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Physical Directories vs. MVC View Paths

- by Rick Strahl

This post falls into the bucket of operator error on my part, but I want to share this anyway because it describes an issue that has bitten me a few times now and writing it down might keep it a little stronger in my mind. I've been working on an MVC project the last few days, and at the end of a long day I accidentally moved one of my View folders from the MVC Root Folder to the project root. It must have been at the very end of the day before shutting down because tests and manual site navigation worked fine just before I quit for the night. I checked in changes and called it a night. Next day I came back, started running the app and had a lot of breaks with certain views. Oddly custom routes to these controllers/views worked, but stock /{controller}/{action} routes would not. After a bit of spelunking I realized that "Hey one of my View Folders is missing", which made some sense given the error messages I got. I looked in the recycle bin - nothing there, so rather than try to figure out what the hell happened, just restored from my last SVN checkin. At this point the folders are back… but… view access still ends up breaking for this set of views. Specifically I'm getting the Yellow Screen of Death with: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current context Here's the full error: Server Error in '/ClassifiedsWeb' Application. Compilation ErrorDescription: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.Compiler Error Message: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current contextSource Error: Line 1: @model ClassifiedsWeb.EntryViewModel Line 2: @{ Line 3: ViewBag.Title = Model.Entry.Title + " - " + ClassifiedsBusiness.App.Configuration.ApplicationName; Source File: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml Line: 1 Compiler Warning Messages: Show Detailed Compiler Output: Show Complete Compilation Source: Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.272 Here's what's really odd about this error: The views now do exist in the /Views/Classifieds folder of the project, but it appears like MVC is trying to execute the views directly. This is getting pretty weird, man! So I hook up some break points in my controllers to see if my controller actions are getting fired - and sure enough it turns out they are not - but only for those views that were previously 'lost' and then restored from SVN. WTF? At this point I'm thinking that I must have messed up one of the config files, but after some more spelunking and realizing that all the other Controller views work, I give up that idea. Config's gotta be OK if other controllers and views are working. Root Folders and MVC Views don't mix As I mentioned the problem was the fact that I inadvertantly managed to drag my View folder to the root folder of the project. Here's what this looks like in my FUBAR'd project structure after I copied back /Views/Classifieds folder from SVN: There's the actual root folder in the /Views folder and the accidental copy that sits of the root. I of course did not notice the /Classifieds folder at the root because it was excluded and didn't show up in the project. Now, before you call me a complete idiot remember that this happened by accident - an accidental drag probably just before shutting down for the night. :-) So why does this break? MVC should be happy with views in the /Views/Classifieds folder right? While MVC might be happy, IIS is not. The fact that there is a physical folder on disk takes precedence over MVC's routing. In other words if a URL exists that matches a route the pysical path is accessed first. What happens here is that essentially IIS is trying to execute the .cshtml pages directly without ever routing to the Controller methods. In the error page I showed above my clue should have been that the view was served as: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml rather than c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Views\Classifieds\Show.cshtml But of course I didn't notice that right away, just skimming to the end and looking at the file name. The reason that /classifieds/list actually fires that file is that the ASP.NET Web Pages engine looks for physical files on disk that match a path. IOW, when calling Web Pages you drop the .cshtml off the Razor page and IIS will serve that just fine. So: /classifieds/list looks and tries to find /classifieds/list.cshtml and executes that script. And that is exactly what's happening. Web Pages is trying to execute the .cshtml file and it fails because Web Pages knows nothing about the @model tag which is an MVC specific template extension. This is why my breakpoints in the controller methods didn't fire and it also explains why the error mentions that the @model key word is invalid (@model is an MVC provided template enhancement to the Razor Engine). The solution of course is super simple: Delete the accidentally created root folder and the problem is solved. Routing and Physical Paths I've run into problems with this before actually. In the past I've had a number of applications that had a physical /Admin folder which also would conflict with an MVC Admin controller. More than once I ended up wondering why the index route (/Admin/) was not working properly. If a physical /Admin folder exists /Admin will not route to the Index action (or whatever default action you have set up, but instead try to list the directory or show the default document in the folder. The only way to force the index page through MVC is to explicitly use /Admin/Index. Makes perfect sense once you realize the physical folder is there, but that's easy to forget in an MVC application. As you might imagine after a few times of running into this I gave up on the Admin folder and moved everything into MVC views to handle those operations. Still it's one of those things that can easily bite you, because the behavior and error messages seem to point at completely different problems. Moral of the story is: If you see routing problems where routes are not reaching obvious controller methods, always check to make sure there's isn't a physical path being mapped by IIS instead. That way you won't feel stupid like I did after trying a million things for about an hour before discovering my sloppy mousing behavior :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC IIS7 Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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techniques for an AI for a highly cramped turn-based tactics game

- by Adam M.

I'm trying to write an AI for a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. I can't change the game rules in any way, only upgrade the AI. I have experience programming AI for classic board games (basically minimax and its variants), but I think the branching factor is too great for the approach to be reasonable here. I'll describe the game and some current AI flaws that I'd like to fix. I'd like to hear ideas for applicable techniques. I'm a decent enough programmer, so I only need the ideas, not an implementation (though that's always appreciated). I'd rather not expend effort chasing (too many) dead ends, so although speculation and brainstorming are good and probably helpful, I'd prefer to hear from somebody with actual experience solving this kind of problem. For those who know it, the game is the land battle mini-game in Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) and you can skim/skip the next two paragraphs. For those who don't, here's briefly how it works. The battle is turn-based and takes place on a 16x16 grid. There are three terrain types: clear (no hindrance), forest (hinders movement, ranged attacks, and sight), and rock (impassible, but does not hinder attacks or sight). The map is randomly generated with roughly equal amounts of each type of terrain. Because there are many rock and forest tiles, movement is typically very cramped. This is tactically important. The terrain is not flat; higher terrain gives minor bonuses. The terrain is known to both sides. The player is always the attacker and the AI is always the defender, so it's perfectly valid for the AI to set up a defensive position and just wait. The player wins by killing all defenders or by getting a unit to the city gates (a tile on the other side of the map). There are very few units on each side, usually 4-8. Because of this, it's crucial not to take damage without gaining some advantage from it. Units can take multiple actions per turn. All units on one side move before any units on the other side. Order of execution is important, and interleaving of actions between units is often useful. Units have melee and ranged attacks. Melee attacks vary widely in strength; ranged attacks have the same strength but vary in range. The main challenges I face are these: Lots of useful move combinations start with a "useless" move that gains no immediate advantage, or even loses advantage, in order to set up a powerful flank attack in the future. And, since the player units are stronger and have longer range, the AI pretty much always has to take some losses before they can start to gain kills. The AI must be able to look ahead to distinguish between sacrificial actions that provide a future benefit and those that don't. Because the terrain is so cramped, most of the tactics come down to achieving good positioning with multiple units that work together to defend an area. For instance, two defenders can often dominate a narrow pass by positioning themselves so an enemy unit attempting to pass must expose itself to a flank attack. But one defender in the same pass would be useless, and three units can defend a slightly larger pass. Etc. The AI should be able to figure out where the player must go to reach the city gates and how to best position its few units to cover the approaches, shifting, splitting, or combining them appropriately as the player moves. Because flank attacks are extremely deadly (and engineering flank attacks is key to the player strategy), the AI should be competent at moving its units so that they cover each other's flanks unless the sacrifice of a unit would give a substantial benefit. They should also be able to force flank attacks on players, for instance by threatening a unit from two different directions such that responding to one threat exposes the flank to the other. The AI should attack if possible, but sometimes there are no good ways to approach the player's position. In that case, the AI should be able to recognize this and set up a defensive position of its own. But the AI shouldn't be vulnerable to a trivial exploit where the player repeatedly opens and closes a hole in his defense and shoots at the AI as it approaches and retreats. That is, the AI should ideally be able to recognize that the player is capable of establishing a solid defense of an area, even if the defense is not currently in place. (I suppose if a good unit allocation algorithm existed, as needed for the second bullet point, the AI could run it on the player units to see where they could defend.) Because it's important to choose a good order of action and interleave actions between units, it's not as simple as just finding the best move for each unit in turn. All of these can be accomplished with a minimax search in theory, but the search space is too large, so specialized techniques are needed. I thought about techniques such as influence mapping, but I don't see how to use the technique to great effect. I thought about assigning goals to the units. This can help them work together in some limited way, and the problem of "how do I accomplish this goal?" is easier to solve than "how do I win this battle?", but assigning good goals is a hard problem in itself, because it requires knowing whether the goal is achievable and whether it's a good use of resources. So, does anyone have specific ideas for techniques that can help cleverize this AI? Update: I found a related question on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133273/ai-for-a-final-fantasy-tactics-like-game The selected answer gives a decent approach to choosing between alternative actions, but it doesn't seem to have much ability to look into the future and discern beneficial sacrifices from wasteful ones. It also focuses on a single unit at a time and it's not clear how it could be extended to support cooperation between units in defending or attacking.

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CI Deployment Of Azure Web Roles Using TeamCity

- by srkirkland

After recently migrating an important new website to use Windows Azure “Web Roles” I wanted an easier way to deploy new versions to the Azure Staging environment as well as a reliable process to rollback deployments to a certain “known good” source control commit checkpoint. By configuring our JetBrains’ TeamCity CI server to utilize Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets to create new automated deployments, I’ll show you how to take control of your Azure publish process. Step 0: Configuring your Azure Project in Visual Studio Before we can start looking at automating the deployment, we should make sure manual deployments from Visual Studio are working properly. Detailed information for setting up deployments can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683672.aspx#PublishAzure or by doing some quick Googling, but the basics are as follows: Install the prerequisite Windows Azure SDK Create an Azure project by right-clicking on your web project and choosing “Add Windows Azure Cloud Service Project” (or by manually adding that project type) Configure your Role and Service Configuration/Definition as desired Right-click on your azure project and choose “Publish,” create a publish profile, and push to your web role You don’t actually have to do step #4 and create a publish profile, but it’s a good exercise to make sure everything is working properly. Once your Windows Azure project is setup correctly, we are ready to move on to understanding the Azure Publish process. Understanding the Azure Publish Process The actual Windows Azure project is fairly simple at its core—it builds your dependent roles (in our case, a web role) against a specific service and build configuration, and outputs two files: ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg: This is just the file containing your package configuration info, for example Instance Count, OsFamily, ConnectionString and other Setting information. ProjectName.Azure.cspkg: This is the package file that contains the guts of your deployment, including all deployable files. When you package your Azure project, these two files will be created within the directory ./[ProjectName].Azure/bin/[ConfigName]/app.publish/. If you want to build your Azure Project from the command line, it’s as simple as calling MSBuild on the “Publish” target: msbuild.exe /target:Publish Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets The last pieces of the puzzle that make CI automation possible are the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156055.aspx). These cmdlets are what will let us create deployments without Visual Studio or other user intervention. Preparing TeamCity for Azure Deployments Now we are ready to get our TeamCity server setup so it can build and deploy Windows Azure projects, which we now know requires the Azure SDK and the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets. Installing the Azure SDK is easy enough, just go to https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/ and click “Install” Once this SDK is installed, I recommend running a test build to make sure your project is building correctly. You’ll want to setup your build step using MSBuild with the “Publish” target against your solution file. Mine looks like this: Assuming the build was successful, you will now have the two *.cspkg and *cscfg files within your build directory. If the build was red (failed), take a look at the build logs and keep an eye out for “unsupported project type” or other build errors, which will need to be addressed before the CI deployment can be completed. With a successful build we are now ready to install and configure the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets: Follow the instructions at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj554332 to install the Cmdlets and configure PowerShell After installing the Cmdlets, you’ll need to get your Azure Subscription Info using the Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile command. Store the resulting *.publishsettings file somewhere you can get to easily, like C:\TeamCity, because you will need to reference it later from your deploy script. Scripting the CI Deploy Process Now that the cmdlets are installed on our TeamCity server, we are ready to script the actual deployment using a TeamCity “PowerShell” build runner. Before we look at any code, here’s a breakdown of our deployment algorithm: Setup your variables, including the location of the *.cspkg and *cscfg files produced in the earlier MSBuild step (remember, the folder is something like [ProjectName].Azure/bin/[ConfigName]/app.publish/ Import the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets Import and set your Azure Subscription information (this is basically your authentication/authorization step, so protect your settings file Now look for a current deployment, and if you find one Upgrade it, else Create a new deployment Pretty simple and straightforward. Now let’s look at the code (also available as a gist here: https://gist.github.com/3694398): $subscription = "[Your Subscription Name]" $service = "[Your Azure Service Name]" $slot = "staging" #staging or production $package = "[ProjectName]\bin\[BuildConfigName]\app.publish\[ProjectName].cspkg" $configuration = "[ProjectName]\bin\[BuildConfigName]\app.publish\ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg" $timeStampFormat = "g" $deploymentLabel = "ContinuousDeploy to $service v%build.number%" Write-Output "Running Azure Imports" Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\*.psd1" Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile "C:\TeamCity\[PSFileName].publishsettings" Set-AzureSubscription -CurrentStorageAccount $service -SubscriptionName $subscription function Publish(){ $deployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot -ErrorVariable a -ErrorAction silentlycontinue if ($a[0] -ne $null) { Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - No deployment is detected. Creating a new deployment. " } if ($deployment.Name -ne $null) { #Update deployment inplace (usually faster, cheaper, won't destroy VIP) Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Deployment exists in $servicename. Upgrading deployment." UpgradeDeployment } else { CreateNewDeployment } } function CreateNewDeployment() { write-progress -id 3 -activity "Creating New Deployment" -Status "In progress" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Creating New Deployment: In progress" $opstat = New-AzureDeployment -Slot $slot -Package $package -Configuration $configuration -label $deploymentLabel -ServiceName $service $completeDeployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot $completeDeploymentID = $completeDeployment.deploymentid write-progress -id 3 -activity "Creating New Deployment" -completed -Status "Complete" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Creating New Deployment: Complete, Deployment ID: $completeDeploymentID" } function UpgradeDeployment() { write-progress -id 3 -activity "Upgrading Deployment" -Status "In progress" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Upgrading Deployment: In progress" # perform Update-Deployment $setdeployment = Set-AzureDeployment -Upgrade -Slot $slot -Package $package -Configuration $configuration -label $deploymentLabel -ServiceName $service -Force $completeDeployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot $completeDeploymentID = $completeDeployment.deploymentid write-progress -id 3 -activity "Upgrading Deployment" -completed -Status "Complete" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Upgrading Deployment: Complete, Deployment ID: $completeDeploymentID" } Write-Output "Create Azure Deployment" Publish Creating the TeamCity Build Step The only thing left is to create a second build step, after your MSBuild “Publish” step, with the build runner type “PowerShell”. Then set your script to “Source Code,” the script execution mode to “Put script into PowerShell stdin with “-Command” arguments” and then copy/paste in the above script (replacing the placeholder sections with your values). This should look like the following: Wrap Up After combining the MSBuild /target:Publish step (which creates the necessary Windows Azure *.cspkg and *.cscfg files) and a PowerShell script step which utilizes the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets, we have a fully deployable build configuration in TeamCity. You can configure this step to run whenever you’d like using build triggers – for example, you could even deploy whenever a new master branch deploy comes in and passes all required tests. In the script I’ve hardcoded that every deployment goes to the Staging environment on Azure, but you could deploy straight to Production if you want to, or even setup a deployment configuration variable and set it as desired. After your TeamCity Build Configuration is complete, you’ll see something that looks like this: Whenever you click the “Run” button, all of your code will be compiled, published, and deployed to Windows Azure! One additional enormous benefit of automating the process this way is that you can easily deploy any specific source control changeset by clicking the little ellipsis button next to "Run.” This will bring up a dialog like the one below, where you can select the last change to use for your deployment. Since Azure Web Role deployments don’t have any rollback functionality, this is a critical feature. Enjoy!

