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• New Feature in ODI 11.1.1.6: ODI for Big Data

  - by Julien Testut

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} By Ananth Tirupattur Starting with Oracle Data Integrator 11.1.1.6.0, ODI is offering a solution to process Big Data. This post provides an overview of this feature. With all the buzz around Big Data and before getting into the details of ODI for Big Data, I will provide a brief introduction to Big Data and Oracle Solution for Big Data. So, what is Big Data? Big data includes: structured data (this includes data from relation data stores, xml data stores), semi-structured data (this includes data from weblogs) unstructured data (this includes data from text blob, images) Traditionally, business decisions are based on the information gathered from transactional data. For example, transactional Data from CRM applications is fed to a decision system for analysis and decision making. Products such as ODI play a key role in enabling decision systems. However, with the emergence of massive amounts of semi-structured and unstructured data it is important for decision system to include them in the analysis to achieve better decision making capability. While there is an abundance of opportunities for business for gaining competitive advantages, process of Big Data has challenges. The challenges of processing Big Data include: Volume of data Velocity of data - The high Rate at which data is generated Variety of data In order to address these challenges and convert them into opportunities, we would need an appropriate framework, platform and the right set of tools. Hadoop is an open source framework which is highly scalable, fault tolerant system, for storage and processing large amounts of data. Hadoop provides 2 key services, distributed and reliable storage called Hadoop Distributed File System or HDFS and a framework for parallel data processing called Map-Reduce. Innovations in Hadoop and its related technology continue to rapidly evolve, hence therefore, it is highly recommended to follow information on the web to keep up with latest information. Oracle's vision is to provide a comprehensive solution to address the challenges faced by Big Data. Oracle is providing the necessary Hardware, software and tools for processing Big Data Oracle solution includes: Big Data Appliance Oracle NoSQL Database Cloudera distribution for Hadoop Oracle R Enterprise- R is a statistical package which is very popular among data scientists. ODI solution for Big Data Oracle Loader for Hadoop for loading data from Hadoop to Oracle. Further details can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/big-data-appliance/overview/index.html ODI Solution for Big Data: ODI’s goal is to minimize the need to understand the complexity of Hadoop framework and simplify the adoption of processing Big Data seamlessly in an enterprise. ODI is providing the capabilities for an integrated architecture for processing Big Data. This includes capability to load data in to Hadoop, process data in Hadoop and load data from Hadoop into Oracle. ODI is expanding its support for Big Data by providing the following out of the box Knowledge Modules (KMs). IKM File to Hive (LOAD DATA).Load unstructured data from File (Local file system or HDFS ) into Hive IKM Hive Control AppendTransform and validate structured data on Hive IKM Hive TransformTransform unstructured data on Hive IKM File/Hive to Oracle (OLH)Load processed data in Hive to Oracle RKM HiveReverse engineer Hive tables to generate models Using the Loading KM you can map files (local and HDFS files) to the corresponding Hive tables. For example, you can map weblog files categorized by date into a corresponding partitioned Hive table schema. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Using the Hive control Append KM you can validate and transform data in Hive. In the below example, two source Hive tables are joined and mapped to a target Hive table. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} The Hive Transform KM facilitates processing of semi-structured data in Hive. In the below example, the data from weblog is processed using a Perl script and mapped to target Hive table. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Using the Oracle Loader for Hadoop (OLH) KM you can load data from Hive table or HDFS to a corresponding table in Oracle. OLH is available as a standalone product. ODI greatly enhances OLH capability by generating the configuration and mapping files for OLH based on the configuration provided in the interface and KM options. ODI seamlessly invokes OLH when executing the scenario. In the below example, a HDFS file is mapped to a table in Oracle. Development and Deployment:The following diagram illustrates the development and deployment of ODI solution for Big Data. Using the ODI Studio on your development machine create and develop ODI solution for processing Big Data by connecting to a MySQL DB or Oracle database on a BDA machine or Hadoop cluster. Schedule the ODI scenarios to be executed on the ODI agent deployed on the BDA machine or Hadoop cluster. ODI Solution for Big Data provides several exciting new capabilities to facilitate the adoption of Big Data in an enterprise. You can find more information about the Oracle Big Data connectors on OTN. You can find an overview of all the new features introduced in ODI 11.1.1.6 in the following document: ODI 11.1.1.6 New Features Overview

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• Thread placement policies on NUMA systems - update

  - by Dave

  In a prior blog entry I noted that Solaris used a "maximum dispersal" placement policy to assign nascent threads to their initial processors. The general idea is that threads should be placed as far away from each other as possible in the resource topology in order to reduce resource contention between concurrently running threads. This policy assumes that resource contention -- pipelines, memory channel contention, destructive interference in the shared caches, etc -- will likely outweigh (a) any potential communication benefits we might achieve by packing our threads more densely onto a subset of the NUMA nodes, and (b) benefits of NUMA affinity between memory allocated by one thread and accessed by other threads. We want our threads spread widely over the system and not packed together. Conceptually, when placing a new thread, the kernel picks the least loaded node NUMA node (the node with lowest aggregate load average), and then the least loaded core on that node, etc. Furthermore, the kernel places threads onto resources -- sockets, cores, pipelines, etc -- without regard to the thread's process membership. That is, initial placement is process-agnostic. Keep reading, though. This description is incorrect. On Solaris 10 on a SPARC T5440 with 4 x T2+ NUMA nodes, if the system is otherwise unloaded and we launch a process that creates 20 compute-bound concurrent threads, then typically we'll see a perfect balance with 5 threads on each node. We see similar behavior on an 8-node x86 x4800 system, where each node has 8 cores and each core is 2-way hyperthreaded. So far so good; this behavior seems in agreement with the policy I described in the 1st paragraph. I recently tried the same experiment on a 4-node T4-4 running Solaris 11. Both the T5440 and T4-4 are 4-node systems that expose 256 logical thread contexts. To my surprise, all 20 threads were placed onto just one NUMA node while the other 3 nodes remained completely idle. I checked the usual suspects such as processor sets inadvertently left around by colleagues, processors left offline, and power management policies, but the system was configured normally. I then launched multiple concurrent instances of the process, and, interestingly, all the threads from the 1st process landed on one node, all the threads from the 2nd process landed on another node, and so on. This happened even if I interleaved thread creating between the processes, so I was relatively sure the effect didn't related to thread creation time, but rather that placement was a function of process membership. I this point I consulted the Solaris sources and talked with folks in the Solaris group. The new Solaris 11 behavior is intentional. The kernel is no longer using a simple maximum dispersal policy, and thread placement is process membership-aware. Now, even if other nodes are completely unloaded, the kernel will still try to pack new threads onto the home lgroup (socket) of the primordial thread until the load average of that node reaches 50%, after which it will pick the next least loaded node as the process's new favorite node for placement. On the T4-4 we have 64 logical thread contexts (strands) per socket (lgroup), so if we launch 48 concurrent threads we will find 32 placed on one node and 16 on some other node. If we launch 64 threads we'll find 32 and 32. That means we can end up with our threads clustered on a small subset of the nodes in a way that's quite different that what we've seen on Solaris 10. So we have a policy that allows process-aware packing but reverts to spreading threads onto other nodes if a node becomes too saturated. It turns out this policy was enabled in Solaris 10, but certain bugs suppressed the mixed packing/spreading behavior. There are configuration variables in /etc/system that allow us to dial the affinity between nascent threads and their primordial thread up and down: see lgrp_expand_proc_thresh, specifically. In the OpenSolaris source code the key routine is mpo_update_tunables(). This method reads the /etc/system variables and sets up some global variables that will subsequently be used by the dispatcher, which calls lgrp_choose() in lgrp.c to place nascent threads. Lgrp_expand_proc_thresh controls how loaded an lgroup must be before we'll consider homing a process's threads to another lgroup. Tune this value lower to have it spread your process's threads out more. To recap, the 'new' policy is as follows. Threads from the same process are packed onto a subset of the strands of a socket (50% for T-series). Once that socket reaches the 50% threshold the kernel then picks another preferred socket for that process. Threads from unrelated processes are spread across sockets. More precisely, different processes may have different preferred sockets (lgroups). Beware that I've simplified and elided details for the purposes of explication. The truth is in the code. Remarks: It's worth noting that initial thread placement is just that. If there's a gross imbalance between the load on different nodes then the kernel will migrate threads to achieve a better and more even distribution over the set of available nodes. Once a thread runs and gains some affinity for a node, however, it becomes "stickier" under the assumption that the thread has residual cache residency on that node, and that memory allocated by that thread resides on that node given the default "first-touch" page-level NUMA allocation policy. Exactly how the various policies interact and which have precedence under what circumstances could the topic of a future blog entry. The scheduler is work-conserving. The x4800 mentioned above is an interesting system. Each of the 8 sockets houses an Intel 7500-series processor. Each processor has 3 coherent QPI links and the system is arranged as a glueless 8-socket twisted ladder "mobius" topology. Nodes are either 1 or 2 hops distant over the QPI links. As an aside the mapping of logical CPUIDs to physical resources is rather interesting on Solaris/x4800. On SPARC/Solaris the CPUID layout is strictly geographic, with the highest order bits identifying the socket, the next lower bits identifying the core within that socket, following by the pipeline (if present) and finally the logical thread context ("strand") on the core. But on Solaris on the x4800 the CPUID layout is as follows. [6:6] identifies the hyperthread on a core; bits [5:3] identify the socket, or package in Intel terminology; bits [2:0] identify the core within a socket. Such low-level details should be of interest only if you're binding threads -- a bad idea, the kernel typically handles placement best -- or if you're writing NUMA-aware code that's aware of the ambient placement and makes decisions accordingly. Solaris introduced the so-called critical-threads mechanism, which is expressed by putting a thread into the FX scheduling class at priority 60. The critical-threads mechanism applies to placement on cores, not on sockets, however. That is, it's an intra-socket policy, not an inter-socket policy. Solaris 11 introduces the Power Aware Dispatcher (PAD) which packs threads instead of spreading them out in an attempt to be able to keep sockets or cores at lower power levels. Maximum dispersal may be good for performance but is anathema to power management. PAD is off by default, but power management polices constitute yet another confounding factor with respect to scheduling and dispatching. If your threads communicate heavily -- one thread reads cache lines last written by some other thread -- then the new dense packing policy may improve performance by reducing traffic on the coherent interconnect. On the other hand if your threads in your process communicate rarely, then it's possible the new packing policy might result on contention on shared computing resources. Unfortunately there's no simple litmus test that says whether packing or spreading is optimal in a given situation. The answer varies by system load, application, number of threads, and platform hardware characteristics. Currently we don't have the necessary tools and sensoria to decide at runtime, so we're reduced to an empirical approach where we run trials and try to decide on a placement policy. The situation is quite frustrating. Relatedly, it's often hard to determine just the right level of concurrency to optimize throughput. (Understanding constructive vs destructive interference in the shared caches would be a good start. We could augment the lines with a small tag field indicating which strand last installed or accessed a line. Given that, we could augment the CPU with performance counters for misses where a thread evicts a line it installed vs misses where a thread displaces a line installed by some other thread.)

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 01, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 01, 2013Popular ReleasesQuickMon: Version 2.10.3: Mainly just a service release - no major changes. Toolbar buttons on main and config window can now be re-arrange (using ALT key) Added property to disable corrective scriptsDotNetNuke® IFrame: IFrame 04.05.00: New DNN6/7 Manifest file and Azure Compatibility.VidCoder: 1.5.2 Beta: Fixed crash on presets with an invalid bitrate.Roadkill - .NET Wiki engine: Roadkill v1.7: New features in 1.7: New file manager: Multiple file uploads Drag and drop uploads Delete folders (admins only) Delete files (admins only) (Experimental) Syntaxhighlighting custom variable (using https://github.com/alexgorbatchev/SyntaxHighlighter) - use [[[code lang=c#|your code here]]] (Experimental) MathJax custom variable - use [[[Mathjax]]] and $$your tex$$ on the page. Improved black bar theme Site speed improvements for Javascript/CSS files - now just two files files ea...Download Sharepoint Solution package: Release 4: version updated for SP2013WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.5: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8.0 and 8.1 Preview SDKs. Do not download the source code from here if you are looking for latest updates! You can download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Composition library for visual tree rende...Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.1: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.1 has new facilities for defining and manipulating character classes. These changes make the construction of large Unicode character classes more convenient. The runtime code for performing automaton backup has been re-implemented, and is now faster for scanners that need backup. Source CodeThe distribution contains a complete VS2010 project for the appli...ZXMAK2: Version 2.7.5.7: - fix TZX emulation (Bruce Lee, Zynaps) - fix ATM 16 colors for border - add memory module PROFI 512K; add PROFI V03 rom image; fix PROFI 3.XX configTwitter image Downloader: Twitter Image Downloader 2 with Installer: Application file with Install shield and Dot Net 4.0 redistributableUltimate Music Tagger: Ultimate Music Tagger 1.0.0.0: First release of Ultimate Music TaggerBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.2: 2013.06.28 Ver5.9.2 (1) ??????????(????SMTP?????)?????????? (2) HTTPS???????????Outlook 2013 Add-In: Configuration Form: This new version includes the following changes: - Refactored code a bit. - Removing configuration from main form to gain more space to display items. - Moved configuration to separate form. You can click the little "gear" icon to access the configuration form (still very simple). - Added option to show past day appointments from the selected day (previous in time, that is). - Added some tooltips. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it ...Terminals: Version 3.0 - Release: Changes since version 2.0:Choose 100% portable or installed version Removed connection warning when running RDP 8 (Windows 8) client Fixed Active directory search Extended Active directory search by LDAP filters Fixed single instance mode when running on Windows Terminal server Merged usage of Tags and Groups Added columns sorting option in tables No UAC prompts on Windows 7 Completely new file persistence data layer New MS SQL persistence layer (Store data in SQL database)...NuGet: NuGet 2.6: Released June 26, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.6Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0 Beta: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, and cross platform debugging support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuewiStN...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for Windows Azure Media Services Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expectin...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.95: update parser to allow for CSS3 calc( function to nest. add recognition of -pponly (Preprocess-Only) switch in AjaxMinManifestTask build task. Fix crashing bug in EXE when processing a manifest file using the -xml switch and an error message needs to be displayed (like a missing input file). Create separate Clean and Bundle build tasks for working with manifest files (AjaxMinManifestCleanTask and AjaxMinBundleTask). Removed the IsCleanOperation from AjaxMinManifestTask -- use AjaxMinMan...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.44: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImgChili.net" links FIXED: Auto UpdaterDocument.Editor: 2013.25: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.25: Improved Spell Check support Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsNew ProjectsAerCloud.net Client - Java, Linux & Windows: This project source code provides a step by step guide for using AerCloud.net Framework as a Service API. For more information please visit http://www.aercloudAmiClient – Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) client based on the Rx Framework: Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) client based on the Rx Frameworkbaidupan: cdcddddC#??????: C#??????ImageHelper: imagehelperIP switcher: IP switcher is a simple tool for switching settings, and store presets, on networkadapters.MastersProject: A MS project with a goal of creating a fully Code Contracts verified physics engine and a relatively simple game that uses it.Multiplatform card game: Example multipatform project.PhoneTools: A collection of tools designed to help developers create beautiful Windows Phone 8 apps.rodidexter: lllSharePoint 2013 List Item Encryption: This coding exercise project enables you to encrypt/decrypt list item text field in the browser using industry standard algorithms.tvaSoft: simulation, rotor dynamics, Finite Element Analisys, FEM, ODE, torsional vibration, flexural vibrationX3DML Project: X3DML is an xml-based markup language that defines rules for modeling 3D scenes from a tag-based document. It may be usefull in 3D web design and VR.zhuang-tfs: zhuang tfs

