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How to solve conflicts with another programmer..

- by Tio

Hi all.. I've read this question, but I think it doesn't really applies in my case.. I started to work at new company about 2 months ago with the position of senior web developer, there was already one programmer there, my position is above his, but I'm not his boss.. I don't tell him what to do.. Since the day I started to work at the company, I managed to implement a kind of a test server which he refuses to use, implemented a project management tool which he refuses to use also, and I'm in the process of implementing version control using mercurial ( damn Mercurial that's giving me so much headaches ), which he is going to use.. He is a nice guy, but just the other day we had a big discussion about "best practices", and "coding standards".. for me it's absolutely necessary to have this two things, at the place I'm currently working... otherwise it's not going to work.. This discussion, basically revolved about using short tags and the echo shortcut, and how we shouldn't use it anymore ( because I sometimes use short tags ).. this went for about 15 minutes, until I finally dropped the subject because I had work to do.. and of course he didn't budge even a millimeter, he's continuing to use short tags, and the echo shortcut and he not even cares about what I think.. When I mentioned that we are a team, he told me: "We are not a team, you work on your projects and I work on mine".. Let's just say, that the switch in my brain flipped, I raised my voice, and I told him that he was going nuts.. this was the most improper way to deal it with, I know, but there are certain things that can't be said to me.. The question here, is how do I deal with this? I want, to implement more changes on our work workflow, and I know that it's going to be a pain, with him always complaining and saying things like this.. Our boss is going to intervene in a few days, I talked to him today, the other programmer send him an email the day we had the discussion complaining.. Just to clarify, when I talk about implementing changes, I just don't appear at work, the next day with a sheet of paper, and say: "This is our we are doing things from now on! And there is no discussion.." For example, when I was trying to implement the project management tool, I took the time to talk to everybody that was going to be involved in it, to see what they think about it.. everyone was positive except him, he responded that it was just a mean to control us even more.. Does anyone has any idea on how to deal with this? PS: Truth to be told, I didn't start the best way with him, in the 4º day of work at the company, I found a really bad piece of code on our custom CMS, one of those things that I only expect to find in code produced by a programmer that has only 1 month of training in programming, and I talked to my boss about it... he showed up at the time I saw that piece of code, he saw my face and asked about it, so I told him.. I know the worst thing that can be said to a programmer is saying that their code is awful, but I've already learned that my code isn't the best of the world, so I take criticism in a completely different way now.. maybe he doesn't..

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Need WIF Training?

- by Your DisplayName here!

I spend numerous hours every month answering questions about WIF and identity in general. This made me realize that this is still quite a complicated topic once you go beyond the standard fedutil stuff. My good friend Brock and I put together a two day training course about WIF that covers everything we think is important. The course includes extensive lab material where you take standard application and apply all kinds of claims and federation techniques and technologies like WS-Federation, WS-Trust, session management, delegation, home realm discovery, multiple identity providers, Access Control Service, REST, SWT and OAuth. The lab also includes the latest version of the thinktecture identityserver and you will learn how to use and customize it. If you are looking for an open enrollment style of training, have a look here. Or contact me directly! The course outline looks as follows: Day 1 Intro to Claims-based Identity & the Windows Identity Foundation WIF introduces important concepts like conversion of security tokens and credentials to claims, claims transformation and claims-based authorization. In this module you will learn the basics of the WIF programming model and how WIF integrates into existing .NET code. Externalizing Authentication for Web Applications WIF includes support for the WS-Federation protocol. This protocol allows separating business and authentication logic into separate (distributed) applications. The authentication part is called identity provider or in more general terms - a security token service. This module looks at this scenario both from an application and identity provider point of view and walks you through the necessary concepts to centralize application login logic both using a standard product like Active Directory Federation Services as well as a custom token service using WIF’s API support. Externalizing Authentication for SOAP Services One big benefit of WIF is that it unifies the security programming model for ASP.NET and WCF. In the spirit of the preceding modules, we will have a look at how WIF integrates into the (SOAP) web service world. You will learn how to separate authentication into a separate service using the WS-Trust protocol and how WIF can simplify the WCF security model and extensibility API. Day 2 Advanced Topics: Security Token Service Architecture, Delegation and Federation The preceding modules covered the 80/20 cases of WIF in combination with ASP.NET and WCF. In many scenarios this is just the tip of the iceberg. Especially when two business partners decide to federate, you usually have to deal with multiple token services and their implications in application design. Identity delegation is a feature that allows transporting the client identity over a chain of service invocations to make authorization decisions over multiple hops. In addition you will learn about the principal architecture of a STS, how to customize the one that comes with this training course, as well as how to build your own. Outsourcing Authentication: Windows Azure & the Azure AppFabric Access Control Service Microsoft provides a multi-tenant security token service as part of the Azure platform cloud offering. This is an interesting product because it allows to outsource vital infrastructure services to a managed environment that guarantees uptime and scalability. Another advantage of the Access Control Service is, that it allows easy integration of both the “enterprise” protocols like WS-* as well as “web identities” like LiveID, Google or Facebook into your applications. ACS acts as a protocol bridge in this case where the application developer doesn’t need to implement all these protocols, but simply uses a service to make it happen. Claims & Federation for the Web and Mobile World Also the web & mobile world moves to a token and claims-based model. While the mechanics are almost identical, other protocols and token types are used to achieve better HTTP (REST) and JavaScript integration for in-browser applications and small footprint devices. Also patterns like how to allow third party applications to work with your data without having to disclose your credentials are important concepts in these application types. The nice thing about WIF and its powerful base APIs and abstractions is that it can shield application logic from these details while you can focus on implementing the actual application. HTH

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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 2012

- by Bob Rhubart

The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for October 2012. OAM/OVD JVM Tuning | @FusionSecExpert Vinay from the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture Group (known as the A-Team) shares a process for analyzing and improving performance in Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Access Manager. SOA Galore: New Books for Technical Eyes Only Shake up up your technical skills with this trio of new technical books from community members covering SOA and BPM. Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic – when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. Solving Big Problems in Our 21st Century Information Society | Irving Wladawsky-Berger "I believe that the kind of extensive collaboration between the private sector, academia and government represented by the Internet revolution will be the way we will generally tackle big problems in the 21st century. Just as with the Internet, governments have a major role to play as the catalyst for many of the big projects that the private sector will then take forward and exploit. The need for high bandwidth, robust national broadband infrastructures is but one such example." -- Irving Wladawsky-Berger Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments | ZDNet Another interesting post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick about changing roles in IT. ADF Mobile - Login Functionality | Andrejus Baranovskis "The new ADF Mobile approach with native deployment is cool when you want to access phone functionality (camera, email, sms and etc.), also when you want to build mobile applications with advanced UI," reports Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis. Podcast: Are You Future Proof? - Part 2 In Part 2, practicing architects and Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra (AT&T), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology), and Ronald van Luttikhuizen (Vennster) discuss re-tooling one’s skill set to reflect changes in enterprise IT, including the knowledge to steer stakeholders around the hype to what's truly valuable. ADF Mobile Custom Javascript — iFrame Injection | John Brunswick The ADF Mobile Framework provides a range of out of the box components to add within your AMX pages, according to John Brunswick. But what happens when "an out of the box component does not directly fulfill your development need? What options are available to extend your application interface?" John has an answer. Oracle Solaris 11.1 update focuses on database integration, cloud | Mark Fontecchio TechTarget editor Mark Fontecchio reports on the recent Oracle Solaris 11.1 release, with comments from IDC's Al Gillen. Architects Matter: Making sense of the people who make sense of enterprise IT Why do architects matter? Oracle Enterprise Architect Eric Stephens suggests that you ask yourself this question the next time you take the elevator to the Oracle offices on the 45th floor of the Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois (or any other skyscraper, for that matter). If you had to take the stairs to get to those offices, who would you blame? "You get the picture," he says. "Architecture is essential for any necessarily complex structure, be it a building or an enterprise." (Read the article) Thought for the Day "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas." — Frederick P. Brooks Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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PowerShell Script To Find Where SharePoint 2010 Features Are Activated

