the host system behavior.   The third way of isolating the code from the host system is the main “meat” of this post: Subterranean perimeters Subterranean perimeters are Deep rooted perimeters  - “always on” seams that that can lie very deep in the heart of the host system where they are fully invisible even to the test itself, not just to the code under test. Because they lie deep inside a system you can’t control, the only way I’ve found to control them is with runtime (not compile time) interception of method calls on the system. One way to get such abilities is by using Aspect oriented frameworks – for example, in SilverUnit, I’ve used the CThru AOP framework based on Typemock hooks and CLR profilers to intercept such system level method calls and effectively turn them into seams that lie deep down at the heart of the silverlight runtime. the image below depicts an example of what such a perimeter could look like: As you can see, the actual seams can be very far away form the actual code under test, and as you’ll discover, that’s actually a very good thing. Here is only a partial list of examples of such deep rooted seams : disabling the constructor of a base class five levels below the code under test (this.base.base.base.base) faking static methods of a type that’s being called several levels down the stack: method x() calls y() calls z() calls SomeType.StaticMethod()  Replacing an async mechanism with a synchronous one (replacing all timers with your own timer behavior that always Ticks immediately upon calls to “start()” on the same caller thread for example) Replacing event mechanisms with your own event mechanism (to allow “firing” system events) Changing the way the system saves information with your own saving behavior (in silverunit, I replaced all Dependency Property set and get with calls to an in memory value store instead of using the one built into silverlight which threw exceptions without a browser) several questions could jump in: How do you know what to fake? (how do you discover the perimeter?) How do you fake it? Wouldn’t this be problematic  - to fake something you don’t own? it might change in the future How do you discover the perimeter to fake? To discover a perimeter all you have to do is start with a wishful invocation. a wishful invocation is the act of trying to invoke a method (or even just create an instance ) of an object using “regular” test code. You invoke the thing that you’d like to do in a real unit test, to see what happens: Can I even create an instance of this object without getting an exception? Can I invoke this method on that instance without getting an exception? Can I verify that some call into the system happened? You make the invocation, get an exception (because there is a dependency) and look at the stack trace. choose a location in the stack trace and disable it. Then try the invocation again. if you don’t get an exception the perimeter is good for that invocation, so you can move to trying out other methods on that object. in a future post I will show the process using CThru, and how you end up with something close to a domain specific test framework after you’re done creating the perimeter you need.

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• Learning content for MCSDs: Web Applications and Windows Store Apps using HTML5

  Recently, I started again to learn for various Microsoft certifications. First candidate on my way to MSCD: Web Applications is the Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3. Motivation to go for a Microsoft exam I guess, this is quite personal but let me briefly describe my intentions to go that exam. First, I'm doing web development since the 1990's. Working with HTML, CSS and Javascript is happening almost daily in my workspace. And honestly, I do not only do 'pure' web development but already integrated several HTML/CSS/Javascript frontend UIs into an existing desktop application (written in Visual FoxPro) inclusive two-way communication and data exchange. Hm, might be an interesting topic for another blog article here... Second, this exam has a very interesting aspect which is listed at the bottom of the exam's details: Credit Toward Certification When you pass Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, you complete the requirements for the following certification(s): Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3: counts as credit toward the following certification(s): MCSD: Web Applications MCSD: Windows Store Apps using HTML5 So, passing one single exam will earn you specialist certification straight-forward, and opens the path to higher levels of certifications. Preparations and learning path Well, due to a newsletter from Microsoft Learning (MSL) I caught interest in picking up the circumstances and learning materials for this particular exam. As of writing this article there is a promotional / voucher code available which enables you to register for this exam for free! Simply register yourself with or log into your existing account at Prometric, choose the exam for a testing facility near to you and enter the voucher code HTMLJMP (available through 31.03.2013 or while supplies last). Hurry up, there are restrictions... As stated above, I'm already very familiar with web development and the programming flavours involved into this. But of course, it is always good to freshen up your knowledge and reflect on yourself. Microsoft is putting a lot of effort to attract any kind of developers into the 'App Development'. Whether it is for the Windows 8 Store or the Windows Phone 8 Store, doesn't really matter. They simply need more apps. This demand for skilled developers also comes with a nice side-effect: Lots and lots of material to study. During the first couple of hours, I could easily gather high quality preparation material - again for free! Following is just a small list of starting points. If you have more resources, please drop me a message in the comment section, and I'll be glad to update this article accordingly. Developing HTML5 Apps Jump Start This is an accelerated jump start video course on development of HTML5 Apps for Windows 8. There are six modules that are split into two video sessions per module. Very informative and intense course material. This is packed stuff taken from an official preparation course for exam 70-480. Developing Windows Store Apps with HTML5 Jump Start Again, an accelerated preparation video course on Windows 8 Apps. There are six modules with two video sessions each which will catapult you to your exam. This is also related to preps for exam 70-481. Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Kraig Brockschmidt delves into the ups and downs of Windows 8 App development over 800+ pages. Great eBook to read, study, and to practice the samples - best of all, it's for free. codeSHOW() This is a Windows 8 HTML/JS project with the express goal of demonstrating simple development concepts for the Windows 8 platform. Code, code and more code... absolutely great stuff to study and practice. Microsoft Virtual Academy I already wrote about the MVA in a previous article. Well, if you haven't registered yourself yet, now is the time. The list is not complete for sure, but this might keep you busy for at least one or even two weeks to go through the material. Please don't hesitate to add more resources in the comment section. Right now, I'm already through all videos once, and digging my way through chapter 4 of Kraig's book. Additional material - Pluralsight Apart from those free online resources, I also following some courses from the excellent library of Pluralsight. They already have their own section for Windows 8 development, but of course, you get companion material about HTML5, CSS and Javascript in other sections, too. Introduction to Building Windows 8 Applications Building Windows 8 Applications with JavaScript and HTML Selling Windows 8 Apps HTML5 Fundamentals Using HTML5 and CSS3 HTML5 Advanced Topics CSS3 etc... Interesting to see that Michael Palermo provides his course material on multiple platforms. Fantastic! You might also pay a visit to his personal blog. Hm, it just came to my mind that Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight publishes so-called '24 hours Learning Paths' based on courses available in the course library. Would be interested to see a combination for Windows 8 App development using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript in the future. Recommended workspace environment Well, you might have guessed it but this requires Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012 Express or another flavour, and a valid Developers License. Due to an MSDN subscription I working on VS 2012 Premium with some additional tools by Telerik. Honestly, the fastest way to get you up and running for Windows 8 App development is the source code archive of codeSHOW(). It does not only give you all source code in general but contains a couple of SDKs like Bing Maps, Microsoft Advertising, Live ID, and Telerik Windows 8 controls... for free! Hint: Get the Windows Phone 8 SDK as well. Don't worry, while you are studying the material for Windows 8 you will be able to leverage from this knowledge to development for the phone platform, too. It takes roughly one to two hours to get your workspace and learning environment, at least this was my time frame due to slow internet connection and an aged spare machine. ;-) Oh, before I forget to mention it, as soon as you're done, go quickly to the Windows Store and search for ClassBrowserPlus. You might not need it ad hoc for your development using HTML5, CSS and Javascript but I think that it is a great developer's utility that enables you to view the properties, methods and events (along with help text) for all Windows 8 classes. It's always good to look behind the scenes and to explore how it is made. Idea: Start/join a learning group The way you learn new things or intensify your knowledge in a certain technology is completely up to your personal preference. Back in my days at the university, we used to meet once or twice a week in a small quiet room to exchange our progress, questions and problems we ran into. In general, I recommend to any software craftsman to lift your butt and get out to exchange with other developers. Personally, I like this approach, as it gives you new points of view and an insight into others' own experience with certain techniques and how they managed to solve tricky issues. Just keep it relaxed and not too formal after all, and you might a have a good time away from your dull office desk. Give your machine a break, too.

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• Personal Development : Time, Planning , Repairs & Maintenance