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 17, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 17, 2010New ProjectsAstalanumerator: A JavaScript based recursive DOM/JS object inspector. Uses a simple tree menu to enumerate all properties of a object.BDD Log Converter: A simple .NET class and console application that will convert BDD logs (MDT) into XML format.CastleInvestProj: Castle Investigating project Easy Callback: This library facilitates the use of multiple asynchronous calls on the same page, and asynchronous calls from a user control also have a clean cod...Easy Wings: Small webApp to manage aircraft booking in flying club. French only for the moment.EPiServer Template Foundation: EPiServer Template Foundation builds on top of Page Type Builder to provide a framework for common site features such as basic page type properties...guidebook: a project to plan your road trip.Look into documents for e-discovery: Search, browse, tag, annotate documents such as MS Word, PDF, e-mail, etc. Good for legal professionals do e-discovery. One Bus Away for Windows Phone: A Windows Phone 7 application written in Silverlight for the OneBusAway (www.onebusaway.org) website. Allows mobile users to search for public tra...OneBusAway for Windows Phone 7: OneBusAway is a service with transit information for the Seattle, WA region. We are creating a mobile application for Windows Phone 7 utilizing th...PoFabLab - Poetry Generation Library and Editor in .NET: PoFabLab is an open source library and word processor designed for digital poets. The library can scan lines, perform Markov analysis, filter text...Project Axure: More details coming soon.Чат кутежа 2.0: ИРЦ чат специально для форума ЕНЕ简易代码生成器: 初次使用CodePlex，这只是一个测试项目。打算用WPF做一个简单的代码生成器，兼具SQL Server Client功能。使用.Net 4.0, C#开发。运营工作系统: TRAS(Team resource assist system) is a toolkit that help the studio to manage and distribute the daily work, like publish the news, GM broadcast a...New ReleasesAmuse - A New MU* Client For Windows: 2010 June: Important Notice to TestersPlease uninstall any previous versions of Amuse prior to this one before installing. Changes and InformationFirst relea...ASP.NET Generic Data Source Control: V1.0: GenericDataSource - Version 1.0Binary This is the first official binary release of the GenericDataSource for ASP.NET - stable and ready for product...Astalanumerator: Astalanumerator 0.7: I wanted to map all properties in javascript and inspect them regardless if they were objects or not. IE doesn’t support for(i in..) for native pro...BDD Log Converter: BDD Log Converter 0.1.0: First release (0.1.0).DVD Swarm: 0.8.10.616: Major update with improvements to encoding speed.Easy Callback: Easy Callback 1.0.0.0: Easy Callback library 1.0.0.0Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET: Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET - v1.0: Now supporting Facebook's new Open Graph API JavaScript SDK, this release of FBConnectAuth also adds support for running in partially trusted envir...FlickrNet API Library: 3.0 Beta 3: Another small Beta. Changed parsing code so exceptions aren't raised when new attributes are added by Flickr. This affects searches where you are ...Infragistics Analytics Framework: Infragistics Analytics Framework 10.2: An updated version of Infragistics Analytics Framework, which utilizes the newest version (v.1.4.4) of MSAF as well as the newest release (v.10.2) ...NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications: NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications 1.0 build 1: Version 1.0 build 1:[change] Test run failure notification now disappears automaticallyOpen Source PLM Activities: 3dxml player integration for Aras Innovator: This is just a simple html file you need to add to your Aras Innovator install directory. It loads the 3Dxml player for your 3dxml files. Tested o...patterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: WAAG - Part 2 - Drop 1: First code and docs drop for Part 2 of the Windows Azure Architecture Guide Part 1 of the Guide is released here. Highlights of this release are:...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (June 2010): Installer of the latest binaries of Phalanger 2.0 (June 2010) and its integration into Visual Studio 2008 SP1. * Improved compatibility with P...RIA Services Essentials: Book Club Application (June 16, 2010): Added some XAML to hide/show link to BookShelf page based on whether the user is logged in or not. Updated IsBookOwner authorization rule implement...secs4net: Relase 1.01: version 1.01 releasesELedit: sELedit v1.1c: Added: Tool for exporting NPC/Mob database file that is used by sNPCeditSharePoint Ad Rotator: SPAdRotator 2.0 Beta 2: Added: Open tool pane link to default Web Part text Made all images except the first hidden by default, so the Web Part will degrade gracefully w...sMAPtool: sMAPtool v0.7f (without Maps): Added: 3rd party magnifier softwaresNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9c: Added: npc/mob names and corresponding datbaseSolidWorks Addin Development: GenericAddinFrameworkR1-06.17.2010: .sTASKedit: sTASKedit v0.8: Important BugFix: there was an mistake in the structure, team-member block and get-items block was swapped internally. Tasks that contains both blo...stefvanhooijdonk.com: UnitTesting-SP2010-TFS2010: Files for my post on TFS2010 and NUnit testing with SP2010 projects. see the post here: http://wp.me/pMnlQ-88 The XSLT here is from http://nunit4t...Telerik CAB Enabling Kit for RadControls for WinForms: TCEK 2010.1.10.504: What's new in v2010.1.0610 (Beta): RadDocking component has been replaced with the latest RadDock control Requirements: Visual Studio 2005+ Tele...TFS Buddy: TFS Buddy 1.2: Fixes a problem with notificationsThales Simulator Library: Version 0.9: The Thales Simulator Library is an implementation of a software emulation of the Thales (formerly Zaxus & Racal) Hardware Security Module cryptogra...Triton Application Framework: Tools - Code Generator - Build 1.0: This is the first release of the Generator. This is buggy but works.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30616.0: Automatic drop of latest buildXsltDb - DotNetNuke Module Builder: 01.01.27: Code completion for XsltDb, HTML and XSL stuff!! Full screen editing Some bugs are still in EditArea component and object lists in code completi...Чат кутежа 2.0: 0.9a build 2 версия: вторая сборка первой альфа-версии ирц-клиента.Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsdotSpatialpatterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contribpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETLightweight Fluent WorkflowRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodeSunlit World SchemeNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSolidWorks Addin DevelopmentN2 CMS

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 23, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 23, 2010New Projects.NET StarCraft II Replay Parser: A .NET 3.5 Library used to parse StarCraft II replays. Developed in C# 3.5.BackToBasics "B2B" Chat: With technology and software getting more and more complicated, why not get back to basics with BackToBasicsChat. B2B allows you to chat over a ser...Dark Neuron Game Engine: Dark Neuron allows you to easily create fun and interesting games with no need of developing basic game components. This engine is developed for C#...DeepZoom Pivot Constructor: Library to make building DeepZoom images and Pivot displays simpler.ePaper reader: The project is aimed at creating a tool which helps in reading electronic editions of news papers(pdf/flash)FSharpPageProvider for EPiServer CMS 6: This project starts as the port of EPiServer XmlPageProvider to F# programming language. Hammock for REST: Hammock is a REST library for .NET that greatly simplifies consuming and wrapping RESTful services.Kirill Osenkov: Various small projects, tools, utilities and samples by Kirill OsenkovliveDB: liveDB - web client for sql serverLucilla Framework: lucilla frameworkMVC Foolproof Validation: MVC Foolproof Validation aims to extend the Data Annotation validation provided in ASP.NET MVC. Initial efforts are focused on adding contingent va...MVC2Forums: MVC2Forums is simply a forum system based upon MVC2.Mvvm Foundation Silverlight: Mvvm Foundation Silverlight is a library of classes that are helpful when building Silverlight applications based in the MVVM pattern. This librar...MyPersonalWebsite: This is my personal web site developed using ASP.NET MVC 2Planner: Planner makes it easier for all peoples to plan your tasks. It's developed in Delphi.Prose: Prose is an playground for an experimental JavaScript like language compiler. Eventually it will implement 0-CFA, CFA2, and a Tracing JITQuestTracker: QuestTracker is a todo list presented in the format of a quest tracking list such as the one in World of Warcraft.SevenZipLib: SevenZipLib is a C# interface to the 7-zip library.SimpleGeo .Net: .Net Client library for the SimpleGeo.com serviceNew ReleasesAutenticar no OpenLDAP utilizando pGIna: DLL LDAPAuth Plus: New Group: No LoginBMap.NET: BMap.NET 2: This is the 2nd version of BMap.NET. It has included these tags: Bing Maps, and "About BMap.NET".Cronos: Version 2.04: This is primarily a bug-fix release. Several numerical issues have been resolved, and a resource leak (of MS Windows graphics objects) has been fi...EV Dashboard: v1.0: This release includes support for an App.config file and Auto Connect, which will connect to the specified BMS at startup. Note: You still have to ...GKO Libraries: GKO Libraries 0.1 Beta: 0.1 Beta Added More utilities and functions RefactoringsGLB Virtual Player Builder: 0.4.2 Beta: Beta build that includes a new player creator.HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201003222215): New features: (None) Bug fix: Fixed bugs of unable to parse XML file stream returned from HKGolden API, as the encoding of XML file stream chang...jQuery Web Controls ASP.Net: jQueryWebControls 1.1.1.2: En esta versión se han corregido problemas existentes en la ejecución de los scripts de jquery cuando se utilizaban MasterPage y/o Ajax Control Too...LightKit: Version 0.2.2: Fixed: fixed bug when CollectionItemsEditor ditermines IsChanged property incorrectly fixed ObjectEditor`a thisstring propertyName method wrong l...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.8: New items added since v1.1 include: Support for OAuth (via DotNetOpenAuth), secure communication via https, VB language support, serialization of ...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi (March 22): This version fixes the icons for the desktop installer and changes the install directory to Program Files\MapWindow instead of Program Files\ISU.Math.NET Numerics: 2010.3.22.1334 Build: Latest alpha buildMiniCalendar Web Part: MiniCalendar Web Part 1.8: A small web part to display links to events stored in a list (or document library) in a mini calendar (in month view mode). It shows tooltips for t...OCInject: Release Two: This release brings some missing features such as Singleton support, Func<T> factories and child containers. It, also, has an updated constructor ...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (March 2010): Installer of the latest binaries of Phalanger 2.0 (March 2010) and its integration into Visual Studio 2008. Easy installer with automatic IIS int...Planner: Planner: firstQuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.1: This is the preliminary release of QuestTracker. There's not much documentation or many features yet, but it is functional. Any feedback would be a...QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.1.1: Bugfix for QuestTracker 0.1QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.1.2: Fixes an issue with saving the quest list.Rawr: Rawr 2.3.13: We're pleased to announce that, after long last, Rawr3 has entered public beta. You're still welcome to continue using Rawr2 (that's what you're re...Single Web Session: Alpha Model Plugin: !How to use Single Web Session add following line into your web config <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.W...SMIL - SharePoint Map Integration Layer: SMIL 1.0: Custom data field Extracts Lat/Lon from EXIF from images being uploaded. Map Web Part Filter with SharePoint views Filter by connecting to...sTASKedit: sTASKedit 42532 (Developer Alpha): This release is only to verify the currently decoded task structure... Supported files: tasks.data (v1.3.6 client)VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30322.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Advanced Notepad (Visual C++ 2008): An notepad written in c that can save in a rich text file format.Wallpaper Rotator: Wallpaper Rotator 0.5: Wallpaper Rotator 0.5 This version includes the following improvements: Saving the choice of "Random Order (Shuffle Mode)" Updating the configu...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETLINQ to TwitterPHPExcelFarseer Physics EngineFacebook Developer ToolkitNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices: Composite WPF and SilverlightN2 CMS

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• .NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

  - by RobertChipperfield

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

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• Writing the tests for FluentPath