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.NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

- by RobertChipperfield

One of the great things about working at Red Gate is getting to play with new technology - and right now, that means mobile. A few weeks ago, we decided that a little research into the tablet computing arena was due, and purely from a numbers point of view, that suggested the iPad as a good target device. A quick trip to iPhoneDevCon in San Diego later, and Marine and I came back full of ideas, and with some concept of how iOS development was meant to work. Here's how we went from there to the release of Stacks & Heaps, our geeky take on the classic "Snakes & Ladders" game. Step 1: Buy a Mac I've played with many operating systems in my time: from the original BBC Model B, through DOS, Windows, Linux, and others, but I'd so far managed to avoid buying fruit-flavoured computer hardware! If you want to develop for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, that's the first thing that needs to change. If you've not used OS X before, the first thing you'll realise is that everything is different! In the interests of avoiding a flame war in the comments section, I'll only go so far as to say that a lot of my Windows-flavoured muscle memory no longer worked. If you're in the UK, you'll also realise your keyboard is lacking a # key, and that " and @ are the other way around from normal. The wonderful Ukelele keyboard layout editor restores some sanity here, as long as you don't look at the keyboard when you're typing. I couldn't give up the PC entirely, but a handy application called Synergy comes to the rescue - it lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. There's a few limitations: Alt-Tab always seems to go to the Mac, and Windows 7's UAC dialogs require the local mouse for security reasons, but it gets you a long way at least. Step 2: Register as an Apple Developer You can register as an Apple Developer free of charge, and that lets you download XCode and the iOS SDK. You also get the iPhone / iPad emulator, which is handy, since you'll need to be a paid member before you can deploy your apps to a real device. You can either enroll as an individual, or as a company. They both cost the same ($99/year), but there's a few differences between them. If you register as a company, you can add multiple developers to your team (all for the same $99 - not $99 per developer), and you get to use your company name in the App Store. However, you'll need to send off significantly more documentation to Apple, and I suspect the process takes rather longer than for an individual, where they just need to verify some credit card details. Here's a tip: if you're registering as a company, do so as early as possible. The approval process can take a while to complete, so get the application in in plenty of time. Step 3: Learn to love the square brackets! Objective-C is the language of the iPad. C and C++ are also supported, and if you're doing some serious game development, you'll probably spend most of your time in C++ talking OpenGL, but for forms-based apps, you'll be interacting with a lot of the Objective-C SDK. Like shifting from Ctrl-C to Cmd-C, it feels a little odd at first, with the familiar string.format(.) turning into: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hello world, it's %@", [NSDate date]]; Thankfully XCode's auto-complete is normally passable, if not up to Visual Studio's standards, which coupled with a huge amount of content on Stack Overflow means you'll soon get to grips with the API. You'll need to get used to some terminology changes, though; here's an incomplete approximation: Coming from a .NET background, there's some luxuries you no longer have developing Objective C in XCode: Generics! Remember back in .NET 1.1, when all collections were just objects? Yup, we're back there now. ReSharper. Or, more generally, very much refactoring support. The not-many-keystrokes to rename a class, its file, and al references to it in Visual Studio turns into a much more painful experience in XCode. Garbage collection. This is actually rather less of an issue than you might expect: if you follow the rules, the reference counting provided by Objective C gets you a long way without too much pain. Circular references are their usual problematic self, though. Decent exception handling. You do have exceptions, but they're nowhere near as widely used. Generally, if something goes wrong, you get nil (see translation table above) back. Which brings me on to. Calling a method on a nil object isn't a failure - it just returns nil itself! There's many arguments for and against this, but personally I fall into the "stuff should fail as quickly and explicitly as possible" camp. Less specifically, I found that there's more chance of code failing at runtime rather than getting caught at compile-time: using the @selector(.) syntax to pass a method signature isn't (can't be) checked at compile-time, so the first you know about a typo is a crash when you try and call it. The solution to this is of course lots of great testing, both automated and manual, but I still find comfort in provably correct type safety being enforced in addition to testing. Step 4: Submit to the App Store Assuming you want to distribute to more than a handful of devices, you're going to need to submit your app to the Apple App Store. There's a few gotchas in terms of getting builds signed with the right certificates, and you'll be bouncing around between XCode and iTunes Connect a fair bit, but eventually you get everything checked off the to-do list, and are ready to upload your first binary! With some amount of anticipation, I pressed the Upload button in XCode, ready to release our creation into the world, but was instead greeted by an error informing me my XML file was malformed. Uh. A little Googling later, and it turned out that a simple rename from "Stacks&Heaps.app" to "StacksAndHeaps.app" worked around an XML escaping bug, and we were good to go. The next step is to wait for approval (or otherwise). After a couple of weeks of intensive development, this part is agonising. Did we make it? The Apple jury is still out at the moment, but our fingers are firmly crossed! In the meantime, you can see some screenshots and leave us your email address if you'd like us to get in touch when it does go live at the MobileFoo website. Step 5: Profit! Actually, that wasn't the idea here: Stacks & Heaps is free; there's no adverts, and we're not going to sell all your data either. So why did we do it? We wanted to get an idea of what it's like to move from coding for a desktop environment, to something completely different. We don't know whether in a year's time, the iPad will still be the dominant force, or whether Android will have smoothed out some bugs, tweaked the performance, and polished the UI, but I think it's a fairly sure bet that the tablet form factor is here to stay. We want to meet people who are using it, start chatting to them, and find out about some of the pain they're feeling. What better way to do that than do it ourselves, and get to write a cool game in the process?

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ASP.NET MVC JavaScript Routing

- by zowens

Have you ever done this sort of thing in your ASP.NET MVC view? The weird thing about this isn’t the alert function, it’s the code block containing the Url formation using the ASP.NET MVC UrlHelper. The terrible thing about this experience is the obvious lack of IntelliSense and this ugly inline JavaScript code. Inline JavaScript isn’t portable to other pages beyond the current page of execution. It is generally considered bad practice to use inline JavaScript in your public-facing pages. How ludicrous would it be to copy and paste the entire jQuery code base into your pages…? Not something you’d ever consider doing. The problem is that your URLs have to be generated by ASP.NET at runtime and really can’t be copied to your JavaScript code without some trickery. How about this? Does the hard-coded URL bother you? It really bothers me. The typical solution to this whole routing in JavaScript issue is to just hard-code your URLs into your JavaScript files and call it done. But what if your URLs change? You have to now go an track down the places in JavaScript and manually replace them. What if you get the pattern wrong? Do you have tests around it? This isn’t something you should have to worry about. The Solution To Our Problems The solution is to port routing over to JavaScript. Does that sound daunting to you? It’s actually not very hard, but I decided to create my own generator that will do all the work for you. What I have created is a very basic port of the route formation feature of ASP.NET routing. It will generate the formatted URLs based on your routing patterns. Here’s how you’d do this: Does that feel familiar? It looks a lot like something you’d do inside of your ASP.NET MVC views… but this is inside of a JavaScript file… just a plain ol’ .js file. Your first question might be why do you have to have that “.toUrl()” thing. The reason is that I wanted to make POST and GET requests dead simple. Here’s how you’d do a POST request (and the same would work with a GET request): The first parameter is extra data passed to the post request and the second parameter is a function that handles the success of the POST request. If you’re familiar with jQuery’s Ajax goodness, you’ll know how to use it. (if not, check out http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.Post/ and the parameters are essentially the same). But we still haven’t gotten rid of the magic strings. We still have controller names and action names represented as strings. This is going to blow your mind… If you’ve seen T4MVC, this will look familiar. We’re essentially doing the same sort of thing with my JavaScript router, but we’re porting the concept to JavaScript. The good news is that parameters to the controllers are directly reflected in the action function, just like T4MVC. And the even better news… IntlliSense is easily transferred to the JavaScript version if you’re using Visual Studio as your JavaScript editor. The additional data parameter gives you the ability to pass extra routing data to the URL formatter. About the Magic You may be wondering how this all work. It’s actually quite simple. I’ve built a simple jQuery pluggin (called routeManager) that hangs off the main jQuery namespace and routes all the URLs. Every time your solution builds, a routing file will be generated with this pluggin, all your route and controller definitions along with your documentation. Then by the power of Visual Studio, you get some really slick IntelliSense that is hard to live without. But there are a few steps you have to take before this whole thing is going to work. First and foremost, you need a reference to the JsRouting.Core.dll to your projects containing controllers or routes. Second, you have to specify your routes in a bit of a non-standard way. See, we can’t just pull routes out of your App_Start in your Global.asax. We force you to build a route source like this: The way we determine the routes is by pulling in all RouteSources and generating routes based upon the mapped routes. There are various reasons why we can’t use RouteCollection (different post for another day)… but in this case, you get the same route mapping experience. Converting the RouteSource to a RouteCollection is trivial (there’s an extension method for that). Next thing you have to do is generate a documentation XML file. This is done by going to the project settings, going to the build tab and clicking the checkbox. (this isn’t required, but nice to have). The final thing you need to do is hook up the generation mechanism. Pop open your project file and look for the AfterBuild step. Now change the build step task to look like this: The “PathToOutputExe” is the path to the JsRouting.Output.exe file. This will change based on where you put the EXE. The “PathToOutputJs” is a path to the output JavaScript file. The “DicrectoryOfAssemblies” is a path to the directory containing controller and routing DLLs. The JsRouting.Output.exe executable pulls in all these assemblies and scans them for controllers and route sources. Now that wasn’t too bad, was it :) The State of the Project This is definitely not complete… I have a lot of plans for this little project of mine. For starters, I need to look at the generation mechanism. Either I will be creating a utility that will do the project file manipulation or I will go a different direction. I’d like some feedback on this if you feel partial either way. Another thing I don’t support currently is areas. While this wouldn’t be too hard to support, I just don’t use areas and I wanted something up quickly (this is, after all, for a current project of mine). I’ll be adding support shortly. There are a few things that I haven’t covered in this post that I will most certainly be covering in another post, such as routing constraints and how these will be translated to JavaScript. I decided to open source this whole thing, since it’s a nice little utility I think others should really be using. Currently we’re using ASP.NET MVC 2, but it should work with MVC 3 as well. I’ll upgrade it as soon as MVC 3 is released. Along those same lines, I’m investigating how this could be put on the NuGet feed. Show me the Bits! OK, OK! The code is posted on my GitHub account. Go nuts. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you want. Tell me that you hate it. All feedback is welcome! https://github.com/zowens/ASP.NET-MVC-JavaScript-Routing

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Center Pictures and Other Objects in Office 2007 & 2010