  - by Rajesh Pillai

  Personal Development : Time, Planning, Repairs & Maintenance These are just my thoughts, but some you may find something interesting in it. Please think over it. We may know many things, but still we always keeps procrastinating it. I have written this as I have heard many people coming back and saying they don’t have time to do things they like. These are my thoughts buy may be useful to someone else too. Certain things in life needs periodic repairs and maintenance. To cite some examples , your CAR, your HOUSE, your personal laptop/desktop, your health etc. Likewise there are certain other things in professional life that requires repair/ maintenance /or some kind of polishing, so that you always stay on top of it. But they are not always obvious. Some of them are - Improving your communication skills - Increasing your vocabulary - Upgrading your technical skills - Pursuing your hobby - Increasing your knowledge/awareness etc… etc… And then there are certain things that we are always short of…. one is TIME. We all know TIME is one of the most precious things in life and yet we all are very miserable at managing it. Remember you can only manage it and not control it. You can only control which you own or which you create. In theory time is infinite. So, there should be abundant of it. But remember one thing, you know this, it’s not reversible. Once it has elapsed you cannot live it again. Think over it. So, how do find that golden 25th hour every day. To find the 25th hour you need to reflect back on your current daily activities. Analyze them and see where you are spending most of your time and is it really important. Even the 8 hours that you spent in the office, is it spent fruitfully. At the end of the day is the 8 precious hour that you spent was worth it. Just reflect back on your activities. Did you learn something? If yes did you make a point to NOTE IT. If you didn’t NOTED it then was the time you spent really worth it. Just ponder over it. Some calculations of your daily activities where most of the time is spent. Let’s start (in no particular order though) - Sleep (6.5 hours) [Remember you only require 6 good hours of sleep every day]. Some may thing it is 8, but it’s a myth.   o To achive 6 hours of sleep and be in good health you can practice 15 minutes of daily meditation. So effectively you can    round it to 6.5 hours. - Morning chores(2 hours) : Some may need to prepare breakfast and all other things. - Office commuting (avg. to and fro 3 hours) - Office Work (avg 9.5 hours) Total Hours: 21 hours effective time which is spent irrespective of what you do. There may be some variations here and there. Still you have 3 hours EXTRA. Where do these 3 hours go? If you can find it, then you may get that golden 25th hour out of these 3 hours. Let’s discount 2 hours for contingencies, still you have 1 hour with you. If you can’t find it then you are living a direction less life. As you can see, the 25th Hour lies within the 24 hours of the day. It’s upto each one of us to find and make use of it. Now what can you do with that 25th hour i.e. 1 hour extra of your life. Imagine the possibility. Again some calculations 1 hour daily * 30 days = 30 hours every month 30 hours pm * 12 month = 360 hours every year. 360 hours every year seems very promising. Let’s add some contingencies, say, let’s be optimistic and say 50 % contingency. Still you have 180 hours every year. That leaves with 30 minutes every day of extra time. That’s hell a lot of time, if you could manage it. These may sound like a high talk [yes, it is, unless you apply these simple rules and rationalize your everyday living and stop procrastinating]. NOTE: I haven’t taken weekend, holidays and leaves into account. So, that leaves us with a lot of buffer time. You can meet family friends, relatives, other tasks, and yet have these 180 pure hours of joy every year. Do whatever you want to do with it. So, how important is this 180 hours per year to you? Just think over it. You may use it the way you like - 50 hours [pursue your hobby like drawing, crafting, learn dance, learn juggling, learn swimming, travelling hmm.. anything you like doing and you didn’t had time to do it.] - 30 hours you can learn a new programming language or technology (i.e. you can get comfortable with it) - 50 hours [improve existing skills] - 20 hours [improve you communication skill]. Do some light reading. - 30 hours [YOU DECIDE WHAT TO DO]? So, if you had done this for one year you would have learnt a new programming language, upgraded existing skills, improved you communication etc.. If you had done this for two years.. imagine the level of personal development or growth which you may have attained….. If you had done this for three years….. NOW I think I don’t need to mention this… So, you still have TIME, as they say TIME is infinite. So, make judicious use of this precious thing. And never ever comeback saying “I don’t have time”. So, if you are RICH in TIME, everything else will be automatically taken care of, as those things may just be a byproduct of how you spend your time… So, happy TIMING your TIME everyday.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 28, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 28, 2010New ProjectsFeed Tracker: Feed Tracker allows you to track your favorite feeds (RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0) and open them up directly in your browser.FIM 2010 Resource Management Client: The Forefront Identity Management 2010 Resource Management Client is a library to communicate with the FIM 2010 web service. The development langu...Infection Protection: A game about controlling disease outbreak in a city. Developed for OGPC 2010, using Qt.OrthoLab: Homepage of Orthocone open-source laboratory.Paragliding ThermalMarker: Paragliding / Hanggliding Windows Application that receives waypoint files and returns only the thermals that get triggered more often in a place.RSSFalls: RssFalls makes it easier for developers to download RSS or Podcast enclosures.String Library for C++ Language: StrLib++ is a string library for C++ language. for now it support only ANSI strings, later Unicode support will added for UT8, UTF16 and UTF32 for...Sweeper: Sweeper is a Visual Studio 2008 add-in for C# that takes care of many of the trivial code-formatting issues that developers run into - particularly...System.Common: A .Net library that provides methods, properties and more that the .Net Framework doesn't provide.Tiveriad: The framework is designed to help you more easily build modular Windows applicationT-Shirts Online: Online shop build in Silverlight 4 using DIBS as payment module.New ReleasesArkSwitch: ArkSwitch v1.1.3: This release has some important changes. Thanks to MichyPrima for helping with some of the code. 1. Improved theming to more easily support multip...Catharsis: Catharsis 2.5 on catarsa.com: The Catharsis framework has finally its own portal http://catarsa.com The latest release version is 2.5 - string names of properties are not any ...EffiProz - A Pure C# Database: EffiProz CF 1.0: EffiProz for .Net compact framework.Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.6: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.6). It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My Documents. Once you have ext...Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.009: Added Pentagon Crazy Recipe QuizGapi.NET - .NET (C#) wrapper for Google API: Gapi.NET 0.5.0.0: - Fixed some minor bugs. - Add minor features. - Performance improvement. See code check-ins for detailed informationHouseFly experimental controls: HouseFly experimental control: Alpha version of HouseFly experimental controlsiTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.2.3738 Beta 2: V1.2 allows you to synchronize one or more iTunes playlists to a USB MP3 player. Beta 2 resolves all known issues. This continues the evolution ye...jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services: SPServices 0.5.4: 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...JSINQ - LINQ to Objects for JavaScript: JSINQ 1.0: This is the first stable release of JSINQ. It is fully compatible with the 0.9 beta release. It contains the following new features: Now supports ...MSBuild Mercurial Tasks: 1.0.0 Beta: First release of the application. This version integrates all the basic functionalities of Mercurial as defined in the Use Case 1.Open Portal Foundation: Open Portal Foundation V1.4.2: What's news? noscript template was updated naming convention for layout autogenerated controls now use the "master" prefix. The documentation ce...Open Portal Foundation: Open Portal Foundation V1.4.4: What's news? ASP .NET Master page support for custom aspx integrated pages New usercontrols for ASCX, ASPX and Master page integration : Link: f...Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 1.5.0: RLE compression is now working fully on save. File sizes are now competitive with Photoshop's. Saving takes about twice as long with RLE compressi...Paragliding ThermalMarker: ThermalMarker_Alfa0.1: Release Alfa 1Simple Service Locator: Simple Service Locator v0.7: The Simple Service Locator is an easy-to-use Inversion of Control library that is a complete implementation of the Common Service Locator interface...String Library for C++ Language: Release 0.9: version 0.9 beta release DO NOT USE IN SERIOUS PROJECTS this release use default application heap, and because visual studio is using special debug...Sweeper: Sweeper Alpha 1: SweeperA Visual Studio Add-in for C# Code Formatting - Visual Studio 2008 Includes: A UI for options, Enable or disable any specific task you want ...T-Shirts Online: 1.0: First release of the online shop.Twilio Server Library for .NET (TSL.NET): v0.1.0 Beta: This is the first release of TSL.NET. This v0.1.0 release is a Beta. Subsequent builds will be posted as v0.1.x and release-candidate Betas will be...Vr30 OS: Facebook 1.0: Connect you to Facebook without your web browser.Vr30 OS: SkyBlog 1.0: SkyBlog without web browser.Vr30 OS: YouTube 1.0: Youtube without web browserWeb Image Resize Handler: Web Image Resize, Zoom, Rotate and Greyscale v.1.0: Efficient Web Image Resize, Zoom, Rotate and Greyscale cacheing handler for ASP.Net.WinXound: WinXound 3.3.0 Beta 1 for Mac OsX: This is the first Beta release for Apple Mac OsX (Universal Binary). DEBUG HELP NEEDED ! Please signal bugs, suggestions or feedback to: stefano_b...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesManaged Extensibility FrameworkBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology Foundationpatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightLINQ to TwitterFarseer Physics EngineTable2ClassNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• A Good Developer is So Hard to Find

