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• Creating A SharePoint Parent/Child List Relationship&ndash; SharePoint 2010 Edition

  - by Mark Rackley

  Hey blog readers… It has been almost 2 years since I posted my most read blog on creating a Parent/Child list relationship in SharePoint 2007: Creating a SharePoint List Parent / Child Relationship - Out of the Box And then a year ago I improved on my method and redid the blog post… still for SharePoint 2007: Creating a SharePoint List Parent/Child Relationship – VIDEO REMIX Since then many of you have been asking me how to get this to work in SharePoint 2010, and frankly I have just not had time to look into it. I wish I could have jumped into this sooner, but have just recently began to look at it. Well.. after all this time I have actually come up with two solutions that work, neither of them are as clean as I’d like them to be, but I wanted to get something in your hands that you can start using today. Hopefully in the coming weeks and months I’ll be able to improve upon this further and give you guys some better options. For the most part, the process is identical to the 2007 process, but you have probably found out that the list view web parts in 2010 behave differently, and getting the Parent ID to your new child form can be a pain in the rear (at least that’s what I’ve discovered). Anyway, like I said, I have found a couple of solutions that work. If you know of a better one, please let us know as it bugs me that this not as eloquent as my 2007 implementation. Getting on the same page First thing I’d recommend is recreating this blog: Creating a SharePoint List Parent/Child Relationship – VIDEO REMIX in SharePoint 2010… There are some vague differences, but it’s basically the same…  Here’s a quick video of me doing this in SP 2010: Creating Lists necessary for this blog post Now that you have the lists created, lets set up the New Time form to use a QueryString variable to populate the Parent ID field: Creating parameters in Child’s new item form to set parent ID Did I talk fast enough through both of those videos? Hopefully by now that stuff is old hat to you, but I wanted to make sure everyone could get on the same page.  Okay… let’s get started. Solution 1 – XSLTListView with Javascript This solution is the more elegant of the two, however it does require the use of a little javascript.  The other solution does not use javascript, but it also doesn’t use the pretty new SP 2010 pop-ups.  I’ll let you decide which you like better. The basic steps of this solution are: Inserted a Related Item View Insert a ContentEditorWebPart Insert script in ContentEditorWebPart that pulls the ID from the Query string and calls the method to insert a new item on the child entry form Hide the toolbar from data view to remove “add new item” link. Again, you don’t HAVE to use a CEWP, you could just put the javascript directly in the page using SPD.  Anyway, here is how I did it: Using Related Item View / JavaScript Here’s the JavaScript I used in my Content Editor Web Part: <script type="text/javascript"> function NewTime() { // Get the Query String values and split them out into the vals array var vals = new Object(); var qs = location.search.substring(1, location.search.length); var args = qs.split("&"); for (var i=0; i < args.length; i++) { var nameVal = args[i].split("="); var temp = unescape(nameVal[1]).split('+'); nameVal[1] = temp.join(' '); vals[nameVal[0]] = nameVal[1]; } var issueID = vals["ID"]; //use this to bring up the pretty pop up NewItem2(event,"http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID=" + issueID); //use this to open a new window //window.location="http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID=" + issueID; } </script> Solution 2 – DataFormWebPart and exact same 2007 Process This solution is a little more of a hack, but it also MUCH more close to the process we did in SP 2007. So, if you don’t mind not having the pretty pop-up and prefer the comforts of what you are used to, you can give this one a try.  The basics steps are: Insert a DataFormWebPart instead of the List Data View Create a Parameter on DataFormWebPart to store “ID” Query String Variable Filter DataFormWebPart using Parameter Insert a link at bottom of DataForm Web part that points to the Child’s new item form and passes in the Parent Id using the Parameter. See.. like I told you, exact same process as in 2007 (except using the DataFormWeb Part). The DataFormWebPart also requires a lot more work to make it look “pretty” but it’s just table rows and cells, and can be configured pretty painlessly.  Here is that video: Using DataForm Web Part One quick update… if you change the link in this solution from: <tr> <td><a href="http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID={$IssueIDParam}">Click here to create new item...</a> </td> </tr> to: <tr> <td> <a href="javascript:NewItem2(event,'http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID={$IssueIDParam}');">Click here to create new item...</a> </td> </tr> It will open up in the pretty pop up and act the same as solution one… So… both Solutions will now behave the same to the end user. Just depends on which you want to implement. That’s all for now… Remember in both solutions when you have them working, you can make the “IssueID” invisible to users by using the “ms-hidden” class (it’s my previous blog post on the subject up there). That’s basically all there is to it! No pithy or witty closing this time… I am sorry it took me so long to dive into this and I hope your questions are answered. As I become more polished myself I will try to come up with a cleaner solution that will make everyone happy… As always, thanks for taking the time to stop by.

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• SQL Monitor’s data repository

  - by Chris Lambrou

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

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• Anti-Forgery Request Helpers for ASP.NET MVC and jQuery AJAX

  - by Dixin

  Background To secure websites from cross-site request forgery (CSRF, or XSRF) attack, ASP.NET MVC provides an excellent mechanism: The server prints tokens to cookie and inside the form; When the form is submitted to server, token in cookie and token inside the form are sent in the HTTP request; Server validates the tokens. To print tokens to browser, just invoke HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken():<% using (Html.BeginForm()) { %> <%: this.Html.AntiForgeryToken(Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)%> <%-- Other fields. --%> <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> <% } %> This invocation generates a token then writes inside the form:<form action="..." method="post"> <input name="__RequestVerificationToken" type="hidden" value="J56khgCvbE3bVcsCSZkNVuH9Cclm9SSIT/ywruFsXEgmV8CL2eW5C/gGsQUf/YuP" /> <!-- Other fields. --> <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> </form> and also writes into the cookie: __RequestVerificationToken_Lw__= J56khgCvbE3bVcsCSZkNVuH9Cclm9SSIT/ywruFsXEgmV8CL2eW5C/gGsQUf/YuP When the above form is submitted, they are both sent to server. In the server side, [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute is used to specify the controllers or actions to validate them:[HttpPost] [ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public ActionResult Action(/* ... */) { // ... } This is very productive for form scenarios. But recently, when resolving security vulnerabilities for Web products, some problems are encountered. Specify validation on controller (not on each action) The server side problem is, It is expected to declare [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] on controller, but actually it has be to declared on each POST actions. Because POST actions are usually much more then controllers, this is a little crazy Problem Usually a controller contains actions for HTTP GET and actions for HTTP POST requests, and usually validations are expected for HTTP POST requests. So, if the [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] is declared on the controller, the HTTP GET requests become invalid:[ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public class SomeController : Controller // One [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute. { [HttpGet] public ActionResult Index() // Index() cannot work. { // ... } [HttpPost] public ActionResult PostAction1(/* ... */) { // ... } [HttpPost] public ActionResult PostAction2(/* ... */) { // ... } // ... } If browser sends an HTTP GET request by clicking a link: http://Site/Some/Index, validation definitely fails, because no token is provided. So the result is, [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute must be distributed to each POST action:public class SomeController : Controller // Many [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attributes. { [HttpGet] public ActionResult Index() // Works. { // ... } [HttpPost] [ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public ActionResult PostAction1(/* ... */) { // ... } [HttpPost] [ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public ActionResult PostAction2(/* ... */) { // ... } // ... } This is a little bit crazy, because one application can have a lot of POST actions. Solution To avoid a large number of [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attributes (one for each POST action), the following ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute wrapper class can be helpful, where HTTP verbs can be specified:[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)] public class ValidateAntiForgeryTokenWrapperAttribute : FilterAttribute, IAuthorizationFilter { private readonly ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute _validator; private readonly AcceptVerbsAttribute _verbs; public ValidateAntiForgeryTokenWrapperAttribute(HttpVerbs verbs) : this(verbs, null) { } public ValidateAntiForgeryTokenWrapperAttribute(HttpVerbs verbs, string salt) { this._verbs = new AcceptVerbsAttribute(verbs); this._validator = new ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute() { Salt = salt }; } public void OnAuthorization(AuthorizationContext filterContext) { string httpMethodOverride = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.GetHttpMethodOverride(); if (this._verbs.Verbs.Contains(httpMethodOverride, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { this._validator.OnAuthorization(filterContext); } } } When this attribute is declared on controller, only HTTP requests with the specified verbs are validated:[ValidateAntiForgeryTokenWrapper(HttpVerbs.Post, Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public class SomeController : Controller { // GET actions are not affected. // Only HTTP POST requests are validated. } Now one single attribute on controller turns on validation for all POST actions. Maybe it would be nice if HTTP verbs can be specified on the built-in [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute, which is easy to implemented. Submit token via AJAX The browser side problem is, if server side turns on anti-forgery validation for POST, then AJAX POST requests will fail be default. Problem For AJAX scenarios, when request is sent by jQuery instead of form:$.post(url, { productName: "Tofu", categoryId: 1 // Token is not posted. }, callback); This kind of AJAX POST requests will always be invalid, because server side code cannot see the token in the posted data. Solution The tokens are printed to browser then sent back to server. So first of all, HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken() must be called somewhere. Now the browser has token in HTML and cookie. Then jQuery must find the printed token in the HTML, and append token to the data before sending:$.post(url, { productName: "Tofu", categoryId: 1, __RequestVerificationToken: getToken() // Token is posted. }, callback); To be reusable, this can be encapsulated into a tiny jQuery plugin:/// <reference path="jquery-1.4.2.js" /> (function ($) { $.getAntiForgeryToken = function (tokenWindow, appPath) { // HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken() must be invoked to print the token. tokenWindow = tokenWindow && typeof tokenWindow === typeof window ? tokenWindow : window; appPath = appPath && typeof appPath === "string" ? "_" + appPath.toString() : ""; // The name attribute is either __RequestVerificationToken, // or __RequestVerificationToken_{appPath}. tokenName = "__RequestVerificationToken" + appPath; // Finds the <input type="hidden" name={tokenName} value="..." /> from the specified. // var inputElements = $("input[type='hidden'][name='__RequestVerificationToken" + appPath + "']"); var inputElements = tokenWindow.document.getElementsByTagName("input"); for (var i = 0; i < inputElements.length; i++) { var inputElement = inputElements[i]; if (inputElement.type === "hidden" && inputElement.name === tokenName) { return { name: tokenName, value: inputElement.value }; } } return null; }; $.appendAntiForgeryToken = function (data, token) { // Converts data if not already a string. if (data && typeof data !== "string") { data = $.param(data); } // Gets token from current window by default. token = token ? token : $.getAntiForgeryToken(); // $.getAntiForgeryToken(window). data = data ? data + "&" : ""; // If token exists, appends {token.name}={token.value} to data. return token ? data + encodeURIComponent(token.name) + "=" + encodeURIComponent(token.value) : data; }; // Wraps $.post(url, data, callback, type). $.postAntiForgery = function (url, data, callback, type) { return $.post(url, $.appendAntiForgeryToken(data), callback, type); }; // Wraps $.ajax(settings). $.ajaxAntiForgery = function (settings) { settings.data = $.appendAntiForgeryToken(settings.data); return $.ajax(settings); }; })(jQuery); In most of the scenarios, it is Ok to just replace $.post() invocation with $.postAntiForgery(), and replace $.ajax() with $.ajaxAntiForgery():$.postAntiForgery(url, { productName: "Tofu", categoryId: 1 }, callback); // Token is posted. There might be some scenarios of custom token. Here $.appendAntiForgeryToken() is provided:data = $.appendAntiForgeryToken(data, token); // Token is already in data. No need to invoke $.postAntiForgery(). $.post(url, data, callback); And there are scenarios that the token is not in the current window. For example, an HTTP POST request can be sent by iframe, while the token is in the parent window. Here window can be specified for $.getAntiForgeryToken():data = $.appendAntiForgeryToken(data, $.getAntiForgeryToken(window.parent)); // Token is already in data. No need to invoke $.postAntiForgery(). $.post(url, data, callback); If you have better solution, please do tell me.

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• The last MVVM you'll ever need?

  - by Nuri Halperin

  As my MVC projects mature and grow, the need to have some omnipresent, ambient model properties quickly emerge. The application no longer has only one dynamic pieced of data on the page: A sidebar with a shopping cart, some news flash on the side – pretty common stuff. The rub is that a controller is invoked in context of a single intended request. The rest of the data, even though it could be just as dynamic, is expected to appear on it's own. There are many solutions to this scenario. MVVM prescribes creating elaborate objects which expose your new data as a property on some uber-object with more properties exposing the "side show" ambient data. The reason I don't love this approach is because it forces fairly acute awareness of the view, and soon enough you have many MVVM objects laying around, and views have to start doing null-checks in order to ensure you really supplied all the values before binding to them. Ick. Just as unattractive is the ViewData dictionary. It's not strongly typed, and in both this and the MVVM approach someone has to populate these properties – n'est pas? Where does that live? With MVC2, we get the formerly-futures  feature Html.RenderAction(). The feature allows you plant a line in a view, of the format: <% Html.RenderAction("SessionInterest", "Session"); %> While this syntax looks very clean, I can't help being bothered by it. MVC was touting a very strong separation of concerns, the Model taking on the role of the business logic, the controller handling route and performing minimal view-choosing operations and the views strictly focused on rendering out angled-bracket tags. The RenderAction() syntax has the view calling some controller and invoking it inline with it's runtime rendering. This – to my taste – embeds too much  knowledge of controllers into the view's code – which was allegedly forbidden.  The one way flow "Controller Receive Data –> Controller invoke Model –> Controller select view –> Controller Hand data to view" now gets a "View calls controller and gets it's own data" which is not so one-way anymore. Ick. I toyed with some other solutions a bit, including some base controllers, special view classes etc. My current favorite though is making use of the ExpandoObject and dynamic features with C# 4.0. If you follow Phil Haack or read a bit from David Heyden you can see the general picture emerging. The game changer is that using the new dynamic syntax, one can sprout properties on an object and make use of them in the view. Well that beats having a bunch of uni-purpose MVVM's any day! Rather than statically exposed properties, we'll just use the capability of adding members at runtime. Armed with new ideas and syntax, I went to work: First, I created a factory method to enrich the focuse object: public static class ModelExtension { public static dynamic Decorate(this Controller controller, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest(); result.TagUsage = CodeCampBL.TagUsage(); return result; } } This gives me a nice fluent way to have the controller add the rest of the ambient "side show" items (SessionInterest, TagUsage in this demo) and expose them all as the Model: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); dynamic result = this.Decorate(data); return View(result); } So now what remains is that my view knows to expect a dynamic object (rather than statically typed) so that the ASP.NET page compiler won't barf: <%@ Page Language="C#" Title="Ambient Demo" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Ambient.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<dynamic>" %> Notice the generic ViewPage<dynamic>. It doesn't work otherwise. In the page itself, Model.Value property contains the main data returned from the controller. The nice thing about this, is that the master page (Ambient.Master) also inherits from the generic ViewMasterPage<dynamic>. So rather than the page worrying about all this ambient stuff, the side bars and panels for ambient data all reside in a master page, and can be rendered using the RenderPartial() syntax: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest as Dictionary<string, int>); %> Note here that a cast is necessary. This is because although dynamic is magic, it can't figure out what type this property is, and wants you to give it a type so its binder can figure out the right property to bind to at runtime. I use as, you can cast if you like. So there we go – no violation of MVC, no explosion of MVVM models and voila – right? Well, I could not let this go without a tweak or two more. The first thing to improve, is that some views may not need all the properties. In that case, it would be a waste of resources to populate every property. The solution to this is simple: rather than exposing properties, I change d the factory method to expose lambdas - Func<T> really. So only if and when a view accesses a member of the dynamic object does it load the data. public static class ModelExtension { // take two.. lazy loading! public static dynamic LazyDecorate(this Controller c, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest()); result.TagUsage = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.TagUsage()); return result; } } Now that lazy loading is in place, there's really no reason not to hook up all and any possible ambient property. Go nuts! Add them all in – they won't get invoked unless used. This now requires changing the signature of usage on the ambient properties methods –adding some parenthesis to the master view: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest() as Dictionary<string, int>); %> And, of course, the controller needs to call LazyDecorate() rather than the old Decorate(). The final touch is to introduce a convenience method to the my Controller class , so that the tedium of calling Decorate() everywhere goes away. This is done quite simply by adding a bunch of methods, matching View(object), View(string,object) signatures of the Controller class: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); return AmbientView(data); } //these methods can reside in a base controller for the solution: public ViewResult AmbientView(dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(result); } public ViewResult AmbientView(string viewName, dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(viewName, result); } The call to AmbientView now replaces any call the View() that requires the ambient data. DRY sattisfied, lazy loading and no need to replace core pieces of the MVC pipeline. I call this a good MVC day. Enjoy!