- by Brian Jackett

The script on this post will find where features are activated within your SharePoint 2010 farm. Problem Over the past few months I’ve gotten literally dozens of emails, blog comments, or personal requests from people asking “how do I find where a SharePoint feature has been activated?” I wrote a script to find which features are installed on your farm almost 3 years ago. There is also the Get-SPFeature PowerShell commandlet in SharePoint 2010. The problem is that these only tell you if a feature is installed not where they have been activated. This is especially important to know if you have multiple web applications, site collections, and /or sites. Solution The default call (no parameters) for Get-SPFeature will return all features in the farm. Many of the parameter sets accept filters for specific scopes such as web application, site collection, and site. If those are supplied then only the enabled / activated features are returned for that filtered scope. Taking the concept of recursively traversing a SharePoint farm and merging that with calls to Get-SPFeature at all levels of the farm you can find out what features are activated at that level. Store the results into a variable and you end up with all features that are activated at every level. Below is the script I came up with (slight edits for posting on blog). With no parameters the function lists all features activated at all scopes. If you provide an Identity parameter you will find where a specific feature is activated. Note that the display name for a feature you see in the SharePoint UI rarely matches the “internal” display name. I would recommend using the feature id instead. You can download a full copy of the script by clicking on the link below. Note: This script is not optimized for medium to large farms. In my testing it took 1-3 minutes to recurse through my demo environment. This script is provided as-is with no warranty. Run this in a smaller dev / test environment first. 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042 043 044 045 046 047 048 049 050 051 052 053 054 055 056 057 058 059 060 061 062 063 064 065 066 067 068 function Get-SPFeatureActivated { # see full script for help info, removed for formatting [CmdletBinding()] param( [Parameter(position = 1, valueFromPipeline=$true)] [Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPFeatureDefinitionPipeBind] $Identity )#end param Begin { # declare empty array to hold results. Will add custom member ` # for Url to show where activated at on objects returned from Get-SPFeature. $results = @() $params = @{} } Process { if([string]::IsNullOrEmpty($Identity) -eq $false) { $params = @{Identity = $Identity ErrorAction = "SilentlyContinue" } } # check farm features $results += (Get-SPFeature -Farm -Limit All @params | % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty ` -Name Url -Value ([string]::Empty) -PassThru} | Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url) # check web application features foreach($webApp in (Get-SPWebApplication)) { $results += (Get-SPFeature -WebApplication $webApp -Limit All @params | % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty ` -Name Url -Value $webApp.Url -PassThru} | Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url) # check site collection features in current web app foreach($site in ($webApp.Sites)) { $results += (Get-SPFeature -Site $site -Limit All @params | % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty ` -Name Url -Value $site.Url -PassThru} | Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url) $site.Dispose() # check site features in current site collection foreach($web in ($site.AllWebs)) { $results += (Get-SPFeature -Web $web -Limit All @params | % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty ` -Name Url -Value $web.Url -PassThru} | Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url) $web.Dispose() } } } } End { $results } } #end Get-SPFeatureActivated Snippet of output from Get-SPFeatureActivated Conclusion This script has been requested for a long time and I’m glad to finally getting a working “clean” version. If you find any bugs or issues with the script please let me know. I’ll be posting this to the TechNet Script Center after some internal review. Enjoy the script and I hope it helps with your admin / developer needs. -Frog Out

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My collection of favourite TFS utilities

- by Aaron Kowall

So, you’re in charge of your company or team’s Team Foundation Server. Wish it was easier to manage, administer, extend? Well, here are a few utilities that I highly recommend looking at. I’ve recently had need to rebuild my laptop and upgrade my local TFS environment to TFS 2012 Update 1. This gave me cause to enumerate some of the utilities I like to have on hand. One of the reasons I love to use TFS on projects is that it’s basically a complete ALM toolkit. Everything from Task Management, Version Control, Build Management, Test Management, Metrics and Reporting are all there ‘in the box’. However, no matter how complete a product set it, there are always ways to make it better. Here are a list of utilities and libraries that are pretty generally useful. this is not intended to be an exhaustive list of TFS extensions but rather a set that I recommend you look at. There are many more out there that may be applicable in one scenario or another. This set of tools should work with TFS 2012 or 2010 if you grab the right version. Most of these tools (and more) are available from the Visual Studio Gallery or CodePlex. General TFS Power Tools – This is ‘the’ collection of utilities and extensions delivered by the Product Group. Highly recommended from here are the Best Practice Analyzer for ensuring your TFS implementation is healthy and the Team Foundation Server Backups to ensure your TFS databases are backed up correctly. TFS Administrators Toolkit – helps make updates to work item types and reports across many team projects. Also provides visibility of disk usage by finding large files in version control or test attachments to assist in managing storage utilization. Version Control Git-TF - a set of cross-platform, command line tools that facilitate sharing of changes between TFS and Git. These tools allow a developer to use a local Git repository, and configure it to share changes with a TFS server. Great for all Git lovers who must integrate into a TFS repository. Testing TFS 2012 Tester Power Tool – A utility for bulk copying test cases which assists in an approach for managing test cases across multiple releases. A little plug that this utility was written and maintained by Anna Russo of Imaginet where I also work. Test Scribe - A documentation power tool designed to construct documents directly from the TFS for test plan and test run artifacts for the purpose of discussion, reporting etc. Reporting Community TFS Report Extensions - a single repository of SQL Server Reporting Services report for Team Foundation 2010 (and above). Check out the Test Plan Status report by Imaginet’s Steve St. Jean. Very valuable for your test managers. Builds TFS Build Manager – A great utility if you are build manager over a complex build environment with many TFS build definitions. Community TFS Build Extensions – contains many custom build activities. Current release binaries are for TFS 2010 but many of the activities can be recompiled for use with TFS 2012. While compiling this list, I was surprised by the number of TFS utilities and extensions I no longer use/need in TFS 2012 because of the great work by the TFS team addressing many gaps since the 2010 release. Are there any utilities you depend on that I’ve missed? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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How to define template directives (from an API perspective)?

- by Ralph

Preface I'm writing a template language (don't bother trying to talk me out of it), and in it, there are two kinds of user-extensible nodes. TemplateTags and TemplateDirectives. A TemplateTag closely relates to an HTML tag -- it might look something like div(class="green") { "content" } And it'll be rendered as <div class="green">content</div> i.e., it takes a bunch of attributes, plus some content, and spits out some HTML. TemplateDirectives are a little more complicated. They can be things like for loops, ifs, includes, and other such things. They look a lot like a TemplateTag, but they need to be processed differently. For example, @for($i in $items) { div(class="green") { $i } } Would loop over $items and output the content with the variable $i substituted in each time. So.... I'm trying to decide on a way to define these directives now. Template Tags The TemplateTags are pretty easy to write. They look something like this: [TemplateTag] static string div(string content = null, object attrs = null) { return HtmlTag("div", content, attrs); } Where content gets the stuff between the curly braces (pre-rendered if there are variables in it and such), and attrs is either a Dictionary<string,object> of attributes, or an anonymous type used like a dictionary. It just returns the HTML which gets plunked into its place. Simple! You can write tags in basically 1 line. Template Directives The way I've defined them now looks like this: [TemplateDirective] static string @for(string @params, string content) { var tokens = Regex.Split(@params, @"\sin\s").Select(s => s.Trim()).ToArray(); string itemName = tokens[0].Substring(1); string enumName = tokens[1].Substring(1); var enumerable = data[enumName] as IEnumerable; var sb = new StringBuilder(); var template = new Template(content); foreach (var item in enumerable) { var templateVars = new Dictionary<string, object>(data) { { itemName, item } }; sb.Append(template.Render(templateVars)); } return sb.ToString(); } (Working example). Basically, the stuff between the ( and ) is not split into arguments automatically (like the template tags do), and the content isn't pre-rendered either. The reason it isn't pre-rendered is because you might want to add or remove some template variables or something first. In this case, we add the $i variable to the template variables, var templateVars = new Dictionary<string, object>(data) { { itemName, item } }; And then render the content manually, sb.Append(template.Render(templateVars)); Question I'm wondering if this is the best approach to defining custom Template Directives. I want to make it as easy as possible. What if the user doesn't know how to render templates, or doesn't know that he's supposed to? Maybe I should pass in a Template instance pre-filled with the content instead? Or maybe only let him tamper w/ the template variables, and then automatically render the content at the end? OTOH, for things like "if" if the condition fails, then the template wouldn't need to be rendered at all. So there's a lot of flexibility I need to allow in here. Thoughts?

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XNA Multiplayer Games and Networking