  - by James Michael Hare

  Let me start out by saying I want to damn the writers of the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever – 2. It is eating every last shred of my free time! But as I've been churning through each puzzle and marvelling at the brain teasers and trivia within, I began to think about interviewing developers and why it seems to be so hard to find good ones.  The problem is, it seems like no matter how hard we try to find the perfect way to separate the chaff from the wheat, inevitably someone will get hired who falls far short of expectations or someone will get passed over for missing a piece of trivia or a tricky brain teaser that could have been an excellent team member.   In shops that are primarily software-producing businesses or other heavily IT-oriented businesses (Microsoft, Amazon, etc) there often exists a much tighter bond between HR and the hiring development staff because development is their life-blood. Unfortunately, many of us work in places where IT is viewed as a cost or just a means to an end. In these shops, too often, HR and development staff may work against each other due to differences in opinion as to what a good developer is or what one is worth.  It seems that if you ask two different people what makes a good developer, often you will get three different opinions.   With the exception of those shops that are purely development-centric (you guys have it much easier!), most other shops have management who have very little knowledge about the development process.  Their view can often be that development is simply a skill that one learns and then once aquired, that developer can produce widgets as good as the next like workers on an assembly-line floor.  On the other side, you have many developers that feel that software development is an art unto itself and that the ability to create the most pure design or know the most obscure of keywords or write the shortest-possible obfuscated piece of code is a good coder.  So is it a skill?  An Art?  Or something entirely in between?   Saying that software is merely a skill and one just needs to learn the syntax and tools would be akin to saying anyone who knows English and can use Word can write a 300 page book that is accurate, meaningful, and stays true to the point.  This just isn't so.  It takes more than mere skill to take words and form a sentence, join those sentences into paragraphs, and those paragraphs into a document.  I've interviewed candidates who could answer obscure syntax and keyword questions and once they were hired could not code effectively at all.  So development must be more than a skill.   But on the other end, we have art.  Is development an art?  Is our end result to produce art?  I can marvel at a piece of code -- see it as concise and beautiful -- and yet that code most perform some stated function with accuracy and efficiency and maintainability.  None of these three things have anything to do with art, per se.  Art is beauty for its own sake and is a wonderful thing.  But if you apply that same though to development it just doesn't hold.  I've had developers tell me that all that matters is the end result and how you code it is entirely part of the art and I couldn't disagree more.  Yes, the end result, the accuracy, is the prime criteria to be met.  But if code is not maintainable and efficient, it would be just as useless as a beautiful car that breaks down once a week or that gets 2 miles to the gallon.  Yes, it may work in that it moves you from point A to point B and is pretty as hell, but if it can't be maintained or is not efficient, it's not a good solution.  So development must be something less than art.   In the end, I think I feel like development is a matter of craftsmanship.  We use our tools and we use our skills and set about to construct something that satisfies a purpose and yet is also elegant and efficient.  There is skill involved, and there is an art, but really it boils down to being able to craft code.  Crafting code is far more than writing code.  Anyone can write code if they know the syntax, but so few people can actually craft code that solves a purpose and craft it well.  So this is what I want to find, I want to find code craftsman!  But how?   I used to ask coding-trivia questions a long time ago and many people still fall back on this.  The thought is that if you ask the candidate some piece of coding trivia and they know the answer it must follow that they can craft good code.  For example:   What C++ keyword can be applied to a class/struct field to allow it to be changed even from a const-instance of that class/struct?  (answer: mutable)   So what do we prove if a candidate can answer this?  Only that they know what mutable means.  One would hope that this would infer that they'd know how to use it, and more importantly when and if it should ever be used!  But it rarely does!  The problem with triva questions is that you will either: Approve a really good developer who knows what some obscure keyword is (good) Reject a really good developer who never needed to use that keyword or is too inexperienced to know how to use it (bad) Approve a really bad developer who googled "C++ Interview Questions" and studied like hell but can't craft (very bad) Many HR departments love these kind of tests because they are short and easy to defend if a legal issue arrises on hiring decisions.  After all it's easy to say a person wasn't hired because they scored 30 out of 100 on some trivia test.  But unfortunately, you've eliminated a large part of your potential developer pool and possibly hired a few duds.  There are times I've hired candidates who knew every trivia question I could throw out them and couldn't craft.  And then there are times I've interviewed candidates who failed all my trivia but who I took a chance on who were my best finds ever.    So if not trivia, then what?  Brain teasers?  The thought is, these type of questions measure the thinking power of a candidate.  The problem is, once again, you will either: Approve a good candidate who has never heard the problem and can solve it (good) Reject a good candidate who just happens not to see the "catch" because they're nervous or it may be really obscure (bad) Approve a candidate who has studied enough interview brain teasers (once again, you can google em) to recognize the "catch" or knows the answer already (bad). Once again, you're eliminating good candidates and possibly accepting bad candidates.  In these cases, I think testing someone with brain teasers only tests their ability to answer brain teasers, not the ability to craft code. So how do we measure someone's ability to craft code?  Here's a novel idea: have them code!  Give them a computer and a compiler, or a whiteboard and a pen, or paper and pencil and have them construct a piece of code.  It just makes sense that if we're going to hire someone to code we should actually watch them code.  When they're done, we can judge them on several criteria: Correctness - does the candidate's solution accurately solve the problem proposed? Accuracy - is the candidate's solution reasonably syntactically correct? Efficiency - did the candidate write or use the more efficient data structures or algorithms for the job? Maintainability - was the candidate's code free of obfuscation and clever tricks that diminish readability? Persona - are they eager and willing or aloof and egotistical?  Will they work well within your team? It may sound simple, or it may sound crazy, but when I'm looking to hire a developer, I want to see them actually develop well-crafted code.

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• Movement prediction for non-shooters

  - by ShadowChaser

  I'm working on an isometric 2D game with moderate-scale multiplayer, approximately 20-30 players connected at once to a persistent server. I've had some difficulty getting a good movement prediction implementation in place. Physics/Movement The game doesn't have a true physics implementation, but uses the basic principles to implement movement. Rather than continually polling input, state changes (ie/ mouse down/up/move events) are used to change the state of the character entity the player is controlling. The player's direction (ie/ north-east) is combined with a constant speed and turned into a true 3D vector - the entity's velocity. In the main game loop, "Update" is called before "Draw". The update logic triggers a "physics update task" that tracks all entities with a non-zero velocity uses very basic integration to change the entities position. For example: entity.Position += entity.Velocity.Scale(ElapsedTime.Seconds) (where "Seconds" is a floating point value, but the same approach would work for millisecond integer values). The key point is that no interpolation is used for movement - the rudimentary physics engine has no concept of a "previous state" or "current state", only a position and velocity. State Change and Update Packets When the velocity of the character entity the player is controlling changes, a "move avatar" packet is sent to the server containing the entity's action type (stand, walk, run), direction (north-east), and current position. This is different from how 3D first person games work. In a 3D game the velocity (direction) can change frame to frame as the player moves around. Sending every state change would effectively transmit a packet per frame, which would be too expensive. Instead, 3D games seem to ignore state changes and send "state update" packets on a fixed interval - say, every 80-150ms. Since speed and direction updates occur much less frequently in my game, I can get away with sending every state change. Although all of the physics simulations occur at the same speed and are deterministic, latency is still an issue. For that reason, I send out routine position update packets (similar to a 3D game) but much less frequently - right now every 250ms, but I suspect with good prediction I can easily boost it towards 500ms. The biggest problem is that I've now deviated from the norm - all other documentation, guides, and samples online send routine updates and interpolate between the two states. It seems incompatible with my architecture, and I need to come up with a better movement prediction algorithm that is closer to a (very basic) "networked physics" architecture. The server then receives the packet and determines the players speed from it's movement type based on a script (Is the player able to run? Get the player's running speed). Once it has the speed, it combines it with the direction to get a vector - the entity's velocity. Some cheat detection and basic validation occurs, and the entity on the server side is updated with the current velocity, direction, and position. Basic throttling is also performed to prevent players from flooding the server with movement requests. After updating its own entity, the server broadcasts an "avatar position update" packet to all other players within range. The position update packet is used to update the client side physics simulations (world state) of the remote clients and perform prediction and lag compensation. Prediction and Lag Compensation As mentioned above, clients are authoritative for their own position. Except in cases of cheating or anomalies, the client's avatar will never be repositioned by the server. No extrapolation ("move now and correct later") is required for the client's avatar - what the player sees is correct. However, some sort of extrapolation or interpolation is required for all remote entities that are moving. Some sort of prediction and/or lag-compensation is clearly required within the client's local simulation / physics engine. Problems I've been struggling with various algorithms, and have a number of questions and problems: Should I be extrapolating, interpolating, or both? My "gut feeling" is that I should be using pure extrapolation based on velocity. State change is received by the client, client computes a "predicted" velocity that compensates for lag, and the regular physics system does the rest. However, it feels at odds to all other sample code and articles - they all seem to store a number of states and perform interpolation without a physics engine. When a packet arrives, I've tried interpolating the packet's position with the packet's velocity over a fixed time period (say, 200ms). I then take the difference between the interpolated position and the current "error" position to compute a new vector and place that on the entity instead of the velocity that was sent. However, the assumption is that another packet will arrive in that time interval, and it's incredibly difficult to "guess" when the next packet will arrive - especially since they don't all arrive on fixed intervals (ie/ state changes as well). Is the concept fundamentally flawed, or is it correct but needs some fixes / adjustments? What happens when a remote player stops? I can immediately stop the entity, but it will be positioned in the "wrong" spot until it moves again. If I estimate a vector or try to interpolate, I have an issue because I don't store the previous state - the physics engine has no way to say "you need to stop after you reach position X". It simply understands a velocity, nothing more complex. I'm reluctant to add the "packet movement state" information to the entities or physics engine, since it violates basic design principles and bleeds network code across the rest of the game engine. What should happen when entities collide? There are three scenarios - the controlling player collides locally, two entities collide on the server during a position update, or a remote entity update collides on the local client. In all cases I'm uncertain how to handle the collision - aside from cheating, both states are "correct" but at different time periods. In the case of a remote entity it doesn't make sense to draw it walking through a wall, so I perform collision detection on the local client and cause it to "stop". Based on point #2 above, I might compute a "corrected vector" that continually tries to move the entity "through the wall" which will never succeed - the remote avatar is stuck there until the error gets too high and it "snaps" into position. How do games work around this?

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• Cloud Computing = Elasticity * Availability