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

  - by Rick Strahl

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

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• Asserting with JustMock

  - by mehfuzh

  In this post, i will be digging in a bit deep on Mock.Assert. This is the continuation from previous post and covers up the ways you can use assert for your mock expectations. I have used another traditional sample of Talisker that has a warehouse [Collaborator] and an order class [SUT] that will call upon the warehouse to see the stock and fill it up with items. Our sample, interface of warehouse and order looks similar to : public interface IWarehouse {     bool HasInventory(string productName, int quantity);     void Remove(string productName, int quantity); }   public class Order {     public string ProductName { get; private set; }     public int Quantity { get; private set; }     public bool IsFilled { get; private set; }       public Order(string productName, int quantity)     {         this.ProductName = productName;         this.Quantity = quantity;     }       public void Fill(IWarehouse warehouse)     {         if (warehouse.HasInventory(ProductName, Quantity))         {             warehouse.Remove(ProductName, Quantity);             IsFilled = true;         }     }   }   Our first example deals with mock object assertion [my take] / assert all scenario. This will only act on the setups that has this “MustBeCalled” flag associated. To be more specific , let first consider the following test code:    var order = new Order(TALISKER, 0);    var wareHouse = Mock.Create<IWarehouse>();      Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(Arg.Any<string>(), 0)).Returns(true).MustBeCalled();    Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.Remove(Arg.Any<string>(), 0)).Throws(new InvalidOperationException()).MustBeCalled();    Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.Remove(Arg.Any<string>(), 100)).Throws(new InvalidOperationException());      //exercise    Assert.Throws<InvalidOperationException>(() => order.Fill(wareHouse));    // it will assert first and second setup.    Mock.Assert(wareHouse); Here, we have created the order object, created the mock of IWarehouse , then I setup our HasInventory and Remove calls of IWarehouse with my expected, which is called by the order.Fill internally. Now both of these setups are marked as “MustBeCalled”. There is one additional IWarehouse.Remove that is invalid and is not marked.   On line 9 ,  as we do order.Fill , the first and second setups will be invoked internally where the third one is left  un-invoked. Here, Mock.Assert will pass successfully as  both of the required ones are called as expected. But, if we marked the third one as must then it would fail with an  proper exception. Here, we can also see that I have used the same call for two different setups, this feature is called sequential mocking and will be covered later on. Moving forward, let’s say, we don’t want this must call, when we want to do it specifically with lamda. For that let’s consider the following code: //setup - data var order = new Order(TALISKER, 50); var wareHouse = Mock.Create<IWarehouse>();   Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(TALISKER, 50)).Returns(true);   //exercise order.Fill(wareHouse);   //verify state Assert.True(order.IsFilled); //verify interaction Mock.Assert(()=> wareHouse.HasInventory(TALISKER, 50));   Here, the snippet shows a case for successful order, i haven’t used “MustBeCalled” rather i used lamda specifically to assert the call that I have made, which is more justified for the cases where we exactly know the user code will behave. But, here goes a question that how we are going assert a mock call if we don’t know what item a user code may request for. In that case, we can combine the matchers with our assert calls like we do it for arrange: //setup - data  var order = new Order(TALISKER, 50);  var wareHouse = Mock.Create<IWarehouse>();    Mock.Arrange(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(TALISKER, Arg.Matches<int>( x => x <= 50))).Returns(true);    //exercise  order.Fill(wareHouse);    //verify state  Assert.True(order.IsFilled);    //verify interaction  Mock.Assert(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(Arg.Any<string>(), Arg.Matches<int>(x => x <= 50)));   Here, i have asserted a mock call for which i don’t know the item name,  but i know that number of items that user will request is less than 50.  This kind of expression based assertion is now possible with JustMock. We can extent this sample for properties as well, which will be covered shortly [in other posts]. In addition to just simple assertion, we can also use filters to limit to times a call has occurred or if ever occurred. Like for the first test code, we have one setup that is never invoked. For such, it is always valid to use the following assert call: Mock.Assert(() => wareHouse.Remove(Arg.Any<string>(), 100), Occurs.Never()); Or ,for warehouse.HasInventory we can do the following: Mock.Assert(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(Arg.Any<string>(), 0), Occurs.Once()); Or,  to be more specific, it’s even better with: Mock.Assert(() => wareHouse.HasInventory(Arg.Any<string>(), 0), Occurs.Exactly(1));   There are other filters  that you can apply here using AtMost, AtLeast and AtLeastOnce but I left those to the readers. You can try the above sample that is provided in the examples shipped with JustMock.Please, do check it out and feel free to ping me for any issues.   Enjoy!!

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• "Randomly" occurring errors...

  - by ClarkeyBoy

  Hi, My website has a setup whereby when the application starts a module called SiteContent is "created". This runs a clearup function which basically deletes any irrelevant data from the database, in case any has been left in there from previously run functions. The module has instances of Manager classes - namely RangeManager, CollectionManager, DesignManager. There are others but I will just use these as an example. Each Manager class contains an array of items - items may be of type Range, Collection or Design, whichever one is relevant. Data for each range is then read into an instance of Range, Collection or Design. I know this is basically duplicating data - not very efficient but its my final year project at the moment so I can always change it to use Linq or something similar later, when I am not pressured by the one month deadline. I have a form which, on clicking the Save button, saves data by calling SiteContent.RangeManager.Create(vars) or SiteContent.RangeManager.Update(Range As Range, vars) (or the equivalent for other manager classes, whichever one happens to be relevant). These functions call a stored procedure to insert or update in the relevant table. Classes Range, Collection and Design all have attributes such as Name, Description, Display and several others. When the Create or Update function is called, the Manager loops through all the other items to check if an item with the same name already exists. The Update function ensures that it does not compare the item being updated to itself. A custom exception (ItemAlreadyExistsException) is thrown if another item with the same name is found. For some weird reason, if I go into a Range, Collection or Design in edit mode, change something and try to update it, it occasionally doesnt update the item. When I say occasionally I mean every 3 - 4 page loads, sometimes more. I see absolutely no pattern in when or why it occurs. I have a try-catch statement which catches ItemAlreadyExistsException, and outputs "An item with this name already exists" when caught. Occasionally it will output this; other times it will not. Does anyone have any idea why this could happen? Maybe a mistake which someone has made and solved before? I used to have regular expressions in place that the names were compared to - I believe it was [a-zA-Z]{1, 100} (between 1 and 100 lower- or upper-case characters). For some reason the customer who I am developing the site for used to get errors saying its not in the correct format. Yet he could try the same text 5 minutes later and it would work fine. I am thinking this could well be the same problem, since both problems occur at random. Many thanks in advance. Regards, Richard Clarke Edit: After much time spent narrowing down the code, I have decided to wait till my brother, who has been a programmer for at least 8 years more than I have, to come down over Easter and get him to have a look at it. If he cant solve it then I will zip the files up and put them somewhere for people to access and have a go at. I narrowed it down literally to the minimum number of files possible, and it still occurs. It seems to be about every 10th time. Having said that, I force the manager classes to refresh every 10 page loads or 5 minutes (whichever one is sooner). I may look into this - this could be causing a problem. Basically each Manager contains an array of an object. This array is populated using data from the database. The Update function takes an instance of the item and the new values to be set for the object. If it happens to be a page load where the array is reset (ie the data is loaded freshly from the database) then the object instance with the same ID wont be the same instance as the one being passed in. This explains the fact that it throws an ItemAlreadyExistsException now and then. It all makes sense now the more I think about it. If I were to pass in the ID of the object to be altered, rather than the object itself, then it should work perfectly. I will answer the question if I solve it..

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• Building extensions for Expression Blend 4 using MEF

  - by Timmy Kokke

  Introduction Although it was possible to write extensions for Expression Blend and Expression Design, it wasn’t very easy and out of the box only one addin could be used. With Expression Blend 4 it is possible to write extensions using MEF, the Managed Extensibility Framework. Until today there’s no documentation on how to build these extensions, so look thru the code with Reflector is something you’ll have to do very often. Because Blend and Design are build using WPF searching the visual tree with Snoop and Mole belong to the tools you’ll be using a lot exploring the possibilities.  Configuring the extension project Extensions are regular .NET class libraries. To create one, load up Visual Studio 2010 and start a new project. Because Blend is build using WPF, choose a WPF User Control Library from the Windows section and give it a name and location. I named mine DemoExtension1. Because Blend looks for addins named *.extension.dll  you’ll have to tell Visual Studio to use that in the Assembly Name. To change the Assembly Name right click your project and go to Properties. On the Application tab, add .Extension to name already in the Assembly name text field. To be able to debug this extension, I prefer to set the output path on the Build tab to the extensions folder of Expression Blend. This means that everything that used to go into the Debug folder is placed in the extensions folder. Including all referenced assemblies that have the copy local property set to false. One last setting. To be able to debug your extension you could start Blend and attach the debugger by hand. I like it to be able to just hit F5. Go to the Debug tab and add the the full path to Blend.exe in the Start external program text field. Extension Class Add a new class to the project.  This class needs to be inherited from the IPackage interface. The IPackage interface can be found in the Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility namespace. To get access to this namespace add Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility.dll to your references. This file can be found in the same folder as the (Expression Blend 4 Beta) Blend.exe file. Make sure the Copy Local property is set to false in this reference. After implementing the interface the class would look something like: using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility; namespace DemoExtension1 { public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { public void Load(IServices services) { } public void Unload() { } } } These two methods are called when your addin is loaded and unloaded. The parameter passed to the Load method, IServices services, is your main entry point into Blend. The IServices interface exposes the GetService<T> method. You will be using this method a lot. Almost every part of Blend can be accessed thru a service. For example, you can use to get to the commanding services of Blend by calling GetService<ICommandService>() or to get to the Windowing services by calling GetService<IWindowService>(). To get Blend to load the extension we have to implement MEF. (You can get up to speed on MEF on the community site or read the blog of Mr. MEF, Glenn Block.)  In the case of Blend extensions, all that needs to be done is mark the class with an Export attribute and pass it the type of IPackage. The Export attribute can be found in the System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace which is part of the .NET 4 framework. You need to add this to your references. using System.ComponentModel.Composition; using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility;   namespace DemoExtension1 { [Export(typeof(IPackage))] public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { Blend is able to find your addin now. Adding UI The addin doesn’t do very much at this point. The WPF User Control Library came with a UserControl so lets use that in this example. I just drop a Button and a TextBlock onto the surface of the control to have something to show in the demo. To get the UserControl to work in Blend it has to be registered with the WindowService.  Call GetService<IWindowService>() on the IServices interface to get access to the windowing services. The UserControl will be used in Blend on a Palette and has to be registered to enable it. This is done by calling the RegisterPalette on the IWindowService interface and passing it an identifier, an instance of the UserControl and a caption for the palette. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(); windowService.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } After hitting F5 to start debugging Expression Blend will start. You should be able to find the addin in the Window menu now. Activating this window will show the “Demo Extension” palette with the UserControl, style according to the settings of Blend. Now what? Because little is publicly known about how to access different parts of Blend adding breakpoints in Debug mode and browsing thru objects using the Quick Watch feature of Visual Studio is something you have to do very often. This demo extension can be used for that purpose very easily. Add the click event handler to the button on the UserControl. Change the contructor to take the IServices interface and store this in a field. Set a breakpoint in the Button_Click method. public partial class UserControl1 : UserControl { private readonly IServices _services;   public UserControl1(IServices services) { _services = services; InitializeComponent(); }   private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { } } Change the call to the constructor in the load method and pass it the services property. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService service = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(services); service.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } Hit F5 to compile and start Blend. Got to the window menu and start show the addin. Click on  the button to hit the breakpoint. Now place the carrot text _services text in the code window and hit Shift+F9 to show the Quick Watch window. Now start exploring and discovering where to find everything you need.  More Information The are no official resources available yet. Microsoft has released one extension for expression Blend that is very useful as a reference, the Microsoft Expression Blend® Add-in Preview for Windows® Phone. This will install a .extension.dll file in the extension folder of Blend. You can load this file with Reflector and have a peek at how Microsoft is building his addins. Conclusion I hope this gives you something to get started building extensions for Expression Blend. Until Microsoft releases the final version, which hopefully includes more information about building extensions, we’ll have to work on documenting it in the community.

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• Silverlight for Windows Embedded Tutorial (step 5 and a bit of Windows Phone 7)

  - by Valter Minute

  If you haven’t spent the last week in the middle of the Sahara desert or traveling on a sled in the north pole area you should have heard something about the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series (or Windows Phone Series 7, or Windows Series Phone 7 or something like that). Even if you are in the middle of the desert or somewhere around the north pole you may have been reached by the news, since it seems that WP7S (using the full name will kill my available bandwidth!) is generating a lot of buzz in the development and IT communities. One of the most important aspects of this new platform is that it will be programmed using a new set of tools and frameworks, completely different from the ones used on older releases of Windows Mobile (or SmartPhone, or PocketPC or whatever…). WP7S applications can be developed using Silverlight or XNA. If you want to learn something more about WP7S development you can download the preview of Charles Petzold’s book about it: http://www.charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html Charles Petzold is also the author of “Programming Windows”, the first book I ever read about programming on Windows (it was Windows 3.0 at that time!). The fact that even I was able to learn how to develop Windows application is a proof of the quality of Petzold’s work. This book is up to his standards and the 150pages preview is already rich in technical contents without being boring or complicated to understand. I may be able to become a Windows Phone developer thanks to mr. Petzold. Mr. Petzold uses some nice samples to introduce the basic concepts of Silverlight development on WP7S. On this new platform you’ll use managed code to develop your application, so those samples can’t be ported on Windows CE R3 as they are, but I would like to take one of the first samples (called “SilverlightTapHello1”) and adapt it to Silverlight for Windows Embedded to show that even plain old native code can be used to develop “cool” user interfaces! The sample shows the standard WP7S title header and a textbox with an hello world message inside it. When the user touches the textbox, it will change its color. When the user touches the background (Grid) behind it, its default color (plain old White) will be restored. Let’s see how we can implement the same features on our embedded device! I took the XAML code of the sample (you can download the book samples here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/D/B/1DB49641-3956-41F1-BAFA-A021673C709E/CodeSamples_DRAFTPreview_ProgrammingWindowsPhone7Series.zip) and changed it a little bit to remove references to WP7S or managed runtime. If you compare the resulting files you will see that I was able to keep all the resources inside the App.xaml files and the structure of  MainPage.XAML almost intact. This is the Silverlight for Windows Embedded version of MainPage.XAML: <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightTapHello1.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:phoneNavigation="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Navigation" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="480" d:DesignHeight="800" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}" FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}" Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}" Width="640" Height="480">   <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="*"/> </Grid.RowDefinitions>   <!--TitleGrid is the name of the application and page title--> <Grid x:Name="TitleGrid" Grid.Row="0"> <TextBlock Text="SILVERLIGHT TAP HELLO #1" x:Name="textBlockPageTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle1Style}"/> <TextBlock Text="main page" x:Name="textBlockListTitle" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextPageTitle2Style}"/> </Grid>   <!--ContentGrid is empty. Place new content here--> <Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1" MouseLeftButtonDown="ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown" Background="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundBrush}"> <TextBlock x:Name="TextBlock" Text="Hello, Silverlight for Windows Embedded!" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Grid> </Grid> </UserControl> If you compare it to the WP7S sample (not reported here to avoid any copyright issue) you’ll notice that I had to replace the original phoneNavigation:PhoneApplicationPage with UserControl as the root node. This make sense because there is not support for phone applications on CE 6. I also had to specify width and height of my main page (on the WP7S device this will be adjusted by the OS) and I had to replace the multi-touch event handler with the MouseLeftButtonDown event (no multitouch support for Windows CE R3, still). I also changed the hello message, of course. I used XAML2CPP to generate the boring part of our application and then added the initialization code to WinMain: int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) { if (!XamlRuntimeInitialize()) return -1;   HRESULT retcode;   IXRApplicationPtr app; if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return -1; XRXamlSource dictsrc;   dictsrc.SetResource(hInstance,TEXT("XAML"),IDR_XAML_App);   if (FAILED(retcode=app->LoadResourceDictionary(&dictsrc,NULL))) return -1;   MainPage page;   if (FAILED(page.Init(hInstance,app))) return -1;   UINT exitcode;   if (FAILED(page.GetVisualHost()->StartDialog(&exitcode))) return -1;   return exitcode; }   You may have noticed that there is something different from the previous samples. I added the code to load a resource dictionary. Resources are an important feature of XAML that allows you to define some values that could be replaced inside any XAML file loaded by the runtime. You can use resources to define custom styles for your fonts, backgrounds, controls etc. and to support internationalization, by providing different strings for different languages. The rest of our WinMain isn’t that different. It creates an instances of our MainPage object and displays it. The MainPage class implements an event handler for the MouseLeftButtonDown event of the ContentGrid: class MainPage : public TMainPage<MainPage> { public:   HRESULT ContentGrid_MouseButtonDown(IXRDependencyObject* source,XRMouseButtonEventArgs* args) { HRESULT retcode; IXRSolidColorBrushPtr brush; IXRApplicationPtr app;   if (FAILED(retcode=GetXRApplicationInstance(&app))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=app->CreateObject(IID_IXRSolidColorBrush,&brush))) return retcode;   COLORREF color=RGBA(0xff,0xff,0xff,0xff);   if (args->pOriginalSource==TextBlock) color=RGBA(rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,rand()&0xFF,0xFF);   if (FAILED(retcode=brush->SetColor(color))) return retcode;   if (FAILED(retcode=TextBlock->SetForeground(brush))) return retcode; return S_OK; } }; As you can see this event is generated when a used clicks inside the grid or inside one of the objects it contains. Since our TextBlock is inside the grid, we don’t need to provide an event handler for its MouseLeftButtonDown event. We can just use the pOriginalSource member of the event arguments to check if the event was generated inside the textblock. If the event was generated inside the grid we create a white brush,if it’s inside the textblock we create some randomly colored brush. Notice that we need to use the RGBA macro to create colors, specifying also a transparency value for them. If we use the RGB macro the resulting color will have its Alpha channel set to zero and will be transparent. Using the SetForeground method we can change the color of our control. You can compare this to the managed code that you can find at page 40-41 of Petzold’s preview book and you’ll see that the native version isn’t much more complex than the managed one. As usual you can download the full code of the sample here: http://cid-9b7b0aefe3514dc5.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/SilverlightTapHello1.zip And remember to pre-order Charles Petzold’s “Programming Windows Phone 7 series”, I bet it will be a best-seller! Technorati Tags: Silverlight for Windows Embedded,Windows CE