- by JoshReuben

· XNA communication must by default be lightweight – if you are syncing game state between players from the Game.Update method, you must minimize traffic. That game loop may be firing 60 times a second and player 5 needs to know if his tank has collided with any player 3 and the angle of that gun turret. There are no WCF ServiceContract / DataContract niceties here, but at the same time the XNA networking stack simplifies the details. The payload must be simplistic - just an ordered set of numbers that you would map to meaningful enum values upon deserialization. Overview · XNA allows you to create and join multiplayer game sessions, to manage game state across clients, and to interact with the friends list · Dependency on Gamer Services - to receive notifications such as sign-in status changes and game invitations · two types of online multiplayer games: system link game sessions (LAN) and LIVE sessions (WAN). · Minimum dev requirements: 1 Xbox 360 console + Creators Club membership to test network code - run 1 instance of game on Xbox 360, and 1 on a Windows-based computer Network Sessions · A network session is made up of players in a game + up to 8 arbitrary integer properties describing the session · create custom enums – (e.g. GameMode, SkillLevel) as keys in NetworkSessionProperties collection · Player state: lobby, in-play Session Types · local session - for split-screen gaming - requires no network traffic. · system link session - connects multiple gaming machines over a local subnet. · Xbox LIVE multiplayer session - occurs on the Internet. Ranked or unranked Session Updates · NetworkSession class Update method - must be called once per frame. · performs the following actions: o Sends the network packets. o Changes the session state. o Raises the managed events for any significant state changes. o Returns the incoming packet data. · synchronize the session à packet-received and state-change events à no threading issues Session Config · Session host - gaming machine that creates the session. XNA handles host migration · NetworkSession properties: AllowJoinInProgress , AllowHostMigration · NetworkSession groups: AllGamers, LocalGamers, RemoteGamers Subscribe to NetworkSession events · GamerJoined · GamerLeft · GameStarted · GameEnded – use to return to lobby · SessionEnded – use to return to title screen Create a Session session = NetworkSession.Create( NetworkSessionType.SystemLink, maximumLocalPlayers, maximumGamers, privateGamerSlots, sessionProperties ); Start a Session if (session.IsHost) { if (session.IsEveryoneReady) { session.StartGame(); foreach (var gamer in SignedInGamer.SignedInGamers) { gamer.Presence.PresenceMode = GamerPresenceMode.InCombat; Find a Network Session AvailableNetworkSessionCollection availableSessions = NetworkSession.Find( NetworkSessionType.SystemLink, maximumLocalPlayers, networkSessionProperties); availableSessions.AllowJoinInProgress = true; Join a Network Session NetworkSession session = NetworkSession.Join( availableSessions[selectedSessionIndex]); Sending Network Data var packetWriter = new PacketWriter(); foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) { // Get the tank associated with this player. Tank myTank = gamer.Tag as Tank; // Write the data. packetWriter.Write(myTank.Position); packetWriter.Write(myTank.TankRotation); packetWriter.Write(myTank.TurretRotation); packetWriter.Write(myTank.IsFiring); packetWriter.Write(myTank.Health); // Send it to everyone. gamer.SendData(packetWriter, SendDataOptions.None); } Receiving Network Data foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) { // Keep reading while packets are available. while (gamer.IsDataAvailable) { NetworkGamer sender; // Read a single packet. gamer.ReceiveData(packetReader, out sender); if (!sender.IsLocal) { // Get the tank associated with this packet. Tank remoteTank = sender.Tag as Tank; // Read the data and apply it to the tank. remoteTank.Position = packetReader.ReadVector2(); … End a Session if (session.AllGamers.Count == 1) { session.EndGame(); session.Update(); } Performance • Aim to minimize payload, reliable in order messages • Send Data Options: o Unreliable, out of order -(SendDataOptions.None) o Unreliable, in order (SendDataOptions.InOrder) o Reliable, out of order (SendDataOptions.Reliable) o Reliable, in order (SendDataOptions.ReliableInOrder) o Chat data (SendDataOptions.Chat) • Simulate: NetworkSession.SimulatedLatency , NetworkSession.SimulatedPacketLoss • Voice support – NetworkGamer properties: HasVoice ,IsTalking , IsMutedByLocalUser

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How do I make a firefox extension execute script on page open/load? [migrated]

- by Will Mc

Thanks in advance! I am creating my first extension (A firefox extension). See below for full description of final product. I need help starting off. I have looked and studied the HelloWorld.xpi example found on Mozilla's site so I am happy to edit that to learn. In the example, when you click a menu item it runs script to display an alert message. My question is, how would I edit this extension to run the script on page load? I am guessing I need to insert some code in the browserOverlay as it loads on page load so, here is the browserOverlay.xpi from the example I am editing to learn: <?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="chrome://global/skin/" ?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="chrome://xulschoolhello/skin/browserOverlay.css" ?> <!DOCTYPE overlay SYSTEM "chrome://xulschoolhello/locale/browserOverlay.dtd"> <overlay id="xulschoolhello-browser-overlay" xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"> <script type="application/x-javascript" src="chrome://xulschoolhello/content/browserOverlay.js" /> <stringbundleset id="stringbundleset"> <stringbundle id="xulschoolhello-string-bundle" src="chrome://xulschoolhello/locale/browserOverlay.properties" /> </stringbundleset> <menubar id="main-menubar"> <menu id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloMenu.accesskey;" insertafter="helpMenu"> <menupopup> <menuitem id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu-item" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloItem.accesskey;" oncommand="XULSchoolChrome.BrowserOverlay.sayHello(event);" /> </menupopup> </menu> </menubar> <vbox id="appmenuSecondaryPane"> <menu id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu-2" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloMenu.accesskey;" insertafter="appmenu_addons"> <menupopup> <menuitem id="xulschoolhello-hello-menu-item-2" label="&xulschoolhello.hello.label;" accesskey="&xulschoolhello.helloItem.accesskey;" oncommand="XULSchoolChrome.BrowserOverlay.sayHello(event);" /> </menupopup> </menu> </vbox> </overlay> I hope you can help me. I need to know what code I should use and where I should put it... Here is the gist of my overall extension - I am creating a click to call extension. This extension will search any new page for a phone number whether just refreshed, new page, new tab etc... Each phone number when clicked will open a new tab and direct user to a custom URL. Thanks again!

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Musings on the launch of SQL Monitor

- by Phil Factor

For several years, I was responsible for the smooth running of a large number of enterprise database servers. We ran a network monitoring tool that was primitive by today’s standards but which performed the useful function of polling every system, including all the Servers in my charge. It ran a configurable script for each service that you needed to monitor that was merely required to return one of a number of integer values. These integer values represented the pain level of the service, from 10 (“hurtin’ real bad”) to 1 (“Things is great”). Not only could you program the visual appearance of each server on the network diagram according to the value of the integer, but you could even opt to run a sound file. Very soon, we had a large TFT Screen, high on the wall of the server room, with every server represented by an icon, and a speaker next to it that would give out a series of grunts, groans, snores, shrieks and funeral marches, depending on the problem. One glance at the display, and you could dive in with iSQL/QA/SSMS and check what was going on with your favourite diagnostic tools. If you saw a server icon burst into flames on the screen or droop like a jelly, you dropped your mug of coffee to do it. It was real fun, but I remember it more for the huge difference it made to have that real-time visibility into how your servers are performing. The management soon stopped making jokes about the real reason we wanted the TFT screen. (It rendered DVDs beautifully they said; particularly flesh-tints). If you are instantly alerted when things start to go wrong, then there was a good chance you could fix it before being alerted to the problem by the users of the system. There is a world of difference between this sort of tool, one that gives whoever is ‘on watch’ in the server room the first warning of a potential problem on one of any number of servers, and the breed of tool that attempts to provide some sort of prosthetic DBA Brain. I like to get the early warning, to get the right information to help to diagnose a problem: No auto-fix, but just the information. I prefer to leave the task of ascertaining the exact cause of a problem to my own routines, custom code, intuition and forensic instincts. A simulated aircraft cockpit doesn’t do anything for me, especially before I know where I should be flying. Time has moved on, and that TFT screen is now, with SQL Monitor, an iPad or any other mobile or static device that can support a browser. Rather than trying to reproduce the conceptual topology of the servers, it lists them in their groups so as to give a display that scales with the increasing number of databases you monitor. It gives the history of the major events and trends for the servers. It gives the icons and colours that you can spot out of the corner of your eye, but goes on to give you just enough information in drill-down to give you a much clearer idea of where to look with your DBA tools and routines. It doesn't swamp you with information. Whereas a few server and database-level problems are pretty easily fixed, others depend on judgement and experience to sort out. Although the idea of an application that automates the bulk of a DBA’s skills is attractive to many, I can’t see it happening soon. SQL Server’s complexity increases faster than the panaceas can be created. In the meantime, I believe that the best way of helping DBAs is to make the monitoring process as simple and effective as possible, and provide the right sort of detail and ‘evidence’ to allow them to decide on the fix. In the end, it is still down to the skill of the DBA.

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The Three-Legged Milk Stool - Why Oracle Fusion Incentive Compensation makes the difference!