  - by Herve Roggero

  What is cloud computing? Is hosting the same thing as cloud computing? Are you running a cloud if you already use virtual machines? What is the difference between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and a cloud provider? And the list goes on… these questions keep coming up and all try to fundamentally explain what “cloud” means relative to other concepts. At the risk of over simplification, answering these questions becomes simpler once you understand the primary foundations of cloud computing: Elasticity and Availability.   Elasticity The basic value proposition of cloud computing is to pay as you go, and to pay for what you use. This implies that an application can expand and contract on demand, across all its tiers (presentation layer, services, database, security…).  This also implies that application components can grow independently from each other. So if you need more storage for your database, you should be able to grow that tier without affecting, reconfiguring or changing the other tiers. Basically, cloud applications behave like a sponge; when you add water to a sponge, it grows in size; in the application world, the more customers you add, the more it grows. Pure IaaS providers will provide certain benefits, specifically in terms of operating costs, but an IaaS provider will not help you in making your applications elastic; neither will Virtual Machines. The smallest elasticity unit of an IaaS provider and a Virtual Machine environment is a server (physical or virtual). While adding servers in a datacenter helps in achieving scale, it is hardly enough. The application has yet to use this hardware.  If the process of adding computing resources is not transparent to the application, the application is not elastic.   As you can see from the above description, designing for the cloud is not about more servers; it is about designing an application for elasticity regardless of the underlying server farm.   Availability The fact of the matter is that making applications highly available is hard. It requires highly specialized tools and trained staff. On top of it, it's expensive. Many companies are required to run multiple data centers due to high availability requirements. In some organizations, some data centers are simply on standby, waiting to be used in a case of a failover. Other organizations are able to achieve a certain level of success with active/active data centers, in which all available data centers serve incoming user requests. While achieving high availability for services is relatively simple, establishing a highly available database farm is far more complex. In fact it is so complex that many companies establish yearly tests to validate failover procedures.   To a certain degree certain IaaS provides can assist with complex disaster recovery planning and setting up data centers that can achieve successful failover. However the burden is still on the corporation to manage and maintain such an environment, including regular hardware and software upgrades. Cloud computing on the other hand removes most of the disaster recovery requirements by hiding many of the underlying complexities.   Cloud Providers A cloud provider is an infrastructure provider offering additional tools to achieve application elasticity and availability that are not usually available on-premise. For example Microsoft Azure provides a simple configuration screen that makes it possible to run 1 or 100 web sites by clicking a button or two on a screen (simplifying provisioning), and soon SQL Azure will offer Data Federation to allow database sharding (which allows you to scale the database tier seamlessly and automatically). Other cloud providers offer certain features that are not available on-premise as well, such as the Amazon SC3 (Simple Storage Service) which gives you virtually unlimited storage capabilities for simple data stores, which is somewhat equivalent to the Microsoft Azure Table offering (offering a server-independent data storage model). Unlike IaaS providers, cloud providers give you the necessary tools to adopt elasticity as part of your application architecture.    Some cloud providers offer built-in high availability that get you out of the business of configuring clustered solutions, or running multiple data centers. Some cloud providers will give you more control (which puts some of that burden back on the customers' shoulder) and others will tend to make high availability totally transparent. For example, SQL Azure provides high availability automatically which would be very difficult to achieve (and very costly) on premise.   Keep in mind that each cloud provider has its strengths and weaknesses; some are better at achieving transparent scalability and server independence than others.    Not for Everyone Note however that it is up to you to leverage the elasticity capabilities of a cloud provider, as discussed previously; if you build a website that does not need to scale, for which elasticity is not important, then you can use a traditional host provider unless you also need high availability. Leveraging the technologies of cloud providers can be difficult and can become a journey for companies that build their solutions in a scale up fashion. Cloud computing promises to address cost containment and scalability of applications with built-in high availability. If your application does not need to scale or you do not need high availability, then cloud computing may not be for you. In fact, you may pay a premium to run your applications with cloud providers due to the underlying technologies built specifically for scalability and availability requirements. And as such, the cloud is not for everyone.   Consistent Customer Experience, Predictable Cost With all its complexities, buzz and foggy definition, cloud computing boils down to a simple objective: consistent customer experience at a predictable cost.  The objective of a cloud solution is to provide the same user experience to your last customer than the first, while keeping your operating costs directly proportional to the number of customers you have. Making your applications elastic and highly available across all its tiers, with as much automation as possible, achieves the first objective of a consistent customer experience. And the ability to expand and contract the infrastructure footprint of your application dynamically achieves the cost containment objectives.     Herve Roggero is a SQL Azure MVP and co-author of Pro SQL Azure (APress).  He is the co-founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (www.bluesyntax.net), a company focusing on cloud computing technologies helping customers understand and adopt cloud computing technologies. For more information contact herve at hroggero @ bluesyntax.net .

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• Setting useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy At Runtime

  - by Reed

  Version 4.0 of the .NET Framework included a new CLR which is almost entirely backwards compatible with the 2.0 version of the CLR.  However, by default, mixed-mode assemblies targeting .NET 3.5sp1 and earlier will fail to load in a .NET 4 application.  Fixing this requires setting useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy in your app.Config for the application.  While there are many good reasons for this decision, there are times when this is extremely frustrating, especially when writing a library.  As such, there are (rare) times when it would be beneficial to set this in code, at runtime, as well as verify that it’s running correctly prior to receiving a FileLoadException. Typically, loading a pre-.NET 4 mixed mode assembly is handled simply by changing your app.Config file, and including the relevant attribute in the startup element: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0"/> </startup> </configuration> .csharpcode { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; color: black; font-size: small } .csharpcode pre { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; color: black; font-size: small } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000 } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080 } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0 } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633 } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00 } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000 } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000 } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; margin: 0em; width: 100% } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060 } This causes your application to run correctly, and load the older, mixed-mode assembly without issues. For full details on what’s happening here and why, I recommend reading Mark Miller’s detailed explanation of this attribute and the reasoning behind it. Before I show any code, let me say: I strongly recommend using the official approach of using app.config to set this policy. That being said, there are (rare) times when, for one reason or another, changing the application configuration file is less than ideal. While this is the supported approach to handling this issue, the CLR Hosting API includes a means of setting this programmatically via the ICLRRuntimeInfo interface.  Normally, this is used if you’re hosting the CLR in a native application in order to set this, at runtime, prior to loading the assemblies.  However, the F# Samples include a nice trick showing how to load this API and bind this policy, at runtime.  This was required in order to host the Managed DirectX API, which is built against an older version of the CLR. This is fairly easy to port to C#.  Instead of a direct port, I also added a little addition – by trapping the COM exception received if unable to bind (which will occur if the 2.0 CLR is already bound), I also allow a runtime check of whether this property was setup properly: public static class RuntimePolicyHelper { public static bool LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully { get; private set; } static RuntimePolicyHelper() { ICLRRuntimeInfo clrRuntimeInfo = (ICLRRuntimeInfo)RuntimeEnvironment.GetRuntimeInterfaceAsObject( Guid.Empty, typeof(ICLRRuntimeInfo).GUID); try { clrRuntimeInfo.BindAsLegacyV2Runtime(); LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully = true; } catch (COMException) { // This occurs with an HRESULT meaning // "A different runtime was already bound to the legacy CLR version 2 activation policy." LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully = false; } } [ComImport] [InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)] [Guid("BD39D1D2-BA2F-486A-89B0-B4B0CB466891")] private interface ICLRRuntimeInfo { void xGetVersionString(); void xGetRuntimeDirectory(); void xIsLoaded(); void xIsLoadable(); void xLoadErrorString(); void xLoadLibrary(); void xGetProcAddress(); void xGetInterface(); void xSetDefaultStartupFlags(); void xGetDefaultStartupFlags(); [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.InternalCall, MethodCodeType = MethodCodeType.Runtime)] void BindAsLegacyV2Runtime(); } } Using this, it’s possible to not only set this at runtime, but also verify, prior to loading your mixed mode assembly, whether this will succeed. In my case, this was quite useful – I am working on a library purely for internal use which uses a numerical package that is supplied with both a completely managed as well as a native solver.  The native solver uses a CLR 2 mixed-mode assembly, but is dramatically faster than the pure managed approach.  By checking RuntimePolicyHelper.LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully at runtime, I can decide whether to enable the native solver, and only do so if I successfully bound this policy. There are some tricks required here – To enable this sort of fallback behavior, you must make these checks in a type that doesn’t cause the mixed mode assembly to be loaded.  In my case, this forced me to encapsulate the library I was using entirely in a separate class, perform the check, then pass through the required calls to that class.  Otherwise, the library will load before the hosting process gets enabled, which in turn will fail. This code will also, of course, try to enable the runtime policy before the first time you use this class – which typically means just before the first time you check the boolean value.  As a result, checking this early on in the application is more likely to allow it to work. Finally, if you’re using a library, this has to be called prior to the 2.0 CLR loading.  This will cause it to fail if you try to use it to enable this policy in a plugin for most third party applications that don’t have their app.config setup properly, as they will likely have already loaded the 2.0 runtime. As an example, take a simple audio player.  The code below shows how this can be used to properly, at runtime, only use the “native” API if this will succeed, and fallback (or raise a nicer exception) if this will fail: public class AudioPlayer { private IAudioEngine audioEngine; public AudioPlayer() { if (RuntimePolicyHelper.LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully) { // This will load a CLR 2 mixed mode assembly this.audioEngine = new AudioEngineNative(); } else { this.audioEngine = new AudioEngineManaged(); } } public void Play(string filename) { this.audioEngine.Play(filename); } } Now – the warning: This approach works, but I would be very hesitant to use it in public facing production code, especially for anything other than initializing your own application.  While this should work in a library, using it has a very nasty side effect: you change the runtime policy of the executing application in a way that is very hidden and non-obvious.

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• From J2EE to Java EE: what has changed?