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• Stop Spinning Your Wheels&hellip; Sage Advice for Aspiring Developers

  - by Mark Rackley

  So… lately I’ve been tasked with helping bring some non-developers over the hump and become full-fledged, all around, SharePoint developers. Well, only time will tell if I’m successful or a complete failure. Good thing about failures though, you know what NOT to do next time! Anyway, I’ve been writing some sort of code since I was about 10 years old; so I sometimes take for granted the effort some people have to go through to learn a new technology. I guess if I had to say I was an “expert” in one thing it would be learning (and getting “stuff” done) in new technologies. Maybe that’s why I’ve embraced SharePoint and the SharePoint community. SharePoint is the first technology I haven’t been able to master or get everything done without help from other people. I KNOW I’ll never know it all and I learn something new every day.  It keeps it interesting, it keeps me motivated, and keeps me involved. So, what some people may consider a downside of SharePoint, I definitely consider a plus. Crap.. I’m rambling. Where was I? Oh yeah… me trying to be helpful. Like I said, I am able to quickly and effectively pick up new languages, technology, etc. and put it to good use. Am I just brilliant? Well, my mom thinks so.. but maybe not. Maybe I’ve just been doing it for a long time…. 25 years in some form or fashion… wow I’m old… Anyway, what I lack in depth I make up for in breadth and being the “go-to” guy wherever I work when someone needs to “get stuff done”.  Let’s see if I can take some of that experience and put it to practical use to help new people get up to speed faster, learn things more effectively, and become that go-to guy. First off…  make sure you… Know The Basics I don’t have the time to teach new developers the basics, but you gotta know them. I’ve only been “taught” two languages.. Fortran 77 and C… everything else I’ve picked up from “doing”. I HAD to know the basics though, and all new developers need to understand the very basics of development.  97.23% of all languages will have the following: Variables Functions Arrays If statements For loops / While loops If you think about it, most development is “if this, do this… or while this, do this…”.  “This” may be some unique method to your language or something you develop, but the basics are the basics. YES there are MANY other development topics you need to understand, but you shouldn’t be scratching your head trying to figure out what a ”for loop” is… (Also learn about classes and hashtables as quickly as possible). Once you have the basics down it makes it much easier to… Learn By Doing This may just apply to me and my warped brain.  I don’t learn a new technology by reading or hearing someone speak about it. I learn by doing. It does me no good to try and learn all of the intricacies of a new language or technology inside-and-out before getting my hands dirty. Just show me how to do one thing… let me get that working… then show me how to do the next thing.. let me get that working… Now, let’s see what I can figure out on my own. Okay.. now it starts to make sense. I see how the language works, I can step through the code, and before you know it.. I’m productive in a new technology. Be careful here though…. make sure you… Don’t Reinvent The Wheel People have been writing code for what… 50+ years now? So, why are you trying to tackle ANYTHING without first Googling it with Bing to see what others have done first? When I was first learning C# (I had come from a Java background) I had to call a web service.  Sure! No problem! I’d done this many times in Java. So, I proceeded to write an HTTP Handler, called the Web Service and it worked like a charm!!!  Probably about 2.3 seconds after I got it working completely someone says to me “Why didn’t you just add a Web Reference?” Really? You can do that?  oops… I just wasted a lot of time. Before undertaking the development of any sort of utility method in a new language, make sure it’s not already handled for you… Okay… you are starting to write some code and are curious about the possibilities? Well… don’t just sit there… Try It And See What Happens This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves. “So… ‘x++’ works in C#, but does it also work in JavaScript?”   Really? Did you just ask me that? In the time it spent for you to type that email, press the send button, me receive the email, get around to reading it, and replying with “yes” you could have tested it 47 times and know the answer! Just TRY it! See what happens! You aren’t doing brain surgery. You aren’t going to kill anyone, and you BETTER not be developing in production. So, you are not going to crash any production systems!! Seriously! Get off your butt and just try it yourself. The extra added benefit is that it doesn’t work, the absolute best way to learn is to… Learn From Your Failures I don’t know about you… but if I screw up and something doesn’t work, I learn A LOT more debugging my problem than if everything magically worked. It’s okay that you aren’t perfect! Not everyone can be me? In the same vein… don’t ask someone else to debug your problem until you have made a valiant attempt to do so yourself. There’s nothing quite like stepping through code line by line to see what it’s REALLY doing… and you’ll never feel more stupid sometimes than when you realize WHY it’s not working.. but you realize... you learn... and you remember. There is nothing wrong with failure as long as you learn from it. As you start writing more and more and more code make sure that you ALWAYS… Develop for Production You will soon learn that the “prototype” you wrote last week to show as a “proof of concept” is going to go directly into production no matter how much you beg and plead and try to explain it’s not ready to go into production… it’s going to go straight there.. and it’s like herpes.. it doesn’t go away and there’s no fixing it once it’s in there.  So, why not write ALL your code like it will be put in production? It MIGHT take a little longer, but in the long run it will be easier to maintain, get help on, and you won’t be embarrassed that it’s sitting on a production server for everyone to use and see. So, now that you are getting comfortable and writing code for production it is important to to remember the… KISS Principle… Learn It… Love It… Keep It Simple Stupid Seriously.. don’t try to show how smart you are by writing the most complicated code in history. Break your problem up into discrete steps and write each step. If it turns out you have some redundancy, you can always go back and tweak your code later.  How bad is it when you write code that LOOKS cocky? I’ve seen it before… some of the most abstract and complicated classes when a class wasn’t even needed! Or the most elaborate unreadable code jammed into one really long line when it could have been written in three lines, performed just as well, and been SOOO much easier to maintain. Keep it clear and simple.. baby steps people. This will help you learn the technology, debug problems, AND it will help others help you find your problems if they don’t have to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls just to figure out what you are trying to do…. Really.. don’t be that guy… try to curb your ego and… Keep an Open Mind No matter how smart you are… how fast you type… or how much you get paid, don’t let your ego get in the way. There is probably a better way to do everything you’ve ever done. Don’t become so cocky that you can’t think someone knows more than you. There’s a lot of brilliant, helpful people out there willing to show you tricks if you just give them a chance. A very super-awesome developer once told me “So what if you’ve been writing code for 10 years or more! Does your code look basically the same? Are you not growing as a developer?” Those 10 years become pretty meaningless if you just “know” that you are right and have not picked up new tips, tricks, methods, and patterns along the way. Learn from others and find out what’s new in development land (you know you don’t have to specifically use pointers anymore??). Along those same lines… If it’s not working, first assume you are doing something wrong. You have no idea how much it annoys people who are trying to help you when you first assume that the help they are trying to give you is wrong. Just MAYBE… you… the person learning is making some small mistake? Maybe you didn’t describe your problem correctly? Maybe you are using the wrong terminology? “I did exactly what you said and it didn’t work.”  Oh really? Are you SURE about that? “Your solution doesn’t work.”  Well… I’m pretty sure it works, I’ve used it 200 times… What are you doing differently? First try some humility and appreciation.. it will go much further, especially when it turns out YOU are the one that is wrong. When all else fails…. Try Professional Training Some people just don’t have the mindset to go and figure stuff out. It’s a gift and not everyone has it. If everyone could do it I wouldn’t have a job and there wouldn’t be professional training available.  So, if you’ve tried everything else and no light bulbs are coming on, contact the experts who specialize in training. Be careful though, there is bad training out there. Want to know the names of some good places? Just shoot me a message and I’ll let you know. I’m boycotting endorsing Andrew Connell anymore until I get that free course dangit!! So… that’s it.. that’s all I got right now. Maybe you thought all of this is common sense, maybe you think I’m smoking crack. If so, don’t just sit there, there’s a comments section for a reason. Finally, what about you? What tips do you have to help this aspiring to learn the dark arts??

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

  - by AjarnMark

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

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• Life Technologies: Making Life Easier to Manage

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When we’re thinking about customer engagement, we’re acutely aware of all the forces at play competing for our customer’s attention. Solutions that make life easier for our customers draw attention to themselves. We tend to engage more when there is a distinct benefit and we can take a deep breath and accept that there is hope in the world and everything isn’t designed to frustrate us and make our lives miserable. (sigh…) When products are designed to automate processes that were consuming hours of our time with no relief in sight, they deserve to be recognized. One of our recent Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners in the WebCenter category, Life Technologies, has recently posted a video promoting their “award winning” solution. The Oracle Innovation Awards are part of the overall Oracle Excellence awards given to customers for innovation with Oracle products. More info here. Their award nomination included this description: Life Technologies delivered the My Life Service Portal as part of a larger Digital Hub strategy. This Portal is the first of its kind in the biotechnology service providing industry. The Portal provides access to Life Technologies cloud based service monitoring system where all customer deployed instruments can be remotely monitored and proactively repaired. The portal provides alerts from these cloud based monitoring services directly to the customer and to Life Technologies Field Engineers. The Portal provides insight into the instruments and services customers purchased for the purpose of analyzing and anticipating future customer needs and creating targeted sales and service programs. This portal not only provides benefits for Life Technologies internal sales and service teams but provides customers a central place to track all pertinent instrument information including: instrument service history instrument status and previous activities instrument performance analytics planned service visits warranty/contract information discussion forums social networks for lab management and collaboration alerts and notifications on all of the above team scheduling for instrument usage promote optional reagents required to keep instruments performing From their website The Life Technologies Instruments & Services Portal Helps You Save Time and Gain Peace of Mind Introducing the new, award-winning, free online tool that enables easier management of your instrument use and care, faster response to requests for service or service quotes, and instant sharing of key instrument and service information with your colleagues. Now – this unto itself is obviously beneficial for their customers who were previously burdened with having to do all of these tasks separately, manually and inconsistently by nature. Now – all in one place and free to their customers – a portal that ties it all together. They now have built the platform to give their customers yet another reason to do business with them – Their headline on their product page says it all: “Life is now easier to manage - All your instrument use and care in one place – the no-cost, no-hassle Instruments and Services Portal.” Of course – it’s very convenient that the company name includes “Life” and now can also promote to their clients and prospects that doing business with them is easy and their sophisticated lab equipment is easy to manage. In an industry full of PhD’s – “Easy” isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind, but Life Technologies has now tied the word to their brand in a very eloquent way. Between our work lives and family or personal lives, getting any mono-focused minutes of dedicated attention has become such a rare occurrence in our current era of multi-tasking that those moments of focus are highly prized. So – when something is done really well – so well that it becomes captivating and urges sharing impulses – I take notice and dig deeper and most of the time I discover other gems not so hidden below the surface. And then I share with those I know would enjoy and understand. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit here that the first person I shared the videos below with was my daughter. She’s in her senior year of high school in the midst of her college search. She’s passionate about her academics and has already decided that she wants to study Neuroscience in college and like her mother will be in for the long haul to a PhD eventually. In a summer science program at Smith College 2 summers ago – she sent the family famous text to me – “I just dissected a sheep’s brain – wicked cool!” – This was followed by an equally memorable text this past summer in a research mentorship in Neuroscience at UConn – “Just sliced up some rat brain. Reminded me of a deli slicer at the supermarket… sorry I forgot to call last night…” So… needless to say – I knew I had an audience that would enjoy and understand these videos below and are now being shared among her science classmates and faculty. And evidently - so does Life Technologies! They’ve done a great job on these making them fun and something that will easily be shared among their customers social networks. They’ve created a neuro-archetypal character, “Ph.Diddy” and know that their world of clients in academics, research, and other institutions would understand and enjoy the “edutainment” value in this series of videos on their YouTube channel that pokes fun at the stereotypes while also promoting their products at the same time. They use their Facebook page for additional engagement with their clients and as another venue to promote these videos. Enjoy this one as well! More to be found here: http://www.youtube.com/lifetechnologies Stay tuned to this Oracle WebCenter blog channel. Tomorrow we'll be taking a look at another winner of the Innovation Awards, LADWP - helping to keep the citizens of Los Angeles engaged with their Water and Power provider.

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• Developer’s Life – Attitude and Communication – They Can Cause Problems – Notes from the Field #027

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a 27th episode of Notes from the Field series. The biggest challenge for anyone is to understand human nature. We human have so many things on our mind at any moment of time. There are cases when what we say is not what we mean and there are cases where what we mean we do not say. We do say and things as per our mood and our agenda in mind. Sometimes there are incidents when our attitude creates confusion in the communication and we end up creating a situation which is absolutely not warranted. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Mike Walsh explains a very crucial issue we face in our career, which is not technical but more to relate to human nature. Read on this may be the best blog post you might read in recent times. In this week’s note from the field, I’m taking a slight departure from technical knowledge and concepts explained. We’ll be back to it next week, I’m sure. Pinal wanted us to explain some of the issues we bump into and how we see some of our customers arrive at problem situations and how we have helped get them back on the right track. Often it is a technical problem we are officially solving – but in a lot of cases as a consultant, we are really helping fix some communication difficulties. This is a technical blog post and not an “advice column” in a newspaper – but the longer I am a consultant, the more years I add to my experience in technology the more I learn that the vast majority of the problems we encounter have “soft skills” included in the chain of causes for the issue we are helping overcome. This is not going to be exhaustive but I hope that sharing four pieces of advice inspired by real issues starts a process of searching for places where we can be the cause of these challenges and look at fixing them in ourselves. Or perhaps we can begin looking at resolving them in teams that we manage. I’ll share three statements that I’ve either heard, read or said and talk about some of the communication or attitude challenges highlighted by the statement. 1 – “But that’s the SAN Administrator’s responsibility…” I heard that early on in my consulting career when talking with a customer who had serious corruption and no good recent backups – potentially no good backups at all. The statement doesn’t have to be this one exactly, but the attitude here is an attitude of “my job stops here, and I don’t care about the intent or principle of why I’m here.” It’s also a situation of having the attitude that as long as there is someone else to blame, I’m fine…  You see in this case, the DBA had a suspicion that the backups were not being handled right.  They were the DBA and they knew that they had responsibility to ensure SQL backups were good to go – it’s a basic requirement of a production DBA. In my “As A DBA Where Do I start?!” presentation, I argue that is job #1 of a DBA. But in this case, the thought was that there was someone else to blame. Rather than create extra work and take on responsibility it was decided to just let it be another team’s responsibility. This failed the company, the company’s customers and no one won. As technologists – we should strive to go the extra mile. If there is a lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities and we know it – we should push to get it resolved. Especially as the DBAs who should act as the advocates of the data contained in the databases we are responsible for. 2 – “We’ve always done it this way, it’s never caused a problem before!” Complacency. I have to say that many failures I’ve been paid good money to help recover from would have not happened had it been for an attitude of complacency. If any thoughts like this have entered your mind about your situation you may be suffering from it. If, while reading this, you get this sinking feeling in your stomach about that one thing you know should be fixed but haven’t done it.. Why don’t you stop and go fix it then come back.. “We should have better backups, but we’re on a SAN so we should be fine really.” “Technically speaking that could happen, but what are the chances?” “We’ll just clean that up as a fast follow” ..and so on. In the age of tightening IT budgets, increased expectations of up time, availability and performance there is no room for complacency. Our customers and business units expect – no demand – the best. Complacency says “we will give you second best or hopefully good enough and we accept the risk and know this may hurt us later. Sometimes an organization will opt for “good enough” and I agree with the concept that at times the perfect can be the enemy of the good. But when we make those decisions in a vacuum and are not reporting them up and discussing them as an organization that is different. That is us unilaterally choosing to do something less than the best and purposefully playing a game of chance. 3 – “This device must accept interference from other devices but not create any” I’ve paraphrased this one – but it’s something the Federal Communications Commission – a federal agency in the United States that regulates electronic communication – requires of all manufacturers of any device that could cause or receive interference electronically. I blogged in depth about this here (http://www.straightpathsql.com/archives/2011/07/relationship-advice-from-the-fcc/) so I won’t go into much detail other than to say this… If we all operated more on the premise that we should do our best to not be the cause of conflict, and to be less easily offended and less upset when we perceive offense life would be easier in many areas! This doesn’t always cause the issues we are called in to help out. Not directly. But where we see it is in unhealthy relationships between the various technology teams at a client. We’ll see teams hoarding knowledge, not sharing well with others and almost working against other teams instead of working with them. If you trace these problems back far enough it often stems from someone or some group of people violating this principle from the FCC. To Sum It Up Technology problems are easy to solve. At Linchpin People we help many customers get past the toughest technological challenge – and at the end of the day it is really just a repeatable process of pattern based troubleshooting, logical thinking and starting at the beginning and carefully stepping through to the end. It’s easy at the end of the day. The tough part of what we do as consultants is the people skills. Being able to help get teams working together, being able to help teams take responsibility, to improve team to team communication? That is the difficult part, and we get to use the soft skills on every engagement. Work on professional development (http://professionaldevelopment.sqlpass.org/) and see continuing improvement here, not just with technology. I can teach just about anyone how to be an excellent DBA and performance tuner, but some of these soft skills are much more difficult to teach. If you want to get started with performance analytics and triage of virtualized SQL Servers with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• SQL Server Master class winner