- by Matthew Guay

Sometimes it can be difficult to center a picture in a document just by dragging it dragging it around. Today we show you how to center pictures, images, and other objects perfectly in Word and PowerPoint. Note: For this tutorial we’re using Office 2010, but the steps are nearly identical in 2007. Centering a Picture in Word First let’s insert a picture into our document. Click the Insert tab, and then click Picture. Once you select the picture you want, it will be added to your document. Usually, pictures are added wherever your curser was in the document, so in a blank document it will be added at the top left. Also notice Picture Tools show up in the Ribbon after inserting an image. Note: The following menu items are available in Picture Tools Format tab which is displayed when you select the object or image you’re working with. How do we align the picture just like we want? Click Position to get some quick placement options, including centered in the middle of the document or on the top. However, for more advanced placement, we can use the Align tool. If Word isn’t maximized, you may only see the icon without the “Align” label. Notice the tools were grayed out in the menu by default. To be able to change the Alignment, we need to first change the text wrap settings. Click the Wrap Text button, and any option other than “In Line with Text”. Your choice will depend on the document you’re writing, just choose the option that works best in the document. Now, select the Align tools again. You can now position your image precisely with these options. Align Center will position your picture in the center of the page widthwise. Align Middle will put the picture in the middle of the page height-wise. This works the same with textboxes. Simply click the Align button in the Format tab, and you can center it in the page. And if you’d like to align several objects together, simply select them all, click Group, and then select Group from the menu. Now, in the align tools, you can center the whole group on your page for a heading, or whatever you want to use the pictures for. These steps also work the same with Office 2007. Center objects in PowerPoint This works similar in PowerPoint, except that pictures are automatically set for square wrapping automatically, so you don’t have to change anything. Simply insert the picture or other object of your choice, click Align, and choose the option you want. Additionally, if one object is already aligned like you want, drag another object near it and you will see a Smart Guide to help you align or center the second object with the first. This only works with shapes in PowerPoint 2010 beta, but will work with pictures, textboxes, and media in the final release this summer. Conclusion These are good methods for centering images and objects in Word and PowerPoint. From designing perfect headers to emphasizing your message in a PowerPoint presentation, this is something we’ve found useful and hope you will too. Since we’re talking about Office here, it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft has announced the Technology Guarantee Program for Office 2010. Essentially what this means is, if you purchase a version of Office 2007 between March 5th and September 30th of this year, when Office 2010 is released you’ll be able to upgrade to it for free! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteAdd More Functions To Office 2007 By Installing Add-InsCustomize Your Welcome Picture Choices in Windows VistaEasily Rotate Pictures In Word 2007Add Effects To Your Pictures in Word 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox)

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Maintaining packages with code - Adding a property expression programmatically

Every now and then I've come across scenarios where I need to update a lot of packages all in the same way. The usual scenario revolves around a group of packages all having been built off the same package template, and something needs to updated to keep up with new requirements, a new logging standard for example.You'd probably start by updating your template package, but then you need to address all your existing packages. Often this can run into the hundreds of packages and clearly that's not a job anyone wants to do by hand. I normally solve the problem by writing a simple console application that looks for files and patches any package it finds, and it is an example of this I'd thought I'd tidy up a bit and publish here. This sample will look at the package and find any top level Execute SQL Tasks, and change the SQL Statement property to use an expression. It is very simplistic working on top level tasks only, so nothing inside a Sequence Container or Loop will be checked but obviously the code could be extended for this if required. The code that actually sets the expression is shown below, the rest is just wrapper code to find the package and to find the task. /// <summary> /// The CreationName of the Tasks to target, e.g. Execute SQL Task /// </summary> private const string TargetTaskCreationName = "Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Tasks.ExecuteSQLTask.ExecuteSQLTask, Microsoft.SqlServer.SQLTask, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91"; /// <summary> /// The name of the task property to target. /// </summary> private const string TargetPropertyName = "SqlStatementSource"; /// <summary> /// The property expression to set. /// </summary> private const string ExpressionToSet = "@[User::SQLQueryVariable]"; .... // Check if the task matches our target task type if (taskHost.CreationName == TargetTaskCreationName) { // Check for the target property if (taskHost.Properties.Contains(TargetPropertyName)) { // Get the property, check for an expression and set expression if not found DtsProperty property = taskHost.Properties[TargetPropertyName]; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(property.GetExpression(taskHost))) { property.SetExpression(taskHost, ExpressionToSet); changeCount++; } } } This is a console application, so to specify which packages you want to target you have three options: Find all packages in the current folder, the default behaviour if no arguments are specified TaskExpressionPatcher.exe .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Find all packages in a specified folder, pass the folder as the argument TaskExpressionPatcher.exe C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\ .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Find a specific package, pass the file path as the argument TaskExpressionPatcher.exe C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\Package.dtsx The code was written against SQL Server 2005, but just change the reference to Microsoft.SQLServer.ManagedDTS to be the SQL Server 2008 version and it will work fine. If you get an error Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.DtsRuntimeException: The package failed to load due to error 0xC0011008… then check that the package is from the correct version of SSIS compared to the referenced assemblies, 2005 vs 2008 in other words. Download Sample Project TaskExpressionPatcher.zip (6 KB)

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Write your Tests in RSpec with IronRuby

- by kazimanzurrashid

[Note: This is not a continuation of my previous post, treat it as an experiment out in the wild. ] Lets consider the following class, a fictitious Fund Transfer Service: public class FundTransferService : IFundTransferService { private readonly ICurrencyConvertionService currencyConvertionService; public FundTransferService(ICurrencyConvertionService currencyConvertionService) { this.currencyConvertionService = currencyConvertionService; } public void Transfer(Account fromAccount, Account toAccount, decimal amount) { decimal convertionRate = currencyConvertionService.GetConvertionRate(fromAccount.Currency, toAccount.Currency); decimal convertedAmount = convertionRate * amount; fromAccount.Withdraw(amount); toAccount.Deposit(convertedAmount); } } public class Account { public Account(string currency, decimal balance) { Currency = currency; Balance = balance; } public string Currency { get; private set; } public decimal Balance { get; private set; } public void Deposit(decimal amount) { Balance += amount; } public void Withdraw(decimal amount) { Balance -= amount; } } We can write the spec with MSpec + Moq like the following: public class When_fund_is_transferred { const decimal ConvertionRate = 1.029m; const decimal TransferAmount = 10.0m; const decimal InitialBalance = 100.0m; static Account fromAccount; static Account toAccount; static FundTransferService fundTransferService; Establish context = () => { fromAccount = new Account("USD", InitialBalance); toAccount = new Account("CAD", InitialBalance); var currencyConvertionService = new Moq.Mock<ICurrencyConvertionService>(); currencyConvertionService.Setup(ccv => ccv.GetConvertionRate(Moq.It.IsAny<string>(), Moq.It.IsAny<string>())).Returns(ConvertionRate); fundTransferService = new FundTransferService(currencyConvertionService.Object); }; Because of = () => { fundTransferService.Transfer(fromAccount, toAccount, TransferAmount); }; It should_decrease_from_account_balance = () => { fromAccount.Balance.ShouldBeLessThan(InitialBalance); }; It should_increase_to_account_balance = () => { toAccount.Balance.ShouldBeGreaterThan(InitialBalance); }; } and if you run the spec it will give you a nice little output like the following: When fund is transferred » should decrease from account balance » should increase to account balance 2 passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped, took 1.14 seconds (MSpec). Now, lets see how we can write exact spec in RSpec. require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../FundTransfer/bin/Debug/FundTransfer" require "spec" require "caricature" describe "When fund is transferred" do Convertion_Rate = 1.029 Transfer_Amount = 10.0 Initial_Balance = 100.0 before(:all) do @from_account = FundTransfer::Account.new("USD", Initial_Balance) @to_account = FundTransfer::Account.new("CAD", Initial_Balance) currency_convertion_service = Caricature::Isolation.for(FundTransfer::ICurrencyConvertionService) currency_convertion_service.when_receiving(:get_convertion_rate).with(:any, :any).return(Convertion_Rate) fund_transfer_service = FundTransfer::FundTransferService.new(currency_convertion_service) fund_transfer_service.transfer(@from_account, @to_account, Transfer_Amount) end it "should decrease from account balance" do @from_account.balance.should be < Initial_Balance end it "should increase to account balance" do @to_account.balance.should be > Initial_Balance end end I think the above code is self explanatory, treat the require(line 1- 4) statements as the add reference of our visual studio projects, we are adding all the required libraries with this statement. Next, the describe which is a RSpec keyword. The before does exactly the same as NUnit's Setup or MsTest’s TestInitialize attribute, but in the above we are using before(:all) which acts as ClassInitialize of MsTest, that means it will be executed only once before all the test methods. In the before(:all) we are first instantiating the from and to accounts, it is same as creating with the full name (including namespace) like fromAccount = new FundTransfer.Account(.., ..), next, we are creating a mock object of ICurrencyConvertionService, check that for creating the mock we are not using the Moq like the MSpec version. This is somewhat an interesting issue of IronRuby or maybe the DLR, it seems that it is not possible to use the lambda expression that most of the mocking tools uses in arrange phase in Iron Ruby, like: currencyConvertionService.Setup(ccv => ccv.GetConvertionRate(Moq.It.IsAny<string>(), Moq.It.IsAny<string>())).Returns(ConvertionRate); But the good news is, there is already an excellent mocking tool called Caricature written completely in IronRuby which we can use to mock the .NET classes. May be all the mocking tool providers should give some thought to add the support for the DLR, so that we can use the tool that we are already familiar with. I think the rest of the code is too simple, so I am skipping the explanation. Now, the last thing, how we are going to run it with RSpec, lets first install the required gems. Open you command prompt and type the following: igem sources -a http://gems.github.com This will add the GitHub as gem source. Next type: igem install uuidtools caricature rspec and at last we have to create a batch file so that we can execute it in the Notepad++, create a batch like in the IronRuby bin directory like my previous post and put the following in that batch file: @echo off cls call spec %1 --format specdoc pause Next, add a run menu and shortcut in the Notepad++ like my previous post. Now when we run it it will show the following output: When fund is transferred - should decrease from account balance - should increase to account balance Finished in 0.332042 seconds 2 examples, 0 failures Press any key to continue . . . You will complete code of this post in the bottom. That's it for today. Download: RSpecIntegration.zip

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The blocking nature of aggregates

- by Rob Farley

I wrote a post recently about how query tuning isn’t just about how quickly the query runs – that if you have something (such as SSIS) that is consuming your data (and probably introducing a bottleneck), then it might be more important to have a query which focuses on getting the first bit of data out. You can read that post here. In particular, we looked at two operators that could be used to ensure that a query returns only Distinct rows. and The Sort operator pulls in all the data, sorts it (discarding duplicates), and then pushes out the remaining rows. The Hash Match operator performs a Hashing function on each row as it comes in, and then looks to see if it’s created a Hash it’s seen before. If not, it pushes the row out. The Sort method is quicker, but has to wait until it’s gathered all the data before it can do the sort, and therefore blocks the data flow. But that was my last post. This one’s a bit different. This post is going to look at how Aggregate functions work, which ties nicely into this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. I’ve frequently explained about the fact that DISTINCT and GROUP BY are essentially the same function, although DISTINCT is the poorer cousin because you have less control over it, and you can’t apply aggregate functions. Just like the operators used for Distinct, there are different flavours of Aggregate operators – coming in blocking and non-blocking varieties. The example I like to use to explain this is a pile of playing cards. If I’m handed a pile of cards and asked to count how many cards there are in each suit, it’s going to help if the cards are already ordered. Suppose I’m playing a game of Bridge, I can easily glance at my hand and count how many there are in each suit, because I keep the pile of cards in order. Moving from left to right, I could tell you I have four Hearts in my hand, even before I’ve got to the end. By telling you that I have four Hearts as soon as I know, I demonstrate the principle of a non-blocking operation. This is known as a Stream Aggregate operation. It requires input which is sorted by whichever columns the grouping is on, and it will release a row as soon as the group changes – when I encounter a Spade, I know I don’t have any more Hearts in my hand. Alternatively, if the pile of cards are not sorted, I won’t know how many Hearts I have until I’ve looked through all the cards. In fact, to count them, I basically need to put them into little piles, and when I’ve finished making all those piles, I can count how many there are in each. Because I don’t know any of the final numbers until I’ve seen all the cards, this is blocking. This performs the aggregate function using a Hash Match. Observant readers will remember this from my Distinct example. You might remember that my earlier Hash Match operation – used for Distinct Flow – wasn’t blocking. But this one is. They’re essentially doing a similar operation, applying a Hash function to some data and seeing if the set of values have been seen before, but before, it needs more information than the mere existence of a new set of values, it needs to consider how many of them there are. A lot is dependent here on whether the data coming out of the source is sorted or not, and this is largely determined by the indexes that are being used. If you look in the Properties of an Index Scan, you’ll be able to see whether the order of the data is required by the plan. A property called Ordered will demonstrate this. In this particular example, the second plan is significantly faster, but is dependent on having ordered data. In fact, if I force a Stream Aggregate on unordered data (which I’m doing by telling it to use a different index), a Sort operation is needed, which makes my plan a lot slower. This is all very straight-forward stuff, and information that most people are fully aware of. I’m sure you’ve all read my good friend Paul White (@sql_kiwi)’s post on how the Query Optimizer chooses which type of aggregate function to apply. But let’s take a look at SQL Server Integration Services. SSIS gives us a Aggregate transformation for use in Data Flow Tasks, but it’s described as Blocking. The definitive article on Performance Tuning SSIS uses Sort and Aggregate as examples of Blocking Transformations. I’ve just shown you that Aggregate operations used by the Query Optimizer are not always blocking, but that the SSIS Aggregate component is an example of a blocking transformation. But is it always the case? After all, there are plenty of SSIS Performance Tuning talks out there that describe the value of sorted data in Data Flow Tasks, describing the IsSorted property that can be set through the Advanced Editor of your Source component. And so I set about testing the Aggregate transformation in SSIS, to prove for sure whether providing Sorted data would let the Aggregate transform behave like a Stream Aggregate. (Of course, I knew the answer already, but it helps to be able to demonstrate these things). A query that will produce a million rows in order was in order. Let me rephrase. I used a query which produced the numbers from 1 to 1000000, in a single field, ordered. The IsSorted flag was set on the source output, with the only column as SortKey 1. Performing an Aggregate function over this (counting the number of rows per distinct number) should produce an additional column with 1 in it. If this were being done in T-SQL, the ordered data would allow a Stream Aggregate to be used. In fact, if the Query Optimizer saw that the field had a Unique Index on it, it would be able to skip the Aggregate function completely, and just insert the value 1. This is a shortcut I wouldn’t be expecting from SSIS, but certainly the Stream behaviour would be nice. Unfortunately, it’s not the case. As you can see from the screenshots above, the data is pouring into the Aggregate function, and not being released until all million rows have been seen. It’s not doing a Stream Aggregate at all. This is expected behaviour. (I put that in bold, because I want you to realise this.) An SSIS transformation is a piece of code that runs. It’s a physical operation. When you write T-SQL and ask for an aggregation to be done, it’s a logical operation. The physical operation is either a Stream Aggregate or a Hash Match. In SSIS, you’re telling the system that you want a generic Aggregation, that will have to work with whatever data is passed in. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be possible to make a sometimes-blocking aggregation component in SSIS. A Custom Component could be created which could detect whether the SortKeys columns of the input matched the Grouping columns of the Aggregation, and either call the blocking code or the non-blocking code as appropriate. One day I’ll make one of those, and publish it on my blog. I’ve done it before with a Script Component, but as Script components are single-use, I was able to handle the data knowing everything about my data flow already. As per my previous post – there are a lot of aspects in which tuning SSIS and tuning execution plans use similar concepts. In both situations, it really helps to have a feel for what’s going on behind the scenes. Considering whether an operation is blocking or not is extremely relevant to performance, and that it’s not always obvious from the surface. In a future post, I’ll show the impact of blocking v non-blocking and synchronous v asynchronous components in SSIS, using some of LobsterPot’s Script Components and Custom Components as examples. When I get that sorted, I’ll make a Stream Aggregate component available for download.