  - by Bruno.Borges

  See original @Java_EE tweet on 29 May 2014 Yeap, it has been 8 years since the term J2EE was replaced, and still some people refer to it (mostly recruiters, luckily!). But then comes the question: what has changed besides the name? Our community friend Abhishek Gupta worked on this question and provided an excellent response titled "What's in a name? Java EE? J2EE?". But let me give you a few highlights here so you don't lose yourself with YATO (yet another tab opened): J2EE used to be an infrastructure and resources provider only, requiring developers to depend on external 3rd-party frameworks to then implement application requirements or improve productivity J2EE used to require hundreds of XML lines of codes to define just a dozen of resources like EJBs, MDBs, Servlets, and so on J2EE used to support only EAR (Enterprise Archives) with a bunch of other archives like JARs and WARs just to run a simple Web application And so on, and so on! It was a great technology but still required a lot of work to get something up and running. Remember xDoclet? Remember Struts? The old days of pure Hibernate code? Or when Ajax became a trending topic and we were all implementing it with DWR Servlet? Still, we J2EE developers survived, and learned, and helped evolve the platform to a whole new level of DX (Developer Experience). A new DX for J2EE suggested a new name. One that referred to the platform as the Enterprise Edition of Java, because "Java is why we're here" quoting Bill Shannon. The release of Java EE 5 included so many features that clearly showed developers the platform was going after all those DX gaps. Radical simplification of the persistence model with the introduction of JPA Support of Annotations following the launch of Java SE 5.0 Updated XML APIs with the introduction of StAX Drastic simplification of the EJB component model (with annotations!) Convention over Configuration and Dependency Injection A few bullets you may say but that represented a whole new DX and a vision for upcoming versions. Clearly, the release of Java EE 5 helped drive the future of the platform by reducing the number of XMLs, Java Interfaces, simplified configurations, provided convention-over-configuration, etc! We then saw the release of Java EE 6 with even more great features like Managed Beans, CDI, Bean Validation, improved JSP and Servlets APIs, JASPIC, the posisbility to deploy plain WARs and so many other improvements it is difficult to list in one sentence. And we've gotta give Spring Framework some credit here: thanks to Rod Johnson and team, concepts like Dependency Injection fit perfectly into the Java EE Platform. Clearly, Spring used to be one of the most inspiring frameworks for the Java EE platform, and it is great to see things like Pivotal and Spring supporting JSR 352 Batch API standard! Cooperation to keep improving DX at maximum in the server-side Java landscape.  The master piece result of these previous releases is seen and called today as Java EE 7, which by providing a newly and improved JavaServer Faces release, with new features for Web Development like WebSockets API, improved JAX-RS, and JSON-P, but also including Batch API and so many other great improvements, has increased developer productivity and brought innovation to server-side Java developers. Java EE is not just a new name (which was introduced back in May 2006!) but a new Developer Experience for server-side Java developers. To show you why we are here and where we are going (see the Java EE 8 update), we wanted to share with you a draft of the new Java EE logos that the evangelist team created, to help you spread the word about Java EE. You can get access to these images at the Java EE Platform Facebook Album, or the Google+ Java EE Platform Album whichever is better for you, but don't forget to like and/or +1 those social network profiles :-) A message to all job recruiters: stop using J2EE and start using Java EE if you want to find great Java EE 5, Java EE 6, or Java EE 7 developers To not only save you recruiter valuable characters when tweeting that job opportunity but to also match the correct term, we invite you to replace long terms like "Java/J2EE" or even worse "#Java #J2EE #JEE" or all these awkward combinations with the only acceptable hashtag: #JavaEE. And to prove that Java EE is catching among developers and even recruiters, and that J2EE is past, let me highlight here how are the jobs trends! The image below is from Indeed.com trends page, for the following keywords: J2EE, Java/J2EE, Java/JEE, JEE. As you can see, J2EE is indeed going away, while JEE saw some increase. Perhaps because some people are just lazy to type "Java" but at the same time they are aware that J2EE (the '2') is past. We shall forgive that for a while :-) Another proof that J2EE is going away is by looking at its trending statistics at Google. People have been showing less and less interest in the term J2EE. See the chart below:  Recruiter, if you still need proof that J2EE is past, that Java EE is trending, and that other job recruiters are seeking for Java EE developers, and that the developer community is aware of the new term, perhaps these other charts can show you what term you should be using. See for example the Job Trends for Java EE at Indeed.com and notice where it started... 2006! 8 years ago :-) Last but not least, the Google Trends for Java EE term (including the still wrong but forgivable JavaEE term) shows us that the new term is catching up very well. J2EE is past. Oh, and don't worry about the curves going down. We developers like to be hipsters sometimes and today only AngularJS, NodeJS, BigData are going up. Java EE and other traditional server-side technologies such as Spring, or even from other platforms such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, Grails, are pretty much consolidated and the curves... well, they are consolidated too. So If you are a Java EE developer, drop that J2EE from your résumé, and let recruiters also know that this term is past. Embrace Java EE, and enjoy a new developer experience for server-side Java developers. Java EE on TwitterJava EE on Google+Java EE on Facebook

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• Set Context User Principal for Customized Authentication in SignalR

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2014/05/27/set-context-user-principal-for-customized-authentication-in-signalr.aspxCurrently I'm working on a single page application project which is built on AngularJS and ASP.NET WebAPI. When I need to implement some features that needs real-time communication and push notifications from server side I decided to use SignalR. SignalR is a project currently developed by Microsoft to build web-based, read-time communication application. You can find it here. With a lot of introductions and guides it's not a difficult task to use SignalR with ASP.NET WebAPI and AngularJS. I followed this and this even though it's based on SignalR 1. But when I tried to implement the authentication for my SignalR I was struggled 2 days and finally I got a solution by myself. This might not be the best one but it actually solved all my problem.   In many articles it's said that you don't need to worry about the authentication of SignalR since it uses the web application authentication. For example if your web application utilizes form authentication, SignalR will use the user principal your web application authentication module resolved, check if the principal exist and authenticated. But in my solution my ASP.NET WebAPI, which is hosting SignalR as well, utilizes OAuth Bearer authentication. So when the SignalR connection was established the context user principal was empty. So I need to authentication and pass the principal by myself.   Firstly I need to create a class which delivered from "AuthorizeAttribute", that will takes the responsible for authenticate when SignalR connection established and any method was invoked. 1: public class QueryStringBearerAuthorizeAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute 2: { 3: public override bool AuthorizeHubConnection(HubDescriptor hubDescriptor, IRequest request) 4: { 5: } 6:  7: public override bool AuthorizeHubMethodInvocation(IHubIncomingInvokerContext hubIncomingInvokerContext, bool appliesToMethod) 8: { 9: } 10: } The method "AuthorizeHubConnection" will be invoked when any SignalR connection was established. And here I'm going to retrieve the Bearer token from query string, try to decrypt and recover the login user's claims. 1: public override bool AuthorizeHubConnection(HubDescriptor hubDescriptor, IRequest request) 2: { 3: var dataProtectionProvider = new DpapiDataProtectionProvider(); 4: var secureDataFormat = new TicketDataFormat(dataProtectionProvider.Create()); 5: // authenticate by using bearer token in query string 6: var token = request.QueryString.Get(WebApiConfig.AuthenticationType); 7: var ticket = secureDataFormat.Unprotect(token); 8: if (ticket != null && ticket.Identity != null && ticket.Identity.IsAuthenticated) 9: { 10: // set the authenticated user principal into environment so that it can be used in the future 11: request.Environment["server.User"] = new ClaimsPrincipal(ticket.Identity); 12: return true; 13: } 14: else 15: { 16: return false; 17: } 18: } In the code above I created "TicketDataFormat" instance, which must be same as the one I used to generate the Bearer token when user logged in. Then I retrieve the token from request query string and unprotect it. If I got a valid ticket with identity and it's authenticated this means it's a valid token. Then I pass the user principal into request's environment property which can be used in nearly future. Since my website was built in AngularJS so the SignalR client was in pure JavaScript, and it's not support to set customized HTTP headers in SignalR JavaScript client, I have to pass the Bearer token through request query string. This is not a restriction of SignalR, but a restriction of WebSocket. For security reason WebSocket doesn't allow client to set customized HTTP headers from browser. Next, I need to implement the authentication logic in method "AuthorizeHubMethodInvocation" which will be invoked when any SignalR method was invoked. 1: public override bool AuthorizeHubMethodInvocation(IHubIncomingInvokerContext hubIncomingInvokerContext, bool appliesToMethod) 2: { 3: var connectionId = hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context.ConnectionId; 4: // check the authenticated user principal from environment 5: var environment = hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context.Request.Environment; 6: var principal = environment["server.User"] as ClaimsPrincipal; 7: if (principal != null && principal.Identity != null && principal.Identity.IsAuthenticated) 8: { 9: // create a new HubCallerContext instance with the principal generated from token 10: // and replace the current context so that in hubs we can retrieve current user identity 11: hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context = new HubCallerContext(new ServerRequest(environment), connectionId); 12: return true; 13: } 14: else 15: { 16: return false; 17: } 18: } Since I had passed the user principal into request environment in previous method, I can simply check if it exists and valid. If so, what I need is to pass the principal into context so that SignalR hub can use. Since the "User" property is all read-only in "hubIncomingInvokerContext", I have to create a new "ServerRequest" instance with principal assigned, and set to "hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context". After that, we can retrieve the principal in my Hubs through "Context.User" as below. 1: public class DefaultHub : Hub 2: { 3: public object Initialize(string host, string service, JObject payload) 4: { 5: var connectionId = Context.ConnectionId; 6: ... ... 7: var domain = string.Empty; 8: var identity = Context.User.Identity as ClaimsIdentity; 9: if (identity != null) 10: { 11: var claim = identity.FindFirst("Domain"); 12: if (claim != null) 13: { 14: domain = claim.Value; 15: } 16: } 17: ... ... 18: } 19: } Finally I just need to add my "QueryStringBearerAuthorizeAttribute" into the SignalR pipeline. 1: app.Map("/signalr", map => 2: { 3: // Setup the CORS middleware to run before SignalR. 4: // By default this will allow all origins. You can 5: // configure the set of origins and/or http verbs by 6: // providing a cors options with a different policy. 7: map.UseCors(CorsOptions.AllowAll); 8: var hubConfiguration = new HubConfiguration 9: { 10: // You can enable JSONP by uncommenting line below. 11: // JSONP requests are insecure but some older browsers (and some 12: // versions of IE) require JSONP to work cross domain 13: // EnableJSONP = true 14: EnableJavaScriptProxies = false 15: }; 16: // Require authentication for all hubs 17: var authorizer = new QueryStringBearerAuthorizeAttribute(); 18: var module = new AuthorizeModule(authorizer, authorizer); 19: GlobalHost.HubPipeline.AddModule(module); 20: // Run the SignalR pipeline. We're not using MapSignalR 21: // since this branch already runs under the "/signalr" path. 22: map.RunSignalR(hubConfiguration); 23: }); On the client side should pass the Bearer token through query string before I started the connection as below. 1: self.connection = $.hubConnection(signalrEndpoint); 2: self.proxy = self.connection.createHubProxy(hubName); 3: self.proxy.on(notifyEventName, function (event, payload) { 4: options.handler(event, payload); 5: }); 6: // add the authentication token to query string 7: // we cannot use http headers since web socket protocol doesn't support 8: self.connection.qs = { Bearer: AuthService.getToken() }; 9: // connection to hub 10: self.connection.start(); 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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• Developing Mobile Applications: Web, Native, or Hybrid?