  - by Testas

   The winner of the SQL Server MasterClass competition courtesy of the UK SQL Server User Group and SQL Server Magazine!    Steve Hindmarsh     There is still time to register for the seminar yourself at:  www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql     More information about the seminar     Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, London  When: Thursday 17th June 2010  This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance. The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will: Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour    Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data    Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Please Note: Agenda may be subject to change  Sessions Abstracts  KEYNOTE: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Production    Applications are commonly developed with little regard for how design choices will affect performance in production. This is often because developers don't realize the implications of their design on how SQL Server will be able to handle a high workload (e.g. blocking, fragmentation) and/or because there's no full-time trained DBA that can recognize production problems and help educate developers. The keynote sets the stage for the rest of the day. Discussing some of the issues that can arise, explaining how some can be avoided and highlighting some of the features in SQL 2008 that can help developers and DBAs make better use of SQL Server, and troubleshoot when things go wrong.   SESSION ONE: SQL Server Mythbusters  It's amazing how many myths and misconceptions have sprung up and persisted over the years about SQL Server - after many years helping people out on forums, newsgroups, and customer engagements, Paul and Kimberly have heard it all. Are there really non-logged operations? Can interrupting shrinks or rebuilds cause corruption? Can you override the server's MAXDOP setting? Will the server always do a table-scan to get a row count? Many myths lead to poor design choices and inappropriate maintenance practices so these are just a few of many, many myths that Paul and Kimberly will debunk in this fast-paced session on how SQL Server operates and should be managed and maintained.   SESSION TWO: Database Recovery Techniques Demo-Fest  Even if a company has a disaster recovery strategy in place, they need to practice to make sure that the plan will work when a disaster does strike. In this fast-paced demo session Paul and Kimberly will repeatedly do nasty things to databases and then show how they are recovered - demonstrating many techniques that can be used in production for disaster recovery. Not for the faint-hearted!   SESSION THREE: GUIDs: Use, Abuse, and How To Move Forward   Since the addition of the GUID (Microsoft’s implementation of the UUID), my life as a consultant and "tuner" has been busy. I’ve seen databases designed with GUID keys run fairly well with small workloads but completely fall over and fail because they just cannot scale. And, I know why GUIDs are chosen - it simplifies the handling of parent/child rows in your batches so you can reduce round-trips or avoid dealing with identity values. And, yes, sometimes it's even for distributed databases and/or security that GUIDs are chosen. I'm not entirely against ever using a GUID but overusing and abusing GUIDs just has to be stopped! Please, please, please let me give you better solutions and explanations on how to deal with your parent/child rows, round-trips and clustering keys!   SESSION 4: Essential Database Maintenance  In this session, Paul and Kimberly will run you through their top-ten database maintenance recommendations, with a lot of tips and tricks along the way. These are distilled from almost 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server customers and are geared towards making your databases more performant, more available, and more easily managed (to save you time!). Everything in this session will be practical and applicable to a wide variety of databases. Topics covered include: backups, shrinks, fragmentation, statistics, and much more! Focus will be on 2005 but we'll explain some of the key differences for 2000 and 2008 as well. Speaker Biographies     Kimberley L. Tripp Paul and Kimberly are a husband-and-wife team who own and run SQLskills.com, a world-renowned SQL Server consulting and training company. They are both SQL Server MVPs and Microsoft Regional Directors, with over 30 years of combined experience on SQL Server. Paul worked on the SQL Server team for nine years in development and management roles, writing many of the DBCC commands, and ultimately with responsibility for core Storage Engine for SQL Server 2008. Paul writes extensively on his blog (SQLskills.com/blogs/Paul) and for TechNet Magazine, for which he is also a Contributing Editor. Kimberly worked on the SQL Server team in the early 1990s as a tester and writer before leaving to found SQLskills and embrace her passion for teaching and consulting. Kimberly has been a staple at worldwide conferences since she first presented at TechEd in 1996, and she blogs at SQLskills.com/blogs/Kimberly. They have written Microsoft whitepapers and books for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, and are regular, top-rated presenters worldwide on database maintenance, high availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and SQL Server internals. Together they teach the SQL MCM certification and throughout Microsoft.In their spare time, they like to find frogfish in remote corners of the world.   Speaker Testimonials  "To call them good trainers is an epic understatement. They know how to deliver technical material in ways that illustrate it well. I had to stop Paul at one point and ask him how long it took to build a particular slide because the animations were so good at conveying a hard-to-describe process." "These are not beginner presenters, and they put an extreme amount of preparation and attention to detail into everything that they do. Completely, utterly professional." "When it comes to the instructors themselves, Kimberly and Paul simply have no equal. Not only are they both ultimate authorities, but they have endless enthusiasm about the material, and spot on delivery. If either ever got tired they never showed it, even after going all day and all week. We witnessed countless demos over the course of the week, some extremely involved, multi-step processes, and I can’t recall one that didn’t go the way it was supposed to." "You might think that with this extreme level of skill comes extreme levels of egotism and lack of patience. Nothing could be further from the truth. ... They simply know how to teach, and are approachable, humble, and patient." "The experience Paul and Kimberly have had with real live customers yields a lot more information and things to watch out for than you'd ever get from documentation alone." “Kimberly, I just wanted to send you an email to let you know how awesome you are! I have applied some of your indexing strategies to our website’s homegrown CMS and we are experiencing a significant performance increase. WOW....amazing tips delivered in an exciting way!  Thanks again” 

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• Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

  Back in February at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series (EKS) I spoke to various people at Emtel about their data centre here on the island. I was trying to see whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting over there for a selected group of our community members. Well, let's say it like this... My first approach wasn't that promising and far from successful but during the following months there were more and more occasions to get in touch with the "right" contact persons at Emtel to make it happen... Setting up an appointment and pre-requisites The major improvement came during a Boot Camp for Windows Phone 8.1 App development organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands in cooperation with Emtel at the Emtel World, Ebene. Apart from learning bits and pieces regarding Universal Apps I took the opportunity to get in touch with Arvin Lockee, Sales Executive - Data, during our lunch break. And this really kicked off the whole procedure. Prior to get access to the Emtel data centre it is requested that you provide full name and National ID of anyone going to visit. Also, it should be noted that there was only a limited amount of seats available. Anyways, packed with this information I posted through the usual social media channels. Responses came in very quickly and based on First-come, first-serve (FCFS) principle I noted down the details and forwarded them to Emtel in order to fix a date and time for the visit. In preparation on our side, all attendees exchanged contact details and we organised transport options to go to the data centre in Arsenal. The day before and on the day of our meeting, Arvin send me a reminder to check whether everything is still confirmed and ready to go... Of course, it was! Arriving at the Emtel Data Centre As I'm coming from Flic En Flac towards the North, we agreed that I'm going to pick up a couple of young fellows near the old post office in Port Louis. All went well, except that Sean eventually might be living in another time zone compared to the rest of us. Anyway, after some extended stop we were complete and arrived just in time in Arsenal to meet and greet with Ish and Veer. Again, Emtel is taking access procedures to their data centre very serious and the gate stayed close until all our IDs had been noted and compared to the list of registered attendees. Despite having a good laugh at the mixture of old and new ID cards it was a straight-forward processing. The ward was very helpful and guided us to the waiting area at the entrance section of the building. Shortly after we were welcomed by Kamlesh Bokhoree, the Data Centre Officer. He gave us brief introduction into the rules and regulations during our visit, like no photography allowed, not touching the buttons, and following his instructions through the whole visit. Of course! Inside the data centre Next, he explained us the multi-factor authentication system using a combination of bio-metric data, like finger print reader, and "classic" pin panel. The Emtel data centre provides multiple services and next to co-location for your own hardware they also offer storage options for your backup and archive data in their massive, fire-resistant vault. Very impressive to get to know about the considerations that have been done in choosing the right location and how to set up the whole premises. It should also be noted that there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance inside and outside the buildings. Strengths of the Emtel TIER 3 Data Centre, Mauritius Finally, we were guided into the first server room. And wow, the whole setup is cleverly planned and outlined in the architecture. From the false floor and ceilings in order to provide optimum air flow, over to the separation of cold and hot aisles between the full-size server racks, and of course the monitored air conditions in order to analyse and watch changes in temperature, smoke detection and other parameters. And not surprisingly everything has been implemented in two independent circuits. There is a standardised classification for the construction and operation of data centres world-wide, and the Emtel's one has been designed to be a TIER 4 building but due to the lack of an alternative power supplier on the island it is officially registered as a TIER 3 compliant data centre. Maybe in the long run there might be a second supplier of energy next to CEB... time will tell. Luckily, the data centre is integrated into the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and Emtel already connects internationally through diverse undersea cable routes like SAFE & LION/LION2 out of Mauritius and through several other providers for onwards connectivity. The data centre is part of the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and has redundant internet connectivity onwards. Meanwhile, Arvin managed to join our little group of geeks and he supported Kamlesh in answering our technical questions regarding the capacities and general operation of the data centre. Visiting the NOC and its dedicated team of IT professionals was surely one of the visual highlights. Seeing their wall of screens to monitor any kind of activities on the data lines, the managed servers and the activity in and around the building was great. Even though I'm using a multi-head setup since years I cannot keep it up with that setup... ;-) But I got a couple of ideas on how to improve my work spaces here at the office. Clear advantages of hosting your e-commerce and mobile backends locally After the completely isolated NOC area we continued our Q&A session with Kamlesh and Arvin in the second server room which is dedictated to shared environments. On first thought it should be well-noted that there is lots of space for full-sized racks and therefore co-location of your own hardware. Actually, given the feedback that there will be upcoming changes in prices the facilities at the Emtel data centre are getting more and more competitive and interesting for local companies, especially small and medium enterprises. After seeing this world-class infrastructure available on the island, I'm already considering of moving one of my root servers abroad to be co-located here on the island. This would provide an improved user experience in terms of site performance and latency. This would be a good improvement, especially for upcoming e-commerce solutions for two of my local clients. Later on, we actually started the conversation of additional services that could be a catalyst for the local market in order to attract more small and medium companies to take the data centre into their evaluations regarding online activities. Until today Emtel does not provide virtualised server environments but there might be ongoing plans in the future to cover this field as well. Emtel is a mobile operator and internet connectivity provider in the first place, entering a market of managed and virtualised server infrastructures including capacities in terms of cloud storage and computing are rather new and there is a continuous learning curve at Emtel, too. You cannot just jump into a new market and see how it works out... And I appreciate Emtel's approach towards a solid fundament and then building new services on top of that. Emtel as a future one-stop-shop service provider for all your internet and telecommunications needs. Emtel's promotional video about their TIER 3 data centre in Arsenal, Mauritius More details are thoroughly described in Emtel's brochure of their data centre. Check out their PDF document here. Thanks for this opportunity Visiting and walking through the Emtel data centre for more than 2 hours was a great experience. As representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) I would like to thank anyone at Emtel involved in the process of making it happen, and especially to Arvin Lockee and Kamlesh Bokhoree for their time and patience in explaining the infrastructure and answering all the endless questions from our members. Thank You!

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• 24+ Coda Alternatives for Windows and Linux

  - by Matt

  Coda plays an important role in designing layout on Mac. There are numerous coda alternatives for windows and Linux too. It is not possible to describe each and everyone so some of the coda alternatives, which work on both windows and Linux platforms, are discussed below. EditPlus $35.00 Good thing about EditPlus is that it highlights URLs and email addresses, activating them when you ‘crtl + double-click’. It also has a built in browser for previewing HTML, and FTP and SFTP support. Also supports Macros and RegEx find and replace. UltraEdit $49.99 It is another good coda alternative for windows and Linux. It is the best suited editor for text, HTML and HEX. It also plays an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. It supports disk-based 64-bit or standard file handling on 32-bit Windows platforms or window 2000 and later versions. HippoEdit $39.95 HippoEDIT has the best autocomplete it gives pop a ‘tooltip’ above your cursor as you type, suggesting words you’ve already typed. It does syntax highlighting for over 2 dozen language. Sublime Text $59.00 Sublime Text awesome ‘zoomed out’ view of the file lets you focus on the area you want. It lets you open a local file when you right-click on its link, and there are a few automation features, so this would make a solid choice of a text editor. Textpad $24.70 TextPad is simple editor with nifty features such as column select, drag-and-drop text between files, and hyperlink support. It also supports large files. Aptana Free Aptana Studio is one of the best editors working on both windows and Linux. It is a complete web development setting that has a nice blend of powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services. It is quite helpful as it support for PHP, CSS, FTP, and more. SciTE Free It is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. It has gradually developed as a generally useful editor. It provides for building and running programs. It is best to be used for jobs with simple configurations. SciTE is currently available for Intel Win32 and Linux compatible operating systems with GTK+. It has been run on Windows XP and on Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 with GTK+ 2.12 E Text Editor $34.96 E Text Editor is a new text editor for Windows, which also works on Linux as well. It has powerful editing features and also some unique abilities. It makes text manipulation quite fast and easy, and makes user focus on his writing as it automatically does all the manual work. It can be extend it in any language. It supports Text Mate bundles, thus allows the user to tap into a huge and active community. Editra Free Editra is an upcoming editor, with some fantastic features such as user profiles, auto-completion, session saving, and syntax highlighing for 60+ languages. Plugins can extend the feature set, offering an integrated python console, FTP client, file browser, and calculator, among others. PSPad Free PSPad is a good Template for writing CSS, as it an internal web browser, and a macro recorder to the table. It also supports hex editing, and some degree of code compiling. JEdit Free It is a mature programmer’s text editor and has taken a good deal of time to be developed as it is today. It is better than many costlier development tools due to its features and simplicity of use. It has been released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0. Which also adds to its attractiveness. NEdit Free It is a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System, which also works on Linux. It combines a standard, easy to use, graphical user interface with the full functionality and stability required by users who edit text for long period a day. It also provides for thorough support for development in various languages. It also facilitates the use of text processors, and other tools at the same time. It can be used productively by anyone who needs to edit text. It is quite a user-friendly tool. Its salient features include syntax highlighting with built in pattern, auto indent, tab emulation, block indentation adjustment etc. As of version 5.1, NEdit may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. MadEdit Free Mad Edit is an Open-Source and Cross-Platform Text/Hex Editor. It is written in C++ and wxWidgets. MadEdit can edit files in Text/Column/Hex modes. It also supports many useful functions, such as Syntax Highlighting, Word Wrap, Encoding for UTF8/16/32,and others. It also supports word count, which makes it quite a useful text editor for both windows and Linux. It has been recently modified on 10/09/2010. KompoZer Free Kompozer is a complete web authoring system that has a combination of web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. KompoZer has been designed to be completely and extensively easy to use. It is thus an ideal tool for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without knowing HTML or web coding. It is based on the NVU source code. Vim Free Vim or “Vi IMproved” is an advanced text editor. Its salient features are syntax highlighting, word completion and it also has a huge amount of contributed content. Vim has several “modes” on offer for editing, which adds to the efficiency in editing. Thus it becomes a non-user-friendly application but it is also strength for its users. The normal mode binds alphanumeric keys to task-oriented commands. The visual mode highlights text. More tools for search & replace, defining functions, etc. are offered through command line mode. Vim comes with complete help. NotePad ++ Free One of the the best free text editor for Windows out there; with support for simple things—like syntax highlighting and folding—all the way up to FTP, Notepad++ should tick most of the boxes Notepad2 Free Notepad2 is also based on the Scintilla editing engine, but it’s much simpler than Notepad++. It bills itself as being fast, light-weight, and Notepad-like. Crimson Editor Free Crimson Editor has the ability to edit remote files, using a built-in FTP client; there’s also a spell checker. TotalEdit Free TotalEdit allows file comparison, RegEx search and replace, and has multiple options for file backup / versioning. For cleanup, it offers (X)HTML and XML customizable formatting, and a spell checker. In-Type Free ConTEXT Free SourceEdit Free SourceEdit includes features such as clipboard history, syntax highlighting and autocompletion for a decent set of languages. A hex editor and FTP client. RJ TextED Free RJ TextED supports integration with TopStyle Lite. Provides HTML validation and formatting. It includes an FTP client, a file browser, and a code browser, as well as a character map and support for email. GEDIT Free It is one of the best coda alternatives for windows and Linux. It has syntax highlighting and is best suitable for programming. It has many attractive features such as full support for UTF-8, undo/redo, and clipboard support, search and replace, configurable syntax highlighting for various languages and many more supportive features. It is extensible with plug ins. Other important coda alternatives for windows and Linux are Redcar, Bluefish Editor, NVU, Ruby Mine, Slick Edit, Geany, Editra, txt2html and CSSED. There are many more. Its up to user to decide which one suits best to his requirements. Related posts:10 Useful Text Editor For Developer Applications to Install & Run Windows on Linux Open Source WYSIWYG Text Editors