- by Richard Lefebvre

During the London Olympics, we were exposed to dozens of athletes who worked with sports psychologists to maximize their performance. Executives often hire business psychologists to coach their teams to excellence. In the same vein, Fusion Incentive Compensation can be used to get people to change their sales behavior so we can make our numbers. But what about using incentive compensation solutions in a non-sales scenario to drive change? Recently, I was working an opportunity where a company was having a low user adoption rate for Salesforce.com, which was causing problems for them. I suggested they use Fusion Incentive Comp to change the reps' behavior. We tossed around the idea of tracking user adoption by creating a variable bonus for reps based on how well they forecasted revenues in the new system. Another thought was to reward the reps for how often they logged into the system or for the percentage of leads that became opportunities and turned into revenue. A new twist on a great product. Fusion CRM's Sweet Spot I'm excited about the sales performance management (SPM) tools in Fusion CRM. This trio of Incentive Compensation, Territory Management, and Quota Management sets us apart from the competition because Oracle is the only vendor that provides all three of these capabilities on a single tech stack, in a single application, and with a single look and feel. The niche vendors offer standalone territory or incentive compensation solutions, but then the customer has to custom build the other tools and can end up with a Frankenstein-type environment. On average, companies overpay sales commissions by three to eight percent. You calculate that number for a company the size of Oracle for one quarter and it makes a pretty air-tight financial case for using SPM tools to figure accurate commissions. Plus when sales reps get the right compensation, they can be out selling rather than spending precious time figuring out what they didn't get paid or looking for another job. And one more thing ... Oracle knows incentive comp. We have been a Gartner Market Scope leader in this space for the last five years. Our solution gets high marks because of its scalability and because of its interoperability with other technologies. And now that we're leading with Fusion, our incentive compensation offering includes the innovations that the Fusion team built, plus enhancements from the E-Business Suite Incentive Comp team. It's a case of making a good thing even better. (See product video.) The "Wedge" Apps In a number of accounts that I'm working on, there is a non-Oracle CRM system of record. That gives me the perfect opportunity to introduce the benefits of our SPM tools and to get the customer using Fusion. Then the door is wide open for the company to uptake more of Fusion CRM, especially since all the integrations they need are out of the box. I really believe that implementing this wedge of SPM tools is the ticket to taking market share away from other vendors. It allows us to insert ourselves in an environment where no other CRM solution in the market has the extending capabilities of Fusion. Not Just Your Usual Suspects Usually the stakeholders that I talk to for Territory Management are tightly aligned with the sales management team. When I sell the quota planning tool, I'm talking to finance people on the ERP side of the house who are measuring quotas and forecasting revenue. And then Incentive Comp is of most interest to the sales operations people, and generally these people roll up to either HR or the payroll department. I think of our Fusion SPM tools as a three-legged stool straddling an organization's Sales, Finance, and HR departments. So when you're prospecting for opportunities -- yes, people with a CRM perspective will be very interested -- but don't limit yourselves to that constituency. You might find stakeholders in accounting, revenue planning, or HR compensation teams. You just might discover, as I did at United Airlines, that the HR organization is spearheading the CRM project because incentive compensation is what they need ... and they're the ones with the budget. Jason Loh Global Solutions Manager, Fusion CRM Sales Planning Oracle Corporation

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How to automate a monitoring system for ETL runs

- by Jeffrey McDaniel

Upon completion of the Primavera ETL process there are a few ways to determine if the process finished successfully. First, in the <installation directory>\log folder, there is a staretlprocess.log and staretl.html files. These files will give the output results of the ETL run. The staretl.html file will give a detailed summary of each step of the process, its run time, and its status. The .log file, based on the logging level set in the Configuration tool, can give extensive information about the ETL process. The log file can be used as a validation for process completion. To automate the monitoring of these log files, perform the following steps: 1. Write a custom application to parse through the log file and search for [ERROR] . In most cases, a major [ERROR] could cause the ETL process to fail. Searching the log and finding this value is worthy of an alert. 2. Determine the total number of steps in the ETL process, and validate that the log file recorded and entry for the final step. For example validate that your log file contains an entry for Step 39/39 (could be different based on the version you are running). If there is no Step 39/39, then either the process is taking longer than expected or it didn't make it to the end. Either way this would be a good cause for an alert. 3. Check the last line in the log file. The last line of the log file should contain an indication that the ETL run completed successfully. For example, the last line of a log file will say (results could be different based on Reporting Database versions): [INFO] (Message) Finished Writing Report 4. You could write an Ant script to execute the ETL process and have it set to - failonerror="true" - and from there send results to an external tool to monitor the jobs, send to email, or send to database. With each ETL run, the log file appends to the existing log file by default. Because of this behavior, I would recommend renaming the existing log files before running a new ETL process. By doing this, only log entries for the currently running ETL process is recorded in the new log files. Based on these log entries, alerts can be setup to notify the administrator or DBA. Another way to determine if the ETL process has completed successfully is to monitor the etl_processmaster table. Depending on the Reporting Database version this could be in the Stage or Star databases. As of Reporting Database 2.2 and higher this would be in the Star database. The etl_processmaster table records entries for the ETL run along with a Start and Finish time. If the ETl process has failed the Finish date should be null. This table can be queried at a time when ETL process is expected to be finished and if null send an alert. These are just some options. There are additional ways this can be accomplished based around these two areas - log files or database. Here is an additional query to gather more information about your ETL run (connect as Staruser): SELECT SYSDATE,test_script,decode(loc, 0, PROCESSNAME, trim(SUBSTR(PROCESSNAME, loc+1))) PROCESSNAME ,duration duration from ( select (e.endtime - b.starttime) * 1440 duration, to_char(b.starttime, 'hh24:mi:ss') starttime, to_char(e.endtime, 'hh24:mi:ss') endtime, b.PROCESSNAME, instr(b.PROCESSNAME, ']') loc, b.infotype test_script from ( select processid, infodate starttime, PROCESSNAME, INFOMSG, INFOTYPE from etl_processinfo where processid = (select max(PROCESSID) from etl_processinfo) and infotype = 'BEGIN' ) b inner Join ( select processid, infodate endtime, PROCESSNAME, INFOMSG, INFOTYPE from etl_processinfo where processid = (select max(PROCESSID) from etl_processinfo) and infotype = 'END' ) e on b.processid = e.processid and b.PROCESSNAME = e.PROCESSNAME order by b.starttime)

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Social Targeting: This One's Just for You

- by Mike Stiles

Think of social targeting in terms of the archery competition we just saw in the Olympics. If someone loaded up 5 arrows and shot them straight up into the air all at once, hoping some would land near the target, the world would have united in laughter. But sadly for hysterical YouTube video viewing, that’s not what happened. The archers sought to maximize every arrow by zeroing in on the spot that would bring them the most points. Marketers have always sought to do the same. But they can only work with the tools that are available. A firm grasp of the desired target does little good if the ad products aren’t there to deliver that target. On the social side, both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to enhance targeting for marketers. And why not? As the demand to monetize only goes up, they’re quite motivated to leverage and deliver their incredible user bases in ways that make economic sense for advertisers. You could target keywords on Twitter with promoted accounts, and get promoted tweets into search. They would surface for your followers and some users that Twitter thought were like them. Now you can go beyond keywords and target Twitter users based on 350 interests in 25 categories. How does a user wind up in one of these categories? Twitter looks at that user’s tweets, they look at whom they follow, and they run data through some sort of Twitter secret sauce. The result is, you have a much clearer shot at Twitter users who are most likely to welcome and be responsive to your tweets. And beyond the 350 interests, you can also create custom segments that find users who resemble followers of whatever Twitter handle you give it. That means you can now use boring tweets to sell like a madman, right? Not quite. This ad product is still quality-based, meaning if you’re not putting out tweets that lead to interest and thus, engagement, that tweet will earn a low quality score and wind up costing you more under Twitter’s auction system to maintain. That means, as the old knight in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” cautions, “choose wisely” when targeting based on these interests and categories to make sure your interests truly do line up with theirs. On the Facebook side, they’re rolling out ad targeting that uses email addresses, phone numbers, game and app developers’ user ID’s, and eventually addresses for you bigger brands. Why? Because you marketers asked for it. Here you were with this amazing customer list but no way to reach those same customers should they be on Facebook. Now you can find and communicate with customers you gathered outside of social, and use Facebook to do it. Fair to say such users are a sensible target and will be responsive to your message since they’ve already bought something from you. And no you’re not giving your customer info to Facebook. They’ll use something called “hashing” to make sure you don’t see Facebook user data (beyond email, phone number, address, or user ID), and Facebook can’t see your customer data. The end result, social becomes far more workable and more valuable to marketers when it delivers on the promise that made it so exciting in the first place. That promise is the ability to move past casting wide nets to the masses and toward concentrating marketing dollars efficiently on the targets most likely to yield results.

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Customizing the Test Status on the TFS 2010 SSRS Stories Overview Report