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Authors: Joe Huang, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Mobile Application Development Framework  and Carlos Chang, Senior Principal Product Director The proliferation of mobile devices and platforms represents a game-changing technology shift on a number of levels. Companies must decide not only the best strategic use of mobile platforms, but also how to most efficiently implement them. Inevitably, this conversation devolves to the developers, who face the task of developing and supporting mobile applications—not a simple task in light of the number of devices and platforms. Essentially, developers can choose from the following three different application approaches, each with its own set of pros and cons. Native Applications: This refers to apps built for and installed on a specific platform, such as iOS or Android, using a platform-specific software development kit (SDK).  For example, apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad are designed to run specifically on iOS and are written in Xcode/Objective-C. Android has its own variation of Java, Windows uses C#, and so on.  Native apps written for one platform cannot be deployed on another. Native apps offer fast performance and access to native-device services but require additional resources to develop and maintain each platform, which can be expensive and time consuming. Mobile Web Applications: Unlike native apps, mobile web apps are not installed on the device; rather, they are accessed via a Web browser.  These are server-side applications that render HTML, typically adjusting the design depending on the type of device making the request.  There are no program coding constraints for writing server-side apps—they can be written in Java, C, PHP, etc., it doesn’t matter.  Instead, the server detects what type of mobile browser is pinging the server and adjusts accordingly. For example, it can deliver fully JavaScript and CSS-enabled content to smartphone browsers, while downgrading gracefully to basic HTML for feature phone browsers. Mobile apps work across platforms, but are limited to what you can do through a browser and require Internet connectivity. For certain types of applications, these constraints may not be an issue. Oracle supports mobile web applications via ADF Faces (for tablets) and ADF Mobile browser (Trinidad) for smartphone and feature phones. Hybrid Applications: As the name implies, hybrid apps combine technologies from native and mobile Web apps to gain the benefits each. For example, these apps are installed on a device, like their pure native app counterparts, while the user interface (UI) is based on HTML5.  This UI runs locally within the native container, which usually leverages the device’s browser engine.  The advantage of using HTML5 is a consistent, cross-platform UI that works well on most devices.  Combining this with the native container, which is installed on-device, provides mobile users with access to local device services, such as camera, GPS, and local device storage.  Native apps may offer greater flexibility in integrating with device native services.  However, since hybrid applications already provide device integrations that typical enterprise applications need, this is typically less of an issue.  The new Oracle ADF Mobile release is an HTML5 and Java hybrid framework that targets mobile app development to iOS and Android from one code base. So, Which is the Best Approach? The short answer is – the best choice depends on the type of application you are developing.  For instance, animation-intensive apps such as games would favor native apps, while hybrid applications may be better suited for enterprise mobile apps because they provide multi-platform support. Just for starters, the following issues must be considered when choosing a development path. Application Complexity: How complex is the application? A quick app that accesses a database or Web service for some data to display?  You can keep it simple, and a mobile Web app may suffice. However, for a mobile/field worker type of applications that supports mission critical functionality, hybrid or native applications are typically needed. Richness of User Interactivity: What type of user experience is required for the application?  Mobile browser-based app that’s optimized for mobile UI may suffice for quick lookup or productivity type of applications.  However, hybrid/native application would typically be required to deliver highly interactive user experiences needed for field-worker type of applications.  For example, interactive BI charts/graphs, maps, voice/email integration, etc.  In the most extreme case like gaming applications, native applications may be necessary to deliver the highly animated and graphically intensive user experience. Performance: What type of performance is required by the application functionality?  For instance, for real-time look up of data over the network, mobile app performance depends on network latency and server infrastructure capabilities.  If consistent performance is required, data would typically need to be cached, which is supported on hybrid or native applications only. Connectivity and Availability: What sort of connectivity will your application require? Does the app require Web access all the time in order to always retrieve the latest data from the server? Or do the requirements dictate offline support? While native and hybrid apps can be built to operate offline, Web mobile apps require Web connectivity. Multi-platform Requirements: The terms “consumerization of IT” and BYOD (bring your own device) effectively mean that the line between the consumer and the enterprise devices have become blurred. Employees are bringing their personal mobile devices to work and are often expecting that they work in the corporate network and access back-office applications.  Even if companies restrict access to the big dogs: (iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, possibly Windows Phone and tablets), trying to support each platform natively will require increasing resources and domain expertise with each new language/platform. And let’s not forget the maintenance costs, involved in upgrading new versions of each platform.   Where multi-platform support is needed, Web mobile or hybrid apps probably have the advantage. Going native, and trying to support multiple operating systems may be cost prohibitive with existing resources and developer skills. Device-Services Access:  If your app needs to access local device services, such as the camera, contacts app, accelerometer, etc., then your choices are limited to native or hybrid applications.   Fragmentation: Apple controls Apple iOS and the only concern is what version iOS is running on any given device.   Not so Android, which is open source. There are many, many versions and variants of Android running on different devices, which can be a nightmare for app developers trying to support different devices running different flavors of Android.  (Is it an Amazon Kindle Fire? a Samsung Galaxy?  A Barnes & Noble Nook?) This is a nightmare scenario for native apps—on the other hand, a mobile Web or hybrid app, when properly designed, can shield you from these complexities because they are based on common frameworks.  Resources: How many developers can you dedicate to building and supporting mobile application development?  What are their existing skills sets?  If you’re considering native application development due to the complexity of the application under development, factor the costs of becoming proficient on a each platform’s OS and programming language. Add another platform, and that’s another language, another SDK. On the other side of the equation, Web mobile or hybrid applications are simpler to make, and readily support more platforms, but there may be performance trade-offs. Conclusion This only scratches the surface. However, I hope to have suggested some food for thought in choosing your mobile development strategy.  Do your due diligence, search the Web, read up on mobile, talk to peers, attend events. The development team at Oracle is working hard on mobile technologies to help customers extend enterprise applications to mobile faster and effectively.  To learn more on what Oracle has to offer, check out the Oracle ADF Mobile (hybrid) and ADF Faces/ADF Mobile browser (Web Mobile) solutions from Oracle.   Additional Information Blog: ADF Blog Product Information on OTN: ADF Mobile Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 1)