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Writing the tests for FluentPath is a challenge. The library is a wrapper around a legacy API (System.IO) that wasn’t designed to be easily testable. If it were more testable, the sensible testing methodology would be to tell System.IO to act against a mock file system, which would enable me to verify that my code is doing the expected file system operations without having to manipulate the actual, physical file system: what we are testing here is FluentPath, not System.IO. Unfortunately, that is not an option as nothing in System.IO enables us to plug a mock file system in. As a consequence, we are left with few options. A few people have suggested me to abstract my calls to System.IO away so that I could tell FluentPath – not System.IO – to use a mock instead of the real thing. That in turn is getting a little silly: FluentPath already is a thin abstraction around System.IO, so layering another abstraction between them would double the test surface while bringing little or no value. I would have to test that new abstraction layer, and that would bring us back to square one. Unless I’m missing something, the only option I have here is to bite the bullet and test against the real file system. Of course, the tests that do that can hardly be called unit tests. They are more integration tests as they don’t only test bits of my code. They really test the successful integration of my code with the underlying System.IO. In order to write such tests, the techniques of BDD work particularly well as they enable you to express scenarios in natural language, from which test code is generated. Integration tests are being better expressed as scenarios orchestrating a few basic behaviors, so this is a nice fit. The Orchard team has been successfully using SpecFlow for integration tests for a while and I thought it was pretty cool so that’s what I decided to use. Consider for example the following scenario: Scenario: Change extension Given a clean test directory When I change the extension of bar\notes.txt to foo Then bar\notes.txt should not exist And bar\notes.foo should exist This is human readable and tells you everything you need to know about what you’re testing, but it is also executable code. What happens when SpecFlow compiles this scenario is that it executes a bunch of regular expressions that identify the known Given (set-up phases), When (actions) and Then (result assertions) to identify the code to run, which is then translated into calls into the appropriate methods. Nothing magical. Here is the code generated by SpecFlow: [NUnit.Framework.TestAttribute()] [NUnit.Framework.DescriptionAttribute("Change extension")] public virtual void ChangeExtension() { TechTalk.SpecFlow.ScenarioInfo scenarioInfo = new TechTalk.SpecFlow.ScenarioInfo("Change extension", ((string[])(null))); #line 6 this.ScenarioSetup(scenarioInfo); #line 7 testRunner.Given("a clean test directory"); #line 8 testRunner.When("I change the extension of " + "bar\\notes.txt to foo"); #line 9 testRunner.Then("bar\\notes.txt should not exist"); #line 10 testRunner.And("bar\\notes.foo should exist"); #line hidden testRunner.CollectScenarioErrors();} The #line directives are there to give clues to the debugger, because yes, you can put breakpoints into a scenario: The way you usually write tests with SpecFlow is that you write the scenario first, let it fail, then write the translation of your Given, When and Then into code if they don’t already exist, which results in running but failing tests, and then you write the code to make your tests pass (you implement the scenario). In the case of FluentPath, I built a simple Given method that builds a simple file hierarchy in a temporary directory that all scenarios are going to work with: [Given("a clean test directory")] public void GivenACleanDirectory() { _path = new Path(SystemIO.Path.GetTempPath()) .CreateSubDirectory("FluentPathSpecs") .MakeCurrent(); _path.GetFileSystemEntries() .Delete(true); _path.CreateFile("foo.txt", "This is a text file named foo."); var bar = _path.CreateSubDirectory("bar"); bar.CreateFile("baz.txt", "bar baz") .SetLastWriteTime(DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(-2)); bar.CreateFile("notes.txt", "This is a text file containing notes."); var barbar = bar.CreateSubDirectory("bar"); barbar.CreateFile("deep.txt", "Deep thoughts"); var sub = _path.CreateSubDirectory("sub"); sub.CreateSubDirectory("subsub"); sub.CreateFile("baz.txt", "sub baz") .SetLastWriteTime(DateTime.Now); sub.CreateFile("binary.bin", new byte[] {0x00, 0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05, 0xFF}); } Then, to implement the scenario that you can read above, I had to write the following When: [When("I change the extension of (.*) to (.*)")] public void WhenIChangeTheExtension( string path, string newExtension) { var oldPath = Path.Current.Combine(path.Split('\\')); oldPath.Move(p => p.ChangeExtension(newExtension)); } As you can see, the When attribute is specifying the regular expression that will enable the SpecFlow engine to recognize what When method to call and also how to map its parameters. For our scenario, “bar\notes.txt” will get mapped to the path parameter, and “foo” to the newExtension parameter. And of course, the code that verifies the assumptions of the scenario: [Then("(.*) should exist")] public void ThenEntryShouldExist(string path) { Assert.IsTrue(_path.Combine(path.Split('\\')).Exists); } [Then("(.*) should not exist")] public void ThenEntryShouldNotExist(string path) { Assert.IsFalse(_path.Combine(path.Split('\\')).Exists); } These steps should be written with reusability in mind. They are building blocks for your scenarios, not implementation of a specific scenario. Think small and fine-grained. In the case of the above steps, I could reuse each of those steps in other scenarios. Those tests are easy to write and easier to read, which means that they also constitute a form of documentation. Oh, and SpecFlow is just one way to do this. Rob wrote a long time ago about this sort of thing (but using a different framework) and I highly recommend this post if I somehow managed to pique your interest: http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/make-bdd-your-bff-2/ And this screencast (Rob always makes excellent screencasts): http://blog.wekeroad.com/mvc-storefront/kona-3/ (click the “Download it here” link)

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• My Code Kata–A Solution Kata

  - by Glav

  There are many developers and coders out there who like to do code Kata’s to keep their coding ability up to scratch and to practice their skills. I think it is a good idea. While I like the concept, I find them dead boring and of minimal purpose. Yes, they serve to hone your skills but that’s about it. They are often quite abstract, in that they usually focus on a small problem set requiring specific solutions. It is fair enough as that is how they are designed but again, I find them quite boring. What I personally like to do is go for something a little larger and a little more fun. It takes a little more time and is not as easily executed as a kata though, but it services the same purposes from a practice perspective and allows me to continue to solve some problems that are not directly part of the initial goal. This means I can cover a broader learning range and have a bit more fun. If I am lucky, sometimes they even end up being useful tools. With that in mind, I thought I’d share my current ‘kata’. It is not really a code kata as it is too big. I prefer to think of it as a ‘solution kata’. The code is on bitbucket here. What I wanted to do was create a kind of simplistic virtual world where I can create a player, or a class, stuff it into the world, and see if it survives, and can navigate its way to the exit. Requirements were pretty simple: Must be able to define a map to describe the world using simple X,Y co-ordinates. Z co-ordinates as well if you feel like getting clever. Should have the concept of entrances, exists, solid blocks, and potentially other materials (again if you want to get clever). A coder should be able to easily write a class which will act as an inhabitant of the world. An inhabitant will receive stimulus from the world in the form of surrounding environment and be able to make a decision on action which it passes back to the ‘world’ for processing. At a minimum, an inhabitant will have sight and speed characteristics which determine how far they can ‘see’ in the world, and how fast they can move. Coders who write a really bad ‘inhabitant’ should not adversely affect the rest of world. Should allow multiple inhabitants in the world. So that was the solution I set out to act as a practice solution and a little bit of fun. It had some interesting problems to solve and I figured, if it turned out ok, I could potentially use this as a ‘developer test’ for interviews. Ask a potential coder to write a class for an inhabitant. Show the coder the map they will navigate, but also mention that we will use their code to navigate a map they have not yet seen and a little more complex. I have been playing with solution for a short time now and have it working in basic concepts. Below is a screen shot using a very basic console visualiser that shows the map, boundaries, blocks, entrance, exit and players/inhabitants. The yellow asterisks ‘*’ are the players, green ‘O’ the entrance, purple ‘^’ the exit, maroon/browny ‘#’ are solid blocks. The players can move around at different speeds, knock into each others, and make directional movement decisions based on what they see and who is around them. It has been quite fun to write and it is also quite fun to develop different players to inject into the world. The code below shows a really simple implementation of an inhabitant that can work out what to do based on stimulus from the world. It is pretty simple and just tries to move in some direction if there is nothing blocking the path. public class TestPlayer:LivingEntity { public TestPlayer() { Name = "Beta Boy"; LifeKey = Guid.NewGuid(); } public override ActionResult DecideActionToPerform(EcoDev.Core.Common.Actions.ActionContext actionContext) { try { var action = new MovementAction(); // move forward if we can if (actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Forward; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Left; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Back; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Right; return action; } } return action; } catch (Exception ex) { World.WriteDebugInformation("Player: "+ Name, string.Format("Player Generated exception: {0}",ex.Message)); throw ex; } } private bool CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(MapBlock block) { if (block == null || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowEntry || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowExit || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowPotentialEntry) { return true; } return false; } } It is simple and it seems to work well. The world implementation itself decides the stimulus context that is passed to he inhabitant to make an action decision. All movement is carried out on separate threads and timed appropriately to be as fair as possible and to cater for additional skills such as speed, and eventually maybe stamina, strength, with actions like fighting. It is pretty fun to make up random maps and see how your inhabitant does. You can download the code from here. Along the way I have played with parallel extensions to make the compute intensive stuff spread across all cores, had to heavily factor in visibility of methods and properties so design of classes was paramount, work out movement algorithms that play fairly in the world and properly favour the players with higher abilities, as well as a host of other issues. So that is my ‘solution kata’. If I keep going with it, I may develop a web interface for it where people can upload assemblies and watch their player within a web browser visualiser and maybe even a map designer. What do you do to keep the fires burning?

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

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

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• MySQL Cluster 7.3 Labs Release – Foreign Keys Are In!

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 1097 6254 Homework 52 14 7337 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Summary (aka TL/DR): Support for Foreign Key constraints has been one of the most requested feature enhancements for MySQL Cluster. We are therefore extremely excited to announce that Foreign Keys are part of the first Labs Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 – available for download, evaluation and feedback now! (Select the mysql-cluster-7.3-labs-June-2012 build) In this blog, I will attempt to discuss the design rationale, implementation, configuration and steps to get started in evaluating the first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Labs Release. Pace of Innovation It was only a couple of months ago that we announced the General Availability (GA) of MySQL Cluster 7.2, delivering 1 billion Queries per Minute, with 70x higher cross-shard JOIN performance, Memcached NoSQL key-value API and cross-data center replication.  This release has been a huge hit, with downloads and deployments quickly reaching record levels. The announcement of the first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access lab release at today's MySQL Innovation Day event demonstrates the continued pace in Cluster development, and provides an opportunity for the community to evaluate and feedback on new features they want to see. What’s the Plan for MySQL Cluster 7.3? Well, Foreign Keys, as you may have gathered by now (!), and this is the focus of this first Labs Release. As with MySQL Cluster 7.2, we plan to publish a series of preview releases for 7.3 that will incrementally add new candidate features for a final GA release (subject to usual safe harbor statement below*), including: - New NoSQL APIs; - Features to automate the configuration and provisioning of multi-node clusters, on premise or in the cloud; - Performance and scalability enhancements; - Taking advantage of features in the latest MySQL 5.x Server GA. Design Rationale MySQL Cluster is designed as a “Not-Only-SQL” database. It combines attributes that enable users to blend the best of both relational and NoSQL technologies into solutions that deliver web scalability with 99.999% availability and real-time performance, including: Concurrent NoSQL and SQL access to the database; Auto-sharding with simple scale-out across commodity hardware; Multi-master replication with failover and recovery both within and across data centers; Shared-nothing architecture with no single point of failure; Online scaling and schema changes; ACID compliance and support for complex queries, across shards. Native support for Foreign Key constraints enables users to extend the benefits of MySQL Cluster into a broader range of use-cases, including: - Packaged applications in areas such as eCommerce and Web Content Management that prescribe databases with Foreign Key support. - In-house developments benefiting from Foreign Key constraints to simplify data models and eliminate the additional application logic needed to maintain data consistency and integrity between tables. Implementation The Foreign Key functionality is implemented directly within MySQL Cluster’s data nodes, allowing any client API accessing the cluster to benefit from them – whether using SQL or one of the NoSQL interfaces (Memcached, C++, Java, JPA or HTTP/REST.) The core referential actions defined in the SQL:2003 standard are implemented: CASCADE RESTRICT NO ACTION SET NULL In addition, the MySQL Cluster implementation supports the online adding and dropping of Foreign Keys, ensuring the Cluster continues to serve both read and write requests during the operation. An important difference to note with the Foreign Key implementation in InnoDB is that MySQL Cluster does not support the updating of Primary Keys from within the Data Nodes themselves - instead the UPDATE is emulated with a DELETE followed by an INSERT operation. Therefore an UPDATE operation will return an error if the parent reference is using a Primary Key, unless using CASCADE action, in which case the delete operation will result in the corresponding rows in the child table being deleted. The Engineering team plans to change this behavior in a subsequent preview release. Also note that when using InnoDB "NO ACTION" is identical to "RESTRICT". In the case of MySQL Cluster “NO ACTION” means “deferred check”, i.e. the constraint is checked before commit, allowing user-defined triggers to automatically make changes in order to satisfy the Foreign Key constraints. Configuration There is nothing special you have to do here – Foreign Key constraint checking is enabled by default. If you intend to migrate existing tables from another database or storage engine, for example from InnoDB, there are a couple of best practices to observe: 1. Analyze the structure of the Foreign Key graph and run the ALTER TABLE ENGINE=NDB in the correct sequence to ensure constraints are enforced 2. Alternatively drop the Foreign Key constraints prior to the import process and then recreate when complete. Getting Started Read this blog for a demonstration of using Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster.  You can download MySQL Cluster 7.3 Labs Release with Foreign Keys today - (select the mysql-cluster-7.3-labs-June-2012 build) If you are new to MySQL Cluster, the Getting Started guide will walk you through installing an evaluation cluster on a singe host (these guides reflect MySQL Cluster 7.2, but apply equally well to 7.3) Post any questions to the MySQL Cluster forum where our Engineering team will attempt to assist you. Post any bugs you find to the MySQL bug tracking system (select MySQL Cluster from the Category drop-down menu) And if you have any feedback, please post them to the Comments section of this blog. Summary MySQL Cluster 7.2 is the GA, production-ready release of MySQL Cluster. This first Labs Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 gives you the opportunity to preview and evaluate future developments in the MySQL Cluster database, and we are very excited to be able to share that with you. Let us know how you get along with MySQL Cluster 7.3, and other features that you want to see in future releases. * Safe Harbor Statement This information is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 23, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 23, 2010New ProjectsA2Command: Apple 2 port of CBM-Command (http://cbmcommand.codeplex.com)AgUnit: AgUnit is a plugin for Jetbrains ReSharper (R#) that allows you to run and debug Silverlight unit tests from within Visual Studio.BSonPosh Powershell Module: A collection of useful Powershell functions I have written and collected over the years. It is a Powershell v2 Module composed of mostly scripts.DB Restriker: Simple tool for lookup, parsing, searching some standard databases using wildcards and pattern recognition.Entity Framework Repository & Unit of Work Template: T4 Template for Entity Framework 4 for creating a data access layer using the repository and unit of work patterns. Designed to work well with dep...Fiction Catalog: A catalog project designed to store information about fictional literature.Giving a Presentation: Useful for people doing presentations, this application hides desktop icons, disables screensaver, closes chosen programs when presentation starts,...glueless: Glueless is a local message bus which allows architect to design highly decoupled systems and applications. Glueless is a step beyond dependency i...HtmlCodeIt: Take any code and format it so that it can be viewed properly on a web browser, blog post or website.just testproject :): just have a test!KanbanTaskboard: The aim of the project is to design and implement a functional prototype for visualizing and operating a multi-platform virtual "Kanban Taskboard”Life System: Life SystemOaSys Project: Project Oasys is a project that aims to help solve desertification. Scoring of pingPong Game: Scoring of pingPong GameSilverlight Web Comic: The Silverlight Web Comic makes easier for the people create your own comic with your own pictures o drawings, and add the globes of text like the ...TickSharp: C# Wrapper for http://TickSpot.com RESTful API.Traductor: El Traductor es una aplicación de escritorio para traducción de frases entre distintos idiomas basada en la plataforma Silverlight Out Of Browser y...WatchersNET.SkinObjects.ModulActionsMenu: Displays the Module Actions Menu as a Unsorted CSS Menu.xxfd1r4w96: testingNew ReleasesAgUnit: AgUnit 0.1: Initial release of AgUnit. Copy the extracted files from AgUnit-0.1.zip into the "Bin\Plugins\" folder of your ReSharper installation (default C:...ASP.NET MVC | SCAFFOLD: ASP.NET MVC SCAFFOLD - Beta 1.0: Release versão betaBizTalk Server 2006 Documenter: Documenter_v3.4.0.0: This is the new release of the documenter which has the following highlights Support for 64 bit systems Support for SxS scenarios (so now the sys...CassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers Edition: CassiniDev 3.5.1 Beta 2- VS 2008 Replacement: The CassiniDev Visual Studio build is a fully compatibly Visual Studio 2008/2010 Development server drop-in replacement with all CassiniDev enhance...CBM-Command: 2010-05-22 Beta: Release Notes - 2010-05-22 BetaNew Features Simple text file viewer. Now when you use SHIFT-RETURN to open a file, it will ask if you want to view...Easy Validation: Documentation: Documentation for easyVal was created and presented at University of Texas at Austin in May of 2010.Entity Framework Repository & Unit of Work Template: 1.0: Initial ReleaseFrotz.NET: FrotzNet 1.0 beta: Many, many changes, including: - Got Adaptive Palette working for graphics - Got undo working - Implemented all zcodes - Added scripting as well as...Giving a Presentation: CTP: This release includes basic extensibility infrastructure and three extensions: hides desktop icons, disables screensaver, closes chosen programs wh...Gov 2.0 Kit: SharePoint 2010 MyPeeps Mysite Accelerators: SharePoint 2010 MyPeeps Mysite Accelerators. Attached are the installation and documentations files.HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201005221900): New features: (None) Bug fix: Hong Kong special characters now can be posted without encoding problem. Improvements: (None) Other changes: (None) K...Intellibox - A WPF auto complete textbox search control: Beta 2: Updated the namespace of the Intellibox control from "System.Windows.Controls" to "FeserWard.Controls". Empty binding Path properties now work on...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.14.59111: Fixed DepositFile provider. Fixed FileFactory provider. Added simple fakeness detector (can check if .rar, .zip, .7z files have valid signature...Mute4: V1: Initial version of Mute4NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.05.22.003: Changes since the last build:No changes. Unit test results:Passed 191/191 (100%) Passed 191/191 (100%) Passed 214/214 (100%) Passed 216/216 (100%)...NSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.9: This release includes source code, executable binaries and example materials.Silverlight Gantt Chart: Silverlight Gantt Chart 1.3 (SL4): The latest release mainly makes the Gantt Chart useful in Silverlight 4 applications.SqlServerExtensions: V 0.2 beta: V 0.2 Beta release: New features available TrimStart - trim leading characters TrimEnd - trim trailing characters Remove - remove characters f...Traductor: Version 3.1: Nuevo en esta versión: El Traductor ahora permite escoger entre los motores de Microsoft y Google. El Text to Speech is es ahora habilitado por...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30522.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVDialer Add-In for Outlook 2007 & 2010 - Dial your Vonage phone from Outlook: VDialer Add-In 1.0.3: This release adds new features related to Journal and use of Vonage API Changes in version 1.0.3 Added configurable option to automatically open J...WatchersNET.SkinObjects.ModulActionsMenu: ModulActionsMenu 01.00.00: First Release For Informations How To Install, the Skin Object Read the DocumentationMost Popular ProjectsCodeComment.NETRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlightpatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceCassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers EditionGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSQL Server PowerShell ExtensionsBlogEngine.NETCodeReview