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• Help:Graph contest problem: maybe a modified Dijkstra or another alternative algorithm

  - by newba

  Hi you all, I'm trying to do this contest exercise about graphs: XPTO is an intrepid adventurer (a little too temerarious for his own good) who boasts about exploring every corner of the universe, no matter how inhospitable. In fact, he doesn't visit the planets where people can easily live in, he prefers those where only a madman would go with a very good reason (several millions of credits for instance). His latest exploit is trying to survive in Proxima III. The problem is that Proxima III suffers from storms of highly corrosive acids that destroy everything, including spacesuits that were especially designed to withstand corrosion. Our intrepid explorer was caught in a rectangular area in the middle of one of these storms. Fortunately, he has an instrument that is capable of measuring the exact concentration of acid on each sector and how much damage it does to his spacesuit. Now, he only needs to find out if he can escape the storm. Problem The problem consists of finding an escape route that will allow XPTOto escape the noxious storm. You are given the initial energy of the spacesuit, the size of the rectangular area and the damage that the spacesuit will suffer while standing in each sector. Your task is to find the exit sector, the number of steps necessary to reach it and the amount of energy his suit will have when he leaves the rectangular area. The escape route chosen should be the safest one (i.e., the one where his spacesuit will be the least damaged). Notice that Rodericus will perish if the energy of his suit reaches zero. In case there are more than one possible solutions, choose the one that uses the least number of steps. If there are at least two sectors with the same number of steps (X1, Y1) and (X2, Y2) then choose the first if X1 < X2 or if X1 = X2 and Y1 < Y2. Constraints 0 < E = 30000 the suit's starting energy 0 = W = 500 the rectangle's width 0 = H = 500 rectangle's height 0 < X < W the starting X position 0 < Y < H the starting Y position 0 = D = 10000 the damage sustained in each sector Input The first number given is the number of test cases. Each case will consist of a line with the integers E, X and Y. The following line will have the integers W and H. The following lines will hold the matrix containing the damage D the spacesuit will suffer whilst in the corresponding sector. Notice that, as is often the case for computer geeks, (1,1) corresponds to the upper left corner. Output If there is a solution, the output will be the remaining energy, the exit sector's X and Y coordinates and the number of steps of the route that will lead Rodericus to safety. In case there is no solution, the phrase Goodbye cruel world! will be written. Sample Input 3 40 3 3 7 8 12 11 12 11 3 12 12 12 11 11 12 2 1 13 11 11 12 2 13 2 14 10 11 13 3 2 1 12 10 11 13 13 11 12 13 12 12 11 13 11 13 12 13 12 12 11 11 11 11 13 13 10 10 13 11 12 8 3 4 7 6 4 3 3 2 2 3 2 2 5 2 2 2 3 3 2 1 2 2 3 2 2 4 3 3 2 2 4 1 3 1 4 3 2 3 1 2 2 3 3 0 3 4 10 3 4 7 6 3 3 1 2 2 1 0 2 2 2 4 2 2 5 2 2 1 3 0 2 2 2 2 1 3 3 4 2 3 4 4 3 1 1 3 1 2 2 4 2 2 1 Sample Output 12 5 1 8 Goodbye cruel world! 5 1 4 2 Basically, I think we have to do a modified Dijkstra, in which the distance between nodes is the suit's energy (and we have to subtract it instead of suming up like is normal with distances) and the steps are the ....steps made along the path. The pos with the bester binomial (Energy,num_Steps) is our "way out". Important : XPTO obviously can't move in diagonals, so we have to cut out this cases. I have many ideas, but I have such a problem implementing them... Could someone please help me thinking about this with some code or, at least, ideas? Am I totally wrong?

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• Partitioned Repository for WebCenter Content using Oracle Database 11g

  - by Adao Junior

  One of the biggest challenges for content management solutions is related to the storage management due the high volumes of the unstoppable growing of information. Even if you have storage appliances and a lot of terabytes, thinks like backup, compression, deduplication, storage relocation, encryption, availability could be a nightmare. One standard option that you have with the Oracle WebCenter Content is to store data to the database. And the Oracle Database allows you leverage features like compression, deduplication, encryption and seamless backup. But with a huge volume, the challenge is passed to the DBA to keep the WebCenter Content Database up and running. One solution is the use of DB partitions for your content repository, but what are the implications of this? Can I fit this with my business requirements? Well, yes. It’s up to you how you will manage that, you just need a good plan. During you “storage brainstorm plan” take in your mind what you need, such as storage petabytes of documents? You need everything on-line? There’s a way to logically separate the “good content” from the “legacy content”? The first thing that comes to my mind is to use the creation date of the document, but you need to remember that this document could receive a lot of revisions and maybe you can consider the revision creation date. Your plan can have also complex rules like per Document Type or per a custom metadata like department or an hybrid per date, per DocType and an specific virtual folder. Extrapolation the use, you can have your repository distributed in different servers, different disks, different disk types (Such as ssds, sas, sata, tape,…), separated accordingly your business requirements, separating the “hot” content from the legacy and easily matching your compliance requirements. If you think to use by revision, the simple way is to consider the dId, that is the sequential unique id for every content created using the WebCenter Content or the dLastModified that is the date field of the FileStorage table that contains the date of inclusion of the content to the DB Table using SecureFiles. Using the scenario of partitioned repository using an hierarchical separation by date, we will transform the FileStorage table in an partitioned table using  “Partition by Range” of the dLastModified column (You can use the dId or a join with other tables for other metadata such as dDocType, Security, etc…). The test scenario bellow covers: Previous existent data on the JDBC Storage to be migrated to the new partitioned JDBC Storage Partition by Date Automatically generation of new partitions based on a pre-defined interval (Available only with Oracle Database 11g+) Deduplication and Compression for legacy data Oracle WebCenter Content 11g PS5 (Could present some customizations that do not affect the test scenario) For the test case you need some data stored using JDBC Storage to be the “legacy” data. If you do not have done before, just create an Storage rule pointed to the JDBC Storage: Enable the metadata StorageRule in the UI and upload some documents using this rule. For this test case you can run using the schema owner or an dba user. We will use the schema owner TESTS_OCS. I can’t forgot to tell that this is just a test and you should do a proper backup of your environment. When you use the schema owner, you need some privileges, using the dba user grant the privileges needed: REM Grant privileges required for online redefinition. GRANT EXECUTE ON DBMS_REDEFINITION TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT ALTER ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT DROP ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT LOCK ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT CREATE ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT SELECT ANY TABLE TO TESTS_OCS; REM Privileges required to perform cloning of dependent objects. GRANT CREATE ANY TRIGGER TO TESTS_OCS; GRANT CREATE ANY INDEX TO TESTS_OCS; In our test scenario we will separate the content as Legacy, Day1, Day2, Day3 and Future. This last one will partitioned automatically using 3 tablespaces in a round robin mode. In a real scenario the partition rule could be per month, per year or any rule that you choose. Table spaces for the test scenario: CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_LEGACY DATAFILE 'tests_ocs_part_legacy.dat' SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY1 DATAFILE 'tests_ocs_part_day1.dat' SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY2 DATAFILE 'tests_ocs_part_day2.dat' SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY3 DATAFILE 'tests_ocs_part_day3.dat' SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_A 'tests_ocs_part_round_robin_a.dat' DATAFILE SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_B 'tests_ocs_part_round_robin_b.dat' DATAFILE SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; CREATE TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_C 'tests_ocs_part_round_robin_c.dat' DATAFILE SIZE 500K AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 500K MAXSIZE UNLIMITED; Before start, gather optimizer statistics on the actual FileStorage table: EXEC DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS(USER, 'FileStorage', cascade => TRUE); Now check if is possible execute the redefinition process: EXEC DBMS_REDEFINITION.CAN_REDEF_TABLE('TESTS_OCS', 'FileStorage',DBMS_REDEFINITION.CONS_USE_PK); If no errors messages, you are good to go. Create a Partitioned Interim FileStorage table. You need to create a new table with the partition information to act as an interim table: CREATE TABLE FILESTORAGE_Part ( DID NUMBER(*,0) NOT NULL ENABLE, DRENDITIONID VARCHAR2(30 CHAR) NOT NULL ENABLE, DLASTMODIFIED TIMESTAMP (6), DFILESIZE NUMBER(*,0), DISDELETED VARCHAR2(1 CHAR), BFILEDATA BLOB ) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( ENABLE STORAGE IN ROW NOCACHE LOGGING KEEP_DUPLICATES NOCOMPRESS ) PARTITION BY RANGE (DLASTMODIFIED) INTERVAL (NUMTODSINTERVAL(1,'DAY')) STORE IN (TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_A, TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_B, TESTS_OCS_PART_ROUND_ROBIN_C) ( PARTITION FILESTORAGE_PART_LEGACY VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('05-APR-2012 12.00.00 AM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_LEGACY LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_LEGACY RETENTION NONE DEDUPLICATE COMPRESS HIGH ), PARTITION FILESTORAGE_PART_DAY1 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.25.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY1 LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY1 RETENTION AUTO KEEP_DUPLICATES COMPRESS ), PARTITION FILESTORAGE_PART_DAY2 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.55.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY2 LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY2 RETENTION AUTO KEEP_DUPLICATES NOCOMPRESS ), PARTITION FILESTORAGE_PART_DAY3 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.58.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY3 LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( TABLESPACE TESTS_OCS_PART_DAY3 RETENTION AUTO KEEP_DUPLICATES NOCOMPRESS ) ); After the creation you should see your partitions defined. Note that only the fixed range partitions have been created, none of the interval partition have been created. Start the redefinition process: BEGIN DBMS_REDEFINITION.START_REDEF_TABLE( uname => 'TESTS_OCS' ,orig_table => 'FileStorage' ,int_table => 'FileStorage_PART' ,col_mapping => NULL ,options_flag => DBMS_REDEFINITION.CONS_USE_PK ); END; This operation can take some time to complete, depending how many contents that you have and on the size of the table. Using the DBA user you can check the progress with this command: SELECT * FROM v$sesstat WHERE sid = 1; Copy dependent objects: DECLARE redefinition_errors PLS_INTEGER := 0; BEGIN DBMS_REDEFINITION.COPY_TABLE_DEPENDENTS( uname => 'TESTS_OCS' ,orig_table => 'FileStorage' ,int_table => 'FileStorage_PART' ,copy_indexes => DBMS_REDEFINITION.CONS_ORIG_PARAMS ,copy_triggers => TRUE ,copy_constraints => TRUE ,copy_privileges => TRUE ,ignore_errors => TRUE ,num_errors => redefinition_errors ,copy_statistics => FALSE ,copy_mvlog => FALSE ); IF (redefinition_errors > 0) THEN DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('>>> FileStorage to FileStorage_PART temp copy Errors: ' || TO_CHAR(redefinition_errors)); END IF; END; With the DBA user, verify that there's no errors: SELECT object_name, base_table_name, ddl_txt FROM DBA_REDEFINITION_ERRORS; *Note that will show 2 lines related to the constrains, this is expected. Synchronize the interim table FileStorage_PART: BEGIN DBMS_REDEFINITION.SYNC_INTERIM_TABLE( uname => 'TESTS_OCS', orig_table => 'FileStorage', int_table => 'FileStorage_PART'); END; Gather statistics on the new table: EXEC DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS(USER, 'FileStorage_PART', cascade => TRUE); Complete the redefinition: BEGIN DBMS_REDEFINITION.FINISH_REDEF_TABLE( uname => 'TESTS_OCS', orig_table => 'FileStorage', int_table => 'FileStorage_PART'); END; During the execution the FileStorage table is locked in exclusive mode until finish the operation. After the last command the FileStorage table is partitioned. If you have contents out of the range partition, you should see the new partitions created automatically, not generating an error if you “forgot” to create all the future ranges. You will see something like: You now can drop the FileStorage_PART table: border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; text-align: left; border-left-color: silver; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-bottom: 4px; line-height: 12pt; background-color: #f4f4f4; margin-top: 20px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 4px; width: 97.5%; padding-right: 4px; font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; direction: ltr; max-height: 200px; font-size: 8pt; overflow-x: auto; overflow-y: auto; border-top-color: silver; border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; cursor: text; border-right-color: silver; border-right-width: 1px; border-right-style: solid; padding-top: 4px; " id="codeSnippetWrapper"> DROP TABLE FileStorage_PART PURGE; To check the FileStorage table is valid and is partitioned, use the command: SELECT num_rows,partitioned FROM user_tables WHERE table_name = 'FILESTORAGE'; You can list the contents of the FileStorage table in a specific partition, per example: SELECT * FROM FileStorage PARTITION (FILESTORAGE_PART_LEGACY) Some useful commands that you can use to check the partitions, note that you need to run using a DBA user: SELECT * FROM DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS WHERE table_name = 'FILESTORAGE';   SELECT * FROM DBA_TABLESPACES WHERE tablespace_name like 'TESTS_OCS%'; After the redefinition process complete you have a new FileStorage table storing all content that has the Storage rule pointed to the JDBC Storage and partitioned using the rule set during the creation of the temporary interim FileStorage_PART table. At this point you can test the WebCenter Content downloading the documents (Original and Renditions). Note that the content could be already in the cache area, take a look in the weblayout directory to see if a file with the same id is there, then click on the web rendition of your test file and see if have created the file and you can open, this means that is all working. The redefinition process can be repeated many times, this allow you test what the better layout, over and over again. Now some interesting maintenance actions related to the partitions: Make an tablespace read only. No issues viewing, the WebCenter Content do not alter the revisions When try to delete an content that is part of an read only tablespace, an error will occurs and the document will not be deleted The only way to prevent errors today is creating an custom component that checks the partitions and if you have an document in an “Read Only” repository, execute the deletion process of the metadata and mark the document to be deleted on the next db maintenance, like a new redefinition. Take an tablespace off-line for archiving purposes or any other reason. When you try open an document that is included in this tablespace will receive an error that was unable to retrieve the content, but the others online tablespaces are not affected. Same behavior when deleting documents. Again, an custom component is the solution. If you have an document “out of range”, the component can show an message that the repository for that document is offline. This can be extended to a option to the user to request to put online again. Moving some legacy content to an offline repository (table) using the Exchange option to move the content from one partition to a empty nonpartitioned table like FileStorage_LEGACY. Note that this option will remove the registers from the FileStorage and will not be able to open the stored content. You always need to keep in mind the indexes and constrains. An redefinition separating the original content (vault) from the renditions and separate by date ate the same time. This could be an option for DAM environments that want to have an special place for the renditions and put the original files in a storage with less performance. The process will be the same, you just need to change the script of the interim table to use composite partitioning. Will be something like: CREATE TABLE FILESTORAGE_RenditionPart ( DID NUMBER(*,0) NOT NULL ENABLE, DRENDITIONID VARCHAR2(30 CHAR) NOT NULL ENABLE, DLASTMODIFIED TIMESTAMP (6), DFILESIZE NUMBER(*,0), DISDELETED VARCHAR2(1 CHAR), BFILEDATA BLOB ) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE ( ENABLE STORAGE IN ROW NOCACHE LOGGING KEEP_DUPLICATES NOCOMPRESS ) PARTITION BY LIST (DRENDITIONID) SUBPARTITION BY RANGE (DLASTMODIFIED) ( PARTITION Vault VALUES ('primaryFile') ( SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_LEGACY VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('05-APR-2012 12.00.00 AM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_DAY1 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.25.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_DAY2 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.55.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_DAY3 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.58.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_VAULT_FUTURE VALUES LESS THAN (MAXVALUE) ) ,PARTITION WebLayout VALUES ('webViewableFile') ( SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_LEGACY VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('05-APR-2012 12.00.00 AM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_DAY1 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.25.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_DAY2 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.55.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_DAY3 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.58.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_WEBLAYOUT_FUTURE VALUES LESS THAN (MAXVALUE) ) ,PARTITION Special VALUES ('Special') ( SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_LEGACY VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('05-APR-2012 12.00.00 AM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_DAY1 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.25.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_DAY2 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.55.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_DAY3 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('06-APR-2012 07.58.00 PM', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH.MI.SS AM')) LOB (BFILEDATA) STORE AS SECUREFILE , SUBPARTITION FILESTORAGE_SPECIAL_FUTURE VALUES LESS THAN (MAXVALUE) ) )ENABLE ROW MOVEMENT; The next post related to partitioned repository will come with an sample component to handle the possible exceptions when you need to take off line an tablespace/partition or move to another place. Also, we can include some integration to the Retention Management and Records Management. Another subject related to partitioning is the ability to create an FileStore Provider pointed to a different database, raising the level of the distributed storage vs. performance. Let us know if this is important to you or you have an use case not listed, leave a comment. Cross-posted on the blog.ContentrA.com