  - by Simon Cooper

  SQL Compare is one of Red Gate's most successful SQL Server tools; it allows developers and DBAs to compare and synchronize the contents of their databases. Although similar tools exist for Oracle, they are quite noticeably lacking in the usability and stability that SQL Compare is known for in the SQL Server world. We could see a real need for a usable schema comparison tools for Oracle, and so the Schema Compare for Oracle project was born. Over the next few weeks, as we come up to release of v1, I'll be doing a series of posts on the development of Schema Compare for Oracle. For the first post, I thought I would start with the main pitfalls that we stumbled across when developing the product, especially from a SQL Server background. 1. Schemas and Databases The most obvious difference is that the concept of a 'database' is quite different between Oracle and SQL Server. On SQL Server, one server instance has multiple databases, each with separate schemas. There is typically little communication between separate databases, and most databases are no more than about 1000-2000 objects. This means SQL Compare can register an entire database in a reasonable amount of time, and cross-database dependencies probably won't be an issue. It is a quite different scene under Oracle, however. The terms 'database' and 'instance' are used interchangeably, (although technically 'database' refers to the datafiles on disk, and 'instance' the running Oracle process that reads & writes to the database), and a database is a single conceptual entity. This immediately presents problems, as it is infeasible to register an entire database as we do in SQL Compare; in my Oracle install, using the standard recommended options, there are 63975 system objects. If we tried to register all those, not only would it take hours, but the client would probably run out of memory before we finished. As a result, we had to allow people to specify what schemas they wanted to register. This decision had quite a few knock-on effects for the design, which I will cover in a future post. 2. Connecting to Oracle The next obvious difference is in actually connecting to Oracle – in SQL Server, you can specify a server and database, and off you go. On Oracle things are slightly more complicated. SIDs, Service Names, and TNS A database (the files on disk) must have a unique identifier for the databases on the system, called the SID. It also has a global database name, which consists of a name (which doesn't have to match the SID) and a domain. Alternatively, you can identify a database using a service name, which normally has a 1-to-1 relationship with instances, but may not if, for example, using RAC (Real Application Clusters) for redundancy and failover. You specify the computer and instance you want to connect to using TNS (Transparent Network Substrate). The user-visible parts are a config file (tnsnames.ora) on the client machine that specifies how to connect to an instance. For example, the entry for one of my test instances is: SC_11GDB1 = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = simonctest)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = 11gR1db1) ) ) This gives the hostname, port, and SID of the instance I want to connect to, and associates it with a name (SC_11GDB1). The tnsnames syntax also allows you to specify failover, multiple descriptions and address lists, and client load balancing. You can then specify this TNS identifier as the data source in a connection string. Although using ODP.NET (the .NET dlls provided by Oracle) was fine for internal prototype builds, once we released the EAP we discovered that this simply wasn't an acceptable solution for installs on other people's machines. Due to .NET assembly strong naming, users had to have installed on their machines the exact same version of the ODP.NET dlls as we had on our build server. We couldn't ship the ODP.NET dlls with our installer as the Oracle license agreement prohibited this, and we didn't want to force users to install another Oracle client just so they can run our program. To be able to list the TNS entries in the connection dialog, we also had to locate and parse the tnsnames.ora file, which was complicated by users with several Oracle client installs and intricate TNS entries. After much swearing at our computers, we eventually decided to use a third party Oracle connection library from Devart that we could ship with our program; this could use whatever client version was installed, parse the TNS entries for us, and also had the nice feature of being able to connect to an Oracle server without having any client installed at all. Unfortunately, their current license agreement prevents us from shipping an Oracle SDK, but that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it. 3. Running synchronization scripts The most important difference is that in Oracle, DDL is non-transactional; you cannot rollback DDL statements like you can on SQL Server. Although we considered various solutions to this, including using the flashback archive or recycle bin, or generating an undo script, no reliable method of completely undoing a half-executed sync script has yet been found; so in this case we simply have to trust that the DBA or developer will check and verify the script before running it. However, before we got to that stage, we had to get the scripts to run in the first place... To run a synchronization script from SQL Compare we essentially pass the script over to the SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery method. However, when we tried to do the same for an OracleConnection we got a very strange error – 'ORA-00911: invalid character', even when running the most basic CREATE TABLE command. After much hair-pulling and Googling, we discovered that Oracle has got some very strange behaviour with semicolons at the end of statements. To understand what's going on, we need to take a quick foray into SQL and PL/SQL. PL/SQL is not T-SQL In SQL Server, T-SQL is the language used to interface with the database. It has DDL, DML, control flow, and many other nice features (like Turing-completeness) that you can mix and match in the same script. In Oracle, DDL SQL and PL/SQL are two completely separate languages, with different syntax, different datatypes and different execution engines within the instance. Oracle SQL is much more like 'pure' ANSI SQL, with no state, no control flow, and only the basic DML commands. PL/SQL is the Turing-complete language, but can only do DML and DCL (i.e. BEGIN TRANSATION commands). Any DDL or SQL commands that aren't recognised by the PL/SQL engine have to be passed back to the SQL engine via an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command. In PL/SQL, a semicolons is a valid token used to delimit the end of a statement. In SQL, a semicolon is not a valid token (even though the Oracle documentation gives them at the end of the syntax diagrams) . When you execute the command CREATE TABLE table1 (COL1 NUMBER); in SQL*Plus the semicolon on the end is a command to SQL*Plus to execute the preceding statement on the server; it strips off the semicolon before passing it on. SQL Developer does a similar thing. When executing a PL/SQL block, however, the syntax is like so: BEGIN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (1); INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (2); END; / In this case, the semicolon is accepted by the PL/SQL engine as a statement delimiter, and instead the / is the command to SQL*Plus to execute the current block. This explains the ORA-00911 error we got when trying to run the CREATE TABLE command – the server is complaining about the semicolon on the end. This also means that there is no SQL syntax to execute more than one DDL command in the same OracleCommand. Therefore, we would have to do a round-trip to the server for every command we want to execute. Obviously, this would cause lots of network traffic and be very slow on slow or congested networks. Our first attempt at a solution was to wrap every SQL statement (without semicolon) inside an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command in a PL/SQL block and pass that to the server to execute. One downside of this solution is that we get no feedback as to how the script execution is going; we're currently evaluating better solutions to this thorny issue. Next up: Dependencies; how we solved the problem of being unable to register the entire database, and the knock-on effects to the whole product.

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• ApiChange Is Released!

  - by Alois Kraus

  I have been working on little tool to simplify my life and perhaps yours as developer as well. It is basically a command line tool that allows you to execute queries on your compiled .NET code base. The main purpose is to find out how big the impact of an api change would be if you changed this or that.  Now you can do high level operations like Diff public types for breaking changes. Who uses a method? Who uses a type? Who uses implements an interface? Who references me? What format has the binary  (32/64, Managed C++, Pure IL, Unmanaged)? Search for all event subscribers and unsubscribers. A unique feature is to check for event subscription imbalances. Forgotten event subscriptions are the 90% cause of managed memory leaks. It is done at a per class level. If one class does subscribe to one event more often than it does unsubscribe it is treated as possible event subscription imbalance. Another unique ability is to search for users of string literals which allows you to track users of a string constant which is not possible otherwise. For incremental builds the ShowRebuildTargets command can be used to identify the dependant targets that need a rebuild after you did compile one assembly. It has some heuristics in place to determine the impact of breaking changes and finds out which targets need to be recompiled as well. It has a ton of other features and a an API to access these things programmatically so you can build upon these simple queries create even better tools. Perhaps we get a Visual Studio plug in? You can download it from CodePlex here. It works via XCopy deployment. Simply let it run and check the command line help out. The best feature in my opinion is that the output of nearly all commands can be piped to Excel for further analysis. Since it does read also the pdbs it can show you the source file name and line number as well for all matches. The following picture shows the output of a –WhousesType query. The following command checks where type from BaseLibraryV1.dll are used inside DependantLibV1.dll. All matches are printed out with the reason and matching item along with file and line number. There is even a hyper link to the match which will open Visual Studio. ApiChange -whousestype "*" BaseLibraryV1.dll -in DependantLibV1.dll –excel The "*” is the actual query which means all types. The syntax is the same like in C# just that placeholders are allowed ;-). More info's can be found at the Codeplex Documentation.     The tool was developed in a TDD style manner which means that it is heavily tested and already used by a quite large user base inside the company I do work for. Luckily for you I got the permission to make it public so you take advantage of it. It is fully instrumented with tracing. If you find bugs simply add the –trace command line switch to find out what is failing and send me the output. How is it done? Your first guess might be that it uses reflection. Wrong. It is based on Mono Cecil a free IL parser with a fantastic API to access all internals of a managed assembly. The speed is awesome and to make it even faster I did make the tool heavily multi threaded. The query above did execute in 1.8s with the Excel output. On a rather slow machine I can analyze over 1500 assemblies in less than 40s with a very low memory consumption. The true power of Mono Cecil is that I can load an assembly like any other data file. I have no problems unloading a file but if I would have used reflection I would need to unload a whole AppDomain just to get rid of one assembly in my memory. Just to give you a glimpse how ApiChange.Api.dll can be used I show you one of the unit tests:           public void Can_Find_GenericMethodInvocations_With_Type_Parameters()         { // 1. Create an aggregator to collect our matches             UsageQueryAggregator agg = new UsageQueryAggregator();   // 2. This is the type we want to search for. Load it via the type query             var decimalType = TypeQuery.GetTypeByName(TestConstants.MscorlibAssembly, "System.Decimal");   // 3. register the type query which searches for uses of the Decimal type             new WhoUsesType(agg, decimalType);   // 4. Search for all users of the Decimal type in the DependandLibV1Assembly             agg.Analyze(TestConstants.DependandLibV1Assembly);   // Extract matches and assert             Assert.AreEqual(2, agg.MethodMatches.Count, "Method match count");             Assert.AreEqual("UseGenericMethod", agg.MethodMatches[0].Match.Name);             Assert.AreEqual("UseGenericMethod", agg.MethodMatches[1].Match.Name);         } Many thanks go from here to Jb Evian for the creation of Mono.Cecil. Without this fantastic piece of code it would have been much much harder. There are other options around like the Common Compiler Infrastructure  Metadata Api which should do the same thing but it was not a real option since the Microsoft reader did fail on even simple assemblies (at least in September 2009 this was the case). Besides this I found the CCI Apis much harder to use. The only real competitor was Reflector which does support many things but does not let me access his cool high level analyze commands. So I decided to dig into the IL specs and as a result you can query your compiled binaries from the command line or programmatically. The best thing is you try it out for yourself and give me some feedback what you miss. If you want to contribute or have a cool idea what should be added drop me a mail at A Kraus1@___No [email protected]. There is much more inside the tool I did not talk about it (yet).

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• Book Review: Brownfield Application Development in .NET