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The blocking nature of aggregates

- by Rob Farley

I wrote a post recently about how query tuning isn’t just about how quickly the query runs – that if you have something (such as SSIS) that is consuming your data (and probably introducing a bottleneck), then it might be more important to have a query which focuses on getting the first bit of data out. You can read that post here. In particular, we looked at two operators that could be used to ensure that a query returns only Distinct rows. and The Sort operator pulls in all the data, sorts it (discarding duplicates), and then pushes out the remaining rows. The Hash Match operator performs a Hashing function on each row as it comes in, and then looks to see if it’s created a Hash it’s seen before. If not, it pushes the row out. The Sort method is quicker, but has to wait until it’s gathered all the data before it can do the sort, and therefore blocks the data flow. But that was my last post. This one’s a bit different. This post is going to look at how Aggregate functions work, which ties nicely into this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. I’ve frequently explained about the fact that DISTINCT and GROUP BY are essentially the same function, although DISTINCT is the poorer cousin because you have less control over it, and you can’t apply aggregate functions. Just like the operators used for Distinct, there are different flavours of Aggregate operators – coming in blocking and non-blocking varieties. The example I like to use to explain this is a pile of playing cards. If I’m handed a pile of cards and asked to count how many cards there are in each suit, it’s going to help if the cards are already ordered. Suppose I’m playing a game of Bridge, I can easily glance at my hand and count how many there are in each suit, because I keep the pile of cards in order. Moving from left to right, I could tell you I have four Hearts in my hand, even before I’ve got to the end. By telling you that I have four Hearts as soon as I know, I demonstrate the principle of a non-blocking operation. This is known as a Stream Aggregate operation. It requires input which is sorted by whichever columns the grouping is on, and it will release a row as soon as the group changes – when I encounter a Spade, I know I don’t have any more Hearts in my hand. Alternatively, if the pile of cards are not sorted, I won’t know how many Hearts I have until I’ve looked through all the cards. In fact, to count them, I basically need to put them into little piles, and when I’ve finished making all those piles, I can count how many there are in each. Because I don’t know any of the final numbers until I’ve seen all the cards, this is blocking. This performs the aggregate function using a Hash Match. Observant readers will remember this from my Distinct example. You might remember that my earlier Hash Match operation – used for Distinct Flow – wasn’t blocking. But this one is. They’re essentially doing a similar operation, applying a Hash function to some data and seeing if the set of values have been seen before, but before, it needs more information than the mere existence of a new set of values, it needs to consider how many of them there are. A lot is dependent here on whether the data coming out of the source is sorted or not, and this is largely determined by the indexes that are being used. If you look in the Properties of an Index Scan, you’ll be able to see whether the order of the data is required by the plan. A property called Ordered will demonstrate this. In this particular example, the second plan is significantly faster, but is dependent on having ordered data. In fact, if I force a Stream Aggregate on unordered data (which I’m doing by telling it to use a different index), a Sort operation is needed, which makes my plan a lot slower. This is all very straight-forward stuff, and information that most people are fully aware of. I’m sure you’ve all read my good friend Paul White (@sql_kiwi)’s post on how the Query Optimizer chooses which type of aggregate function to apply. But let’s take a look at SQL Server Integration Services. SSIS gives us a Aggregate transformation for use in Data Flow Tasks, but it’s described as Blocking. The definitive article on Performance Tuning SSIS uses Sort and Aggregate as examples of Blocking Transformations. I’ve just shown you that Aggregate operations used by the Query Optimizer are not always blocking, but that the SSIS Aggregate component is an example of a blocking transformation. But is it always the case? After all, there are plenty of SSIS Performance Tuning talks out there that describe the value of sorted data in Data Flow Tasks, describing the IsSorted property that can be set through the Advanced Editor of your Source component. And so I set about testing the Aggregate transformation in SSIS, to prove for sure whether providing Sorted data would let the Aggregate transform behave like a Stream Aggregate. (Of course, I knew the answer already, but it helps to be able to demonstrate these things). A query that will produce a million rows in order was in order. Let me rephrase. I used a query which produced the numbers from 1 to 1000000, in a single field, ordered. The IsSorted flag was set on the source output, with the only column as SortKey 1. Performing an Aggregate function over this (counting the number of rows per distinct number) should produce an additional column with 1 in it. If this were being done in T-SQL, the ordered data would allow a Stream Aggregate to be used. In fact, if the Query Optimizer saw that the field had a Unique Index on it, it would be able to skip the Aggregate function completely, and just insert the value 1. This is a shortcut I wouldn’t be expecting from SSIS, but certainly the Stream behaviour would be nice. Unfortunately, it’s not the case. As you can see from the screenshots above, the data is pouring into the Aggregate function, and not being released until all million rows have been seen. It’s not doing a Stream Aggregate at all. This is expected behaviour. (I put that in bold, because I want you to realise this.) An SSIS transformation is a piece of code that runs. It’s a physical operation. When you write T-SQL and ask for an aggregation to be done, it’s a logical operation. The physical operation is either a Stream Aggregate or a Hash Match. In SSIS, you’re telling the system that you want a generic Aggregation, that will have to work with whatever data is passed in. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be possible to make a sometimes-blocking aggregation component in SSIS. A Custom Component could be created which could detect whether the SortKeys columns of the input matched the Grouping columns of the Aggregation, and either call the blocking code or the non-blocking code as appropriate. One day I’ll make one of those, and publish it on my blog. I’ve done it before with a Script Component, but as Script components are single-use, I was able to handle the data knowing everything about my data flow already. As per my previous post – there are a lot of aspects in which tuning SSIS and tuning execution plans use similar concepts. In both situations, it really helps to have a feel for what’s going on behind the scenes. Considering whether an operation is blocking or not is extremely relevant to performance, and that it’s not always obvious from the surface. In a future post, I’ll show the impact of blocking v non-blocking and synchronous v asynchronous components in SSIS, using some of LobsterPot’s Script Components and Custom Components as examples. When I get that sorted, I’ll make a Stream Aggregate component available for download.

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Oracle Delivers Latest Release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

- by Scott McNeil

Richer Service Catalog for Database and Middleware as a Service; Enhanced Database and Middleware Management Help Drive Enterprise-Scale Private Cloud Adoption News Summary IT organizations are adopting private clouds as a stepping-stone to business-driven, self-service IT. Successful implementations hinge on the ability to efficiently deploy and manage cloud services at enterprise scale. Having a complete cloud management solution integrated with an enterprise-class technology stack is a fundamental requirement for IT. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 meets that requirement by helping businesses become more agile and responsive, while reducing cost, complexity, and risk. News Facts Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4, available today, lets organizations rapidly adopt Oracle-based, enterprise-scale private clouds. New capabilities provide advanced technology stack management, secure database administration, and enterprise service governance, enabling Oracle customers and partners to maximize database and application performance and drive innovation using self-service IT platforms. The enhancements have been driven by customers and the growing Oracle Enterprise Manager Ecosystem, comprised of more than 750 Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized partners. Oracle and its partners and customers have built over 140 plug-ins and connectors for Oracle Enterprise Manager. Watch the video highlights. Automation for Broader Cloud Services Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 allows for a rapid enterprise-wide adoption of database, middleware and infrastructure services in the private cloud, driven by an enhanced API-enabled service catalog. The release features “push button” style provisioning of complete environments such as SOA and Oracle Active Data Guard, and fast data cloning that enables rapid deployment and testing of enterprise applications. Out-of-the-box capabilities to detect data and configuration vulnerabilities provide enhanced cloud service governance along with greater operational control through a flexible and extensible showback mechanism. Enhanced Database Management A new performance warehouse enables predictive database diagnostics and trend analysis and helps identify database problems before they occur. New enterprise data-governance capabilities enhance security by helping systematically discover and protect sensitive data. Step-by-step orchestration of upgrades with the ability to rollback changes enables faster adoption of Oracle Database 12c. Expanded Fusion Middleware Management A new consolidated view of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c deployments with a guided management capability lets administrators apply best management practices to diverse middleware environments and identify performance issues quickly. A Java VM Diagnostics as a Service feature allows governed access to diagnostics data for IT workers across multiple disciplines for accelerated DevOps resolutions of defects and performance optimization. New automated provisioning for SOA lets middleware administrators perform mass SOA provisioning with ease. Superior Enterprise-Grade Management Private roles and preferred credentials have been added to Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide additional fine-grained security for organizations with complex access control requirements. A new security console provides a single point of control for managing the security of Oracle Enterprise Manager environments. Support for the latest industry standard SNMP v3 protocol, including encryption, enables more secure heterogeneous management. “Smart monitoring” adapts to observed environmental changes and adds self-management capabilities to help Oracle Enterprise Manager run at peak performance, while demanding less IT supervision. Supporting Quotes “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a strong tradition of technology breakthroughs and leadership. As a member of Oracle’s Customer Advisory Board for Oracle Enterprise Manager, we have consistently provided feedback and guidance in the areas of enterprise-scale cloud, self-diagnosability, and secure administration for the product,” said Tim Frazier, CIO, NIF and Photon Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We intend to take advantage of the Release 4 features that support enterprise-scale availability and fine-grained security capabilities for private cloud deployments.” “IDC's most recent CloudTrack survey shows that most enterprises plan to adopt hybrid cloud architectures over the next three years,” said Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. “These organizations plan to deploy a wide range of workloads into cloud environments including mission critical database and middleware services that require high levels of fault tolerance and disaster recovery. Such capabilities were traditionally custom configured for each application but cloud offers the possibility to incorporate such properties within the service definition, enabling organizations to adopt cloud without compromise. With the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Oracle is providing customers with an out-of-the-box experience for delivering highly-resilient cloud services for databases and applications.” “Since its inception, Oracle has been leading the way in innovative, scalable and high performance solutions for the enterprise. With this release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, we are extending this leadership by providing enterprise-scale capabilities for planning, delivering, and managing private clouds. We call this ‘zero-to-cloud – accelerated.’ These enhancements help our customers to expedite their adoption of cloud computing and prepares them for the next generation of self-service IT,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, senior vice president of Systems and Cloud Management at Oracle. Supporting Resources Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Video: Cerner Delivers High Performance Private Cloud Video: BIAS Achieves Outstanding Results with Private Cloud Press Release Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Mobile app

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Oracle Business Intelligence Advanced - Hands-on Workshop para Parceiros - 18 a 21 de Janeiro