- by Bob Hardister

This post shows how to customize the SQL query used by the Team Foundation Server 2010 SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Stories Overview Report. The objective is to show test status for the current version while including user story status of the current and prior versions. Why? Because we don’t copy completed user stories into the next release. We only want one instance of a user story for the product because we believe copies can get out of sync when they are supposed to be the same. In the example below, work items for the current version are on the area path root and prior versions are not on the area path root. However, you can use area path or iteration path criteria in the query as suits your needs. In any case, here’s how you do it: 1. Download a copy of the report RDL file as a backup 2. Open the report by clicking the edit down arrow and selecting “Edit in Report Builder” 3. Right click on the dsOverview Dataset and select Dataset Properties 4. Update the following SQL per the comments in the code: Customization 1 of 3 … -- Get the list deliverable workitems that have Test Cases linked DECLARE @TestCases Table (DeliverableID int, TestCaseID int); INSERT @TestCases SELECT h.ID, flh.TargetWorkItemID FROM @Hierarchy h JOIN FactWorkItemLinkHistory flh ON flh.SourceWorkItemID = h.ID AND flh.WorkItemLinkTypeSK = @TestedByLinkTypeSK AND flh.RemovedDate = CONVERT(DATETIME, '9999', 126) AND flh.TeamProjectCollectionSK = @TeamProjectCollectionSK JOIN [CurrentWorkItemView] wi ON flh.TargetWorkItemID = wi.[System_ID] AND wi.[System_WorkItemType] = @TestCase AND wi.ProjectNodeGUID = @ProjectGuid -- Customization 1 of 3: only include test status information when test case area path = root. Added the following 2 statements AND wi.AreaPath = '{the root area path of the team project}' … Customization 2 of 3 … -- Get the Bugs linked to the deliverable workitems directly DECLARE @Bugs Table (ID int, ActiveBugs int, ResolvedBugs int, ClosedBugs int, ProposedBugs int) INSERT @Bugs SELECT h.ID, SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Active THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Active, SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Resolved THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Resolved, SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Closed THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Closed, SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Proposed THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Proposed FROM @Hierarchy h JOIN FactWorkItemLinkHistory flh ON flh.SourceWorkItemID = h.ID AND flh.TeamProjectCollectionSK = @TeamProjectCollectionSK JOIN [CurrentWorkItemView] wi ON wi.[System_WorkItemType] = @Bug AND wi.[System_Id] = flh.TargetWorkItemID AND flh.RemovedDate = CONVERT(DATETIME, '9999', 126) AND wi.[ProjectNodeGUID] = @ProjectGuid -- Customization 2 of 3: only include test status information when test case area path = root. Added the following statement AND wi.AreaPath = '{the root area path of the team project}' GROUP BY h.ID … Customization 2 of 3 … -- Add the Bugs linked to the Test Cases which are linked to the deliverable workitems -- Walks the links from the user stories to test cases (via the tested by link), and then to -- bugs that are linked to the test case. We don't need to join to the test case in the work -- item history view. -- -- [WIT:User Story/Requirement] --> [Link:Tested By]--> [Link:any type] --> [WIT:Bug] INSERT @Bugs SELECT tc.DeliverableID, SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Active THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Active, SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Resolved THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Resolved, SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Closed THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Closed, SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Proposed THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Proposed FROM @TestCases tc JOIN FactWorkItemLinkHistory flh ON flh.SourceWorkItemID = tc.TestCaseID AND flh.RemovedDate = CONVERT(DATETIME, '9999', 126) AND flh.TeamProjectCollectionSK = @TeamProjectCollectionSK JOIN [CurrentWorkItemView] wi ON wi.[System_Id] = flh.TargetWorkItemID AND wi.[System_WorkItemType] = @Bug AND wi.[ProjectNodeGUID] = @ProjectGuid -- Customization 3 of 3: only include test status information when test case area path = root. Added the following statement AND wi.AreaPath = '{the root area path of the team project}' GROUP BY tc.DeliverableID … 5. Save the report and you’re all set. Note: you may need to re-apply custom parameter changes like pre-selected sprints.

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PowerShell Script To Find Where SharePoint 2007 Features Are Activated

- by Brian T. Jackett

Recently I posted a script to find where SharePoint 2010 Features Are Activated. I built the original version to use SharePoint 2010 PowerShell commandlets as that saved me a number of steps for filtering and gathering features at each level. If there was ever demand for a 2007 version I could modify the script to handle that by using the object model instead of commandlets. Just the other week a fellow SharePoint PFE Jason Gallicchio had a customer asking about a version for SharePoint 2007. With a little bit of work I was able to convert the script to work against SharePoint 2007. Solution Below is the converted script that works against a SharePoint 2007 farm. Note: There appears to be a bug with the 2007 version that does not give accurate results against a SharePoint 2010 farm. I ran the 2007 version against a 2010 farm and got fewer results than my 2010 version of the script. Discussing with some fellow PFEs I think the discrepancy may be due to sandboxed features, a new concept in SharePoint 2010. I have not had enough time to test or confirm. For the time being only use the 2007 version script against SharePoint 2007 farms and the 2010 version against SharePoint 2010 farms. Note: This script is not optimized for medium to large farms. In my testing it took 1-3 minutes to recurse through my demo environment. This script is provided as-is with no warranty. Run this in a smaller dev / test environment first. 001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042 043 044 045 046 047 048 049 050 051 052 053 054 055 056 057 058 059 060 061 062 063 064 065 066 067 068 069 070 function Get-SPFeatureActivated { # see full script for help info, removed for formatting [CmdletBinding()] param( [Parameter(position = 1, valueFromPipeline=$true)] [string] $Identity )#end param Begin { # load SharePoint assembly to access object model [void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") # declare empty array to hold results. Will add custom member for Url to show where activated at on objects returned from Get-SPFeature. $results = @() $params = @{} } Process { if([string]::IsNullOrEmpty($Identity) -eq $false) { $params = @{Identity = $Identity} } # create hashtable of farm features to lookup definition ids later $farm = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm]::Local # check farm features $results += ($farm.FeatureDefinitions | Where-Object {$_.Scope -eq "Farm"} | Where-Object {[string]::IsNullOrEmpty($Identity) -or ($_.DisplayName -eq $Identity)} | % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty -Name Url -Value ([string]::Empty) -PassThru} | Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url) # check web application features $contentWebAppServices = $farm.services | ? {$_.typename -like "Windows SharePoint Services Web Application"} foreach($webApp in $contentWebAppServices.WebApplications) { $results += ($webApp.Features | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Definition | Where-Object {[string]::IsNullOrEmpty($Identity) -or ($_.DisplayName -eq $Identity)} | % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty -Name Url -Value $webApp.GetResponseUri(0).AbsoluteUri -PassThru} | Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url) # check site collection features in current web app foreach($site in ($webApp.Sites)) { $results += ($site.Features | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Definition | Where-Object {[string]::IsNullOrEmpty($Identity) -or ($_.DisplayName -eq $Identity)} | % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty -Name Url -Value $site.Url -PassThru} | Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url) # check site features in current site collection foreach($web in ($site.AllWebs)) { $results += ($web.Features | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Definition | Where-Object {[string]::IsNullOrEmpty($Identity) -or ($_.DisplayName -eq $Identity)} | % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty -Name Url -Value $web.Url -PassThru} | Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url) $web.Dispose() } $site.Dispose() } } } End { $results } } #end Get-SPFeatureActivated Get-SPFeatureActivated Conclusion I have posted this script to the TechNet Script Repository (click here). As always I appreciate any feedback on scripts. If anyone is motivated to run this 2007 version script against a SharePoint 2010 to see if they find any differences in number of features reported versus what they get with the 2010 version script I’d love to hear from you. -Frog Out

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WIF-less claim extraction from ACS: JWT

- by Elton Stoneman

ACS support for JWT still shows as "beta", but it meets the spec and it works nicely, so it's becoming the preferred option as SWT is losing favour. (Note that currently ACS doesn’t support JWT encryption, if you want encrypted tokens you need to go SAML). In my last post I covered pulling claims from an ACS token without WIF, using the SWT format. The JWT format is a little more complex, but you can still inspect claims just with string manipulation. The incoming token from ACS is still presented in the BinarySecurityToken element of the XML payload, with a TokenType of urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt: <t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse xmlns:t="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust"> <t:Lifetime> <wsu:Created xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T07:39:55.337Z</wsu:Created> <wsu:Expires xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T09:19:55.337Z</wsu:Expires> </t:Lifetime> <wsp:AppliesTo xmlns:wsp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/09/policy"> <EndpointReference xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing"> <Address>http://localhost/x.y.z</Address> </EndpointReference> </wsp:AppliesTo> <t:RequestedSecurityToken> <wsse:BinarySecurityToken wsu:Id="_1eeb5cf4-b40b-40f2-89e0-a3343f6bd985-6A15D1EED0CDB0D8FA48C7D566232154" ValueType="urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt" EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd">[ base64string ] </wsse:BinarySecurityToken> </t:RequestedSecurityToken> <t:TokenType>urn:ietf:params:oauth:token-type:jwt</t:TokenType> <t:RequestType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust/Issue</t:RequestType> <t:KeyType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/NoProofKey</t:KeyType> </t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse> The token as a whole needs to be base-64 decoded. The decoded value contains a header, payload and signature, dot-separated; the parts are also base-64, but they need to be decoded using a no-padding algorithm (implementation and more details in this MSDN article on validating an Exchange 2013 identity token). The values are then in JSON; the header contains the token type and the hashing algorithm: "{"typ":"JWT","alg":"HS256"}" The payload contains the same data as in the SWT, but JSON rather than querystring format: {"aud":"http://localhost/x.y.z" "iss":"https://adfstest-bhw.accesscontrol.windows.net/" "nbf":1346398795 "exp":1346404795 "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationinstant":"2012-08-31T07:39:53.652Z" "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationmethod":"http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/authenticationmethod/windows" "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/windowsaccountname":"xyz" "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/emailaddress":"[email protected]" "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/upn":"[email protected]" "identityprovider":"http://fs.svc.x.y.z.com/adfs/services/trust"} The signature is in the third part of the token. Unlike SWT which is fixed to HMAC-SHA-256, JWT can support other protocols (the one in use is specified as the "alg" value in the header). How to: Validate an Exchange 2013 identity token contains an implementation of a JWT parser and validator; apart from the custom base-64 decoding part, it’s very similar to SWT extraction. I've wrapped the basic SWT and JWT in a ClaimInspector.aspx page on gitHub here: SWT and JWT claim inspector. You can drop it into any ASP.Net site and set the URL to be your redirect page in ACS. Swap ACS to issue SWT or JWT, and using the same page you can inspect the claims that come out.