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• IOC Container Handling State Params in Non-Default Constructor

  - by Mystagogue

  For the purpose of this discussion, there are two kinds of parameters an object constructor might take: state dependency or service dependency. Supplying a service dependency with an IOC container is easy: DI takes over. But in contrast, state dependencies are usually only known to the client. That is, the object requestor. It turns out that having a client supply the state params through an IOC Container is quite painful. I will show several different ways to do this, all of which have big problems, and ask the community if there is another option I'm missing. Let's begin: Before I added an IOC container to my project code, I started with a class like this: class Foobar { //parameters are state dependencies, not service dependencies public Foobar(string alpha, int omega){...}; //...other stuff } I decide to add a Logger service depdendency to the Foobar class, which perhaps I'll provide through DI: class Foobar { public Foobar(string alpha, int omega, ILogger log){...}; //...other stuff } But then I'm also told I need to make class Foobar itself "swappable." That is, I'm required to service-locate a Foobar instance. I add a new interface into the mix: class Foobar : IFoobar { public Foobar(string alpha, int omega, ILogger log){...}; //...other stuff } When I make the service locator call, it will DI the ILogger service dependency for me. Unfortunately the same is not true of the state dependencies Alpha and Omega. Some containers offer a syntax to address this: //Unity 2.0 pseudo-ish code: myContainer.Resolve<IFoobar>( new parameterOverride[] { {"alpha", "one"}, {"omega",2} } ); I like the feature, but I don't like that it is untyped and not evident to the developer what parameters must be passed (via intellisense, etc). So I look at another solution: //This is a "boiler plate" heavy approach! class Foobar : IFoobar { public Foobar (string alpha, int omega){...}; //...stuff } class FoobarFactory : IFoobarFactory { public IFoobar IFoobarFactory.Create(string alpha, int omega){ return new Foobar(alpha, omega); } } //fetch it... myContainer.Resolve<IFoobarFactory>().Create("one", 2); The above solves the type-safety and intellisense problem, but it (1) forced class Foobar to fetch an ILogger through a service locator rather than DI and (2) it requires me to make a bunch of boiler-plate (XXXFactory, IXXXFactory) for all varieties of Foobar implementations I might use. Should I decide to go with a pure service locator approach, it may not be a problem. But I still can't stand all the boiler-plate needed to make this work. So then I try this: //code named "concrete creator" class Foobar : IFoobar { public Foobar(string alpha, int omega, ILogger log){...}; static IFoobar Create(string alpha, int omega){ //unity 2.0 pseudo-ish code. Assume a common //service locator, or singleton holds the container... return Container.Resolve<IFoobar>( new parameterOverride[] {{"alpha", alpha},{"omega", omega} } ); } //Get my instance: Foobar.Create("alpha",2); I actually don't mind that I'm using the concrete "Foobar" class to create an IFoobar. It represents a base concept that I don't expect to change in my code. I also don't mind the lack of type-safety in the static "Create", because it is now encapsulated. My intellisense is working too! Any concrete instance made this way will ignore the supplied state params if they don't apply (a Unity 2.0 behavior). Perhaps a different concrete implementation "FooFoobar" might have a formal arg name mismatch, but I'm still pretty happy with it. But the big problem with this approach is that it only works effectively with Unity 2.0 (a mismatched parameter in Structure Map will throw an exception). So it is good only if I stay with Unity. The problem is, I'm beginning to like Structure Map a lot more. So now I go onto yet another option: class Foobar : IFoobar, IFoobarInit { public Foobar(ILogger log){...}; public IFoobar IFoobarInit.Initialize(string alpha, int omega){ this.alpha = alpha; this.omega = omega; return this; } } //now create it... IFoobar foo = myContainer.resolve<IFoobarInit>().Initialize("one", 2) Now with this I've got a somewhat nice compromise with the other approaches: (1) My arguments are type-safe / intellisense aware (2) I have a choice of fetching the ILogger via DI (shown above) or service locator, (3) there is no need to make one or more seperate concrete FoobarFactory classes (contrast with the verbose "boiler-plate" example code earlier), and (4) it reasonably upholds the principle "make interfaces easy to use correctly, and hard to use incorrectly." At least it arguably is no worse than the alternatives previously discussed. One acceptance barrier yet remains: I also want to apply "design by contract." Every sample I presented was intentionally favoring constructor injection (for state dependencies) because I want to preserve "invariant" support as most commonly practiced. Namely, the invariant is established when the constructor completes. In the sample above, the invarient is not established when object construction completes. As long as I'm doing home-grown "design by contract" I could just tell developers not to test the invariant until the Initialize(...) method is called. But more to the point, when .net 4.0 comes out I want to use its "code contract" support for design by contract. From what I read, it will not be compatible with this last approach. Curses! Of course it also occurs to me that my entire philosophy is off. Perhaps I'd be told that conjuring a Foobar : IFoobar via a service locator implies that it is a service - and services only have other service dependencies, they don't have state dependencies (such as the Alpha and Omega of these examples). I'm open to listening to such philosophical matters as well, but I'd also like to know what semi-authorative reference to read that would steer me down that thought path. So now I turn it to the community. What approach should I consider that I havn't yet? Must I really believe I've exhausted my options?

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• Updating a SharePoint master page via a solution (WSP)

  - by Kelly Jones

  In my last blog post, I wrote how to deploy a SharePoint theme using Features and a solution package.  As promised in that post, here is how to update an already deployed master page. There are several ways to update a master page in SharePoint.  You could upload a new version to the master page gallery, or you could upload a new master page to the gallery, and then set the site to use this new page.  Manually uploading your master page to the master page gallery might be the best option, depending on your environment.  For my client, I did these steps in code, which is what they preferred. (Image courtesy of: http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2007/08/sharepoint-and-quick-launch.html ) Before you decide which method you need to use, take a look at your existing pages.  Are they using the SharePoint dynamic token or the static token for the master page reference?  The wha, huh? SO, there are four ways to tell an .aspx page hosted in SharePoint which master page it should use: “~masterurl/default.master” – tells the page to use the default.master property of the site “~masterurl/custom.master” – tells the page to use the custom.master property of the site “~site/default.master” – tells the page to use the file named “default.master” in the site’s master page gallery “~sitecollection/default.master” – tells the page to use the file named “default.master” in the site collection’s master page gallery For more information about these tokens, take a look at this article on MSDN. Once you determine which token your existing pages are pointed to, then you know which file you need to update.  So, if the ~masterurl tokens are used, then you upload a new master page, either replacing the existing one or adding another one to the gallery.  If you’ve uploaded a new file with a new name, you’ll just need to set it as the master page either through the UI (MOSS only) or through code (MOSS or WSS Feature receiver code – or using SharePoint Designer). If the ~site or ~sitecollection tokens were used, then you’re limited to either replacing the existing master page, or editing all of your existing pages to point to another master page.  In most cases, it probably makes sense to just replace the master page. For my project, I’m working with WSS and the existing pages are set to the ~sitecollection token.  Based on this, I decided to just upload a new version of the existing master page (and not modify the dozens of existing pages). Also, since my client prefers Features and solutions, I created a master page Feature and a corresponding Feature Receiver.  For information on creating the elements and feature files, check out this post: http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/development/deploying-the-master-page . This works fine, unless you are overwriting an existing master page, which was my case.  You’ll run into errors because the master page file needs to be checked out, replaced, and then checked in.  I wrote code in my Feature Activated event handler to accomplish these steps. Here are the steps necessary in code: Get the file name from the elements file of the Feature Check out the file from the master page gallery Upload the file to the master page gallery Check in the file to the master page gallery Here’s the code in my Feature Receiver: 1: public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) 2: { 3: try 4: { 5:   6: SPElementDefinitionCollection col = properties.Definition.GetElementDefinitions(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); 7:   8: using (SPWeb curweb = GetCurWeb(properties)) 9: { 10: foreach (SPElementDefinition ele in col) 11: { 12: if (string.Compare(ele.ElementType, "Module", true) == 0) 13: { 14: // <Module Name="DefaultMasterPage" List="116" Url="_catalogs/masterpage" RootWebOnly="FALSE"> 15: // <File Url="myMaster.master" Type="GhostableInLibrary" IgnoreIfAlreadyExists="TRUE" 16: // Path="MasterPages/myMaster.master" /> 17: // </Module> 18: string Url = ele.XmlDefinition.Attributes["Url"].Value; 19: foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode file in ele.XmlDefinition.ChildNodes) 20: { 21: string Url2 = file.Attributes["Url"].Value; 22: string Path = file.Attributes["Path"].Value; 23: string fileType = file.Attributes["Type"].Value; 24:   25: if (string.Compare(fileType, "GhostableInLibrary", true) == 0) 26: { 27: //Check out file in document library 28: SPFile existingFile = curweb.GetFile(Url + "/" + Url2); 29:   30: if (existingFile != null) 31: { 32: if (existingFile.CheckOutStatus != SPFile.SPCheckOutStatus.None) 33: { 34: throw new Exception("The master page file is already checked out. Please make sure the master page file is checked in, before activating this feature."); 35: } 36: else 37: { 38: existingFile.CheckOut(); 39: existingFile.Update(); 40: } 41: } 42:   43: //Upload file to document library 44: string filePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(properties.Definition.RootDirectory, Path); 45: string fileName = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(filePath); 46: char slash = Convert.ToChar("/"); 47: string[] folders = existingFile.ParentFolder.Url.Split(slash); 48:   49: if (folders.Length > 2) 50: { 51: Logger.logMessage("More than two folders were detected in the library path for the master page. Only two are supported.", 52: Logger.LogEntryType.Information); //custom logging component 53: } 54:   55: SPFolder myLibrary = curweb.Folders[folders[0]].SubFolders[folders[1]]; 56:   57: FileStream fs = File.OpenRead(filePath); 58:   59: SPFile newFile = myLibrary.Files.Add(fileName, fs, true); 60:   61: myLibrary.Update(); 62: newFile.CheckIn("Updated by Feature", SPCheckinType.MajorCheckIn); 63: newFile.Update(); 64: } 65: } 66: } 67: } 68: } 69: } 70: catch (Exception ex) 71: { 72: string msg = "Error occurred during feature activation"; 73: Logger.logException(ex, msg, ""); 74: } 75:   76: } 77:   78: /// <summary> 79: /// Using a Feature's properties, get a reference to the Current Web 80: /// </summary> 81: /// <param name="properties"></param> 82: public SPWeb GetCurWeb(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) 83: { 84: SPWeb curweb; 85:   86: //Check if the parent of the web is a site or a web 87: if (properties != null && properties.Feature.Parent.GetType().ToString() == "Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb") 88: { 89:   90: //Get web from parent 91: curweb = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent; 92: 93: } 94: else 95: { 96: //Get web from Site 97: using (SPSite cursite = (SPSite)properties.Feature.Parent) 98: { 99: curweb = (SPWeb)cursite.OpenWeb(); 100: } 101: } 102:   103: return curweb; 104: } This did the trick.  It allowed me to update my existing master page, through an easily repeatable process (which is great when you are working with more than one environment and what to do things like TEST it!).  I did run into what I would classify as a strange issue with one of my subsites, but that’s the topic for another blog post.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 15, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 15, 2011Popular ReleasesAllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Comet - Visual Studio 2010 Addin: Installers: Offers the basic functionality of generating constructors from data members or from superclass. The current release does not respect the user's indentation preferences.Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.Jint - Javascript Interpreter for .NET: Jint - 0.9.0: New CLR interoperability features Many bugfixesBuild Version Increment Add-In Visual Studio: Build Version Increment v2.4.11046.2045: v2.4.11046.2045 Fixes and/or Improvements:Major: Added complete support for VC projects including .vcxproj & .vcproj. All padding issues fixed. A project's assembly versions are only changed if the project has been modified. Minor Order of versioning style values is now according to their respective positions in the attributes i.e. Major, Minor, Build, Revision. Fixed issue with global variable storage with some projects. Fixed issue where if a project item's file does not exist, a ...Document.Editor: 2011.4: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.4: New Subscript support New Superscript support New column display in statusbar Improved dialogs Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsCoding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1 release. Bug fixes and minor feature requests addedTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksNuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues listEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.0: 2.4.0This release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 - Upd...Sterling Isolated Storage Database with LINQ for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7: Sterling OODB v1.0: Note: use this changeset to download the source example that has been extended to show database generation, backup, and restore in the desktop example. Welcome to the Sterling 1.0 RTM. This version is not backwards-compatible with previous versions of Sterling. Sterling is also available via NuGet. This product has been used and tested in many applications and contains a full suite of unit tests. You can refer to the User's Guide for complete documentation, and use the unit tests as guide...PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5.1: Changes from the previous version * Use dynamic layout to better fit text in other languages * Includes French and Spanish localizations Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0.5.1-setup.exe" (reccomended) 2. Down...Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.6.1: This release is a bug fixing release. Most importantly, issues have been seen around WPF 4.0 applications not always showing up in the app chooser. Hopefully, they are fixed now. I thought this issue warranted a minor release since more and more people are going WPF 4.0 and I don't want anyone to have any problems. Dan Hanan also contributes again with several usability features. Thanks Dan! Happy Snooping! p.s. By request, I am also attaching a .zip file ... so that people can install it ...RIBA - Rich Internet Business Application for Silverlight: Preview of MVVM Framework Source + Tutorials: This is a first public release of the MVVM Framework which is part of the final RIBA application. The complete RIBA example LOB application has yet to be published. Further Documentation on the MVVM part can be found on the Blog, http://www.SilverlightBlog.Net and in the downloadable source ( mvvm/doc/ ). Please post all issues and suggestions in the issue tracker.SharePoint Learning Kit: 1.5: SharePoint Learning Kit 1.5 has the following new functionality: *Support for SharePoint 2010 *E-Learning Actions can be localised *Two New Document Library Edit Options *Automatically add the Assignment List Web Part to the Web Part Gallery *Various Bug Fixes for the Drop Box There are 2 downloads for this release SLK-1.5-2010.zip for SharePoint 2010 SLK-1.5-2007.zip for SharePoint 2007 (WSS3 & MOSS 2007)GMare: GMare Alpha 02: Alpha version 2. With fixes detailed in the issue tracker.Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.3 (BETA): This is fourth BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. For more information about this release see the following blog posts: Facebook C# SDK - Writing your first Facebook Application Facebook C# SDK v5 Beta Internals Facebook C# SDK V5.0.0 (BETA) Released We have spend time trying ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.161: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release adds a new Twitter List network importer, makes some minor feature improvements, and fixes a few bugs. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Installation StepsFollow these steps to install and use the template: Download the Zip file. Unzip it into any folder. Use WinZip or a similar program, or just right-click the Zip file...New Projects.NET JSON parser & deserializer: JSON.net makes it easy to consume JSON encoded objects in your application. It features a fast parser and deserializer written in C# 2.0 with a simple and intuitive API making integration in your application a breeze Actor Look: Single screen Actor Outlook(ActorLook) for Skelta.Its skelta based work item component.Its providing outlook features like Compose, Inbox,Outbox(which acted by me), My Requests (wf created by me) and generic custom request history tracking.AJAX Mapping Performance Tests: This project contains simple test html pages that compare the performance of Bing Maps V6.3, Bing Maps V7 and Google Maps V3 when displaying increasing numbers of pushpins on a map.Author-it DITA Project: The Author-it DITA Project contains components that enable importing, authoring, and publishing DITA content using Author-it software.Author-it PowerShell Project: The Author-it PowerShell Project provides cmdlets that allow you to interact with Author-it objects using PowerShell scripts.BizTalk Message Decompressor: This tool, written in C#, enables you to decompress BizTalk messages/context from a screen that looks like SQL Query Analyzer. By simple entering a SQL query and some custom functions, you can retrieve (partial) message content and/or context. Handy for administrators/engineers!CavemanTools Mvc: Asp.Net Mvc 3 toolkit for faster development with less code. Features theming support for both Razor and WebForm engines and easy to use helpers. It's developed in C#, .Net 4 .CityLizard XML Schema Pack: The project is for contribution of XML Schemas to CityLizard Framework.crazyKTV: this is a KTV system from TaiwanException Catcher: Exception catcher is a tool, it can attach to any .net process in the system and record all exceptions(including 1st chance exception) thrown in the process.Export Test Cases From TFS: This project lets the users to export the test cases present in form Work items in TFS 2010 to MS Excel.Extended Text Library for Small Basic: This library extend "Text" class of Microsoft Small Basic to append custom methods, such as Split, Replace, and so on. Small Basic ? Text ???? Split ? Replace ????????????、?????????。fossilGui: Gui for fossil (http://www.fossil-scm.org)Gamoliyas: Gamoliyas is an open source John Conway's Game of Life game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML). Uses mouse and keyboard. Very configurable. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.Gilly Messenger - MSN clone written in VB6: Gilly Messenger is a MSN client built in Visual Basic 6 in 2002-2004 by CrackSoft. It is now open sourced.jetzt liveticker: A desktop version of the liveticker for "jetzt.de", a german online communityLMKTool: LMKTool is a small project that helps users to migrate Thales cryptographic keys from the old LMK to the new LMK set.LocalAdmins WMI Provider: WMI Provider to report all members of the local Administrators group in the WMI Class root\cimv2\Win32_LocalAdminsMarbles CMS: Marbles aims to be a simple Content Management Server for hosting multiple websites.MediaElement Extensions: MediaElement Extensions makes it easier for WPF/SilverLight Developers to interact with MediaElement. You will no longer have to handle media and user events... Controls: ProgressSlider / VolumeSlider / Buttons (Play, Pause, Stop, FullScreen..) Features: PlaylistManagementMessage Router: MessageRouter enables routing of messages in a heterogeneous environment: - ServiceBroker queue - MSMQ - FTP - othersMultiUp: Silverlight application for multiple files upload and recoverymuzoblog: muzoblogMVC 3 con Razor - Mercurial: Proyecto MVC 3 con Razor para trabajar en un proyecto desde cero, con control de código en Mercurial.Opalis Exchange Calendaring Integration Pack: An integration pack for Opalis extending functionality to exchange calendaring features.OpenEMIS: OpenEMIS is a generic open source Education Management Information System (EMIS) developped by UNESCO.PFC2011: My PFC ^^Proyecto español. Aplicacion tpv para bar pub , gestion ... opensource: España Aplicacion tpv para bar pub , gestion ... opensource Datos con XML y resportes con Crystal Reports. Imagen: http://img375.imageshack.us/i/proba1xml.jpg/Realtime C# Pitch Tracker: Use the PitchTracker class to easily track the pitch of a waveform (typically from vocals). It is fast (~3000 detections/sec) and accurate (within 0.02% of the actual frequency). It is written in C#. A sample app is included.SCOM Maintenance Mode Tool: A maintenance mode tool for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)scooby: This is a scooby dooby doo projectSDSConsulting: Samples, resources, and solutions provided by SDS Consulting.SilverPop: Silverpop is a Silverlight 4, PRISM, MVVM demonstration application that demonstrates basic use of these concepts plus how to visualise data in a diagram. It is an accompaniment to a series of blog posts.Skywave Class Library: Skywave Class Library will contain multiple projects (one at start) targeting classes, interfaces, controls and ... for different .Net technologies like ASP.Net, WPF, Windows Forms, ... and one Core Project including shared classes. It's my shared library of 10 years development.Sofire FX: .NET ???????????，?????????????????，??? Sofire ????????！SQL Server Process Info Log: The SQL Server Process Info Log makes it easier to identify the cause of CPU & Physical Disk resource consumption by facilitating the production of visualizations that help pinpoint the smoking gun.Sup!: IIS7.5 + .NET4 + DLR + JSON.NET = Sup! Replacement for ASP.NET web services. Makes interacting with clients of all types pretty and easy. Right now it's like: "What? I can't hear you. My iPhone sucks." With Sup! it's like: "Sup."sven's msvs addons: A couple quick Visual Studio addons implementing features I missed from other IDEs. The first, MultiLineComments, implements inline comment wrapping as per Matlab. The second, FunctionBar, is a function-list C/C++ file navigation bar inspired by XCode. Both are written in C#.UHEMS: This Web Based Employee Management System With the following modules. 1. Employee Registration 2. Attendance Module 3. Leave Module 4. Payroll Processing 5. Reports 6. Independent User and Admin Registration Module 7. ResignationWebsite Monitor: Website monitorWMI Performance Counter Logging Console App: A demonstration how to create and populate a datawarehouse of WMI counters which can be used to diagnose performance problems. A presentation provided demonstrates how to detect IIS/ASP.NET thread starvation.YuxinProjs: YuxinProjs Hello World