- by Claudia Costa

Workshop Description This FREE hands-on workshop highlights strengths of OBIEE 11g by providing attendees a hands-on experience with BI 11g product. OBIEE 11g has adopted the standardized infrastructure of Fusion Middleware to provide robust server capability along with highly anticipated advanced visualization components like Maps, Flash based charts, Scorecards and KPIs. This workshop focuses on new features and infrastructure components for the BI practitioners who are familiar with either OBIEE 10g or previous BI releases. After taking this course, Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Advanced, you will gain insight into OBIEE11g technology, reporting solutions and new features. Workshop provides opportunities to practice with OBIEE11g environment as hands on activities. Participant will gain in-depth understanding of new architecture of OBIEE 11g, security mode, installation/configuration as well as reporting aspects like, new ROLAP/MOLAP style hierarchical browsing, new chart types, Action Framework and Advanced Visualization. If you are a Business Intelligence practitioners and familiar with BI10g - you cannot afford to miss this 3-day workshop. Register Now! PresentationsBusiness Intelligence EE (OBIEE) 11g: Advanced Workshop · OBIEE 11g Overview · OBIEE 11g Architecture and Infrastructure · OBIEE 11g Installation, Configuration and Monitoring · OBIEE11g Security Model and BI Components · OBIEE 11g Homepage Overview · New Visualizations: Master-Detail Events, Charts, Hierarchies · Reports Building with OBIEE 11g and Catalog Management · Spatial Integration, Action Framework, Scorecards · OBIEE 11g Dashboards · OBIEE Integration Options Lab OutlineOracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE) 11g: Advanced Workshop The labs enable OBIEE Core functionality through hands-on activities are based on a Oracle VirtualBox image with software and training samples pre-installed. This Advanced course has few labs optional during the workshop to allow for students to practice them on their own. The primary purpose of the workshop is to provide expertise of 11g features and infrastructure changes from 10g. Labs will allow you to explore concepts to: · Have a clear understanding of the OBIEE 11g architecture · Have a clear understanding of the OBIEE differentiators · OBIEE11g Security Model · OBIEE11g Environment Management · Report Building with OBIEE11g · OBIEE11g Dashboard and Homepage Environment · New Visualization features · Management of Reports, Dashboards and BI Catalog Objects Audience · Business Intelligence Evangelist · Business Intelligence Application Developer or Consultant · Data Warehouse Developer · Enterprise Architects · Industry Solutions Architects Prerequisites · Experience and Understanding of OBIEE 10g is required. · Good understanding of data modeling for reporting purpose · Strong experience with database technologies preferred Equipment RequirementsThis workshop requires attendees to provide their own laptops. Attendee laptops must meet the following minimum hardware/software requirements: OBIEE 11g environments requires at least 3 GB of RAM (4GB Preferred), without which student will not be able to complete labs. This workshop has environment that includes VM Image and also a software components that students will install on their laptop for the labs. · Minimum 3GB RAM. 25GB free disk space · Internet Explorer 7 · VirtualBox (the latest version) · Downloadable from http://www.virtualbox.org · WINRAR or 7zip · Downloadable from http://www.win-rar.com/download.html · Downloadable from http://www.7zip.com/ Attendees will be given a VirtualBox image for Oraclee BI 11g Workshop containing the software along with required toolset, database and data sets for the labs. AgendaThis class duration is 3 Days9:00am: Sign-in and Technical Set up9:30am : Workshop Starts5:00pm : Workhop Ends LocalHotel Holiday Inn Express - Porto Salvo - Lisboa This class is Free. Register early to confirm a seat! Oracle BI Advanced 11g Hands-on Workshop - Schedule Register Now! January 11-13, 2011: Kista, Sweden January 18-20, 2011: Lisbon, Portugal March 1-3, 2011: Reading, Berkshire, UK March 15-17, 2011: Colombes, Paris, France March 29-31, 2011: Amsterdam, Netherlands Questions? For registration questions please send an email to [email protected]. Para outras informações, por favor contacte Claudia Costa, telf: 214235027 ou pelo email

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Token based Authentication for WCF HTTP/REST Services: Authentication

- by Your DisplayName here!

This post shows some of the implementation techniques for adding token and claims based security to HTTP/REST services written with WCF. For the theoretical background, see my previous post. Disclaimer The framework I am using/building here is not the only possible approach to tackle the problem. Based on customer feedback and requirements the code has gone through several iterations to a point where we think it is ready to handle most of the situations. Goals and requirements The framework should be able to handle typical scenarios like username/password based authentication, as well as token based authentication The framework should allow adding new supported token types Should work with WCF web programming model either self-host or IIS hosted Service code can rely on an IClaimsPrincipal on Thread.CurrentPrincipal that describes the client using claims-based identity Implementation overview In WCF the main extensibility point for this kind of security work is the ServiceAuthorizationManager. It gets invoked early enough in the pipeline, has access to the HTTP protocol details of the incoming request and can set Thread.CurrentPrincipal. The job of the SAM is simple: Check the Authorization header of the incoming HTTP request Check if a “registered” token (more on that later) is present If yes, validate the token using a security token handler, create the claims principal (including claims transformation) and set Thread.CurrentPrincipal If no, set an anonymous principal on Thread.CurrentPrincipal. By default, anonymous principals are denied access – so the request ends here with a 401 (more on that later). To wire up the custom authorization manager you need a custom service host – which in turn needs a custom service host factory. The full object model looks like this: Token handling A nice piece of existing WIF infrastructure are security token handlers. Their job is to serialize a received security token into a CLR representation, validate the token and turn the token into claims. The way this works with WS-Security based services is that WIF passes the name/namespace of the incoming token to WIF’s security token handler collection. This in turn finds out which token handler can deal with the token and returns the right instances. For HTTP based services we can do something very similar. The scheme on the Authorization header gives the service a hint how to deal with an incoming token. So the only missing link is a way to associate a token handler (or multiple token handlers) with a scheme and we are (almost) done. WIF already includes token handler for a variety of tokens like username/password or SAML 1.1/2.0. The accompanying sample has a implementation for a Simple Web Token (SWT) token handler, and as soon as JSON Web Token are ready, simply adding a corresponding token handler will add support for this token type, too. All supported schemes/token types are organized in a WebSecurityTokenHandlerCollectionManager and passed into the host factory/host/authorization manager. Adding support for basic authentication against a membership provider would e.g. look like this (in global.asax): var manager = new WebSecurityTokenHandlerCollectionManager(); manager.AddBasicAuthenticationHandler((username, password) => Membership.ValidateUser(username, password)); Adding support for Simple Web Tokens with a scheme of Bearer (the current OAuth2 scheme) requires passing in a issuer, audience and signature verification key: manager.AddSimpleWebTokenHandler( "Bearer", "http://identityserver.thinktecture.com/trust/initial", "https://roadie/webservicesecurity/rest/", "WFD7i8XRHsrUPEdwSisdHoHy08W3lM16Bk6SCT8ht6A="); In some situations, SAML token may be used as well. The following configures SAML support for a token coming from ADFS2: var registry = new ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry(); registry.AddTrustedIssuer( "d1 c5 b1 25 97 d0 36 94 65 1c e2 64 fe 48 06 01 35 f7 bd db", "ADFS"); var adfsConfig = new SecurityTokenHandlerConfiguration(); adfsConfig.AudienceRestriction.AllowedAudienceUris.Add( new Uri("https://roadie/webservicesecurity/rest/")); adfsConfig.IssuerNameRegistry = registry; adfsConfig.CertificateValidator = X509CertificateValidator.None; // token decryption (read from config) adfsConfig.ServiceTokenResolver = IdentityModelConfiguration.ServiceConfiguration.CreateAggregateTokenResolver(); manager.AddSaml11SecurityTokenHandler("SAML", adfsConfig); Transformation The custom authorization manager will also try to invoke a configured claims authentication manager. This means that the standard WIF claims transformation logic can be used here as well. And even better, can be also shared with e.g. a “surrounding” web application. Error handling A WCF error handler takes care of turning “access denied” faults into 401 status codes and a message inspector adds the registered authentication schemes to the outgoing WWW-Authenticate header when a 401 occurs. The next post will conclude with authorization as well as the source code download. (Wanna learn more about federation, WIF, claims, tokens etc.? Click here.)

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Creating Rich View Components in ASP.NET MVC

- by kazimanzurrashid

One of the nice thing of our Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC is, it gives you an excellent extensible platform to create rich view components. In this post, I will show you a tiny but very powerful ListView Component. Those who are familiar with the Webforms ListView component already knows that it has the support to define different parts of the component, we will have the same kind of support in our view component. Before showing you the markup, let me show you the screenshots first, lets say you want to show the customers of Northwind database as a pagable business card style (Yes the example is inspired from our RadControls Suite) And here is the markup of the above view component. <h2>Customers</h2> <% Html.Telerik() .ListView(Model) .Name("customers") .PrefixUrlParameters(false) .BeginLayout(pager => {%> <table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"> <tfoot> <tr> <td colspan="3" class="t-footer"> <% pager.Render(); %> </td> </tr> </tfoot> <tbody> <tr> <%}) .BeginGroup(() => {%> <td> <%}) .Item(item => {%> <fieldset style="border:1px solid #e0e0e0"> <legend><strong>Company Name</strong>:<%= Html.Encode(item.DataItem.CompanyName) %></legend> <div> <div style="float:left;width:120px"> <img alt="<%= item.DataItem.CustomerID %>" src="<%= Url.Content("~/Content/Images/Customers/" + item.DataItem.CustomerID + ".jpg") %>"/> </div> <div style="float:right"> <ul style="list-style:none none;padding:10px;margin:0"> <li> <strong>Contact Name:</strong> <%= Html.Encode(item.DataItem.ContactName) %> </li> <li> <strong>Title:</strong> <%= Html.Encode(item.DataItem.ContactTitle) %> </li> <li> <strong>City:</strong> <%= Html.Encode(item.DataItem.City)%> </li> <li> <strong>Country:</strong> <%= Html.Encode(item.DataItem.Country)%> </li> <li> <strong>Phone:</strong> <%= Html.Encode(item.DataItem.Phone)%> </li> <li> <div style="float:right"> <%= Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", new { id = item.DataItem.CustomerID }) %> <%= Html.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.DataItem.CustomerID })%> </div> </li> </ul> </div> </div> </fieldset> <%}) .EmptyItem(() =>{%> <fieldset style="border:1px solid #e0e0e0"> <legend>Empty</legend> </fieldset> <%}) .EndGroup(() => {%> </td> <%}) .EndLayout(pager => {%> </tr> </tbody> </table> <%}) .GroupItemCount(3) .PageSize(6) .Pager<NumericPager>(pager => pager.ShowFirstLast()) .Render(); %> As you can see that you have the complete control on the final angel brackets and like the webform’s version you also can define the templates. You can also use this component to show Master/Detail data, for example the customers and its order like the following: I am attaching the complete source code along with the above examples for your review, what do you think, how about creating some component with our extensions? Download: MvcListView.zip

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Is Linear Tape File System (LTFS) Best For Transportable Storage?

- by rickramsey

Those of us in tape storage engineering take a lot of pride in what we do, but understand that tape is the right answer to a storage problem only some of the time. And, unfortunately for a storage medium with such a long history, it has built up a few preconceived notions that are no longer valid. When I hear customers debate whether to implement tape vs. disk, one of the common strikes against tape is its perceived lack of usability. If you could go back a few generations of corporate acquisitions, you would discover that StorageTek engineers recognized this problem and started developing a solution where a tape drive could look just like a memory stick to a user. The goal was to not have to care about where files were on the cartridge, but to simply see the list of files that were on the tape, and click on them to open them up. Eventually, our friends in tape over at IBM built upon our work at StorageTek and Sun Microsystems and released the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) feature for the current LTO5 generation of tape drives as an open specification. LTFS is really a wonderful feature and we’re proud to have taken part in its beginnings and, as you’ll soon read, its future. Today we offer LTFS-Open Edition, which is free for you to use in your in Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 environment - not only on your LTO5 drives, but also on your Oracle StorageTek T10000C drives. You can download it free from Oracle and try it out. LTFS does exactly what its forefathers imagined. Now you can see immediately which files are on a cartridge. LTFS does this by splitting a cartridge into two partitions. The first holds all of the necessary metadata to create a directory structure for you to easily view the contents of the cartridge. The second partition holds all of the files themselves. When tape media is loaded onto a drive, a complete file system image is presented to the user. Adding files to a cartridge can be as simple as a drag-and-drop just as you do today on your laptop when transferring files from your hard drive to a thumb drive or with standard POSIX file operations. You may be thinking all of this sounds nice, but asking, “when will I actually use it?” As I mentioned at the beginning, tape is not the right solution all of the time. However, if you ever need to physically move data between locations, tape storage with LTFS should be your most cost-effective and reliable answer. I will give you a few use cases examples of when LTFS can be utilized. Media and Entertainment (M&E), Oil and Gas (O&G), and other industries have a strong need for their storage to be transportable. For example, an O&G company hunting for new oil deposits in remote locations takes very large underground seismic images which need to be shipped back to a central data center. M&E operations conduct similar activities when shooting video for productions. M&E companies also often transfers files to third-parties for editing and other activities. These companies have three highly flawed options for transporting data: electronic transfer, disk storage transport, or tape storage transport. The first option, electronic transfer, is impractical because of the expense of the bandwidth required to transfer multi-terabyte files reliably and efficiently. If there’s one place that has bandwidth, it’s your local post office so many companies revert to physically shipping storage media. Typically, M&E companies rely on transporting disk storage between sites even though it, too, is expensive. Tape storage should be the preferred format because as IDC points out, “Tape is more suitable for physical transportation of large amounts of data as it is less vulnerable to mechanical damage during transportation compared with disk" (See note 1, below). However, tape storage has not been used in the past because of the restrictions created by proprietary formats. A tape may only be readable if both the sender and receiver have the same proprietary application used to write the file. In addition, the workflows may be slowed by the need to read the entire tape cartridge during recall. LTFS solves both of these problems, clearing the way for tape to become the standard platform for transferring large files. LTFS is open and, as long as you’ve downloaded the free reader from our website or that of anyone in the LTO consortium, you can read the data. So if a movie studio ships a scene to a third-party partner to add, for example, sounds effects or a music score, it doesn’t have to care what technology the third-party has. If it’s written back to an LTFS-formatted tape cartridge, it can be read. Some tape vendors like to claim LTFS is a “standard,” but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a specification at this point, not a standard. That said, we’re already seeing application vendors create functionality to write in an LTFS format based on the specification. And it’s my belief that both customers and the tape storage industry will see the most benefit if we all follow the same path. As such, we have volunteered to lead the way in making LTFS a standard first with the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), and eventually through to standard bodies such as American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Expect to hear good news soon about our efforts. So, if storage transportability is one of your requirements, I recommend giving LTFS a look. It makes tape much more user-friendly and it’s free, which allows tape to maintain all of its cost advantages over disk! Note 1 - IDC Report. April, 2011. “IDC’s Archival Storage Solutions Taxonomy, 2011” - Brian Zents Website Newsletter Facebook Twitter

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Searching for the Perfect Developer’s Laptop.