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SPTI problem with Mode Select

- by Bob Murphy

I'm running into a problem in which an attempt to do a "Mode Select" SCSI command using SPTI is returning an error status of 0x02 ("Check Condition"), and hope someone here might have some tips or suggestions. The code in question is intended to work with at a custom SCSI device. I wrote the original support for it using ASPI under WinXP, and am converting it to work with SPTI under 64-bit Windows 7. Here's the problematic code - and what's happening is, sptwb.spt.ScsiStatus is 2, which is a "Check Condition" error. Unfortunately, the device in question doesn't return useful information when you do a "Request Sense" after this problem occurs, so that's no help. void MSSModeSelect(const ModeSelectRequestPacket& inRequest, StatusResponsePacket& outResponse) { IPC_LOG("MSSModeSelect(): PathID=%d, TargetID=%d, LUN=%d", inRequest.m_Device.m_PathId, inRequest.m_Device.m_TargetId, inRequest.m_Device.m_Lun); int adapterIndex = inRequest.m_Device.m_PathId; HANDLE adapterHandle = prvOpenScsiAdapter(inRequest.m_Device.m_PathId); if (adapterHandle == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) { outResponse.m_Status = eScsiAdapterErr; return; } SCSI_PASS_THROUGH_WITH_BUFFERS sptwb; memset(&sptwb, 0, sizeof(sptwb)); #define MODESELECT_BUF_SIZE 32 sptwb.spt.Length = sizeof(SCSI_PASS_THROUGH); sptwb.spt.PathId = inRequest.m_Device.m_PathId; sptwb.spt.TargetId = inRequest.m_Device.m_TargetId; sptwb.spt.Lun = inRequest.m_Device.m_Lun; sptwb.spt.CdbLength = CDB6GENERIC_LENGTH; sptwb.spt.SenseInfoLength = 0; sptwb.spt.DataIn = SCSI_IOCTL_DATA_IN; sptwb.spt.DataTransferLength = MODESELECT_BUF_SIZE; sptwb.spt.TimeOutValue = 2; sptwb.spt.DataBufferOffset = offsetof(SCSI_PASS_THROUGH_WITH_BUFFERS,ucDataBuf); sptwb.spt.Cdb[0] = SCSIOP_MODE_SELECT; sptwb.spt.Cdb[4] = MODESELECT_BUF_SIZE; DWORD length = offsetof(SCSI_PASS_THROUGH_WITH_BUFFERS,ucDataBuf) + sptwb.spt.DataTransferLength; memset(sptwb.ucDataBuf, 0, sizeof(sptwb.ucDataBuf)); sptwb.ucDataBuf[2] = 0x10; sptwb.ucDataBuf[16] = (BYTE)0x01; ULONG bytesReturned = 0; BOOL okay = DeviceIoControl(adapterHandle, IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH, &sptwb, sizeof(SCSI_PASS_THROUGH), &sptwb, length, &bytesReturned, FALSE); DWORD gle = GetLastError(); IPC_LOG(" DeviceIoControl() %s", okay ? "worked" : "failed"); if (okay) { outResponse.m_Status = (sptwb.spt.ScsiStatus == 0) ? eOk : ePrinterStatusErr; } else { outResponse.m_Status = eScsiPermissionsErr; } CloseHandle(adapterHandle); } A few more remarks, for what it's worth: This is derived from some old ASPI code that does the "Mode Select" flawlessly. This routine opens \\.\SCSI<whatever> at the beginning, via prvOpenScsiAdapter(), and closes the handle at the end. All the other routines for dealing with the device do the same thing, including the routine to do "Reserve Unit". Is this a good idea under SPTI, or should the call to "Reserve Unit" leave the handle open, so this routine and others in the sequence can use the same handle? This uses the IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH. Should "Mode Select" use IOCTL_SCSI_PASS_THROUGH_DIRECT instead? Thanks in advance - any help will be greatly appreciated.

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Faster Trip to Innovation with Simplified Data Integration: Sabre Holdings Case Study

- by Tanu Sood

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Author: Irem Radzik, Director of Product Marketing, Data Integration, Oracle In today’s fast-paced, competitive environment, IT teams are under pressure to deliver technology solutions for many critical business initiatives as fast as possible. When the focus is on speed, it can be easy to continue to use old style, point-to-point custom scripts that grow organically to the point where they are unmanageable and too costly to maintain. As data volumes, data sources, and end users grow, uncoordinated data integration efforts create significant inefficiencies for both IT and business users. In addition to losing IT productivity due to maintaining spaghetti architecture, data integrity becomes a concern as well. Errors caused by inconsistent, data and manual data entry can prove very costly for companies and disrupt business activities. Many industry leaders recognize now that data should be moved in an automated and reliable manner across all platforms to have one version of the truth. By simplifying their data integration architecture and standardizing on a centralized approach, IT teams now accelerate time to market. Especially, using a centralized, shared-service approach brings agility, increases IT productivity, and frees up resources for innovation. One such industry leader that simplified its data integration architecture is Sabre Holdings. Sabre Holdings provides distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry, and is a winner of Oracle Excellence Awards for Fusion Middleware in 2011 in the data integration category. I had the pleasure to host Sabre Holdings on a public webcast and discuss their data integration best practices for data warehousing. In this webcast Sabre’s Amjad Saeed, presented how the company reduced complexity by consolidating systems and standardizing development on Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate for its global data warehouse development team. With Oracle’s complete real-time data integration solution, Sabre also streamlined support and maintenance operations, achieved real-time view in the execution of the integration processes, and can manage the data warehouse and business intelligence solution performance on demand. By reducing complexity and leveraging timely market insights, the company was able to decrease time to market by 40%. You can now listen to the webcast on demand: Sabre Holdings Case Study: Accelerating Innovation using Oracle Data Integration I invite you to hear directly from Sabre how to use advanced data integration capabilities to enable accelerated innovation. To learn more about Oracle’s data integration offering you can download our free resources.

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Approach for packing 2D shapes while minimizing total enclosing area

- by Dennis

Not sure on my tags for this question, but in short .... I need to solve a problem of packing industrial parts into crates while minimizing total containing area. These parts are motors, or pumps, or custom-made components, and they have quite unusual shapes. For some, it may be possible to assume that a part === rectangular cuboid, but some are not so simple, i.e. they assume a shape more of that of a hammer or letter T. With those, (assuming 2D shape), by alternating direction of top & bottom, one can pack more objects into the same space, than if all tops were in the same direction. Crude example below with letter "T"-shaped parts: ***** xxxxx ***** x ***** *** ooo * x vs * x vs * x vs * x o * x * xxxxx * x * x o xxxxx xxx Right now we are solving the problem by something like this: using CAD software, make actual models of how things fit in crate boxes make estimates of actual crate dimensions & write them into Excel file (1) is crazy amount of work and as the result we have just a limited amount of possible entries in (2), the Excel file. The good things is that programming this is relatively easy. Given a combination of products to go into crates, we do a lookup, and if entry exists in the Excel (or Database), we bring it out. If it doesn't, we say "sorry, no data!". I don't necessarily want to go full force on making up some crazy algorithm that given geometrical part description can align, rotate, and figure out best part packing into a crate, given its shape, but maybe I do.. Question Well, here is my question: assuming that I can represent my parts as 2D (to be determined how), and that some parts look like letter T, and some parts look like rectangles, which algorithm can I use to give me a good estimate on the dimensions of the encompassing area, while ensuring that the parts are packed in a minimal possible area, to minimize crating/shipping costs? Are there approximation algorithms? Seeing how this can get complex, is there an existing library I could use? My thought / Approach My naive approach would be to define a way to describe position of parts, and place the first part, compute total enclosing area & dimensions. Then place 2nd part in 0 degree orientation, repeat, place it at 180 degree orientation, repeat (for my case I don't think 90 degree rotations will be meaningful due to long lengths of parts). Proceed using brute force "tacking on" other parts to the enclosing area until all parts are processed. I may have to shift some parts a tad (see 3rd pictorial example above with letters T). This adds a layer of 2D complexity rather than 1D. I am not sure how to approach this. One idea I have is genetic algorithms, but I think those will take up too much processing power and time. I will need to look out for shape collisions, as well as adding extra padding space, since we are talking about real parts with irregularities rather than perfect imaginary blocks. I'm afraid this can get geometrically messy fairly fast, and I'd rather keep things simple, if I can. But what if the best (practical) solution is to pack things into different crate boxes rather than just one? This can get a bit more tricky. There is human element involved as well, i.e. like parts can go into same box and are thus a constraint to be considered. Some parts that are not the same are sometimes grouped together for shipping and can be considered as a common grouped item. Sometimes customers want things shipped their way, which adds human element to constraints. so there will have to be some customization.