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 13, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 13, 2011Popular ReleasesTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksNuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues listEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.0: 2.4.0This release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 - Upd...Sterling Isolated Storage Database with LINQ for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7: Sterling OODB v1.0: Note: use this changeset to download the source example that has been extended to show database generation, backup, and restore in the desktop example. Welcome to the Sterling 1.0 RTM. This version is not backwards-compatible with previous versions of Sterling. Sterling is also available via NuGet. This product has been used and tested in many applications and contains a full suite of unit tests. You can refer to the User's Guide for complete documentation, and use the unit tests as guide...PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5.1: Changes from the previous version * Use dynamic layout to better fit text in other languages * Includes French and Spanish localizations Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0.5.1-setup.exe" (reccomended) 2. Down...Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.6.1: This release is a bug fixing release. Most importantly, issues have been seen around WPF 4.0 applications not always showing up in the app chooser. Hopefully, they are fixed now. I thought this issue warranted a minor release since more and more people are going WPF 4.0 and I don't want anyone to have any problems. Dan Hanan also contributes again with several usability features. Thanks Dan! Happy Snooping! p.s. By request, I am also attaching a .zip file ... so that people can install it ...RIBA - Rich Internet Business Application for Silverlight: Preview of MVVM Framework Source + Tutorials: This is a first public release of the MVVM Framework which is part of the final RIBA application. The complete RIBA example LOB application has yet to be published. Further Documentation on the MVVM part can be found on the Blog, http://www.SilverlightBlog.Net and in the downloadable source ( mvvm/doc/ ). Please post all issues and suggestions in the issue tracker.SharePoint Learning Kit: 1.5: SharePoint Learning Kit 1.5 has the following new functionality: *Support for SharePoint 2010 *E-Learning Actions can be localised *Two New Document Library Edit Options *Automatically add the Assignment List Web Part to the Web Part Gallery *Various Bug Fixes for the Drop Box There are 2 downloads for this release SLK-1.5-2010.zip for SharePoint 2010 SLK-1.5-2007.zip for SharePoint 2007 (WSS3 & MOSS 2007)Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.3 (BETA): This is fourth BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. For more information about this release see the following blog posts: Facebook C# SDK - Writing your first Facebook Application Facebook C# SDK v5 Beta Internals Facebook C# SDK V5.0.0 (BETA) Released We have spend time trying ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.161: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release adds a new Twitter List network importer, makes some minor feature improvements, and fixes a few bugs. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Installation StepsFollow these steps to install and use the template: Download the Zip file. Unzip it into any folder. Use WinZip or a similar program, or just right-click the Zip file...WCF Data Services Toolkit: WCF Data Services Toolkit: The source code and binary releases of the WCF Data Services Toolkit. For simplicity, the source code download doesn't include any of the MSTest files. If you want those, you can pull the code down via MercurialyoutubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Video capturing improved Supports YouTube's new layout (january 2011) Internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details. Webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 28785b7248052465ea0738a7775e8e8744d84c27fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.5: AutoChat now allows up to 6 items. Items with nr. 7-0 will be removed! News page url's are now opened in the default browser Added a context menu to the system tray icon (thanks to Alex Banagos) AutoChat now allows configuring the Chat Keys and the Modifier Key The recent files list now supports compact and full mode Fix: Swapped mouse buttons are now properly detected Fix: Sometimes the Play button was pressed while still greyed out Champion: Karma Note: You can also run the u...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.2: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2362-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.19 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...IronRuby: 1.1.2: IronRuby 1.1.2 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. In this release we fixed several major issues: - problems that blocked Gem installation in certain cases - regex syntax: the parser was replaced with a new one that is much more compatible with Ruby 1.9.2 - cras...New ProjectsAbstract | .NET DDD abstraction for infra-structure (Data, Blobs, Queues): In the last few years we have seen many tools abstract access to infra-structures. They are all very different - what makes it difficult for you to move from Azure or to Azure. Abstract makes migration easier by standardising access to these infra-structures.Apex APRS: Apex APRS is a new APRS client application that is unlike any other. Key Features: Online and offline-cached map viewing from multiple popular sources Fast, simple, intuitive & powerful user interface Customizable Notification System: Customizable Notification SystemDaniel Singleton for C++: An elegant solution for C++ singletons using dependency declaration to control lifetime. One object created during any execution, lazy-init, thread safety... nice and compact.Deduplicator: Deduplicator helps to organize your file system. Create one folder organized by choice containing unique files. To be used for photo's, mp3's or any other binary format. Deduplicator is released yet, user interface is limited and some hardcoding is still in placeDigitypon (ASP.NET MVC 3): Digitypon will be a new web application specialized to be used by those who want to set an e-newspaper or an e-magazine. The main difference among other CMSs is that Digitypon’s workflow is a virtualized way of how employees of printed matters (newspaperes, magazinews) work.EdgeJournalImporter: Import journal files written on the Entourage (Pocket) Edge into Microsoft OneNote 2007+FlatFileSerializer: Serialize and deserialize flat file records from and to self defined classes using Attributes.Google Chart Helper: Controls to insert Google Charts to your web application. No Javascript code to do. We do it for you !How to display records from MySQL 5.1 database in asp.net using VB.net or CSharp: How to display records from MySQl 5.1+ database in asp.net with vb.net or C# code.HTTP Filer: HTTP Filer is a utility that allow users to share files and documents over http protocol. This utility was designed especially for Windows Phone users to send files from computer to their phone easily without send emails with attachments or upload files to an internet server.ibamonitoring: Source code for the avian point-count data collection web site www.ibamonitoring.org.JoPack Ultra Light Packaging for large teams: JoPack is an opensource ultra light package management software – that is targeted for simplifying development with large teams sharing volatile assemblies across several solutions. Latest project source code can be found on project home site: http://code.google.com/p/jo-pack/ L-System Turtle Based Fractal Tool (L-Fractal Tool): A tool to help you play with L-System turtle graphic based fractal curves( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system) This tool helps you look into some of the well known curves & lets you define new patterns & production rules to build your own. Have a fun-fractal day !mailer: mailer is a application to mail. It's developed in Python.NJamb: A C# DSL for more rigorous tests: NJamb is a C# syntax for tests and DDD specifications. It makes them more readable, faster to write, and more rigorous. Its Linq-style expressions can assert preconditions and postconditions. IntelliSense makes the syntax almost foolproof. And, it's designed to be extended.NUpdater: NUpdater makes it easier for .NET Framework developers to add auto-updating capability to their software. Putting together numerous patching capabilities, this library is an all-around updater. Developed in C# with CLS compliance (this library is fully compatible with Mono).Perihelia - The .NET & Silverlight Socket Project: Perihelia is an open-source socket framework. The framework includes (or will include) all the necessities you need to satisfy your networking needs. Windows and WPF applications are currently supported, and Silverlight applications will be supported soon.PLogger: PLogger is a light, fast configuration-less file appender logger build using a parallel pipeline architecture. It is much easier and faster to set up and use then Log4Net or the enterprise libraryQuasar: Quasar is a professional .Net utility library which adds sugar on .net framework.Sectors Game Engine: Sectors is a XNA-based 2.5D (Doom-like) game engine with console and scripting support for Windows.SharePoint 2010 Server-Side-Scanner WebPart - embDocumentInhalator: embDocumentInhalator makes it possible for SharePoint 2010 users to scan documents from scanners attached directly to the server. For developers it may help to see the relationship between the individual components required. SIAJUR: Projeto Web para controle de documentossvcutil2: svcutil2 generates Wcf client proxies from Wsdl2 documents.TemporalMemoryNetwork: TemporalMemoryNetwork is a research project exploring how dynamical systems can store and represent patterns that occur through time.WebDAV#: This project aims to implement WebDAV support for .NET, both for client software as well as software hosting their own WebDAV server. The project will start with the server portion. The project will be developed in C# 3.5 for .NET 3.5 and 4.0.

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• The DOS DEBUG Environment

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I thought I would go back in time and have a look at the DEBUG command that has been available since the beginning of dawn in DOS, MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. up to today I always knew it was there, but had no clue on how to use it so for those that are interested this might be a great geek party trick to pull out when you want the awe the younger generation and want to show them what “real” programming is about. But wait, you will have to do it relatively quickly as it seems like DEBUG was finally dumped from the Windows group in Windows 7. Not to worry, pull out that Windows XP box which will get you even more geek points and you can still poke DEBUG a bit. So, for those that are interested and want to find out a bit about the history of DEBUG read the wiki link here. That all put aside, lets get our hands dirty.. How to Start DEBUG in Windows Make sure your version of Windows supports DEBUG. Open up a console window Make a directory where you want to play with debug – in my instance I called it C221 Enter the directory and type Debug You will get a response with a – as illustrated in the image below…   The commands available in DEBUG There are several commands available in DEBUG. The most common ones are A (Assemble) R (Register) T (Trace) G (Go) D (Dump or Display) U (Unassemble) E (Enter) P (Proceed) N (Name) L (Load) W (Write) H (Hexadecimal) I (Input) O (Output) Q (Quit) I am not going to cover all these commands, but what I will do is go through a few of them briefly. A is for Assemble Command (to write code) The A command translates assembly language statements into machine code. It is quite useful for writing small assembly programs. Below I have written a very basic assembly program. The code typed out is as follows mov ax,0015 mov cx,0023 sub cx,ax mov [120],al mov cl,[120]A nop R is for Register (to jump to a point in memory) The r command turns out to be one of the most frequent commands you will use in DEBUG. It allows you to view the contents of registers and to change their values. It can be used with the following combinations… R – Displays the contents of all the registers R f – Displays the flags register R register_name – Displays the contents of a specific register All three methods are illustrated in the image above T is for Trace (To execute a program step by step) The t command allows us to execute the program step by step. Before we can trace the program we need to point back to the beginning of the program. We do this by typing in r ip, which moves us back to memory point 100. We then type trace which executes the first line of code (line 100) (As shown in the image below starting from the red arrow). You can see from the above image that the register AX now contains 0015 as per our instruction mov ax,0015 You can also see that the IP points to line 0103 which has the MOV CX,0023 command If we type t again it will now execute the second line of the program which moves 23 in the cx register. Again, we can see that the line of code was executed and that the CX register now holds the value of 23. What I would like to highlight now is the section underlined in red. These are the status flags. The ones we are going to look at now are 1st (NV), 4th (PL), 5th (NZ) & 8th (NC) NV means no overflow, the alternate would be OV PL means that the sign of the previous arithmetic operation was Plus, the alternate would be NG (Negative) NZ means that the results of the previous arithmetic operation operation was Not Zero, the alternate would be ZR NC means that No final Carry resulted from the previous arithmetic operation. CY means that there was a final Carry. We could now follow this process of entering the t command until the entire program is executed line by line. G is for Go (To execute a program up to a certain line number) So we have looked at executing a program line by line, which is fine if your program is minuscule BUT totally unpractical if we have any decent sized program. A quicker way to run some lines of code is to use the G command. The ‘g’ command executes a program up to a certain specified point. It can be used in connection with the the reset IP command. You would set your initial point and then run the G command with the line you want to end on. P is for Proceed (Similar to trace but slightly more streamlined) Another command similar to trace is the proceed command. All that the p command does is if it is called and it encounters a CALL, INT or LOOP command it terminates the program execution. In the example below I modified our example program to include an int 20 at the end of it as illustrated in the image below… Then when executing the code when I encountered the int 20 command I typed the P command and the program terminated normally (illustrated below). D is for Dump (or for those more polite Display) So, we have all these assembly lines of code, but if you have ever opened up an exe or com file in a text/hex editor, it looks nothing like assembly code. The D command is a way that we can see what our code looks like in memory (or in a hex editor). If we examined the image above, we can see that Debug is storing our assembly code with each instruction following immediately after the previous one. For instance in memory address 110 we have int and 111 we have 20. If we examine the dump of memory we can see at memory point 110 CD is stored and at memory point 111 20 is stored. U is for Unassemble (or Convert Machine code to Assembly Code) So up to now we have gone through a bunch of commands, but probably one of the most useful is the U command. Let’s say we don’t understand machine code so well and so instead we want to see it in its equivalent assembly code. We can type the U command followed by the start memory point, followed by the end memory point and it will show us the assembly code equivalent of the machine code. E is for a bunch of things… The E command can be used for a bunch of things… One example is to enter data or machine code instructions directly into memory. It can also be used to display the contents of memory locations. I am not going to worry to much about it in this post. N / L / W is for Name, Load & Write So we have written out assembly code in debug, and now we want to save it to disk, or write it as a com file or load it. This is where the N, L & W command come in handy. The n command is used to give a name to the executable program file and is pretty simple to use. The w command is a bit trickier. It saves to disk all the memory between point bx and point cx so you need to specify the bx memory address and the cx memory address for it to write your code. Let’s look at an example illustrated below. You do this by calling the r command followed by the either bx or cx. We can then go to the directory where we were working and will see the new file with the name we specified. The L command is relatively simple. You would first specify the name of the file you would like to load using the N command, and then call the L command. Q is for Quit The last command that I am going to write about in this post is the Q command. Simply put, calling the Q command exits DEBUG. Commands we did not Cover Out of the standard DEBUG commands we covered A, T, G, D, U, E, P, R, N, L & W. The ones we did not cover were H, I & O – I might make mention of these in a later post, but for the basics they are not really needed. Some Useful Resources Please note this post is based on the COS2213 handouts for UNISA A Guide to DEBUG - http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/debug/debug.htm#NT