- by mbcrump

I have been in the market for a new computer for several months. I set out with a budget of around $1200. I knew up front that the machine would be used for developing applications and maybe some light gaming. I kept switching between buying a laptop or a desktop but the laptop won because: With a Laptop, I can carry it everywhere and with a desktop I can’t. I searched for about 2 weeks and narrowed it down to a list of must-have’s : i7 Processor (I wasn’t going to settle for an i5 or AMD. I wanted a true Quad-core machine, not 2 dual-core fused together). 15.6” monitor SSD 128GB or Larger. – It’s almost 2011 and I don’t want an old standard HDD in this machine. 8GB of DDR3 Ram. – The more the better, right? 1GB Video Card (Prefer NVidia) – I might want to play games with this. HDMI Port – Almost a standard on new Machines. This would be used when I am on the road and want to stream Netflix to the HDTV in the Hotel room. Webcam Built-in – This would be to video chat with the wife and kids if I am on the road. 6-Cell Battery. – I’ve read that an i7 in a laptop really kills the battery. A 6-cell or 9-cell is even better. That is a pretty long list for a budget of around $1200. I searched around the internet and could not buy this machine prebuilt for under $1200. That was even with coupons and my company’s 10% Dell discount. The only way that I would get a machine like this was to buy a prebuilt and replace parts. I chose the Lenovo Y560 on Newegg to start as my base. Below is a top-down picture of it. Part 1: The Hardware The Specs for this machine: Color : GrayOperating System : Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bitCPU Type : Intel Core i7-740QM(1.73GHz)Screen : 15.6" WXGAMemory Size : 4GB DDR3Hard Disk : 500GBOptical Drive : DVD±R/RWGraphics Card : ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730Video Memory : 1GBCommunication : Gigabit LAN and WLANCard slot : 1 x Express Card/34Battery Life : Up to 3.5 hoursDimensions : 15.20" x 10.00" x 0.80" - 1.30"Weight : 5.95 lbs. This computer met most of the requirements above except that it didn’t come with an SSD or have 8GB of DDR3 Memory. So, I needed to start shopping except this time for an SSD. I asked around on twitter and other hardware forums and everyone pointed me to the Crucial C300 SSD. After checking prices of the drive, it was going to cost an extra $275 bucks and I was going from a spacious 500GB drive to 128GB. After watching some of the SSD videos on YouTube I started feeling better. Below is a pic of the Crucial C300 SSD. The second thing that I needed to upgrade was the RAM. It came with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, but it was slow. I decided to buy the Crucial 8GB (4GB x 2) Kit from Newegg. This RAM cost an extra $120 and had a CAS Latency of 7. In the end this machine delivered everything that I wanted and it cost around $1300. You are probably saying, well your budget was $1200. I have spare parts that I’m planning on selling on eBay or Anandtech. =) If you are interested then shoot me an email and I will give you a great deal mbcrump[at]gmail[dot]com. 500GB Laptop 7200RPM HDD 4GB of DDR3 RAM (2GB x 2) faceVision HD 720p Camera – Unopened In the end my Windows Experience Rating of the SSD was 7.7 and the CPU 7.1. The max that you can get is a 7.9. Part 2: The Software I’m very lucky that I get a lot of software for free. When choosing a laptop, the OS really doesn’t matter because I would never keep the bloatware pre-installed or Windows 7 Home Premium on my main development machine. Matter of fact, as soon as I got the laptop, I immediately took out the old HDD without booting into it. After I got the SSD into the machine, I installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit. The BIOS was out of date, so I updated that to the latest version and started downloading drivers off of Lenovo’s site. I had to download the Wireless Networking Drivers to a USB-Key before I could get my machine on my wireless network. I also discovered that if the date on your computer is off then you cannot join the Windows 7 Homegroup until you fix it. I’m aware that most people like peeking into what programs other software developers use and I went ahead and listed my “essentials” of a fresh build. I am a big Silverlight guy, so naturally some of the software listed below is specific to Silverlight. You should also check out my master list of Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer. See a killer app that I’m missing? Feel free to leave it in the comments below. My Software Essential List. CPU-Z Dropbox Everything Search Tool Expression Encoder Update Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Foxit Reader Google Chrome Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate Edition Keepass Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Microsoft Security Essentials 2 Mindscape Silverlight Elements Notepad 2 (with shell extension) Precode Code Snippet Manager RealVNC Reflector ReSharper v5.1.1753.4 Silverlight 4 Toolkit Silverlight Spy Snagit 10 SyncFusion Reporting Controls for Silverlight Telerik Silverlight RadControls TweetDeck Virtual Clone Drive Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate VS KB2403277 Update to get Feature Pack 2 to work. Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit Windows Live Essentials 2011 Windows Live Writer Backup. Windows Phone Development Tools That is pretty much it, I have a new laptop and am happy with the purchase. If you have any questions then feel free to leave a comment below. Subscribe to my feed

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Calculated Columns in Entity Framework Code First Migrations

- by David Paquette

I had a couple people ask me about calculated properties / columns in Entity Framework this week. The question was, is there a way to specify a property in my C# class that is the result of some calculation involving 2 properties of the same class. For example, in my database, I store a FirstName and a LastName column and I would like a FullName property that is computed from the FirstName and LastName columns. My initial answer was: 1: public string FullName 2: { 3: get { return string.Format("{0} {1}", FirstName, LastName); } 4: } Of course, this works fine, but this does not give us the ability to write queries using the FullName property. For example, this query: 1: var users = context.Users.Where(u => u.FullName.Contains("anan")); Would result in the following NotSupportedException: The specified type member 'FullName' is not supported in LINQ to Entities. Only initializers, entity members, and entity navigation properties are supported. It turns out there is a way to support this type of behavior with Entity Framework Code First Migrations by making use of Computed Columns in SQL Server. While there is no native support for computed columns in Code First Migrations, we can manually configure our migration to use computed columns. Let’s start by defining our C# classes and DbContext: 1: public class UserProfile 2: { 3: public int Id { get; set; } 4: 5: public string FirstName { get; set; } 6: public string LastName { get; set; } 7: 8: [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Computed)] 9: public string FullName { get; private set; } 10: } 11: 12: public class UserContext : DbContext 13: { 14: public DbSet<UserProfile> Users { get; set; } 15: } The DatabaseGenerated attribute is needed on our FullName property. This is a hint to let Entity Framework Code First know that the database will be computing this property for us. Next, we need to run 2 commands in the Package Manager Console. First, run Enable-Migrations to enable Code First Migrations for the UserContext. Next, run Add-Migration Initial to create an initial migration. This will create a migration that creates the UserProfile table with 3 columns: FirstName, LastName, and FullName. This is where we need to make a small change. Instead of allowing Code First Migrations to create the FullName property, we will manually add that column as a computed column. 1: public partial class Initial : DbMigration 2: { 3: public override void Up() 4: { 5: CreateTable( 6: "dbo.UserProfiles", 7: c => new 8: { 9: Id = c.Int(nullable: false, identity: true), 10: FirstName = c.String(), 11: LastName = c.String(), 12: //FullName = c.String(), 13: }) 14: .PrimaryKey(t => t.Id); 15: Sql("ALTER TABLE dbo.UserProfiles ADD FullName AS FirstName + ' ' + LastName"); 16: } 17: 18: 19: public override void Down() 20: { 21: DropTable("dbo.UserProfiles"); 22: } 23: } Finally, run the Update-Database command. Now we can query for Users using the FullName property and that query will be executed on the database server. However, we encounter another potential problem. Since the FullName property is calculated by the database, it will get out of sync on the object side as soon as we make a change to the FirstName or LastName property. Luckily, we can have the best of both worlds here by also adding the calculation back to the getter on the FullName property: 1: [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Computed)] 2: public string FullName 3: { 4: get { return FirstName + " " + LastName; } 5: private set 6: { 7: //Just need this here to trick EF 8: } 9: } Now we can both query for Users using the FullName property and we also won’t need to worry about the FullName property being out of sync with the FirstName and LastName properties. When we run this code: 1: using(UserContext context = new UserContext()) 2: { 3: UserProfile userProfile = new UserProfile {FirstName = "Chanandler", LastName = "Bong"}; 4: 5: Console.WriteLine("Before saving: " + userProfile.FullName); 6: 7: context.Users.Add(userProfile); 8: context.SaveChanges(); 9: 10: Console.WriteLine("After saving: " + userProfile.FullName); 11: 12: UserProfile chanandler = context.Users.First(u => u.FullName == "Chanandler Bong"); 13: Console.WriteLine("After reading: " + chanandler.FullName); 14: 15: chanandler.FirstName = "Chandler"; 16: chanandler.LastName = "Bing"; 17: 18: Console.WriteLine("After changing: " + chanandler.FullName); 19: 20: } We get this output: It took a bit of work, but finally Chandler’s TV Guide can be delivered to the right person. The obvious downside to this implementation is that the FullName calculation is duplicated in the database and in the UserProfile class. This sample was written using Visual Studio 2012 and Entity Framework 5. Download the source code here.

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Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView

- by Rick Strahl

I’m working on some legacy code for a customer today and dealing with a page that has my favorite ‘friend’ on it: A GridView control. The ASP.NET GridView control (and also the older DataGrid control) creates some pretty messed up HTML. One of the more annoying things it does is to generate all rows including the header into the page in the <tbody> section of the document rather than in a properly separated <thead> section. Here’s is typical GridView generated HTML output: <table class="tablesorter blackborder" cellspacing="0" rules="all" border="1" id="Table1" style="border-collapse:collapse;"> <tr> <th scope="col">Name</th> <th scope="col">Company</th> <th scope="col">Entered</th><th scope="col">Balance</th> </tr> <tr> <td>Frank Hobson</td><td>Hobson Inc.</td> <td>10/20/2010 12:00:00 AM</td><td>240.00</td> </tr> ... </table> Notice that all content – both the headers and the body of the table – are generated directly under the <table> tag and there’s no explicit use of <tbody> or <thead> (or <tfooter> for that matter). When the browser renders this the document some default settings kick in and the DOM tree turns into something like this: <table> <tbody> <tr> <-- header <tr> <—detail row <tr> <—detail row </tbody> </table> Now if you’re just rendering the Grid server side and you’re applying all your styles through CssClass assignments this isn’t much of a problem. However, if you want to style your grid more generically using hierarchical CSS selectors it gets a lot more tricky to format tables that don’t properly delineate headers and body content. Also many plug-ins and other JavaScript utilities that work on tables require a properly formed table layout, and many of these simple won’t work out of the box with a GridView. For example, one of the things I wanted to do for this app is use the jQuery TableSorter plug-in which – not surprisingly – requires to work of table headers in the DOM document. Out of the box, the TableSorter plug-in doesn’t work with GridView controls, because the lack of a <thead> section to work on. Luckily with a little help of some jQuery scripting there’s a real easy fix to this problem. Basically, if we know the GridView generated table has a header in it, code like the following will move the headers from <tbody> to <thead>: <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { // Fix up GridView to support THEAD tags $("#gvCustomers tbody").before("<thead><tr></tr></thead>"); $("#gvCustomers thead tr").append($("#gvCustomers th")); $("#gvCustomers tbody tr:first").remove(); $("#gvCustomers").tablesorter({ sortList: [[1, 0]] }); }); </script> And voila you have a table that now works with the TableSorter plug-in. If you use GridView’s a lot you might want something a little more generic so the following does the same thing but should work more generically on any GridView/DataGrid missing its <thead> tag: function fixGridView(tableEl) { var jTbl = $(tableEl); if(jTbl.find("tbody>tr>th").length > 0) { jTbl.find("tbody").before("<thead><tr></tr></thead>"); jTbl.find("thead tr").append(jTbl.find("th")); jTbl.find("tbody tr:first").remove(); } } which you can call like this: $(document).ready(function () { fixGridView( $("#gvCustomers") ); $("#gvCustomers").tablesorter({ sortList: [[1, 0]] }); }); Server Side THEAD Rendering [updated from comments 11/21/2010] Several commenters pointed out that you can also do this on the server side by using the GridView.HeaderRow.TableSection property to force rendering with a proper table header. I was unaware of this option actually – not exactly an easy one to discover. One issue here is that timing of this needs to happen during the databinding process so you need to use an event handler: this.gvCustomers.DataBound += (object o, EventArgs ev) => { gvCustomers.HeaderRow.TableSection = TableRowSection.TableHeader; }; this.gvCustomers.DataSource = custList; this.gvCustomers.DataBind(); You can apply the same logic for the FooterRow. It’s beyond me why this rendering mode isn’t the default for a GridView – why would you ever want to have a table that doesn’t use a THEAD section??? But I disgress :-) I don’t use GridViews much anymore – opting for more flexible approaches using ListViews or even plain code based views or other custom displays that allow more control over layout, but I still see a lot of old code that does use them old clunkers including my own :) (gulp) and this does make life a little bit easier especially if you’re working with any of the jQuery table related plug-ins that expect a proper table structure.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET jQuery

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Memory Efficient Windows SOA Server