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SharePoint Content and Site Editing Tips

- by Bil Simser

A few content management and site editing tips for power users on this bacon flavoured unicorn morning. The theme here is keep it clean!Write "friendly" email addressesRemember it's human beings reading your content. So seeing something like "If you have questions please send an email to [email protected]" breaks up the readiblity. Instead just do the simple steps of writing the content in plain English and going back, highlighting the name and insert a link (note: you might have to prefix the link with mailto:[email protected]). It makes for a friendlier looking page and hides the ugliness that are sometimes in email addresses.Use friendly column and list namesThis is a big pet peeve of mine. When you first create a column or list with spaces the internal name is changed. The display name might be "My Amazing List of Animals with Large Testicles" but the internal (and link) name becomes "My_x00x20_Amazing_x00x20_List_x00x20_of_x00x20_Animals_x00x20_with_x00x20_Large_x00x20_Testicles". What's worse is if you create a publishing page named "This Website is Fueled By a Dolphin's Spleen". Not only is it incorrect grammar, but the apostrophe wreaks havoc on both the internal name for the list (with lots of crazy hex codes) as well as the hyperlink (where everything is uuencoded). Instead create the list with a distinct and compact name then go back and change it to whatever you want. The end result is a better formed name that you can both script and access in code easier.Keep your Views CleanWhen you add a column to a list or create a new list the default is to add it to the default view. Do everyone a favour and don't check this box! The default view of a list should be something similar to the Title field and nothing else. Keep it clean. If you want to set a defalt view that's different, go back and create one with all the fields and filtering and sorting columns you want and set it as default. It's a good idea to keep the original AllItems.aspx (note the lack of space in the filename!) easy and unfiltered. It's also a good idea to keep your column count down in views. Don't let every column be added by default and don't add every column just because you can. Create separate views for distinct responsibilities and try to keep the number of columns down to a single screen to prevent horizontal scrolling.Simple NavigationThe Quick Launch is a great tool for navigating around your site but don't use the default of adding all lists to it. Uncheck that box and keep navigation simple. Create custom groupings that make sense so if you don't have a site with "Documents and Lists" but "Reports and Notices" makes more sense then do it. Also hide internal lists from the Quick Launch. For example, if most users don't need to see all the lookup tables you might have on a site don't show them. You can use audience filtering on the Quick Launch if you want to hide admin items from non-admin users so consider that as an option.Enjoy!

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Two Weeks To Go, Still Time to Register

- by speakjava

Yes, it's now only two weeks to the start of the 17th JavaOne conference! This will be my ninth JavaOne, I came fairly late to this event, attending for the first time in 2002. Since then I've missed two conferences, 2006 for the birth of my son (a reasonable excuse I think) and 2010 for reasons we'll not go into here. I have quite the collection of show devices, I've still got the WoWee robot, the HTC phone for JavaFX, the programmable pen and the Sharp Zaurus. The only one I didn't keep was the homePod music player (I wonder why?) JavaOne is a special conference for many reasons, some of which I list here: A great opportunity to catch up on the latest changes in the Java world. This is not just in terms of the platform, but as much about what people are doing with Java to build new and cool applications. A chance to meet people. We have these things called BoFs, which stands for "Birds of a Feather", as in "Birds of a feather, flock together". The idea being to have sessions where people who are interested in the same topic don't just get to listen to a presentation, but get to talk about it. These sessions are great, but I find that JavaOne is as much about the people I meet in the corridors and the discussions I have there as it is about the sessions I get to attend. Think outside the box. There are a lot of sessions at JavaOne covering the full gamut of Java technologies and applications. Clearly going to sessions that relate to your area of interest is great, but attending some of the more esoteric sessions can often spark thoughts and stimulate the imagination to go off and do new and exciting things once you get back. Get the lowdown from the Java community. Java is as much about community as anything else and there are plenty of events where you can get involved. The GlassFish party is always popular and for Java Champions and JUG leaders there's a couple of special events too. Not just all hard work. Oracle knows how to throw a party and the appreciation event will be a great opportunity to mingle with peers in a more relaxed environment. This year Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon will be playing live. Add free beer and what more could you want? So there you have it. Just a few reasons for why you want to attend JavaOne this year. Oh, and of course I'll be presenting three sessions which is even more reason to go. As usual I've gone for some mainstream ("Custom Charts" for JavaFX) and some more 'out there' ("Java and the Raspberry Pi" and "Gestural Interfaces for JavaFX"). Once again I'll be providing plenty of demos so more than half my luggage this year will consist of a Kinect, robot arm, Raspberry Pis, gamepad and even an EEG sensor. If you're a student there's one even more attractive reason for going to JavaOne: It's Free! Registration is here. Hope to see you there!

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Applying for internship

- by Margus

At the moment I'm thinking about applying for internship at Eesti Energia. I seem to be eligible, but before contacting them I need to learn how to compile an informative and complete CV and cover letter. I do not consider myself as shallow minded, but also I'm not sure how to convincingly justify the stand of interest and how internship will help me in my future career. Course of life Tallinna Tehnikagümnaasium 2003 - 2006 Tallinna Tehnikaülikool 2006 – 2009 Military service at Signal Batallion Tallinna Tehnikaülikool 2010 – ... I started my academic career as Computer and Systems Engineer, but as I excelled in programming classes, I changed my major to Software Engineer and taken my specialty in web applications and logic. Nowadays I mainly use Java, Mathematica and C# to solve problems. For 2 times, I have taken part in ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, where my team won the nationals and did pretty well in Europe. Also as part of notable thing in my academic career, my team wrote the Kalah game AI, that won in University's main programming class AI tournament. My hobbies are mind games and occasional problem solving. Few years ago I also competed in International Checkers EM (requires being in top 3 in nationals) as part of cadet and junior age group - I did not come close to winning, but I exceeded about half of the players each time. In high school and gymnasium I took part and later was the captain of team, that passes regionals and made it to top 3 of nationals (and later won) in (blitz) russian checkers. That was impressive because, it was a team effort as we only had (depending on year) 2-3 strong players. Although I started programming exactly 9,5 years ago I have no work experience. Well actually thats not true, as I completed my army duty, I was hired for a year (days still counting) to be apart of communicational (emergency) infrastructure action group where I'm the teams IT specialist (it's more complicated). So I consider myself to be aware of: rough conditions, teamwork, high stress tolerance, being on time and what responsibility means. As negative things I can mention: I do not have drivers licence. Although only Estonian and English are noted as requirements, then Russian is most likely required as well and I barely understand some of it. Reasons why I want to apply there, are: I need to do at least 4-6 week traineeship and it's in the right field I have the requirements and tasks seem easy enough Company is well known and has fairly good reputation Family and friend think, that it would be acceptable place to work Myriad of options to do final thesis about open up Work place is located in the same city I live atm. At moment, I see myself having a hard time explain why I would prefer it or where I see myself in 10 years if I was offered a job there. Question I have some idea how Curriculum Vitæ should look like, or I can google for template, but I'm not sure how to write informative one. Last I did one, it looked like: picture + contact information + education. Vaguely I only remember, that cover letter should be custom tailored for each place you apply containing ...

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JEP 124: Enhance the Certificate Revocation-Checking API

- by smullan

Revocation checking is the mechanism to determine the revocation status of a certificate. If it is revoked, it is considered invalid and should not be used. Currently as of JDK 7, the PKIX implementation of java.security.cert.CertPathValidator includes a revocation checking implementation that supports both OCSP and CRLs, the two main methods of checking revocation. However, there are very few options that allow you to configure the behavior. You can always implement your own revocation checker, but that's a lot of work. JEP 124 (Enhance the Certificate Revocation-Checking API) is one of the 11 new security features in JDK 8. This feature enhances the java.security.cert API to support various revocation settings such as best-effort checking, end-entity certificate checking, and mechanism-specific options and parameters. Let's describe each of these in more detail and show some examples. The features are provided through a new class named PKIXRevocationChecker. A PKIXRevocationChecker instance is returned by a PKIX CertPathValidator as follows: CertPathValidator cpv = CertPathValidator.getInstance("PKIX"); PKIXRevocationChecker prc = (PKIXRevocationChecker)cpv.getRevocationChecker(); You can now set various revocation options by calling different methods of the returned PKIXRevocationChecker object. For example, the best-effort option (called soft-fail) allows the revocation check to succeed if the status cannot be obtained due to a network connection failure or an overloaded server. It is enabled as follows: prc.setOptions(Enum.setOf(Option.SOFT_FAIL)); When the SOFT_FAIL option is specified, you can still obtain any exceptions that may have been thrown due to network issues. This can be useful if you want to log this information or treat it as a warning. You can obtain these exceptions by calling the getSoftFailExceptions method: List<CertPathValidatorException> exceptions = prc.getSoftFailExceptions(); Another new option called ONLY_END_ENTITY allows you to only check the revocation status of the end-entity certificate. This can improve performance, but you should be careful using this option, as the revocation status of CA certificates will not be checked. To set more than one option, simply specify them together, for example: prc.setOptions(Enum.setOf(Option.SOFT_FAIL, Option.ONLY_END_ENTITY)); By default, PKIXRevocationChecker will try to check the revocation status of a certificate using OCSP first, and then CRLs as a fallback. However, you can switch the order using the PREFER_CRLS option, or disable the fallback altogether using the NO_FALLBACK option. For example, here is how you would only use CRLs to check the revocation status: prc.setOptions(Enum.setOf(Option.PREFER_CRLS, Option.NO_FALLBACK)); There are also a number of other useful methods which allow you to specify various options such as the OCSP responder URI, the trusted OCSP responder certificate, and OCSP request extensions. However, one of the most useful features is the ability to specify a cached OCSP response with the setOCSPResponse method. This can be quite useful if the OCSPResponse has already been obtained, for example in a protocol that uses OCSP stapling. After you have set all of your preferred options, you must add the PKIXRevocationChecker to your PKIXParameters object as one of your custom CertPathCheckers before you validate the certificate chain, as follows: PKIXParameters params = new PKIXParameters(keystore); params.addCertPathChecker(prc); CertPathValidatorResult result = cpv.validate(path, params); Early access binaries of JDK 8 can be downloaded from http://jdk8.java.net/download.html