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• Optimizing AES modes on Solaris for Intel Westmere

  - by danx

  Optimizing AES modes on Solaris for Intel Westmere Review AES is a strong method of symmetric (secret-key) encryption. It is a U.S. FIPS-approved cryptographic algorithm (FIPS 197) that operates on 16-byte blocks. AES has been available since 2001 and is widely used. However, AES by itself has a weakness. AES encryption isn't usually used by itself because identical blocks of plaintext are always encrypted into identical blocks of ciphertext. This encryption can be easily attacked with "dictionaries" of common blocks of text and allows one to more-easily discern the content of the unknown cryptotext. This mode of encryption is called "Electronic Code Book" (ECB), because one in theory can keep a "code book" of all known cryptotext and plaintext results to cipher and decipher AES. In practice, a complete "code book" is not practical, even in electronic form, but large dictionaries of common plaintext blocks is still possible. Here's a diagram of encrypting input data using AES ECB mode: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ AESKey-->(AES Encryption) AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | \/ \/ CipherTextOutput CipherTextOutput Block 1 Block 2 What's the solution to the same cleartext input producing the same ciphertext output? The solution is to further process the encrypted or decrypted text in such a way that the same text produces different output. This usually involves an Initialization Vector (IV) and XORing the decrypted or encrypted text. As an example, I'll illustrate CBC mode encryption: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ IV >----->(XOR) +------------->(XOR) +---> . . . . | | | | | | | | \/ | \/ | AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | | | | | | \/ | \/ | CipherTextOutput ------+ CipherTextOutput -------+ Block 1 Block 2 The steps for CBC encryption are: Start with a 16-byte Initialization Vector (IV), choosen randomly. XOR the IV with the first block of input plaintext Encrypt the result with AES using a user-provided key. The result is the first 16-bytes of output cryptotext. Use the cryptotext (instead of the IV) of the previous block to XOR with the next input block of plaintext Another mode besides CBC is Counter Mode (CTR). As with CBC mode, it also starts with a 16-byte IV. However, for subsequent blocks, the IV is just incremented by one. Also, the IV ix XORed with the AES encryption result (not the plain text input). Here's an illustration: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ AESKey-->(AES Encryption) AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | \/ \/ IV >----->(XOR) IV + 1 >---->(XOR) IV + 2 ---> . . . . | | | | \/ \/ CipherTextOutput CipherTextOutput Block 1 Block 2 Optimization Which of these modes can be parallelized? ECB encryption/decryption can be parallelized because it does more than plain AES encryption and decryption, as mentioned above. CBC encryption can't be parallelized because it depends on the output of the previous block. However, CBC decryption can be parallelized because all the encrypted blocks are known at the beginning. CTR encryption and decryption can be parallelized because the input to each block is known--it's just the IV incremented by one for each subsequent block. So, in summary, for ECB, CBC, and CTR modes, encryption and decryption can be parallelized with the exception of CBC encryption. How do we parallelize encryption? By interleaving. Usually when reading and writing data there are pipeline "stalls" (idle processor cycles) that result from waiting for memory to be loaded or stored to or from CPU registers. Since the software is written to encrypt/decrypt the next data block where pipeline stalls usually occurs, we can avoid stalls and crypt with fewer cycles. This software processes 4 blocks at a time, which ensures virtually no waiting ("stalling") for reading or writing data in memory. Other Optimizations Besides interleaving, other optimizations performed are Loading the entire key schedule into the 128-bit %xmm registers. This is done once for per 4-block of data (since 4 blocks of data is processed, when present). The following is loaded: the entire "key schedule" (user input key preprocessed for encryption and decryption). This takes 11, 13, or 15 registers, for AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256, respectively The input data is loaded into another %xmm register The same register contains the output result after encrypting/decrypting Using SSSE 4 instructions (AESNI). Besides the aesenc, aesenclast, aesdec, aesdeclast, aeskeygenassist, and aesimc AESNI instructions, Intel has several other instructions that operate on the 128-bit %xmm registers. Some common instructions for encryption are: pxor exclusive or (very useful), movdqu load/store a %xmm register from/to memory, pshufb shuffle bytes for byte swapping, pclmulqdq carry-less multiply for GCM mode Combining AES encryption/decryption with CBC or CTR modes processing. Instead of loading input data twice (once for AES encryption/decryption, and again for modes (CTR or CBC, for example) processing, the input data is loaded once as both AES and modes operations occur at in the same function Performance Everyone likes pretty color charts, so here they are. I ran these on Solaris 11 running on a Piketon Platform system with a 4-core Intel Clarkdale processor @3.20GHz. Clarkdale which is part of the Westmere processor architecture family. The "before" case is Solaris 11, unmodified. Keep in mind that the "before" case already has been optimized with hand-coded Intel AESNI assembly. The "after" case has combined AES-NI and mode instructions, interleaved 4 blocks at-a-time. « For the first table, lower is better (milliseconds). The first table shows the performance improvement using the Solaris encrypt(1) and decrypt(1) CLI commands. I encrypted and decrypted a 1/2 GByte file on /tmp (swap tmpfs). Encryption improved by about 40% and decryption improved by about 80%. AES-128 is slighty faster than AES-256, as expected. The second table shows more detail timings for CBC, CTR, and ECB modes for the 3 AES key sizes and different data lengths. » The results shown are the percentage improvement as shown by an internal PKCS#11 microbenchmark. And keep in mind the previous baseline code already had optimized AESNI assembly! The keysize (AES-128, 192, or 256) makes little difference in relative percentage improvement (although, of course, AES-128 is faster than AES-256). Larger data sizes show better improvement than 128-byte data. Availability This software is in Solaris 11 FCS. It is available in the 64-bit libcrypto library and the "aes" Solaris kernel module. You must be running hardware that supports AESNI (for example, Intel Westmere and Sandy Bridge, microprocessor architectures). The easiest way to determine if AES-NI is available is with the isainfo(1) command. For example, $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu No special configuration or setup is needed to take advantage of this software. Solaris libraries and kernel automatically determine if it's running on AESNI-capable machines and execute the correctly-tuned software for the current microprocessor. Summary Maximum throughput of AES cipher modes can be achieved by combining AES encryption with modes processing, interleaving encryption of 4 blocks at a time, and using Intel's wide 128-bit %xmm registers and instructions. References "Block cipher modes of operation", Wikipedia Good overview of AES modes (ECB, CBC, CTR, etc.) "Advanced Encryption Standard", Wikipedia "Current Modes" describes NIST-approved block cipher modes (ECB,CBC, CFB, OFB, CCM, GCM)

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• How to solve exception_priv _instruction exception while running destop project? [on hold]