- by Antony Reynolds

Installing a Memory Efficient SOA Suite 11.1.1.6 on Windows Server Well 11.1.1.6 is now available for download so I thought I would build a Windows Server environment to run it. I will minimize the memory footprint of the installation by putting all functionality into the Admin Server of the SOA Suite domain. Required Software 64-bit JDK SOA Suite If you want 64-bit then choose “Generic” rather than “Microsoft Windows 32bit JVM” or “Linux 32bit JVM” This has links to all the required software. If you choose “Generic” then the Repository Creation Utility link does not show, you still need this so change the platform to “Microsoft Windows 32bit JVM” or “Linux 32bit JVM” to get the software. Similarly if you need a database then you need to change the platform to get the link to XE for Windows or Linux. If possible I recommend installing a 64-bit JDK as this allows you to assign more memory to individual JVMs. Windows XE will work, but it is better if you can use a full Oracle database because of the limitations on XE that sometimes cause it to run out of space with large or multiple SOA deployments. Installation Steps The following flow chart outlines the steps required in installing and configuring SOA Suite. The steps in the diagram are explained below. 64-bit? Is a 64-bit installation required? The Windows & Linux installers will install 32-bit versions of the Sun JDK and JRockit. A separate JDK must be installed for 64-bit. Install 64-bit JDK The 64-bit JDK can be either Hotspot or JRockit. You can choose either JDK 1.7 or 1.6. Install WebLogic If you are using 64-bit then install WebLogic using “java –jar wls1036_generic.jar”. Make sure you include Coherence in the installation, the easiest way to do this is to accept the “Typical” installation. SOA Suite Required? If you are not installing SOA Suite then you can jump straight ahead and create a WebLogic domain. Install SOA Suite Run the SOA Suite installer and point it at the existing Middleware Home created for WebLogic. Note to run the SOA installer on Windows the user must have admin privileges. I also found that on Windows Server 2008R2 I had to start the installer from a command prompt with administrative privileges, granting it privileges when it ran caused it to ignore the jreLoc parameter. Database Available? Do you have access to a database into which you can install the SOA schema. SOA Suite requires access to an Oracle database (it is supported on other databases but I would always use an oracle database). Install Database I use an 11gR2 Oracle database to avoid XE limitations. Make sure that you set the database character set to be unicode (AL32UTF8). I also disabled the new security settings because they get in the way for a developer database. Don’t forget to check that number of processes is at least 150 and number of sessions is not set, or is set to at least 200 (in the DB init parameters). Run RCU The SOA Suite database schemas are created by running the Repository Creation Utility. Install the “SOA and BPM Infrastructure” component to support SOA Suite. If you keep the schema prefix as “DEV” then the config wizard is easier to complete. Run Config Wizard The Config wizard creates the domain which hosts the WebLogic server instances. To get a minimum footprint SOA installation choose the “Oracle Enterprise Manager” and “Oracle SOA Suite for developers” products. All other required products will be automatically selected. The “for developers” installs target the appropriate components at the AdminServer rather than creating a separate managed server to house them. This reduces the number of JVMs required to run the system and hence the amount of memory required. This is not suitable for anything other than a developer environment as it mixes the admin and runtime functions together in a single server. It also takes a long time to load all the required modules, making start up a slow process. If it exists I would recommend running the config wizard found in the “oracle_common/common/bin” directory under the middleware home. This should have access to all the templates, including SOA. If you also want to run BAM in the same JVM as everything else then you need to “Select Optional Configuration” for “Managed Servers, Clusters and Machines”. To target BAM at the AdminServer delete the “bam_server1” managed server that is created by default. This will result in BAM being targeted at the AdminServer. Installation Issues I had a few problems when I came to test everything in my mega-JVM. Following applications were not targeted and so I needed to target them at the AdminServer: b2bui composer Healthcare UI FMW Welcome Page Application (11.1.0.0.0) How Memory Efficient is It? On a Windows 2008R2 Server running under VirtualBox I was able to bring up both the 11gR2 database and SOA/BPM/BAM in 3G memory. I allocated a minimum 512M to the PermGen and a minimum of 1.5G for the heap. The setting from setSOADomainEnv are shown below: set DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS=-Xms1536m -Xmx2048m set PORT_MEM_ARGS=-Xms1536m -Xmx2048m set DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS=%DEFAULT_MEM_ARGS% -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=768m set PORT_MEM_ARGS=%PORT_MEM_ARGS% -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=768m I arrived at these numbers by monitoring JVM memory usage in JConsole. Task Manager showed total system memory usage at 2.9G – just below the 3G I allocated to the VM. Performance is not stellar but it runs and I could run JDeveloper alongside it on my 8G laptop, so in that sense it was a result!

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How to install Sweetcron on XAMPP

- by Sushaantu

This tutorial will take you to the installation steps required to install Sweetcron in the XAMPP. I am taking the liberty to assume that you have already installed XAMPP. I First of all download sweetcron and copy the extracted “sweetcron” folder inside the htdocs folder in the XAMPP directory. You have to get few things in place before installing sweetcron: 1. Create a sweetcron database using Mysql. You can just put a name “sweetcron” and leave all the other settings such as Mysql connection collation as it is. Now that you have the database ready you can configure few settings before making sweetcron to work on XAMPP. 2. Open the config-sample PHP file with your text editor (something like Notepad++ or Komodo Edit is recommended) which is located in Sweetcron/system/application/config. You have to make few changes in it. a. In the first settings you have to edit the value of $config ['base_url']. The default value is “http://www.your-site.com”; and you have to change that into “http://localhost/sweetcron/”; b. You also have to change the deafult settings of $config ['uri_protocol']. The value that you will see is “REQUEST_URI”; but you need to change that into “AUTO”; c. Now that we have made all the changes you can rename the file from config_sample to just config. 3. Open the database-sample.php in the text editor. You need to make the edits regarding the databse in here. a. The values of the databse at the moment are like this: $db['default']['hostname'] = “localhost”; $db['default']['username'] = “”; $db['default']['password'] = “”; $db['default']['database'] = “”; $db['default']['dbdriver'] = “mysql”; $db['default']['dbprefix'] = “”; $db['default']['pconnect'] = TRUE; $db['default']['db_debug'] = TRUE; $db['default']['cache_on'] = FALSE; $db['default']['cachedir'] = “”; $db['default']['char_set'] = “utf8″; $db['default']['dbcollat'] = “utf8_general_ci”; You have to change that into $db['default']['hostname'] = “localhost”; $db['default']['username'] = “root”; $db['default']['password'] = “”; $db['default']['database'] = “sweetcron”; $db['default']['dbdriver'] = “mysql”; $db['default']['dbprefix'] = “”; $db['default']['pconnect'] = TRUE; $db['default']['db_debug'] = TRUE; $db['default']['cache_on'] = FALSE; $db['default']['cachedir'] = “”; $db['default']['char_set'] = “utf8″; $db['default']['dbcollat'] = “utf8_general_ci”; We have written the username as root along with the name of database (sweetcron in my case). Since I was not using any password in xampp for the sweetcron database so I have left the password option empty. You can make suitable changes according to your system. Write down your password in the third line if you are using one in xampp. b. Now that we have made all the edits we can change the file name from database-sample to just database. 4. That leaves us with only one setting and that is editing values in the .htaccess file with our text editor. The default values you will have in the .htaccess file are: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L] and you just have to add “sweetcron” after Rewritebase in the third line. Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /sweetcron RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L] 5. Now you are all set and done. You can access sweetcron in the localhost by going to http://localhost/sweetcron/ you will see some text on the top which would prompt you to click on one script. Click that script and behold, you have your sweetcrom installation on xampp ready. Further it will ask you to add deatils such as Lifestream name, username and email address. Fill those deatils and you will reach the admin panel.

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How can I keep the cpu temp low?

- by Newton

I have an HP pavilion dv7, I'm using ubuntu 12.04 so the overheating problem with sandybridge cpu is a lot better. However my laptop is still becoming too hot to keep on my legs. The problem is that the fan wait too much before starting, so the medium temp is too hight. When I'm using windows 7 the laptop is room-temperature cold, I've absolutely no problem. On windows the fan is always spinning very low & very silently so the heat is continuously removed, without reaching an unconfortable temp. How can I force the computer to act like that also on ubuntu? PS The bios can't let me control this kind of thing, and this is my experience with lm-sensors and fancontrol al@notebook:~$ sudo sensors-detect [sudo] password for al: # sensors-detect revision 5984 (2011-07-10 21:22:53 +0200) # System: Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC (laptop) # Board: Hewlett-Packard 1800 This program will help you determine which kernel modules you need to load to use lm_sensors most effectively. It is generally safe and recommended to accept the default answers to all questions, unless you know what you're doing. Some south bridges, CPUs or memory controllers contain embedded sensors. Do you want to scan for them? This is totally safe. (YES/no): y Module cpuid loaded successfully. Silicon Integrated Systems SIS5595... No VIA VT82C686 Integrated Sensors... No VIA VT8231 Integrated Sensors... No AMD K8 thermal sensors... No AMD Family 10h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 11h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 12h and 14h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h thermal sensors... No AMD Family 15h power sensors... No Intel digital thermal sensor... Success! (driver `coretemp') Intel AMB FB-DIMM thermal sensor... No VIA C7 thermal sensor... No VIA Nano thermal sensor... No Some Super I/O chips contain embedded sensors. We have to write to standard I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe. Do you want to scan for Super I/O sensors? (YES/no): y Probing for Super-I/O at 0x2e/0x2f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... No Trying family `SMSC'... No Trying family `VIA/Winbond/Nuvoton/Fintek'... No Trying family `ITE'... No Probing for Super-I/O at 0x4e/0x4f Trying family `National Semiconductor/ITE'... Yes Found unknown chip with ID 0x8518 Some hardware monitoring chips are accessible through the ISA I/O ports. We have to write to arbitrary I/O ports to probe them. This is usually safe though. Yes, you do have ISA I/O ports even if you do not have any ISA slots! Do you want to scan the ISA I/O ports? (YES/no): y Probing for `National Semiconductor LM78' at 0x290... No Probing for `National Semiconductor LM79' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83781D' at 0x290... No Probing for `Winbond W83782D' at 0x290... No Lastly, we can probe the I2C/SMBus adapters for connected hardware monitoring devices. This is the most risky part, and while it works reasonably well on most systems, it has been reported to cause trouble on some systems. Do you want to probe the I2C/SMBus adapters now? (YES/no): y Using driver `i2c-i801' for device 0000:00:1f.3: Intel Cougar Point (PCH) Module i2c-i801 loaded successfully. Module i2c-dev loaded successfully. Next adapter: i915 gmbus disabled (i2c-0) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus ssc (i2c-1) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOB (i2c-2) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus vga (i2c-3) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOA (i2c-4) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus panel (i2c-5) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Client found at address 0x50 Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1033'... No Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1034'... No Probing for `SPD EEPROM'... No Probing for `EDID EEPROM'... Yes (confidence 8, not a hardware monitoring chip) Next adapter: i915 GPIOC (i2c-6) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Client found at address 0x50 Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1033'... No Probing for `Analog Devices ADM1034'... No Probing for `SPD EEPROM'... No Probing for `EDID EEPROM'... Yes (confidence 8, not a hardware monitoring chip) Next adapter: i915 gmbus dpc (i2c-7) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOD (i2c-8) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus dpb (i2c-9) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOE (i2c-10) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus reserved (i2c-11) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 gmbus dpd (i2c-12) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: i915 GPIOF (i2c-13) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Next adapter: DPDDC-B (i2c-14) Do you want to scan it? (YES/no/selectively): y Now follows a summary of the probes I have just done. Just press ENTER to continue: Driver `coretemp': * Chip `Intel digital thermal sensor' (confidence: 9) To load everything that is needed, add this to /etc/modules: #----cut here---- # Chip drivers coretemp #----cut here---- If you have some drivers built into your kernel, the list above will contain too many modules. Skip the appropriate ones! Do you want to add these lines automatically to /etc/modules? (yes/NO)y Successful! Monitoring programs won't work until the needed modules are loaded. You may want to run 'service module-init-tools start' to load them. Unloading i2c-dev... OK Unloading i2c-i801... OK Unloading cpuid... OK al@notebook:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/module-init-tools restart Rather than invoking init scripts through /etc/init.d, use the service(8) utility, e.g. service module-init-tools restart Since the script you are attempting to invoke has been converted to an Upstart job, you may also use the stop(8) and then start(8) utilities, e.g. stop module-init-tools ; start module-init-tools. The restart(8) utility is also available. module-init-tools stop/waiting al@notebook:~$ sudo service module-init-tools restart stop: Unknown instance: module-init-tools stop/waiting al@notebook:~$ sudo service module-init-tools start module-init-tools stop/waiting al@notebook:~$ sudo pwmconfig # pwmconfig revision 5857 (2010-08-22) This program will search your sensors for pulse width modulation (pwm) controls, and test each one to see if it controls a fan on your motherboard. Note that many motherboards do not have pwm circuitry installed, even if your sensor chip supports pwm. We will attempt to briefly stop each fan using the pwm controls. The program will attempt to restore each fan to full speed after testing. However, it is ** very important ** that you physically verify that the fans have been to full speed after the program has completed. /usr/sbin/pwmconfig: There are no pwm-capable sensor modules installed Is my case too desperate?