  - by DotNetBlues

  I recently finished reading the book Brownfield Application Development in .NET by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham.  The book is available from Manning.  First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Manning as a publisher.  I've found their books to be top-quality, over all.  As a Kindle owner, I also appreciate getting an ebook copy along with the dead tree copy.  I find ebooks to be much more convenient to read, but hard-copies are easier to reference. The book covers, surprisingly enough, working with brownfield applications.  Which is well and good, if that term has meaning to you.  It didn't for me.  Without retreading a chunk of the first chapter, the authors break code bases into three broad categories: greenfield, brownfield, and legacy.  Greenfield is, essentially, new development that hasn't had time to rust and is (hopefully) being approached with some discipline.  Legacy applications are those that are more or less stable and functional, that do not expect to see a lot of work done to them, and are more likely to be replaced than reworked. Brownfield code is the gray (brown?) area between the two and the authors argue, quite effectively, that it is the most likely state for an application to be in.  Brownfield code has, in some way, been allowed to tarnish around the edges and can be difficult to work with.  Although I hadn't realized it, most of the code I've worked on has been brownfield.  Sometimes, there's talk of scrapping and starting over.  Sometimes, the team dismisses increased discipline as ivory tower nonsense.  And, sometimes, I've been the ignorant culprit vexing my future self. The book is broken into two major sections, plus an introduction chapter and an appendix.  The first section covers what the authors refer to as "The Ecosystem" which consists of version control, build and integration, testing, metrics, and defect management.  The second section is on actually writing code for brownfield applications and discusses object-oriented principles, architecture, external dependencies, and, of course, how to deal with these when coming into an existing code base. The ecosystem section is just shy of 140 pages long and brings some real meat to the matter.  The focus on "pain points" immediately sets the tone as problem-solution, rather than academic.  The authors also approach some of the topics from a different angle than some essays I've read on similar topics.  For example, the chapter on automated testing is on just that -- automated testing.  It's all well and good to criticize a project as conflating integration tests with unit tests, but it really doesn't make anyone's life better.  The discussion on testing is more focused on the "right" level of testing for existing projects.  Sometimes, an integration test is the best you can do without gutting a section of functional code.  Even if you can sell other developers and/or management on doing so, it doesn't actually provide benefit to your customers to rewrite code that works.  This isn't to say the authors encourage sloppy coding.  Far from it.  Just that they point out the wisdom of ignoring the sleeping bear until after you deal with the snarling wolf. The other sections take a similarly real-world, workable approach to the pain points they address.  As the section moves from technical solutions like version control and continuous integration (CI) to the softer, process issues of metrics and defect tracking, the authors begin to gently suggest moving toward a zero defect count.  While that really sounds like an unreasonable goal for a lot of ongoing projects, it's quite apparent that the authors have first-hand experience with taming some gruesome projects.  The suggestions are grounded and workable, and the difficulty of some situations is explicitly acknowledged. I have to admit that I started getting bored by the end of the ecosystem section.  No matter how valuable I think a good project manager or business analyst is to a successful ALM, at the end of the day, I'm a gear-head.  Also, while I agreed with a lot of the ecosystem ideas, in theory, I didn't necessarily feel that a lot of the single-developer projects that I'm often involved in really needed that level of rigor.  It's only after reading the sidebars and commentary in the coding section that I had the context for the arguments made in favor of a strong ecosystem supporting the development process.  That isn't to say that I didn't support good product management -- indeed, I've probably pushed too hard, on occasion, for a strong ALM outside of just development.  This book gave me deeper insight into why some corners shouldn't be cut and how damaging certain sins of omission can be. The code section, though, kept me engaged for its entirety.  Many technical books can be used as reference material from day one.  The authors were clear, however, that this book is not one of these.  The first chapter of the section (chapter seven, over all) addresses object oriented (OO) practices.  I've read any number of definitions, discussions, and treatises on OO.  None of the chapter was new to me, but it was a good review, and I'm of the opinion that it's good to review the foundations of what you do, from time to time, so I didn't mind. The remainder of the book is really just about how to apply OOP to existing code -- and, just because all your code exists in classes does not mean that it's object oriented.  That topic has the potential to be extremely condescending, but the authors miraculously managed to never once make me feel like a dolt or that they were wagging their finger at me for my prior sins.  Instead, they continue the "pain points" and problem-solution presentation to give concrete examples of how to apply some pretty academic-sounding ideas.  That's a point worth emphasizing, as my experience with most OO discussions is that they stay in the academic realm.  This book gives some very, very good explanations of why things like the Liskov Substitution Principle exist and why a corporate programmer should even care.  Even if you know, with absolute certainty, that you'll never have to work on an existing code-base, I would recommend this book just for the clarity it provides on OOP. This book goes beyond just theory, or even real-world application.  It presents some methods for fixing problems that any developer can, and probably will, encounter in the wild.  First, the authors address refactoring application layers and internal dependencies.  Then, they take you through those layers from the UI to the data access layer and external dependencies.  Finally, they come full circle to tie it all back to the overall process.  By the time the book is done, you're left with a lot of ideas, but also a reasonable plan to begin to improve an existing project structure. Throughout the book, it's apparent that the authors have their own preferred methodology (TDD and domain-driven design), as well as some preferred tools.  The "Our .NET Toolbox" is something of a neon sign pointing to that latter point.  They do not beat the reader over the head with anything resembling a "One True Way" mentality.  Even for the most emphatic points, the tone is quite congenial and helpful.  With some of the near-theological divides that exist within the tech community, I found this to be one of the more remarkable characteristics of the book.  Although the authors favor tools that might be considered Alt.NET, there is no reason the advice and techniques given couldn't be quite successful in a pure Microsoft shop with Team Foundation Server.  For that matter, even though the book specifically addresses .NET, it could be applied to a Java and Oracle shop, as well.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012Popular Releasesmenu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.1: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...iPDC - Free Phasor Data Concentrator: iPDC-v1.3.1: iPDC suite version-1.3.1, Modifications and Bug Fixed (from v 1.3.0) New User Manual for iPDC-v1.3.1 available on websites. Bug resolved : PMU Simulator TCP connection error and hang connection for client (PDC). Now PMU Simulator (server) can communicate more than one PDCs (clients) over TCP and UDP parallely. PMU Simulator is now sending the exact data frames as mentioned in data rate by user. PMU Simulator data rate has been verified by iPDC database entries and PMU Connection Tes...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks OData Feed: The AdventureWorks OData service exposes resources based on specific SQL views. The SQL views are a limited subset of the AdventureWorks database that results in several consuming scenarios: CompanySales Documents ManufacturingInstructions ProductCatalog TerritorySalesDrilldown WorkOrderRouting How to install the sample You can consume the AdventureWorks OData feed from http://services.odata.org/AdventureWorksV3/AdventureWorks.svc. You can also consume the AdventureWorks OData fe...Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.6: Sorting feeds alphabetical is now optional (see preferences window)DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.03: Major Highlights Fixed issue where mailto: links were not working when sending bulk email Fixed issue where uses did not see friendship relationships Problem is in 6.2, which does not show in the Versions Affected list above. Fixed the issue with cascade deletes in comments in CoreMessaging_Notification Fixed UI issue when using a date fields as a required profile property during user registration Fixed error when running the product in debug mode Fixed visibility issue when...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.65: Fixed null-reference error in the build task constructor.Active Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 5.0.0 RC: RC release of Active Forums 5.0.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.7 Beta: Bug in the display icon for apk's, will fix with next release Added fallback icon if unable to get the image/icon from the Cloud Service Removed some stale plugins that were either out dated or incomplete. Added handler for *.ab files for restoring backups Added plugin to create device backups Backups stored in %USERPROFILE%\Android Backups\%DEVICE_ID%\ Added custom folder icon for the android backups directory better error handling for installing an apk bug fixes for the Runn...BI System Monitor: v2.1: Data Audits report and supporting SQL, and SSIS package Environment Overview report enhancements, improving the appearance, addition of data audit finding indicators Note: SQL 2012 version coming soon.Hidden Capture (HC): Hidden Capture 1.1: Hidden Capture 1.1 by Mohsen E.Dawatgar http://Hidden-Capture.blogfa.comExt Spec: Ext Spec 0.2.1: Refined examples and improved distribution options.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: Version 1: --Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.5: Version 8.5 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine. New features include: Built-in search engine using Lucene.NET Flood control improvements Notifications improvements: sync option and mail body View Roadmap for more details webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 961aff884a9187b6e8a86d68913cdd31f8deaf83WiX Toolset: WiX Toolset v3.6: WiX Toolset v3.6 introduces the Burn bootstrapper/chaining engine and support for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5. Other minor functionality includes: WixDependencyExtension supports dependency checking among MSI packages. WixFirewallExtension supports more features of Windows Firewall. WixTagExtension supports Software Id Tagging. WixUtilExtension now supports recursive directory deletion. Melt simplifies pure-WiX patching by extracting .msi package content and updating .w...Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.2.0）: ????ISE?0.1.0??，?????，ISE?0.2.0?????????，???????，????????20???follow?ISE，????，??ISE??????????，??????????，?????????，?????????0.2.0??????，??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”，??????，?????????，???????，???????????????????，????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????： 1. ??“????” ??。??????????，?????????，???????????????????。??：????????，????????????，??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????，???????，???????????????，?????????????，????????，?0.2.0?，???????...GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.DotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.04: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.04 Don't forget to backup your installation before upgrade. Changes in 06.00.04 Fix: Sql Scripts for 6.003 missed object qualifiers within stored procedures Fix: added missing resource "cmdCancel.Text" in form.ascx.resx Changes in 06.00.03 Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext Changes in 06.00.02 The scripts are now compatible with SQL Azure, tested in a ne...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.New ProjectsAny-Service: AnyService is a .net 4.0 Windows service shell. It hosts any windows application in non-gui mode to run as a service.BabyCloudDrives - the multi cloud drive desktop's application: wpf ????BLACK ORANGE: Download The HPAD TEXT EDITOR and use it Wisely.. CodePlex New Release Checker: CodePlex New Release Checker is a small library that makes it easy to add, "New Version Available!" functionality to your CodePlex project.Collect: ????????！CSVManager: CSV??CSV?????，????CSV??，??????Exam Project: My Exam Project. Computer Vision, C and OpenCV-FTP: Hey guys thanks for checking out my ftp!Haushaltsbuch: 1ModMaker.Lua: ModMaker.Lua is an open source .NET library that parses and executes Lua code.MyJabbr: MyJabbr netduinoscope: Design shield and software to use netduino as oscilloscopeNetSurveillance Web Application: Net Surveillance Web ApplicationNiconicoApiHelper: ????API?????????OStega: A simple library for encrypt text into an bmp or png image.OURORM: ormTFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit: The TFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit is a set of tools that integrate with TFS 2010 to help manage configuration and deployment to various remote environments.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: A step-by-step guide for building Team Foundation Server 2012 environments that include SharePoint Server 2010, SQL Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 and more!WinRT LineChart: An attempt at creating an usable LineChart for everyone to use in his/her own Windows 8 Apps

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