  - by Haritha

  While running desktop project im getting exception_priv _instruction how to solve this??? while running this page is coming # # A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment: # # EXCEPTION_PRIV_INSTRUCTION (0xc0000096) at pc=0x02f5a92b, pid=3012, tid=3104 # # JRE version: 7.0-b147 # Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (21.0-b17 mixed mode, sharing windows-x86 ) # Problematic frame: # C 0x02f5a92b # # Failed to write core dump. Minidumps are not enabled by default on client versions of Windows # # If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit: # http://bugreport.sun.com/bugreport/crash.jsp # The crash happened outside the Java Virtual Machine in native code. # See problematic frame for where to report the bug. # --------------- T H R E A D --------------- Current thread (0x02f5a800): JavaThread "LWJGL Application" [_thread_in_native, id=3104, stack(0x076f0000,0x07740000)] siginfo: ExceptionCode=0xc0000096 Registers: EAX=0x000df4f0, EBX=0x32afc180, ECX=0x000df4f0, EDX=0x00000020 ESP=0x0773f768, EBP=0x0773f790, ESI=0x32afc180, EDI=0x02f5a800 EIP=0x02f5a92b, EFLAGS=0x00010206 Top of Stack: (sp=0x0773f768) 0x0773f768: 02bd429c 02bd429c 0773f770 32afc180 0x0773f778: 0773f7b8 32b022c8 00000000 32afc180 0x0773f788: 00000000 0773f7a0 0773f7dc 00943187 0x0773f798: 229ec1c0 00948839 69081736 00000000 0x0773f7a8: 089b0048 00000000 00000014 00001406 0x0773f7b8: 00000002 0773f7bc 32afbeb0 0773f7f8 0x0773f7c8: 32b022c8 00000000 32afbf00 0773f7a0 0x0773f7d8: 0773f7f0 0773f81c 00943187 69081736 Instructions: (pc=0x02f5a92b) 0x02f5a90b: 00 43 00 00 00 00 f0 bc 02 e8 00 e9 22 40 f7 73 0x02f5a91b: 07 85 a5 94 00 90 f7 73 07 50 cc a0 6d d8 49 c0 0x02f5a92b: 6d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0x02f5a93b: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 80 3d 37 00 00 00 Register to memory mapping: EAX=0x000df4f0 is an unknown value EBX=0x32afc180 is an oop {method} - klass: {other class} ECX=0x000df4f0 is an unknown value EDX=0x00000020 is an unknown value ESP=0x0773f768 is pointing into the stack for thread: 0x02f5a800 EBP=0x0773f790 is pointing into the stack for thread: 0x02f5a800 ESI=0x32afc180 is an oop {method} - klass: {other class} EDI=0x02f5a800 is a thread Stack: [0x076f0000,0x07740000], sp=0x0773f768, free space=317k Native frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code, C=native code) C 0x02f5a92b j org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.glVertexPointer(IILjava/nio/FloatBuffer;)V+48 j com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglGL10.glVertexPointer(IIILjava/nio/Buffer;)V+53 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.glutils.VertexArray.bind()V+149 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Mesh.bind()V+25 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Mesh.render(IIIZ)V+32 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Mesh.render(III)V+8 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.SpriteBatch.flush()V+197 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.SpriteBatch.switchTexture(Lcom/badlogic/gdx/graphics/Texture;)V+1 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.SpriteBatch.draw(Lcom/badlogic/gdx/graphics/Texture;FFFF)V+33 j sevenseas.game.WorldRenderer.drawBob()V+54 j sevenseas.game.WorldRenderer.render()V+12 j sevenseas.game.GameClass.render(F)V+38 j com.badlogic.gdx.Game.render()V+19 j com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication.mainLoop()V+642 j com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication$1.run()V+27 v ~StubRoutines::call_stub V [jvm.dll+0x122c7e] V [jvm.dll+0x1c9c0e] V [jvm.dll+0x122e73] V [jvm.dll+0x122ed7] V [jvm.dll+0xccd1f] V [jvm.dll+0x14433f] V [jvm.dll+0x171549] C [msvcr100.dll+0x5c6de] endthreadex+0x3a C [msvcr100.dll+0x5c788] endthreadex+0xe4 C [kernel32.dll+0xb713] GetModuleFileNameA+0x1b4 Java frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code) j org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.nglVertexPointer(IIIJJ)V+0 j org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.glVertexPointer(IILjava/nio/FloatBuffer;)V+48 j com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglGL10.glVertexPointer(IIILjava/nio/Buffer;)V+53 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.glutils.VertexArray.bind()V+149 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Mesh.bind()V+25 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Mesh.render(IIIZ)V+32 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Mesh.render(III)V+8 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.SpriteBatch.flush()V+197 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.SpriteBatch.switchTexture(Lcom/badlogic/gdx/graphics/Texture;)V+1 j com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.g2d.SpriteBatch.draw(Lcom/badlogic/gdx/graphics/Texture;FFFF)V+33 j sevenseas.game.WorldRenderer.drawBob()V+54 j sevenseas.game.WorldRenderer.render()V+12 j sevenseas.game.GameClass.render(F)V+38 j com.badlogic.gdx.Game.render()V+19 j com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication.mainLoop()V+642 j com.badlogic.gdx.backends.lwjgl.LwjglApplication$1.run()V+27 v ~StubRoutines::call_stub --------------- P R O C E S S --------------- Java Threads: ( => current thread ) 0x003d6c00 JavaThread "DestroyJavaVM" [_thread_blocked, id=3240, stack(0x008c0000,0x00910000)] =>0x02f5a800 JavaThread "LWJGL Application" [_thread_in_native, id=3104, stack(0x076f0000,0x07740000)] 0x02bcf000 JavaThread "Service Thread" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=2612, stack(0x02e00000,0x02e50000)] 0x02bc1000 JavaThread "C1 CompilerThread0" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=2776, stack(0x02db0000,0x02e00000)] 0x02bbf400 JavaThread "Attach Listener" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=2448, stack(0x02d60000,0x02db0000)] 0x02bbe000 JavaThread "Signal Dispatcher" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=1764, stack(0x02d10000,0x02d60000)] 0x02bb8000 JavaThread "Finalizer" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=3864, stack(0x02cc0000,0x02d10000)] 0x02bb3400 JavaThread "Reference Handler" daemon [_thread_blocked, id=2424, stack(0x02c70000,0x02cc0000)] Other Threads: 0x02bb1800 VMThread [stack: 0x02c20000,0x02c70000] [id=3076] 0x02bd1000 WatcherThread [stack: 0x02e50000,0x02ea0000] [id=3276] VM state:not at safepoint (normal execution) VM Mutex/Monitor currently owned by a thread: None Heap def new generation total 4928K, used 2571K [0x229c0000, 0x22f10000, 0x27f10000) eden space 4416K, 46% used [0x229c0000, 0x22bc2e38, 0x22e10000) from space 512K, 100% used [0x22e90000, 0x22f10000, 0x22f10000) to space 512K, 0% used [0x22e10000, 0x22e10000, 0x22e90000) tenured generation total 10944K, used 634K [0x27f10000, 0x289c0000, 0x329c0000) the space 10944K, 5% used [0x27f10000, 0x27faea60, 0x27faec00, 0x289c0000) compacting perm gen total 12288K, used 1655K [0x329c0000, 0x335c0000, 0x369c0000) the space 12288K, 13% used [0x329c0000, 0x32b5dc58, 0x32b5de00, 0x335c0000) ro space 10240K, 42% used [0x369c0000, 0x36dfc660, 0x36dfc800, 0x373c0000) rw space 12288K, 53% used [0x373c0000, 0x37a38180, 0x37a38200, 0x37fc0000) Code Cache [0x00940000, 0x009d8000, 0x02940000) total_blobs=305 nmethods=80 adapters=158 free_code_cache=32183Kb largest_free_block=32955904 Dynamic libraries: 0x00400000 - 0x0042f000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\javaw.exe 0x7c900000 - 0x7c9af000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntdll.dll 0x7c800000 - 0x7c8f6000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\kernel32.dll 0x77dd0000 - 0x77e6b000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\ADVAPI32.dll 0x77e70000 - 0x77f02000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\RPCRT4.dll 0x77fe0000 - 0x77ff1000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\Secur32.dll 0x7e410000 - 0x7e4a1000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll 0x77f10000 - 0x77f59000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\GDI32.dll 0x773d0000 - 0x774d3000 C:\WINDOWS\WinSxS\x86_Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls_6595b64144ccf1df_6.0.2600.5512_x-ww_35d4ce83\COMCTL32.dll 0x77c10000 - 0x77c68000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\msvcrt.dll 0x77f60000 - 0x77fd6000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\SHLWAPI.dll 0x76390000 - 0x763ad000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\IMM32.DLL 0x629c0000 - 0x629c9000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\LPK.DLL 0x74d90000 - 0x74dfb000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\USP10.dll 0x78aa0000 - 0x78b5e000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\msvcr100.dll 0x6d940000 - 0x6dc61000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\client\jvm.dll 0x71ad0000 - 0x71ad9000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\WSOCK32.dll 0x71ab0000 - 0x71ac7000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\WS2_32.dll 0x71aa0000 - 0x71aa8000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\WS2HELP.dll 0x76b40000 - 0x76b6d000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\WINMM.dll 0x76bf0000 - 0x76bfb000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\PSAPI.DLL 0x6d8d0000 - 0x6d8dc000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\verify.dll 0x6d370000 - 0x6d390000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\java.dll 0x6d920000 - 0x6d933000 C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\zip.dll 0x6cec0000 - 0x6cf42000 C:\Documents and Settings\7stl0225\Local Settings\Temp\libgdx7stl0225\37fe1abc\gdx.dll 0x10000000 - 0x1004c000 C:\Documents and Settings\7stl0225\Local Settings\Temp\libgdx7stl0225\52d76f2b\lwjgl.dll 0x5ed00000 - 0x5edcc000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\OPENGL32.dll 0x68b20000 - 0x68b40000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\GLU32.dll 0x73760000 - 0x737ab000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\DDRAW.dll 0x73bc0000 - 0x73bc6000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\DCIMAN32.dll 0x77c00000 - 0x77c08000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\VERSION.dll 0x070b0000 - 0x07115000 C:\DOCUME~1\7stl0225\LOCALS~1\Temp\libgdx7stl0225\52d76f2b\OpenAL32.dll 0x7c9c0000 - 0x7d1d7000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\SHELL32.dll 0x774e0000 - 0x7761d000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\ole32.dll 0x5ad70000 - 0x5ada8000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\uxtheme.dll 0x76fd0000 - 0x7704f000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\CLBCATQ.DLL 0x77050000 - 0x77115000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\COMRes.dll 0x77120000 - 0x771ab000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\OLEAUT32.dll 0x73f10000 - 0x73f6c000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\dsound.dll 0x76c30000 - 0x76c5e000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\WINTRUST.dll 0x77a80000 - 0x77b15000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\CRYPT32.dll 0x77b20000 - 0x77b32000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\MSASN1.dll 0x76c90000 - 0x76cb8000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\IMAGEHLP.dll 0x72d20000 - 0x72d29000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\wdmaud.drv 0x72d10000 - 0x72d18000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\msacm32.drv 0x77be0000 - 0x77bf5000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\MSACM32.dll 0x77bd0000 - 0x77bd7000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\midimap.dll 0x73ee0000 - 0x73ee4000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\KsUser.dll 0x755c0000 - 0x755ee000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\msctfime.ime 0x69000000 - 0x691a9000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\sisgl.dll 0x73b30000 - 0x73b45000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\mscms.dll 0x73000000 - 0x73026000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\WINSPOOL.DRV 0x66e90000 - 0x66ed1000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\icm32.dll 0x07760000 - 0x0778d000 C:\Program Files\WordWeb\WHook.dll 0x74c80000 - 0x74cac000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\OLEACC.dll 0x76080000 - 0x760e5000 C:\WINDOWS\system32\MSVCP60.dll VM Arguments: jvm_args: -Dfile.encoding=Cp1252 java_command: sevenseas.game.MainDesktop Launcher Type: SUN_STANDARD Environment Variables: PATH=C:/Program Files/Java/jre7/bin/client;C:/Program Files/Java/jre7/bin;C:/Program Files/Java/jre7/lib/i386;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0\bin;C:\eclipse; USERNAME=7stl0225 OS=Windows_NT PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER=x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 1, GenuineIntel --------------- S Y S T E M --------------- OS: Windows XP Build 2600 Service Pack 3 CPU:total 1 (1 cores per cpu, 1 threads per core) family 15 model 4 stepping 1, cmov, cx8, fxsr, mmx, sse, sse2, sse3 Memory: 4k page, physical 2031088k(939252k free), swap 3969920k(3011396k free) vm_info: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (21.0-b17) for windows-x86 JRE (1.7.0-b147), built on Jun 27 2011 02:25:52 by "java_re" with unknown MS VC++:1600 time: Sat Oct 26 12:35:14 2013 elapsed time: 0 seconds

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt 3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  Start with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• SQL SERVER – Thinking about Deprecated, Discontinued Features and Breaking Changes while Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 – Guest Post by Nakul Vachhrajani

  - by pinaldave

  Nakul Vachhrajani is a Technical Specialist and systems development professional with iGATE having a total IT experience of more than 7 years. Nakul is an active blogger with BeyondRelational.com (150+ blogs), and can also be found on forums at SQLServerCentral and BeyondRelational.com. Nakul has also been a guest columnist for SQLAuthority.com and SQLServerCentral.com. Nakul presented a webcast on the “Underappreciated Features of Microsoft SQL Server” at the Microsoft Virtual Tech Days Exclusive Webcast series (May 02-06, 2011) on May 06, 2011. He is also the author of a research paper on Database upgrade methodologies, which was published in a CSI journal, published nationwide. In addition to his passion about SQL Server, Nakul also contributes to the academia out of personal interest. He visits various colleges and universities as an external faculty to judge project activities being carried out by the students. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are his own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter | Google+ Let us hear the thoughts of Nakul in first person - Those who have been following my blogs would be aware that I am recently running a series on the database engine features that have been deprecated in Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Based on the response that I have received, I was quite surprised to know that most of the audience found these to be breaking changes, when in fact, they were not! It was then that I decided to write a little piece on how to plan your database upgrade such that it works with the next version of Microsoft SQL Server. Please note that the recommendations made in this article are high-level markers and are intended to help you think over the specific steps that you would need to take to upgrade your database. Refer the documentation – Understand the terms Change is the only constant in this world. Therefore, whenever customer requirements, newer architectures and designs require software vendors to make a change to the keywords, functions, etc; they ensure that they provide their end users sufficient time to migrate over to the new standards before dropping off the old ones. Microsoft does that too with it’s Microsoft SQL Server product. Whenever a new SQL Server release is announced, it comes with a list of the following features: Breaking changes These are changes that would break your currently running applications, scripts or functionalities that are based on earlier version of Microsoft SQL Server These are mostly features whose behavior has been changed keeping in mind the newer architectures and designs Lesson: These are the changes that you need to be most worried about! Discontinued features These features are no longer available in the associated version of Microsoft SQL Server These features used to be “deprecated” in the prior release Lesson: Without these changes, your database would not be compliant/may not work with the version of Microsoft SQL Server under consideration Deprecated features These features are those that are still available in the current version of Microsoft SQL Server, but are scheduled for removal in a future version. These may be removed in either the next version or any other future version of Microsoft SQL Server The features listed for deprecation will compose the list of discontinued features in the next version of SQL Server Lesson: Plan to make necessary changes required to remove/replace usage of the deprecated features with the latest recommended replacements Once a feature appears on the list, it moves from bottom to the top, i.e. it is first marked as “Deprecated” and then “Discontinued”. We know of “Breaking change” comes later on in the product life cycle. What this means is that if you want to know what features would not work with SQL Server 2012 (and you are currently using SQL Server 2008 R2), you need to refer the list of breaking changes and discontinued features in SQL Server 2012. Use the tools! There are a lot of tools and technologies around us, but it is rarely that I find teams using these tools religiously and to the best of their potential. Below are the top two tools, from Microsoft, that I use every time I plan a database upgrade. The SQL Server Upgrade Advisor Ever since SQL Server 2005 was announced, Microsoft provides a small, very light-weight tool called the “SQL Server upgrade advisor”. The upgrade advisor analyzes installed components from earlier versions of SQL Server, and then generates a report that identifies issues to fix either before or after you upgrade. The analysis examines objects that can be accessed, such as scripts, stored procedures, triggers, and trace files. Upgrade Advisor cannot analyze desktop applications or encrypted stored procedures. Refer the links towards the end of the post to know how to get the Upgrade Advisor. The SQL Server Profiler Another great tool that you can use is the one most SQL Server developers & administrators use often – the SQL Server profiler. SQL Server Profiler provides functionality to monitor the “Deprecation” event, which contains: Deprecation announcement – equivalent to features to be deprecated in a future release of SQL Server Deprecation final support – equivalent to features to be deprecated in the next release of SQL Server You can learn more using the links towards the end of the post. A basic checklist There are a lot of finer points that need to be taken care of when upgrading your database. But, it would be worth-while to identify a few basic steps in order to make your database compliant with the next version of SQL Server: Monitor the current application workload (on a test bed) via the Profiler in order to identify usage of features marked as Deprecated If none appear, you are all set! (This almost never happens) Note down all the offending queries and feature usages Run analysis sessions using the SQL Server upgrade advisor on your database Based on the inputs from the analysis report and Profiler trace sessions, Incorporate solutions for the breaking changes first Next, incorporate solutions for the discontinued features Revisit and document the upgrade strategy for your deployment scenarios Revisit the fall-back, i.e. rollback strategies in case the upgrades fail Because some programming changes are dependent upon the SQL server version, this may need to be done in consultation with the development teams Before any other enhancements are incorporated by the development team, send out the database changes into QA QA strategy should involve a comparison between an environment running the old version of SQL Server against the new one Because minimal application changes have gone in (essential changes for SQL Server version compliance only), this would be possible As an ongoing activity, keep incorporating changes recommended as per the deprecated features list As a DBA, update your coding standards to ensure that the developers are using ANSI compliant code – this code will require a change only if the ANSI standard changes Remember this: Change management is a continuous process. Keep revisiting the product release notes and incorporate recommended changes to stay prepared for the next release of SQL Server. May the power of SQL Server be with you! Links Referenced in this post Breaking changes in SQL Server 2012: Link Discontinued features in SQL Server 2012: Link Get the upgrade advisor from the Microsoft Download Center at: Link Upgrade Advisor page on MSDN: Link Profiler: Review T-SQL code to identify objects no longer supported by Microsoft: Link Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 by Vinod Kumar: Link Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Upgrade