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ADO and Two Way Storage Tiering

- by Andy-Oracle

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 We get asked the following question about Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) storage tiering quite a bit. Can you tier back to the original location if the data gets hot again? The answer is yes but not with standard Automatic Data Optimization policies, at least not reliably. That's not how ADO is meant to operate. ADO is meant to mirror a traditional view of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) where data will be very volatile when first created, will become less active or cool, and then will eventually cease to be accessed at all (i.e. cold). I think the reason this question gets asked is because customers realize that many of their business processes are cyclical and the thinking goes that those segments that only get used during month end or year-end cycles could sit on lower cost storage when not being used. Unfortunately this doesn't fit very well with the ADO storage tiering model. ADO storage tiering is based on the amount of free and used space in the source tablespace. There are two parameters that control this behavior, TBS_PERCENT_USED and TBS_PERCENT_FREE. When the space in the tablespace exceeds the TBS_PERCENT_USED value then segments specified in storage tiering clause(s) can be moved until the percent of free space reaches the TBS_PERCENT_FREE value. It is worth mentioning that no checks are made for available space in the target tablespace. Now, it is certainly possible to create custom functions to control storage tiering, but this can get complicated. The biggest problem is insuring that there is enough space to move the segment back to tier 1 storage, assuming that that's the goal. This isn't as much of a problem when moving from tier 1 to tier 2 storage because there is typically more tier 2 storage available. At least that's the premise since it is supposed to be less costly, lower performing and higher capacity storage. In either case though, if there isn't enough space then the operation fails. In the case of a customized function, the question becomes do you attempt to free the space so the move can be made or do you just stop and return false so that the move cannot take place? This is really the crux of the issue. Once you cross into this territory you're really going to have to implement two-way hierarchical storage and the whole point of ADO was to provide automatic storage tiering. You're probably better off using heat map and/or business access requirements and building your own hierarchical storage management infrastructure if you really want two way storage tiering. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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Access Control Lists for Roles

- by Kyle Hatlestad

Back in an earlier post, I wrote about how to enable entity security (access control lists, aka ACLs) for UCM 11g PS3. Well, there was actually an additional security option that was included in that release but not fully supported yet (only for Fusion Applications). It's the ability to define Roles as ACLs to entities (documents and folders). But now in PS5, this security option is now fully supported. The benefit of defining Roles for ACLs is that those user roles come from the enterprise security directory (e.g. OID, Active Directory, etc) and thus the WebCenter Content administrator does not need to define them like they do with ACL Groups (Aliases). So it's a bit of best of both worlds. Users are managed through the LDAP repository and are automatically granted/denied access through their group membership which are mapped to Roles in WCC. A different way to think about it is being able to add multiple Accounts to content items...which I often get asked about. Because LDAP groups can map to Accounts, there has always been this association between the LDAP groups and access to the entity in WCC. But that mapping had to define the specific level of access (RWDA) and you could only apply one Account per content item or folder. With Roles for ACLs, it basically takes away both of those restrictions by allowing users to define more then one Role and define the level of access on-the-fly. To turn on ACLs for Roles, there is a component to enable. On the Component Manager page, click the 'advanced component manager' link in the description paragraph at the top. In the list of Disabled Components, enable the RoleEntityACL component. Then restart. This is assuming the other configuration settings have been made for the other ACLs in the earlier post. Once enabled, a new metadata field called xClbraRoleList will be created. If you are using OracleTextSearch as the search indexer, be sure to run a Fast Rebuild on the collection. For Users and Groups, these values are automatically picked up from the corresponding database tables. In the case of Roles, there is an explicitly defined list of choices that are made available. These values must match the roles that are coming from the enterprise security repository. To add these values, go to Administration -> Admin Applets -> Configuration Manager. On the Views tab, edit the values for the ExternalRolesView. By default, 'guest' and 'authenticated' are added. Once added, you can assign the roles to your content or folder. If you are a user that can both access the Security Group for that item and you belong to that particular Role, you now have access to that item. If you don't belong to that Role, you won't! [Extra] Because the selection mechanism for the list is using a type-ahead field, users may not even know the possible choices to start typing to. To help them, one thing you can add to the form is a placeholder field which offers the entire list of roles as an option list they can scroll through (assuming its a manageable size) and view to know what to type to. By being a placeholder field, it won't need to be added to the custom metadata database table or search engine.

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Should I expose IObservable<T> on my interfaces?

- by Alex

My colleague and I have dispute. We are writing a .NET application that processes massive amounts of data. It receives data elements, groups subsets of them into blocks according to some criterion and processes those blocks. Let's say we have data items of type Foo arriving some source (from the network, for example) one by one. We wish to gather subsets of related objects of type Foo, construct an object of type Bar from each such subset and process objects of type Bar. One of us suggested the following design. Its main theme is exposing IObservable objects directly from the interfaces of our components. // ********* Interfaces ********** interface IFooSource { // this is the event-stream of objects of type Foo IObservable<Foo> FooArrivals { get; } } interface IBarSource { // this is the event-stream of objects of type Bar IObservable<Bar> BarArrivals { get; } } / ********* Implementations ********* class FooSource : IFooSource { // Here we put logic that receives Foo objects from the network and publishes them to the FooArrivals event stream. } class FooSubsetsToBarConverter : IBarSource { IFooSource fooSource; IObservable<Bar> BarArrivals { get { // Do some fancy Rx operators on fooSource.FooArrivals, like Buffer, Window, Join and others and return IObservable<Bar> } } } // this class will subscribe to the bar source and do processing class BarsProcessor { BarsProcessor(IBarSource barSource); void Subscribe(); } // ******************* Main ************************ class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { var fooSource = FooSourceFactory.Create(); var barsProcessor = BarsProcessorFactory.Create(fooSource) // this will create FooSubsetToBarConverter and BarsProcessor barsProcessor.Subscribe(); fooSource.Run(); // this enters a loop of listening for Foo objects from the network and notifying about their arrival. } } The other suggested another design that its main theme is using our own publisher/subscriber interfaces and using Rx inside the implementations only when needed. //********** interfaces ********* interface IPublisher<T> { void Subscribe(ISubscriber<T> subscriber); } interface ISubscriber<T> { Action<T> Callback { get; } } //********** implementations ********* class FooSource : IPublisher<Foo> { public void Subscribe(ISubscriber<Foo> subscriber) { /* ... */ } // here we put logic that receives Foo objects from some source (the network?) publishes them to the registered subscribers } class FooSubsetsToBarConverter : ISubscriber<Foo>, IPublisher<Bar> { void Callback(Foo foo) { // here we put logic that aggregates Foo objects and publishes Bars when we have received a subset of Foos that match our criteria // maybe we use Rx here internally. } public void Subscribe(ISubscriber<Bar> subscriber) { /* ... */ } } class BarsProcessor : ISubscriber<Bar> { void Callback(Bar bar) { // here we put code that processes Bar objects } } //********** program ********* class Program { public static void Main(string[] args) { var fooSource = fooSourceFactory.Create(); var barsProcessor = barsProcessorFactory.Create(fooSource) // this will create BarsProcessor and perform all the necessary subscriptions fooSource.Run(); // this enters a loop of listening for Foo objects from the network and notifying about their arrival. } } Which one do you think is better? Exposing IObservable and making our components create new event streams from Rx operators, or defining our own publisher/subscriber interfaces and using Rx internally if needed? Here are some things to consider about the designs: In the first design the consumer of our interfaces has the whole power of Rx at his/her fingertips and can perform any Rx operators. One of us claims this is an advantage and the other claims that this is a drawback. The second design allows us to use any publisher/subscriber architecture under the hood. The first design ties us to Rx. If we wish to use the power of Rx, it requires more work in the second design because we need to translate the custom publisher/subscriber implementation to Rx and back. It requires writing glue code for every class that wishes to do some event processing.

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