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Trace File Source Adapter

The Trace File Source adapter is a useful addition to your SSIS toolbox. It allows you to read 2005 and 2008 profiler traces stored as .trc files and read them into the Data Flow. From there you can perform filtering and analysis using the power of SSIS. There is no need for a SQL Server connection this just uses the trace file. Example Usages Cache warming for SQL Server Analysis Services Reading the flight recorder Find out the longest running queries on a server Analyze statements for CPU, memory by user or some other criteria you choose Properties The Trace File Source adapter has two properties, both of which combine to control the source trace file that is read at runtime. SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 trace files are supported for both the Database Engine (SQL Server) and Analysis Services. The properties are managed by the Editor form or can be set directly from the Properties Grid in Visual Studio. Property Type Description AccessMode Enumeration This property determines how the Filename property is interpreted. The values available are: DirectInput Variable Filename String This property holds the path for trace file to load (*.trc). The value is either a full path, or the name of a variable which contains the full path to the trace file, depending on the AccessMode property. Trace Column Definition Hopefully the majority of you can skip this section entirely, but if you encounter some problems processing a trace file this may explain it and allow you to fix the problem. The component is built upon the trace management API provided by Microsoft. Unfortunately API methods that expose the schema of a trace file have known issues and are unreliable, put simply the data often differs from what was specified. To overcome these limitations the component uses some simple XML files. These files enable the trace column data types and sizing attributes to be overridden. For example SQL Server Profiler or TMO generated structures define EventClass as an integer, but the real value is a string. TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml - SQL Server Database Engine Trace Columns TraceDataColumnsAS.xml - SQL Server Analysis Services Trace Columns The files can be found in the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents folder, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml" If at runtime the component encounters a type conversion or sizing error it is most likely due to a discrepancy between the column definition as reported by the API and the actual value encountered. Whilst most common issues have already been fixed through these files we have implemented specific exception traps to direct you to the files to enable you to fix any further issues due to different usage or data scenarios that we have not tested. An example error that you can fix through these files is shown below. Buffer exception writing value to column 'Column Name'. The string value is 999 characters in length, the column is only 111. Columns can be overridden by the TraceDataColumns XML files in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml". Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trace File Source transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Please note that the Microsoft Trace classes used in the component are not supported on 64-bit platforms. To use the Trace File Source on a 64-bit host you need to ensure you have the 32-bit (x86) tools available, and the way you execute your package is setup to use them, please see the help topic 64-bit Considerations for Integration Services for more details. Downloads Trace Sources for SQL Server 2005 -- Trace Sources for SQL Server 2008 Version History SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.382 - SQL Sever 2008 public release. (9 Apr 2009) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.0.321 - SQL Server 2005 public release. (18 Nov 2008) -- Screenshots

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How to UEFI install Ubuntu 12.10?

- by Geezanansa

Running a newer FM1 motherboard which is using an AMD 3870k APU with a new 1TB HDD. Following the advice in the motherboard manual and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI have now got to grub option screen for UEFI install. see http://imgur.com/VW5vz The dvd.iso being used is Ubuntu 12.10 desktop amd64 from ubuntu .com. The hdd has had a gpt partition table made for, by using gparted when in a live desktop session when booted in bios mode. (*edit/update: Although the old cd updates on running it is an old kernel and it did make a gpt but that version of gparted uses fdisk whereas gdisk is required to make gpt. Think am going to have to spend more time here http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gparted.html lol Using the gparted from 12.10 live session to make partitions; following the guidance regarding this at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI#Creating_an_EFI_partition, but can only boot to grub option screen http://imgur.com/VW5vz when 12.10 options to "try ubuntu" or "install ubuntu" are selected they give errors as described below*) but after making the gpt decided to leave it unformatted/unallocated space with the intention of using installer to set up partitions. update-originally but gparted now sees hdd as http://imgur.com/hFIvm as described above. *Booting live dvd in EFI mode gives "Secure Boot not installed" just before grub kernel option list with the option to "install ubuntu" but get "can not read cd/0" and "the kernel must be loaded first" errors; when that option is selected. Any pointers on how to get installer going for UEFI install would be good. Thanks in advance. update: Hopefully these screenshots can help better highlight where i am going wrong or if there is something else going on http://imgur.com/g30RB, http://imgur.com/VW5vz, http://imgur.com/31E0q, http://imgur.com/bnuaG, http://imgur.com/y4KGu, http://imgur.com/3u2QE, http://imgur.com/n9lN3, http://imgur.com/FEKvz, http://imgur.com/hFIvm, update: Thank you fernando garcia for pointing me in the right direction to start the process of elimantion. What i have done since asking question is a little home work starting here http://askubuntu.com/faq#bounty and here http://askubuntu.com/questions/how-to-ask. Looking at other similar questions was good fun and found this 12.10 UEFI Secure Boot install the most relative in helping getting ubuntu to uefi install on my system. In response to wolverine's question this article was referred to http://web.dodds.net/~vorlon/wiki/blog/SecureBoot_in_Ubuntu_12.10/ This article in the first sentence gives a link to http://www.ubuntu.com/download which is where i downloaded the 12.10 desktop amd64 .iso(and others) but have been unable to do a efi install of ubuntu on this system and as this is a new system have ended up just going with bios installer running which at least puts my mind at ease that i have not bricked my new mobo.(had to do a clrcmos and flash to latest bios version) So it possibly could be the bios settings or the bios version being used that is problem. To try and eliminate bios version i can not get to post screen in order to id bios version being used. Pressing tab to show post instead of logo and trying to pausebreak to catch post is proving difficult. If logo screen in bios is disabled just get black screen no post shown and pressing tab does not show post. Appreciate using appropriate bios settings and latest 12.10 release should simply get uefi installer running when selected from the grub list (nice graphic details in Identifying if computer boots the cd in efi mode section at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI#Identifying_if_the_computer_boots_the_CD_in_EFI_mode) And to confirm the hdd is booting in efi mode https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI#Identifying_if_the_computer_boots_the_HDD_in_EFI_mode running the command [ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo "EFI boot on HDD" || echo "Legacy boot on HDD" gave Legacy boot on HDD This is as expected because i allowed the bios installer (which was 12.04 desktop amd64 after trying 12.10 desktop amd64 in efi mode) to run to get a working installation. Which is not what was intended or wished for but wanted to get a working os to bench test new mobo i.e. prove it is working. There are other options as in installing other bootmanagers/loaders but do not wish to do so as shim should get grub2 going that is after secure boot has been signed.(Now got rough idea what should happen just it aint happening. Is it possible ahci drivers are required?) Will post boot info script url of the updated config/setup. The original question asked seems irrelevant to what is being said in this update but as the problem is not resolved will keep on trying efi installing! i.e the problem is same as when question asked just trying to update. Have tried to edit and update the best i can!

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Monitoring your WCF Web Apis with AppFabric

- by cibrax

The other day, Ron Jacobs made public a template in the Visual Studio Gallery for enabling monitoring capabilities to any existing WCF Http service hosted in Windows AppFabric. I thought it would be a cool idea to reuse some of that for doing the same thing on the new WCF Web Http stack. Windows AppFabric provides a dashboard that you can use to dig into some metrics about the services usage, such as number of calls, errors or information about different events during a service call. Those events not only include information about the WCF pipeline, but also custom events that any developer can inject and make sense for troubleshooting issues. This monitoring capabilities can be enabled on any specific IIS virtual directory by using the AppFabric configuration tool or adding the following configuration sections to your existing web app, <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> <diagnostics etwProviderId="3e99c707-3503-4f33-a62d-2289dfa40d41"> <endToEndTracing propagateActivity="true" messageFlowTracing="true" /> </diagnostics> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name=""> <etwTracking profileName="EndToEndMonitoring Tracking Profile" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel> <microsoft.applicationServer> <monitoring> <default enabled="true" connectionStringName="ApplicationServerMonitoringConnectionString" monitoringLevel="EndToEndMonitoring" /> </monitoring> </microsoft.applicationServer> Bad news is that none of the configuration above can be easily set on code by using the new configuration model for WCF Web stack. A good thing is that you easily disable it in the configuration when you no longer need it, and also uses ETW, a general-purpose and high-speed tracing facility provided by the operating system (it’s part of the windows kernel). By adding that configuration section, AppFabric will start monitoring your service automatically and providing some basic event information about the service calls. You need some custom code for injecting custom events in the monitoring data. What I did here is to copy and refactor the “WCFUserEventProvider” class provided as sample in the Ron’s template to make it more TDD friendly when using IoC. I created a simple interface “ILogger” that any service (or resource) can use to inject custom events or monitoring information in the AppFabric database. public interface ILogger { bool WriteError(string name, string format, params object[] args); bool WriteWarning(string name, string format, params object[] args); bool WriteInformation(string name, string format, params object[] args); } The “WCFUserEventProvider” class implements this interface by making possible to send the events to the AppFabric monitoring database. The service or resource implementation can receive an “ILogger” as part of the constructor. [ServiceContract] [Export] public class OrderResource { IOrderRepository repository; ILogger logger; [ImportingConstructor] public OrderResource(IOrderRepository repository, ILogger logger) { this.repository = repository; this.logger = logger; } [WebGet(UriTemplate = "{id}")] public Order Get(string id, HttpResponseMessage response) { var order = this.repository.All.FirstOrDefault(o => o.OrderId == int.Parse(id, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)); if (order == null) { response.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.NotFound; response.Content = new StringContent("Order not found"); } this.logger.WriteInformation("Order Requested", "Order Id {0}", id); return order; } } The example above uses “MEF” as IoC for injecting a repository and the logger implementation into the service. You can also see how the logger is used to write an information event in the monitoring database. The following image illustrates how the custom event is injected and the information becomes available for any user in the dashboard. An issue that you might run into and I hope the WCF and AppFabric teams fixed soon is that any WCF service that uses friendly URLs with ASP.NET routing does not get listed as a available service in the WCF services tab in the AppFabric console. The complete example is available to download from here.

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Parner Webcast - Innovations in Products Program

- by Richard Lefebvre

We are pleased to invite you to join the Innovations in Products –webcast. Innovations in Products will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Innovations in Products will be presented on the 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Innovations in Products is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. What are the Benefits for partners? Find out how Innovations in Products helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customers's solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleague alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Application portfolio – for your and your customer’s benefit Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations. Note: At the latter part of this email you have also 17 links into the recent Applications Products presentations and 6 links into the Public Sector Value Proposition presentations that were presented in Innovations in Industries -program. Product breakout sessions: Topics Speaker To Register Fusion Applications Technology and Extensibility: A next-generation platform that adapts to client needs. Matthew Johnson, Sr. Director, SCM Product Development, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion Applications - Transforming your Back-Office Accounting Function: Changing how people work in back office functions to drive value add Liam Nolan, Director, ERP Product Development, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion HCM & Talent Overview & Extensibility: A more in-depth look into a personalized HCM solution Synco Jonkeren, Vice-President HCM Product Development & Management, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion HCM Compensation Planning: Compensate To Compete Rosie Warner, Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Enterprise PLM for the Product Value Chain: Oracle Enterprise PLM offers Industry specific solutions that cover the Product Value Chain Ulf Köster, Sales Development Leader Enterprise PLM, Oracle Western Europe CLICK HERE Oracle's Asset Management and Maintenance Solution: What you need to know to successfully implement Oracle Asset Management solutions within Oracle Installed Base Philip Carey, Asset Management and Maintenance Solution Specialist CLICK HERE For more details please visit Innovations in Products and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery Format Innovations in Products –program is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the web cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Innovations in Products consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. You can also see Innovations in Products afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months. The next Innovations in Products web casts will be presented as follows: July 2nd 2012 October 1st 2012 January 14th 2013 April 8th 2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. Duration Maximum 1 hour For further information please contact me Markku Rouhiainen. Recent Innovations in Products presentations Applications Products presented on April the 2nd, 2012 Speaker To Register Fusion CRM: Effective, Efficient and Easy James Penfold , Senior Director, Applications Product Development and Product Management CLICK HERE Fusion HCM: Talent management overview performance, goals, talent review Jaime Losantos Viñolas, Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Distributed Order Management - Fusion SCM Solution Vikram K Singla, Business Development Director, Supply Chain Management Applications, UK CLICK HERE Oracle Transportation Management Dominic Regan, Senior Director Oracle Transportation Management EMEA CLICK HERE Oracle Value Chain Planning: Demantra Sales & Operation Planning and Demantra Demand Management Lionel Albert, Senior Director Value Chain Planning, EMEA CLICK HERE Oracle CX (Customer Experience) - formerly CEM: Powering Great Customer Experiences Maria Ramirez , CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE EPM 11.1.2.2 Overview Nicholas Cox , EMEA Sales Development Director - Enterprise Performance Management CLICK HERE Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, 11.1.2.1 Daniela Lazar , Senior EPM Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE January the 16th 2012 Speaker To Register CRM / ATG: Best-in-Class CRM & Commerce Maria Ramirez , Associate CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE CRM / Automate Business Rules for Maximum Efficiency with OPA (Oracle Policy Automation) Marco Nilo, Associate CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE CRM / InQuira Toby Baker, Principal Sales Consultant, CRM Product Specialist Team CLICK HERE EPM / Business Intelligence Foundation Suite – Sales and Product Updates Liviu Nitescu, Senior BI Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE EPM / Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.1 - Sales & Product Updates Andreea Voinea, EPM Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE ERP / JDE EnterpriseOne Fulfillment Management Overview Mirela Andreea Nasta , ERP Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE ERP / Spotlights on iExpenses Elena Nita ,ERP Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE MDM / Master Data Management Martin Boyd , Senior Director Product Strategy CLICK HERE Product break through session Fusion Applications Human Capital Management Rosie Warner , Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Recent Innovations in Industries Value Proposition presentations January the 16th 2012 Speaker To Register Process Modernisation Iemke Idsingh Public Sector Solutions Director CLICK HERE Shared Services Ann Smith Business Development Director, Shared Services CLICK HERE Strengthening Financial Discipline Whilst Delivering Cashable Savings Philippa Headley UK Sales Development Director Public Sector - EPM Solutions CLICK HERE Social Welfare Industry Solutions Christian Wernberg-Tougaard Industry Director - Social Welfare CLICK HERE Police Industry Solutions Jeff Penrose Solution Sales Director CLICK HERE Tax and Revenue Management Industry Solutions Andre van der Post Global Director - Tax Solutions and Strategy CLICK HERE

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