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• CEN/CENELEC Lacks Perspective

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  Over the last few months, two of the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs), CEN and CENELEC have circulated an unfortunate position statement distorting the facts around fora and consortia. For the benefit of outsiders to this debate, let's just say that this debate regards whether and how the EU should recognize standards and specifications from certain fora and consortia based on a process evaluating the openness and transparency of such deliverables. The topic is complex, and somewhat confusing even to insiders, but nevertheless crucial to the European economy. As far as I can judge, their positions are not based on facts. This is unfortunate. For the benefit of clarity, here are some of the observations they make: a)"Most consortia are in essence driven by technology companies making hardware and software solutions, by definition very few of the largest ones are European-based". b) "Most consortia lack a European presence, relevant Committees, even those that are often cited as having stronger links with Europe, seem to lack an overall, inclusive set of participants". c) "Recognising specific consortia specifications will not resolve any concrete problems of interoperability for public authorities; interoperability depends on stringing together a range of specifications (from formal global bodies or consortia alike)". d) "Consortia already have the option to have their specifications adopted by the international formal standards bodies and many more exercise this than the two that seem to be campaigning for European recognition. Such specifications can then also be adopted as European standards." e) "Consortium specifications completely lack any process to take due and balanced account of requirements at national level - this is not important for technologies but can be a critical issue when discussing cross-border issues within the EU such as eGovernment, eHealth and so on". f) "The proposed recognition will not lead to standstill on national or European activities, nor to the adoption of the specifications as national standards in the CEN and CENELEC members (usually in their official national languages), nor to withdrawal of conflicting national standards. A big asset of the European standardization system is its coherence and lack of fragmentation." g) "We always miss concrete and specific examples of where consortia referencing are supposed to be helpful." First of all, note that ETSI, the third ESO, did not join the position. The reason is, of course, that ETSI beyond being an ESO, also has a global perspective and, moreover, does consider reality. Secondly, having produced arguments a) to g), CEN/CENELEC has the audacity to call a meeting on Friday 25 February entitled "ICT standardization - improving collaboration in Europe". This sounds very nice, but they have not set the stage for constructive debate. Rather, they demonstrate a striking lack of vision and lack of perspective. I will back this up by three facts, and leave it there. 1. Since the 1980s, global industry fora and consortia, such as IETF, W3C and OASIS have emerged as world-leading ICT standards development organizations with excellent procedures for openness and transparency in all phases of standards development, ex post and ex ante. - Practically no ICT system can be built without using fora and consortia standards (FCS). - Without using FCS, neither the Internet, upon which the EU economy depends, nor EU institutions would operate. - FCS are of high relevance for achieving and promoting interoperability and driving innovation. 2. FCS are complementary to the formally recognized standards organizations including the ESOs. - No work will be taken away from the ESOs should the EU recognize certain FCS. - Each FCS would be evaluated on its merit and on the openness of the process that produced it. ESOs would, with other stakeholders, have a say. - ESOs could potentially educate and assist European stakeholders to engage more actively and constructively with FCS. - ETSI, also an ESO, seems to clearly recognize these facts. 3. Europe and its Member States have a strong voice in several of the most relevant global industry fora and consortia. - W3C: W3C was founded in 1994 by an Englishman, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in collaboration with CERN, the European research lab. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) in France became the first European W3C host and in 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics), also based in France, took over the role of European W3C host from INRIA. Today, W3C has 326 Members, 40% of which are European. Government participation is also strong, and it could be increased - a development that is very much desired by W3C. Current members of the W3C Advisory Board includes Ora Lassila (Nokia) and Charles McCathie Nevile (Opera). Nokia is Finnish company, Opera is a Norwegian company. SAP's Claus von Riegen is an alumni of the same Advisory Board. - OASIS: its membership - 30% of which is European - represents the marketplace, reflecting a balance of providers, user companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. In particular, about 15% of OASIS members are governments or universities. Frederick Hirsch from Nokia, Claus von Riegen from SAP AG and Charles-H. Schulz from Ars Aperta are on the Board of Directors. Nokia is a Finnish company, SAP is a German company and Ars Aperta is a French company. The Chairman of the Board is Peter Brown, who is an Independent Consultant, an Austrian citizen AND an official of the European Parliament currently on long-term leave. - IETF: The oversight of its activities is by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), since 2007 chaired by Olaf Kolkman, a Dutch national who lives in Uithoorn, NL. Kolkman is director of NLnet Labs, a foundation chartered to develop open source software and open source standards for the Internet. Other IAB members include Marcelo Bagnulo whose affiliation is the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain as well as Hannes Tschofenig from Nokia Siemens Networks. Nokia is a Finnish company. Siemens is a German company. Nokia Siemens is a European joint venture. - Member States: At least 17 European Member States have developed Interoperability Frameworks that include FCS, according to the EU-funded National Interoperability Framework Observatory (see list and NIFO web site on IDABC). This also means they actively procure solutions using FCS, reference FCS in their policies and even in laws. Member State reps are free to engage in FCS, and many do. It would be nice if the EU adjusted to this reality. - A huge number of European nationals work in the global IT industry, on European soil or elsewhere, whether in EU registered companies or not. CEN/CENELEC lacks perspective and has engaged in an effort to twist facts that is quite striking from a publicly funded organization. I wish them all possible success with Friday's meeting but I fear all of the most important stakeholders will not be at the table. Not because they do not wish to collaborate, but because they just have been insulted. If they do show up, it would be a gracious move, almost beyond comprehension. While I do not expect CEN/CENELEC to line up perfectly in favor of fora and consortia, I think it would be to their benefit to stick to more palatable observations. Actually, I would suggest an apology, straightening out the facts. This works among friends and it works in an organizational context. Then, we can all move on. Standardization is important. Too important to ignore. Too important to distort. The European economy depends on it. We need CEN/CENELEC. It is an important organization. But CEN/CENELEC needs fora and consortia, too.

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  IStart with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 15, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 15, 2011Popular ReleasesTerraria World Viewer: Version 1.2: Update June 15thNew User Interface Map drawing will not cause the program to freeze anymore Fixed the "Draw Symbols" (now called "Markers") checkbox not having any effectMVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.1.5 RC: Added Extended Dropdown allows a prompt item to be inserted as first element. RequiredAttribute, if present, trggers if no element is chosen Client side javascript function to set/get the values of DateTimeInput, TypedTextBox, TypedEditDisplay, and to bind/unbind a "change" handler The selected page in the pager is applied the attribute selected-page="selected" that can be used in the definition of CSS rules to style the selected page items controls now interpret a null value as an empr...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco CMS 5.0 CTP 1: Umbraco 5 Community Technology Preview Umbraco 5 will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out our first CTP of version 5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a quick low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video here. What's in the v5 CTP box? This is a preview version of version 5 and includes support for the following familiar Umbr...Ribbon Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Browser (1.0.514.30): Initial releaseTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.0 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: In this version, I did an overhaul of the GUI of the program. The only pop-up window you will receive now is a warning box for for when you click on the "Delete" button. Everything has been integrated into the tabs on the form. I added every item included with v1.0.4 of Terraria and added the option to set inventory/bank slots to "No Item". This WILL work with characters that have not been opened in v1.0.4patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 11 - June 14, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Many code changes: please see the readme.mht for details. New "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Updated "Application Notifications" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "jQuery UI Widget" chapter. Updated "Widget QuickStart" appendix and code. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separat...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.2: Build: 1.2.41 Published: 6/14/2010 How to Install Orchard To install Orchard using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx. Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.2.41.zip file. http://orchardproject.net/docs/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file.ashx The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents o...PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension: PowerGUI VSX 1.3.4: Changes - Got rid of suppressed exceptions on assemblies loading at project startup - Fixed Issue #28535 "No Print Support" - Enabled IntelliSence commands wich are supported by ActiPro Syntax Editor control: ToggleBookmark, NextBookmark, PreviousBookmark, ShowMemberList - Added missing Import directives in PS Script project template - Fixed exception occurring on debug start - Fixed an issue: after creating a new PS project, a debugging session hung being run for the second timeSnippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.4.0: Snippet Designer 1.4.0 for Visual Studio 2010 Change logSnippet Explorer ChangesReworked language filter UI to work better in the side bar. Added result count drop down which lets you choose how many results to see. Language filter and result count choices are persisted after Visual Studio is closed. Added file name to search criteria. Search is now case insensitive. Snippet Editor Changes Snippet Editor ChangesAdded menu option for the $end$ symbol which indicates where the c...SizeOnDisk: 1.0.9.0: Can handle Right-To-Left languages (issue 316) About box (issue 310) New language: Deutsch (thanks to kyoka) Fix: file and folder context menuDropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.1: Added different popup descriptions for actions (copy/append/update/remove) Added popup timeout control (with live preview) Added option to overwrite clipboard with the last link only Notification popup closes on user click Notification popup default timeout increased to 3 sec. Added codeplex link to about .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile requiredWCF Community Site: WCF Express Interop Bindings 1.0: Welcome to the first release of the WCF Express Interop BindingsThis project provides a starter kit for WCF service developers wishing to connect with Java clients in WebSphere, WebLogic, Metro and Apache. It supports security, MTOM and RM features. For more information see the Landing page We welcome your feedback (Topic: Interop Bindings). Please submit any feature requests / bug fixes via the issue tracker. FeaturesVSIX Installer WCF Bindings for Oracle WebLogic, Oracle Metro, IBM WebS...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 1.0.4.1: Stable Release 51 Degrees.mobi Foundation is the best way to detect and redirect mobile devices and their capabilities on ASP.NET and is being used on thousands of websites worldwide. We’re highly confident in our software and we recommend all users update to this version. Changes to Version 1.0.4.1Changed the BlackberryHandler and BlackberryVersion6Handler to have equal CONFIDENCE values to ensure they both get a chance at detecting BlackBerry version 4&5 and version 6 devices. Prior to thi...Kouak - HTTP File Share Server: Kouak Beta 3 - Clean: Some critical bug solved and dependecy problems There's 3 package : - The first, contains the cli server and the graphical server. - The second, only the cli server - The third, only the graphical client. It's a beta release, so don't hesitate to emmit issue ;pRawr: Rawr 4.1.06: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta6: ??AcDown?????????????，?????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta6 ?????(imanhua.com)????? ???? ?? ??"????","?????","?????","????"?????? "????"?????"????????"?? ??????????? ?????????????? ?????????????/???? ?? ????Windows 7???????????? ????????? ?? ????????????? ???????/??????????? ???????????? ?? ?? ?????(imanh...Pulse: Pulse Beta 2: - Added new wallpapers provider http://wallbase.cc. Supports english search, multiple keywords* - Improved font rendering in Options window - Added "Set wallpaper as logon background" option* - Fixed crashes if there is no internet connection - Fixed: Rewalls downloads empty images sometimes - Added filters* Note 1: wallbase provider supports only english search. Rewalls provider supports only russian search but Pulse automatically translates your english keyword into russian using Google Tr...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.7: Version: 2.0.0.7 (Milestone 7): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...SimplePlanner: v2.0b: For 2011-2012 Sem 1 ???2011-2012 ????Visual Studio 2010 Help Downloader: 1.0.0.3: Domain name support for proxy Cleanup old packages bug Writing to EventLog with UAC enabled bug Small fixes & RefactoringNew Projects360U: 360UAd Configuration + Rotator for Windows Phone: Ad Configuration and Rotator for Windows Phone is a set of classes and controls which allow you to remotely manage advertising providers used inside your Windows Phone application. Advertising providers can be plugged in on an 'as needed' so application only ship with the providers being used.CommerceShopSystem: CommerceShopSystemContour strikes again: Collection of extensions for the Umbraco Contour form builderFarseer Physics & GLEED2D Link: This project includes c# files usable to implement the Farseer Physics engine in a level created using GLEED2D.FolderComparer: This DLL holds an extension of the DirectoryInfo class. It contains a logic that helps compare the contents of two folders. HierList Hierarchial Outline ASP.NET Server Control ( using UL or OL and LI ): The HierList ASP WebControl generates a hierarchial list using the UL, OL, and LI html tags. Images Organizator: A C# .Net program that organizes all pictures in a folder by date.KiggDemo: i study kiggLavieOrnamentos: LavieOrnamentos is a MVC project written in C# for a standard business website. I plan to use it as a base for a bigger project, a standard business site framework targeting small companies that just want to display their products and latest news.Multiple Choice Training Application: This is an ASP.Net (VB.Net) Web based training application. This application can be configured to ask multiple choice questions for multiple groups, score based on percentage, create completion certificates and be completely managed via a web interface,Orchard Windows Authentication: This module allows Windows domain users to be authenticated in Orchard.Party Estimator: Party Estimator is a training project based on requirements from O'Reilly's _Head First C#_, and is not intended for widespread use. SharePoint Enforcer - Ensuring large sites comply with standards: SharePoint Enforcer is a utility that aids in governance of large SharePoint sites to ensure that the sites comply with various business rules that have been created to keep the site from growing out of control.SharePoint WarmUp Tool (Claims+FBA): This tools is for warming up (waking) SharPoint sites. It addresses the issue of a 403 forbidden error when the SharePoint web app is in claims mode and FBA. It uses Windows authentication to warm up the sites and bypasses the FBA login redirection causing the 403 forbidden error.Super Mario Limitless: Super Mario Limitless is an in-production Super Mario level engine. It allows you to play your own levels and worlds, play others' levels and worlds, and even play online. With limitless features, you'll spend hours playing and creating.VB.NET ASP.NET MVC 2 - Music Store: This project is a port using the VB language with ASP.NET MVC 2 of the MusicStore application that can be found at : http://mvcmusicstore.codeplex.com/ Veni, Vedi, Velcro...: A personal phone 7 social media app that shows basic elements of design, ad model, panorama etc.XMLServiceMonitor: A Windows service (VB.Net) that allows the monitoring of failure of Servers, Services, Applications, Scheduled Tasks and SQL Jobs. The service is configurable with simple XML files and sends out email notifications of failures.