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• Replication Services as ETL extraction tool

  - by jorg

  In my last blog post I explained the principles of Replication Services and the possibilities it offers in a BI environment. One of the possibilities I described was the use of snapshot replication as an ETL extraction tool: “Snapshot Replication can also be useful in BI environments, if you don’t need a near real-time copy of the database, you can choose to use this form of replication. Next to an alternative for Transactional Replication it can be used to stage data so it can be transformed and moved into the data warehousing environment afterwards. In many solutions I have seen developers create multiple SSIS packages that simply copies data from one or more source systems to a staging database that figures as source for the ETL process. The creation of these packages takes a lot of (boring) time, while Replication Services can do the same in minutes. It is possible to filter out columns and/or records and it can even apply schema changes automatically so I think it offers enough features here. I don’t know how the performance will be and if it really works as good for this purpose as I expect, but I want to try this out soon!” Well I have tried it out and I must say it worked well. I was able to let replication services do work in a fraction of the time it would cost me to do the same in SSIS. What I did was the following: Configure snapshot replication for some Adventure Works tables, this was quite simple and straightforward. Create an SSIS package that executes the snapshot replication on demand and waits for its completion. This is something that you can’t do with out of the box functionality. While configuring the snapshot replication two SQL Agent Jobs are created, one for the creation of the snapshot and one for the distribution of the snapshot. Unfortunately these jobs are  asynchronous which means that if you execute them they immediately report back if the job started successfully or not, they do not wait for completion and report its result afterwards. So I had to create an SSIS package that executes the jobs and waits for their completion before the rest of the ETL process continues. Fortunately I was able to create the SSIS package with the desired functionality. I have made a step-by-step guide that will help you configure the snapshot replication and I have uploaded the SSIS package you need to execute it. Configure snapshot replication   The first step is to create a publication on the database you want to replicate. Connect to SQL Server Management Studio and right-click Replication, choose for New.. Publication…   The New Publication Wizard appears, click Next Choose your “source” database and click Next Choose Snapshot publication and click Next   You can now select tables and other objects that you want to publish Expand Tables and select the tables that are needed in your ETL process In the next screen you can add filters on the selected tables which can be very useful. Think about selecting only the last x days of data for example. Its possible to filter out rows and/or columns. In this example I did not apply any filters. Schedule the Snapshot Agent to run at a desired time, by doing this a SQL Agent Job is created which we need to execute from a SSIS package later on. Next you need to set the Security Settings for the Snapshot Agent. Click on the Security Settings button.   In this example I ran the Agent under the SQL Server Agent service account. This is not recommended as a security best practice. Fortunately there is an excellent article on TechNet which tells you exactly how to set up the security for replication services. Read it here and make sure you follow the guidelines!   On the next screen choose to create the publication at the end of the wizard Give the publication a name (SnapshotTest) and complete the wizard   The publication is created and the articles (tables in this case) are added Now the publication is created successfully its time to create a new subscription for this publication.   Expand the Replication folder in SSMS and right click Local Subscriptions, choose New Subscriptions   The New Subscription Wizard appears   Select the publisher on which you just created your publication and select the database and publication (SnapshotTest)   You can now choose where the Distribution Agent should run. If it runs at the distributor (push subscriptions) it causes extra processing overhead. If you use a separate server for your ETL process and databases choose to run each agent at its subscriber (pull subscriptions) to reduce the processing overhead at the distributor. Of course we need a database for the subscription and fortunately the Wizard can create it for you. Choose for New database   Give the database the desired name, set the desired options and click OK You can now add multiple SQL Server Subscribers which is not necessary in this case but can be very useful.   You now need to set the security settings for the Distribution Agent. Click on the …. button Again, in this example I ran the Agent under the SQL Server Agent service account. Read the security best practices here   Click Next   Make sure you create a synchronization job schedule again. This job is also necessary in the SSIS package later on. Initialize the subscription at first synchronization Select the first box to create the subscription when finishing this wizard Complete the wizard by clicking Finish The subscription will be created In SSMS you see a new database is created, the subscriber. There are no tables or other objects in the database available yet because the replication jobs did not ran yet. Now expand the SQL Server Agent, go to Jobs and search for the job that creates the snapshot:   Rename this job to “CreateSnapshot” Now search for the job that distributes the snapshot:   Rename this job to “DistributeSnapshot” Create an SSIS package that executes the snapshot replication We now need an SSIS package that will take care of the execution of both jobs. The CreateSnapshot job needs to execute and finish before the DistributeSnapshot job runs. After the DistributeSnapshot job has started the package needs to wait until its finished before the package execution finishes. The Execute SQL Server Agent Job Task is designed to execute SQL Agent Jobs from SSIS. Unfortunately this SSIS task only executes the job and reports back if the job started succesfully or not, it does not report if the job actually completed with success or failure. This is because these jobs are asynchronous. The SSIS package I’ve created does the following: It runs the CreateSnapshot job It checks every 5 seconds if the job is completed with a for loop When the CreateSnapshot job is completed it starts the DistributeSnapshot job And again it waits until the snapshot is delivered before the package will finish successfully Quite simple and the package is ready to use as standalone extract mechanism. After executing the package the replicated tables are added to the subscriber database and are filled with data:   Download the SSIS package here (SSIS 2008) Conclusion In this example I only replicated 5 tables, I could create a SSIS package that does the same in approximately the same amount of time. But if I replicated all the 70+ AdventureWorks tables I would save a lot of time and boring work! With replication services you also benefit from the feature that schema changes are applied automatically which means your entire extract phase wont break. Because a snapshot is created using the bcp utility (bulk copy) it’s also quite fast, so the performance will be quite good. Disadvantages of using snapshot replication as extraction tool is the limitation on source systems. You can only choose SQL Server or Oracle databases to act as a publisher. So if you plan to build an extract phase for your ETL process that will invoke a lot of tables think about replication services, it would save you a lot of time and thanks to the Extract SSIS package I’ve created you can perfectly fit it in your usual SSIS ETL process.

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• How to create a new WCF/MVC/jQuery application from scratch

  - by pjohnson

  As a corporate developer by trade, I don't get much opportunity to create from-the-ground-up web sites; usually it's tweaks, fixes, and new functionality to existing sites. And with hobby sites, I often don't find the challenges I run into with enterprise systems; usually it's starting from Visual Studio's boilerplate project and adding whatever functionality I want to play around with, rarely deploying outside my own machine. So my experience creating a new enterprise-level site was a bit dated, and the technologies to do so have come a long way, and are much more ready to go out of the box. My intention with this post isn't so much to provide any groundbreaking insights, but to just tie together a lot of information in one place to make it easy to create a new site from scratch. Architecture One site I created earlier this year had an MVC 3 front end and a WCF 4-driven service layer. Using Visual Studio 2010, these project types are easy enough to add to a new solution. I created a third Class Library project to store common functionality the front end and services layers both needed to access, for example, the DataContract classes that the front end uses to call services in the service layer. By keeping DataContract classes in a separate project, I avoided the need for the front end to have an assembly/project reference directly to the services code, a bit cleaner and more flexible of an SOA implementation. Consuming the service Even by this point, VS has given you a lot. You have a working web site and a working service, neither of which do much but are great starting points. To wire up the front end and the services, I needed to create proxy classes and WCF client configuration information. I decided to use the SvcUtil.exe utility provided as part of the Windows SDK, which you should have installed if you installed VS. VS also provides an Add Service Reference command since the .NET 1.x ASMX days, which I've never really liked; it creates several .cs/.disco/etc. files, some of which contained hardcoded URL's, adding duplicate files (*1.cs, *2.cs, etc.) without doing a good job of cleaning up after itself. I've found SvcUtil much cleaner, as it outputs one C# file (containing several proxy classes) and a config file with settings, and it's easier to use to regenerate the proxy classes when the service changes, and to then maintain all your configuration in one place (your Web.config, instead of the Service Reference files). I provided it a reference to a copy of my common assembly so it doesn't try to recreate the data contract classes, had it use the type List<T> for collections, and modified the output files' names and .NET namespace, ending up with a command like: svcutil.exe /l:cs /o:MyService.cs /config:MyService.config /r:MySite.Common.dll /ct:System.Collections.Generic.List`1 /n:*,MySite.Web.ServiceProxies http://localhost:59999/MyService.svc I took the generated MyService.cs file and drop it in the web project, under a ServiceProxies folder, matching the namespace and keeping it separate from classes I coded manually. Integrating the config file took a little more work, but only needed to be done once as these settings didn't often change. A great thing Microsoft improved with WCF 4 is configuration; namely, you can use all the default settings and not have to specify them explicitly in your config file. Unfortunately, SvcUtil doesn't generate its config file this way. If you just copy & paste MyService.config's contents into your front end's Web.config, you'll copy a lot of settings you don't need, plus this will get unwieldy if you add more services in the future, each with its own custom binding. Really, as the only mandatory settings are the endpoint's ABC's (address, binding, and contract) you can get away with just this: <system.serviceModel>  <client>    <endpoint address="http://localhost:59999/MyService.svc" binding="wsHttpBinding" contract="MySite.Web.ServiceProxies.IMyService" />  </client></system.serviceModel> By default, the services project uses basicHttpBinding. As you can see, I switched it to wsHttpBinding, a more modern standard. Using something like netTcpBinding would probably be faster and more efficient since the client & service are both written in .NET, but it requires additional server setup and open ports, whereas switching to wsHttpBinding is much simpler. From an MVC controller action method, I instantiated the client, and invoked the method for my operation. As with any object that implements IDisposable, I wrapped it in C#'s using() statement, a tidy construct that ensures Dispose gets called no matter what, even if an exception occurs. Unfortunately there are problems with that, as WCF's ClientBase<TChannel> class doesn't implement Dispose according to Microsoft's own usage guidelines. I took an approach similar to Technology Toolbox's fix, except using partial classes instead of a wrapper class to extend the SvcUtil-generated proxy, making the fix more seamless from the controller's perspective, and theoretically, less code I have to change if and when Microsoft fixes this behavior. User interface The MVC 3 project template includes jQuery and some other common JavaScript libraries by default. I updated the ones I used to the latest versions using NuGet, available in VS via the Tools > Library Package Manager > Manage NuGet Packages for Solution... > Updates. I also used this dialog to remove packages I wasn't using. Given that it's smart enough to know the difference between the .js and .min.js files, I was hoping it would be smart enough to know which to include during build and publish operations, but this doesn't seem to be the case. I ended up using Cassette to perform the minification and bundling of my JavaScript and CSS files; ASP.NET 4.5 includes this functionality out of the box. The web client to web server link via jQuery was easy enough. In my JavaScript function, unobtrusively wired up to a button's click event, I called $.ajax, corresponding to an action method that returns a JsonResult, accomplished by passing my model class to the Controller.Json() method, which jQuery helpfully translates from JSON to a JavaScript object.$.ajax calls weren't perfectly straightforward. I tried using the simpler $.post method instead, but ran into trouble without specifying the contentType parameter, which $.post doesn't have. The url parameter is simple enough, though for flexibility in how the site is deployed, I used MVC's Url.Action method to get the URL, then sent this to JavaScript in a JavaScript string variable. If the request needed input data, I used the JSON.stringify function to convert a JavaScript object with the parameters into a JSON string, which MVC then parses into strongly-typed C# parameters. I also specified "json" for dataType, and "application/json; charset=utf-8" for contentType. For success and error, I provided my success and error handling functions, though success is a bit hairier. "Success" in this context indicates whether the HTTP request succeeds, not whether what you wanted the AJAX call to do on the web server was successful. For example, if you make an AJAX call to retrieve a piece of data, the success handler will be invoked for any 200 OK response, and the error handler will be invoked for failed requests, e.g. a 404 Not Found (if the server rejected the URL you provided in the url parameter) or 500 Internal Server Error (e.g. if your C# code threw an exception that wasn't caught). If an exception was caught and handled, or if the data requested wasn't found, this would likely go through the success handler, which would need to do further examination to verify it did in fact get back the data for which it asked. I discuss this more in the next section. Logging and exception handling At this point, I had a working application. If I ran into any errors or unexpected behavior, debugging was easy enough, but of course that's not an option on public web servers. Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 filled this gap nicely, with its Logging and Exception Handling functionality. First I installed Enterprise Library; NuGet as outlined above is probably the best way to do so. I needed a total of three assembly references--Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging, and Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging. VS links with the handy Enterprise Library 5.0 Configuration Console, accessible by right-clicking your Web.config and choosing Edit Enterprise Library V5 Configuration. In this console, under Logging Settings, I set up a Rolling Flat File Trace Listener to write to log files but not let them get too large, using a Text Formatter with a simpler template than that provided by default. Logging to a different (or additional) destination is easy enough, but a flat file suited my needs. At this point, I verified it wrote as expected by calling the Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.Logger.Write method from my C# code. With those settings verified, I went on to wire up Exception Handling with Logging. Back in the EntLib Configuration Console, under Exception Handling, I used a LoggingExceptionHandler, setting its Logging Category to the category I already had configured in the Logging Settings. Then, from code (e.g. a controller's OnException method, or any action method's catch block), I called the Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicy.HandleException method, providing the exception and the exception policy name I had configured in the Exception Handling Settings. Before I got this configured correctly, when I tried it out, nothing was logged. In working with .NET, I'm used to seeing an exception if something doesn't work or isn't set up correctly, but instead working with these EntLib modules reminds me more of JavaScript (before the "use strict" v5 days)--it just does nothing and leaves you to figure out why, I presume due in part to the listener pattern Microsoft followed with the Enterprise Library. First, I verified logging worked on its own. Then, verifying/correcting where each piece wires up to the next resolved my problem. Your C# code calls into the Exception Handling module, referencing the policy you pass the HandleException method; that policy's configuration contains a LoggingExceptionHandler that references a logCategory; that logCategory should be added in the loggingConfiguration's categorySources section; that category references a listener; that listener should be added in the loggingConfiguration's listeners section, which specifies the name of the log file. One final note on error handling, as the proper way to handle WCF and MVC errors is a whole other very lengthy discussion. For AJAX calls to MVC action methods, depending on your configuration, an exception thrown here will result in ASP.NET'S Yellow Screen Of Death being sent back as a response, which is at best unnecessarily and uselessly verbose, and at worst a security risk as the internals of your application are exposed to potential hackers. I mitigated this by overriding my controller's OnException method, passing the exception off to the Exception Handling module as above. I created an ErrorModel class with as few properties as possible (e.g. an Error string), sending as little information to the client as possible, to both maximize bandwidth and mitigate risk. I then return an ErrorModel in JSON format for AJAX requests: if (filterContext.HttpContext.Request.IsAjaxRequest()){    filterContext.Result = Json(new ErrorModel(...));    filterContext.ExceptionHandled = true;} My $.ajax calls from the browser get a valid 200 OK response and go into the success handler. Before assuming everything is OK, I check if it's an ErrorModel or a model containing what I requested. If it's an ErrorModel, or null, I pass it to my error handler. If the client needs to handle different errors differently, ErrorModel can contain a flag, error code, string, etc. to differentiate, but again, sending as little information back as possible is ideal. Summary As any experienced ASP.NET developer knows, this is a far cry from where ASP.NET started when I began working with it 11 years ago. WCF services are far more powerful than ASMX ones, MVC is in many ways cleaner and certainly more unit test-friendly than Web Forms (if you don't consider the code/markup commingling you're doing again), the Enterprise Library makes error handling and logging almost entirely configuration-driven, AJAX makes a responsive UI more feasible, and jQuery makes JavaScript coding much less painful. It doesn't take much work to get a functional, maintainable, flexible application, though having it actually do something useful is a whole other matter.

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