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• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - PE Headers

  - by Simon Cooper

  Today, I'll be starting a look at what exactly is inside a .NET assembly - how the metadata and IL is stored, how Windows knows how to load it, and what all those bytes are actually doing. First of all, we need to understand the PE file format. PE files .NET assemblies are built on top of the PE (Portable Executable) file format that is used for all Windows executables and dlls, which itself is built on top of the MSDOS executable file format. The reason for this is that when .NET 1 was released, it wasn't a built-in part of the operating system like it is nowadays. Prior to Windows XP, .NET executables had to load like any other executable, had to execute native code to start the CLR to read & execute the rest of the file. However, starting with Windows XP, the operating system loader knows natively how to deal with .NET assemblies, rendering most of this legacy code & structure unnecessary. It still is part of the spec, and so is part of every .NET assembly. The result of this is that there are a lot of structure values in the assembly that simply aren't meaningful in a .NET assembly, as they refer to features that aren't needed. These are either set to zero or to certain pre-defined values, specified in the CLR spec. There are also several fields that specify the size of other datastructures in the file, which I will generally be glossing over in this initial post. Structure of a PE file Most of a PE file is split up into separate sections; each section stores different types of data. For instance, the .text section stores all the executable code; .rsrc stores unmanaged resources, .debug contains debugging information, and so on. Each section has a section header associated with it; this specifies whether the section is executable, read-only or read/write, whether it can be cached... When an exe or dll is loaded, each section can be mapped into a different location in memory as the OS loader sees fit. In order to reliably address a particular location within a file, most file offsets are specified using a Relative Virtual Address (RVA). This specifies the offset from the start of each section, rather than the offset within the executable file on disk, so the various sections can be moved around in memory without breaking anything. The mapping from RVA to file offset is done using the section headers, which specify the range of RVAs which are valid within that section. For example, if the .rsrc section header specifies that the base RVA is 0x4000, and the section starts at file offset 0xa00, then an RVA of 0x401d (offset 0x1d within the .rsrc section) corresponds to a file offset of 0xa1d. Because each section has its own base RVA, each valid RVA has a one-to-one mapping with a particular file offset. PE headers As I said above, most of the header information isn't relevant to .NET assemblies. To help show what's going on, I've created a diagram identifying all the various parts of the first 512 bytes of a .NET executable assembly. I've highlighted the relevant bytes that I will refer to in this post: Bear in mind that all numbers are stored in the assembly in little-endian format; the hex number 0x0123 will appear as 23 01 in the diagram. The first 64 bytes of every file is the DOS header. This starts with the magic number 'MZ' (0x4D, 0x5A in hex), identifying this file as an executable file of some sort (an .exe or .dll). Most of the rest of this header is zeroed out. The important part of this header is at offset 0x3C - this contains the file offset of the PE signature (0x80). Between the DOS header & PE signature is the DOS stub - this is a stub program that simply prints out 'This program cannot be run in DOS mode.\r\n' to the console. I will be having a closer look at this stub later on. The PE signature starts at offset 0x80, with the magic number 'PE\0\0' (0x50, 0x45, 0x00, 0x00), identifying this file as a PE executable, followed by the PE file header (also known as the COFF header). The relevant field in this header is in the last two bytes, and it specifies whether the file is an executable or a dll; bit 0x2000 is set for a dll. Next up is the PE standard fields, which start with a magic number of 0x010b for x86 and AnyCPU assemblies, and 0x20b for x64 assemblies. Most of the rest of the fields are to do with the CLR loader stub, which I will be covering in a later post. After the PE standard fields comes the NT-specific fields; again, most of these are not relevant for .NET assemblies. The one that is is the highlighted Subsystem field, and specifies if this is a GUI or console app - 0x20 for a GUI app, 0x30 for a console app. Data directories & section headers After the PE and COFF headers come the data directories; each directory specifies the RVA (first 4 bytes) and size (next 4 bytes) of various important parts of the executable. The only relevant ones are the 2nd (Import table), 13th (Import Address table), and 15th (CLI header). The Import and Import Address table are only used by the startup stub, so we will look at those later on. The 15th points to the CLI header, where the CLR-specific metadata begins. After the data directories comes the section headers; one for each section in the file. Each header starts with the section's ASCII name, null-padded to 8 bytes. Again, most of each header is irrelevant, but I've highlighted the base RVA and file offset in each header. In the diagram, you can see the following sections: .text: base RVA 0x2000, file offset 0x200 .rsrc: base RVA 0x4000, file offset 0xa00 .reloc: base RVA 0x6000, file offset 0x1000 The .text section contains all the CLR metadata and code, and so is by far the largest in .NET assemblies. The .rsrc section contains the data you see in the Details page in the right-click file properties page, but is otherwise unused. The .reloc section contains address relocations, which we will look at when we study the CLR startup stub. What about the CLR? As you can see, most of the first 512 bytes of an assembly are largely irrelevant to the CLR, and only a few bytes specify needed things like the bitness (AnyCPU/x86 or x64), whether this is an exe or dll, and the type of app this is. There are some bytes that I haven't covered that affect the layout of the file (eg. the file alignment, which determines where in a file each section can start). These values are pretty much constant in most .NET assemblies, and don't affect the CLR data directly. Conclusion To summarize, the important data in the first 512 bytes of a file is: DOS header. This contains a pointer to the PE signature. DOS stub, which we'll be looking at in a later post. PE signature PE file header (aka COFF header). This specifies whether the file is an exe or a dll. PE standard fields. This specifies whether the file is AnyCPU/32bit or 64bit. PE NT-specific fields. This specifies what type of app this is, if it is an app. Data directories. The 15th entry (at offset 0x168) contains the RVA and size of the CLI header inside the .text section. Section headers. These are used to map between RVA and file offset. The important one is .text, which is where all the CLR data is stored. In my next post, we'll start looking at the metadata used by the CLR directly, which is all inside the .text section.

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• Recap: Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation

  - by Harish Gaur

  Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Oracle Fusion Middleware & Java took the stage on Tuesday to discuss how Oracle Fusion Middleware helps enable business innovation. Through a series of product demos and customer showcases, Hassan demonstrated how Oracle Fusion Middleware is a complete platform to harness the latest technological innovations (cloud, mobile, social and Fast Data) throughout the application lifecycle. Fig 1: Oracle Fusion Middleware is the foundation of business innovation This Session included 4 demonstrations to illustrate these strategies: 1. Build and deploy native mobile applications using Oracle ADF Mobile 2. Empower business user to model processes, design user interface and have rich mobile experience for process interaction using Oracle BPM Suite PS6. 3. Create collaborative user experience and integrate social sign-on using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle WebCenter Content, Oracle Social Network & Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 4. Deploy and manage business applications on Oracle Exalogic Nike, LA Department of Water & Power and Nintendo joined Hasan on stage to share how their organizations are leveraging Oracle Fusion Middleware to enable business innovation. Managing Performance in the Wrld of Social and Mobile How do you provide predictable scalability and performance for an application that monitors active lifestyle of 8 million users on a daily basis? Nike’s answer is Oracle Coherence, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Exadata. Fig 2: Oracle Coherence enabled data grid improves performance of Nike+ Digital Sports Platform Nicole Otto, Sr. Director of Consumer Digital Technology discussed the vision of the Nike+ platform, a platform which represents a shift for NIKE from a  "product"  to  a "product +" experience.  There are currently nearly 8 million users in the Nike+ system who are using digitally-enabled Nike+ devices.  Once data from the Nike+ device is transmitted to Nike+ application, users access the Nike+ website or via the Nike mobile applicatoin, seeing metrics around their daily active lifestyle and even engage in socially compelling experiences to compare, compete or collaborate their data with their friends. Nike expects the number of users to grow significantly this year which will drive an explosion of data and potential new experiences. To deal with this challenge, Nike envisioned building a shared platform that would drive a consumer-centric model for the company. Nike built this new platform using Oracle Coherence and Oracle Exadata. Using Coherence, Nike built a data grid tier as a distributed cache, thereby provide low-latency access to most recent and relevant data to consumers. Nicole discussed how Nike+ Digital Sports Platform is unique in the way that it utilizes the Coherence Grid.  Nike takes advantage of Coherence as a traditional cache using both cache-aside and cache-through patterns.  This new tier has enabled Nike to create a horizontally scalable distributed event-driven processing architecture. Current data grid volume is approximately 150,000 request per minute with about 40 million objects at any given time on the grid. Improving Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels Customer experience is on top of every CIO's mind. Customer Experience needs to be consistent and secure across multiple devices consumers may use.  This is the challenge Matt Lampe, CIO of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) was faced with. Despite being the largest utilities company in the country, LADWP had been relying on a 38 year old customer information system for serving its customers. Their prior system  had been unable to keep up with growing customer demands. Last year, LADWP embarked on a journey to improve customer experience for 1.6million LA DWP customers using Oracle WebCenter platform. Figure 3: Multi channel & Multi lingual LADWP.com built using Oracle WebCenter & Oracle Identity Management platform Matt shed light on his efforts to drive customer self-service across 3 dimensions – new website, new IVR platform and new bill payment service. LADWP has built a new portal to increase customer self-service while reducing the transactions via IVR. LADWP's website is powered Oracle WebCenter Portal and is accessible by desktop and mobile devices. By leveraging Oracle WebCenter, LADWP eliminated the need to build, format, and maintain individual mobile applications or websites for different devices. Their entire content is managed using Oracle WebCenter Content and secured using Oracle Identity Management. This new portal automated their paper based processes to web based workflows for customers. This includes automation of Self Service implemented through My Account -  like Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History and Usage Analysis. LADWP's solution went live in April 2012. Matt indicated that LADWP's Self-Service Portal has greatly improved customer satisfaction.  In a JD Power Associates website satisfaction survey, results indicate rankings have climbed by 25+ points, marking a remarkable increase in user experience. Bolstering Performance and Simplifying Manageability of Business Applications Ingvar Petursson, Senior Vice Preisdent of IT at Nintendo America joined Hasan on-stage to discuss their choice of Exalogic. Nintendo had significant new requirements coming their way for business systems, both internal and external, in the years to come, especially with new products like the WiiU on the horizon this holiday season. Nintendo needed a platform that could give them performance, availability and ease of management as they deploy business systems. Ingvar selected Engineered Systems for two reasons: 1. High performance  2. Ease of management Figure 4: Nintendo relies on Oracle Exalogic to run ATG eCommerce, Oracle e-Business Suite and several business applications Nintendo made a decision to run their business applications (ATG eCommerce, E-Business Suite) and several Fusion Middleware components on the Exalogic platform. What impressed Ingvar was the "stress” testing results during evaluation. Oracle Exalogic could handle their 3-year load estimates for many functions, which was better than Nintendo expected without any hardware expansion. Faster Processing of Big Data Middleware plays an increasingly important role in Big Data. Last year, we announced at OpenWorld the introduction of Oracle Data Integrator for Hadoop and Oracle Loader for Hadoop which helps in the ability to move, transform, load data to and from Big Data Appliance to Exadata.  This year, we’ve added new capabilities to find, filter, and focus data using Oracle Event Processing. This product can natively integrate with Big Data Appliance or runs standalone. Hasan briefly discussed how NTT Docomo, largest mobile operator in Japan, leverages Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence to process mobile data (from 13 million smartphone users) at a speed of 700K events per second before feeding it Hadoop for distributed processing of big data. Figure 5: Mobile traffic data processing at NTT Docomo with Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence    

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• New ways for backup, recovery and restore of Essbase Block Storage databases – part 2 by Bernhard Kinkel

  - by Alexandra Georgescu

  After discussing in the first part of this article new options in Essbase for the general backup and restore, this second part will deal with the also rather new feature of Transaction Logging and Replay, which was released in version 11.1, enhancing existing restore options. Tip: Transaction logging and replay cannot be used for aggregate storage databases. Please refer to the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1). Even if backups are done on a regular, frequent base, subsequent data entries, loads or calculations would not be reflected in a restored database. Activating Transaction Logging could fill that gap and provides you with an option to capture these post-backup transactions for later replay. The following table shows, which are the transactions that could be logged when Transaction Logging is enabled: In order to activate its usage, corresponding statements could be added to the Essbase.cfg file, using the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION command. The complete syntax reads: TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION [ appname [ dbname]] LOGLOCATION NATIVE ?ENABLE | DISABLE Where appname and dbname are optional parameters giving you the chance in combination with the ENABLE or DISABLE command to set Transaction Logging for certain applications or databases or to exclude them from being logged. If only an appname is specified, the setting applies to all databases in that particular application. If appname and dbname are not defined, all applications and databases would be covered. LOGLOCATION specifies the directory to which the log is written, e.g. D:\temp\trlogs. This directory must already exist or needs to be created before using it for log information being written to it. NATIVE is a reserved keyword that shouldn’t be changed. The following example shows how to first enable logging on a more general level for all databases in the application Sample, followed by a disabling statement on a more granular level for only the Basic database in application Sample, hence excluding it from being logged. TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE ENABLE TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Basic Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE DISABLE Tip: After applying changes to the configuration file you must restart the Essbase server in order to initialize the settings. A maybe required replay of logged transactions after restoring a database can be done only by administrators. The following options are available: In Administration Services selecting Replay Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: Here you can select to replay transactions logged after the last replay request was originally executed or after the time of the last restored backup (whichever occurred later) or transactions logged after a specified time. Or you can replay transactions selectively based on a range of sequence IDs, which can be accessed using Display Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: These sequence ID s (0, 1, 2 … 7 in the screenshot below) are assigned to each logged transaction, indicating the order in which the transaction was performed. This helps to ensure the integrity of the restored data after a replay, as the replay of transactions is enforced in the same order in which they were originally performed. So for example a calculation originally run after a data load cannot be replayed before having replayed the data load first. After a transaction is replayed, you can replay only transactions with a greater sequence ID. For example, replaying the transaction with sequence ID of 4 includes all preceding transactions, while afterwards you can only replay transactions with a sequence ID of 5 or greater. Tip: After restoring a database from a backup you should always completely replay all logged transactions, which were executed after the backup, before executing new transactions. But not only the transaction information itself needs to be logged and stored in a specified directory as described above. During transaction logging, Essbase also creates archive copies of data load and rules files in the following default directory: ARBORPATH/app/appname/dbname/Replay These files are then used during the replay of a logged transaction. By default Essbase archives only data load and rules files for client data loads, but in order to specify the type of data to archive when logging transactions you can use the command TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE as an additional entry in the Essbase.cfg file. The syntax for the statement is: TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE [appname [dbname]] [OPTION] While to the [appname [dbname]] argument the same applies like before for TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION, the valid values for the OPTION argument are the following: Make the respective setting for which files copies should be logged, considering from which location transactions are usually taking place. Selecting the NONE option prevents Essbase from saving the respective files and the data load cannot be replayed. In this case you must first manually load the data before you can replay the transactions. Tip: If you use server or SQL data and the data and rules files are not archived in the Replay directory (for example, you did not use the SERVER or SERVER_CLIENT option), Essbase replays the data that is actually in the data source at the moment of the replay, which may or may not be the data that was originally loaded. You can find more detailed information in the following documents: Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1) Oracle Essbase Online Documentation (rel. 11.1.2.1)) Enterprise Performance Management System Documentation (including previous releases) Or on the Oracle Technology Network. If you are also interested in other new features and smart enhancements in Essbase or Hyperion Planning stay tuned for coming articles or check our training courses and web presentations. You can find general information about offerings for the Essbase and Planning curriculum or other Oracle-Hyperion products here; (please make sure to select your country/region at the top of this page) or in the OU Learning paths section, where Planning, Essbase and other Hyperion products can be found under the Fusion Middleware heading (again, please select the right country/region). Or drop me a note directly: [email protected]. About the Author: Bernhard Kinkel started working for Hyperion Solutions as a Presales Consultant and Consultant in 1998 and moved to Hyperion Education Services in 1999. He joined Oracle University in 2007 where he is a Principal Education Consultant. Based on these many years of working with Hyperion products he has detailed product knowledge across several versions. He delivers both classroom and live virtual courses. His areas of expertise are Oracle/Hyperion Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Web Analysis. Disclaimer: All methods and features mentioned in this article must be considered and tested carefully related to your environment, processes and requirements. As guidance please always refer to the available software documentation. This article does not recommend or advise any explicit action or change, hence the author cannot be held responsible for any consequences due to the use or implementation of these features.

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• Why did Ubuntu suddenly get so slow?

  - by user101383

  12.10 has been slowing down mysteriously. Normally, in past versions, I can log in, open Firefox, and it will pop up within seconds. 12.10 is like that upon install too, though once I install my old apps, it gets very slow by Ubuntu standards. After login the hard drive will just make noise for a while before the OS will do anything. Hardware: enter description: Desktop Computer product: XPS 8300 () vendor: Dell Inc. serial: B6G2WR1 width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-2.6 dmi-2.6 vsyscall32 configuration: boot=normal chassis=desktop uuid=44454C4C-3600-1047-8032-C2C04F575231 core description: Motherboard product: 0Y2MRG vendor: Dell Inc. physical id: 0 version: A00 serial: ..CN7360419G04VQ. slot: To Be Filled By O.E.M. *cpu description: CPU product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz vendor: Intel Corp. physical id: 4 bus info: cpu@0 version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz serial: To Be Filled By O.E.M. slot: CPU 1 size: 1600MHz capacity: 1600MHz width: 64 bits clock: 100MHz capabilities: x86-64 fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid cpufreq configuration: cores=4 enabledcores=1 threads=2 *-cache:0 description: L1 cache physical id: 5 slot: L1-Cache size: 256KiB capacity: 256KiB capabilities: internal write-through unified *-cache:1 description: L2 cache physical id: 6 slot: L2-Cache size: 1MiB capacity: 1MiB capabilities: internal write-through unified *-cache:2 DISABLED description: L3 cache physical id: 7 slot: L3-Cache size: 8MiB capacity: 8MiB capabilities: internal write-back unified *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 20 slot: System board or motherboard size: 8GiB *-bank:0 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 0 serial: 7228183 slot: DIMM3 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:1 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 1 serial: 1E28183 slot: DIMM1 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:2 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 2 serial: 9E28183 slot: DIMM4 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:3 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 3 serial: 5527183 slot: DIMM2 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: Dell Inc. physical id: 0 version: A05 date: 09/21/2011 size: 64KiB capacity: 4032KiB capabilities: mca pci upgrade shadowing escd cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer int10video acpi usb zipboot biosbootspecification *-pci description: Host bridge product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1 bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pm msi pciexpress normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:40 ioport:e000(size=4096) memory:fe600000-fe6fffff ioport:d0000000(size=268435456) *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=radeon latency=0 resources: irq:44 memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:fe620000-fe63ffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:fe600000-fe61ffff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI physical id: 0.1 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.1 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:48 memory:fe640000-fe643fff *-communication description: Communication controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 16 bus info: pci@0000:00:16.0 version: 04 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=mei latency=0 resources: irq:45 memory:fe708000-fe70800f *-usb:0 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1a bus info: pci@0000:00:1a.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:fe707000-fe7073ff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1b bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:46 memory:fe700000-fe703fff *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.0 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:41 memory:fe500000-fe5fffff *-network description: Network controller product: BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 version: 01 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=bcma-pci-bridge latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:fe500000-fe503fff *-pci:2 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.3 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:42 memory:fe400000-fe4fffff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: NetLink BCM57788 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 01 serial: 18:03:73:e1:a7:71 size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=tg3 driverversion=3.123 duplex=full firmware=sb ip=192.168.1.3 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:47 memory:fe400000-fe40ffff *-usb:1 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:23 memory:fe706000-fe7063ff *-isa description: ISA bridge product: H67 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: isa bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-storage description: SATA controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage msi pm ahci_1.0 bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ahci latency=0 resources: irq:43 ioport:f070(size=8) ioport:f060(size=4) ioport:f050(size=8) ioport:f040(size=4) ioport:f020(size=32) memory:fe705000-fe7057ff *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:fe704000-fe7040ff ioport:f000(size=32) *-scsi:0 physical id: 1 logical name: scsi0 capabilities: emulated *-disk description: ATA Disk product: Hitachi HUA72201 vendor: Hitachi physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: JP4O serial: JPW9J0HD21BTZC size: 931GiB (1TB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 sectorsize=512 signature=000641dc *-volume:0 description: EXT4 volume vendor: Linux physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 logical name: / version: 1.0 serial: 4e3d91b7-fd38-4f44-a9e9-ba3c39b926ec size: 585GiB capacity: 585GiB capabilities: primary journaled extended_attributes large_files huge_files dir_nlink recover extents ext4 ext2 initialized configuration: created=2012-10-21 16:26:50 filesystem=ext4 lastmountpoint=/ modified=2012-10-29 18:12:08 mount.fstype=ext4 mount.options=rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered mounted=2012-10-29 18:12:08 state=mounted *-volume:1 description: Extended partition physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 logical name: /dev/sda2 size: 7823MiB capacity: 7823MiB capabilities: primary extended partitioned partitioned:extended *-logicalvolume description: Linux swap / Solaris partition physical id: 5 logical name: /dev/sda5 capacity: 7823MiB capabilities: nofs *-volume:2 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 3 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,3 logical name: /dev/sda3 version: 3.1 serial: 84a92aae-347b-7940-a2d1-f4745b885ef2 size: 337GiB capacity: 337GiB capabilities: primary bootable ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2012-10-21 18:43:39 filesystem=ntfs modified_by_chkdsk=true mounted_on_nt4=true resize_log_file=true state=dirty upgrade_on_mount=true *-scsi:1 physical id: 2 logical name: scsi1 capabilities: emulated *-cdrom description: DVD-RAM writer product: DVDRWBD DH-12E3S vendor: PLDS physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/cdrom logical name: /dev/cdrw logical name: /dev/dvd logical name: /dev/dvdrw logical name: /dev/sr0 version: MD11 capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc *-scsi:2 physical id: 3 bus info: usb@2:1.8 logical name: scsi6 capabilities: emulated scsi-host configuration: driver=usb-storage *-disk:0 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdb configuration: sectorsize=512 *-disk:1 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.1 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.1 logical name: /dev/sdc configuration: sectorsize=512 *-disk:2 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.2 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.2 logical name: /dev/sdd configuration: sectorsize=512 *-disk:3 description: SCSI Disk product: MS/MS-Pro vendor: Generic- physical id: 0.0.3 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.3 logical name: /dev/sde version: 1.03 serial: 3 capabilities: removable configuration: sectorsize=512 *-medium physical id: 0 logical name: /dev/sde

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• Do I need to store a generic rotation point/radius for rotating around a point other than the origin for object transforms?

  - by Casey

  I'm having trouble implementing a non-origin point rotation. I have a class Transform that stores each component separately in three 3D vectors for position, scale, and rotation. This is fine for local rotations based on the center of the object. The issue is how do I determine/concatenate non-origin rotations in addition to origin rotations. Normally this would be achieved as a Transform-Rotate-Transform for the center rotation followed by a Transform-Rotate-Transform for the non-origin point. The problem is because I am storing the individual components, the final Transform matrix is not calculated until needed by using the individual components to fill an appropriate Matrix. (See GetLocalTransform()) Do I need to store an additional rotation (and radius) for world rotations as well or is there a method of implementation that works while only using the single rotation value? Transform.h #ifndef A2DE_CTRANSFORM_H #define A2DE_CTRANSFORM_H #include "../a2de_vals.h" #include "CMatrix4x4.h" #include "CVector3D.h" #include <vector> A2DE_BEGIN class Transform { public: Transform(); Transform(Transform* parent); Transform(const Transform& other); Transform& operator=(const Transform& rhs); virtual ~Transform(); void SetParent(Transform* parent); void AddChild(Transform* child); void RemoveChild(Transform* child); Transform* FirstChild(); Transform* LastChild(); Transform* NextChild(); Transform* PreviousChild(); Transform* GetChild(std::size_t index); std::size_t GetChildCount() const; std::size_t GetChildCount(); void SetPosition(const a2de::Vector3D& position); const a2de::Vector3D& GetPosition() const; a2de::Vector3D& GetPosition(); void SetRotation(const a2de::Vector3D& rotation); const a2de::Vector3D& GetRotation() const; a2de::Vector3D& GetRotation(); void SetScale(const a2de::Vector3D& scale); const a2de::Vector3D& GetScale() const; a2de::Vector3D& GetScale(); a2de::Matrix4x4 GetLocalTransform() const; a2de::Matrix4x4 GetLocalTransform(); protected: private: a2de::Vector3D _position; a2de::Vector3D _scale; a2de::Vector3D _rotation; std::size_t _curChildIndex; Transform* _parent; std::vector<Transform*> _children; }; A2DE_END #endif Transform.cpp #include "CTransform.h" #include "CVector2D.h" #include "CVector4D.h" A2DE_BEGIN Transform::Transform() : _position(), _scale(1.0, 1.0), _rotation(), _curChildIndex(0), _parent(nullptr), _children() { /* DO NOTHING */ } Transform::Transform(Transform* parent) : _position(), _scale(1.0, 1.0), _rotation(), _curChildIndex(0), _parent(parent), _children() { /* DO NOTHING */ } Transform::Transform(const Transform& other) : _position(other._position), _scale(other._scale), _rotation(other._rotation), _curChildIndex(0), _parent(other._parent), _children(other._children) { /* DO NOTHING */ } Transform& Transform::operator=(const Transform& rhs) { if(this == &rhs) return *this; this->_position = rhs._position; this->_scale = rhs._scale; this->_rotation = rhs._rotation; this->_curChildIndex = 0; this->_parent = rhs._parent; this->_children = rhs._children; return *this; } Transform::~Transform() { _children.clear(); _parent = nullptr; } void Transform::SetParent(Transform* parent) { _parent = parent; } void Transform::AddChild(Transform* child) { if(child == nullptr) return; _children.push_back(child); } void Transform::RemoveChild(Transform* child) { if(_children.empty()) return; _children.erase(std::remove(_children.begin(), _children.end(), child), _children.end()); } Transform* Transform::FirstChild() { if(_children.empty()) return nullptr; return *(_children.begin()); } Transform* Transform::LastChild() { if(_children.empty()) return nullptr; return *(_children.end()); } Transform* Transform::NextChild() { if(_children.empty()) return nullptr; std::size_t s(_children.size()); if(_curChildIndex >= s) { _curChildIndex = s; return nullptr; } return _children[_curChildIndex++]; } Transform* Transform::PreviousChild() { if(_children.empty()) return nullptr; if(_curChildIndex == 0) { return nullptr; } return _children[_curChildIndex--]; } Transform* Transform::GetChild(std::size_t index) { if(_children.empty()) return nullptr; if(index > _children.size()) return nullptr; return _children[index]; } std::size_t Transform::GetChildCount() const { if(_children.empty()) return 0; return _children.size(); } std::size_t Transform::GetChildCount() { return static_cast<const Transform&>(*this).GetChildCount(); } void Transform::SetPosition(const a2de::Vector3D& position) { _position = position; } const a2de::Vector3D& Transform::GetPosition() const { return _position; } a2de::Vector3D& Transform::GetPosition() { return const_cast<a2de::Vector3D&>(static_cast<const Transform&>(*this).GetPosition()); } void Transform::SetRotation(const a2de::Vector3D& rotation) { _rotation = rotation; } const a2de::Vector3D& Transform::GetRotation() const { return _rotation; } a2de::Vector3D& Transform::GetRotation() { return const_cast<a2de::Vector3D&>(static_cast<const Transform&>(*this).GetRotation()); } void Transform::SetScale(const a2de::Vector3D& scale) { _scale = scale; } const a2de::Vector3D& Transform::GetScale() const { return _scale; } a2de::Vector3D& Transform::GetScale() { return const_cast<a2de::Vector3D&>(static_cast<const Transform&>(*this).GetScale()); } a2de::Matrix4x4 Transform::GetLocalTransform() const { Matrix4x4 p((_parent ? _parent->GetLocalTransform() : a2de::Matrix4x4::GetIdentity())); Matrix4x4 t(a2de::Matrix4x4::GetTranslationMatrix(_position)); Matrix4x4 r(a2de::Matrix4x4::GetRotationMatrix(_rotation)); Matrix4x4 s(a2de::Matrix4x4::GetScaleMatrix(_scale)); return (p * t * r * s); } a2de::Matrix4x4 Transform::GetLocalTransform() { return static_cast<const Transform&>(*this).GetLocalTransform(); } A2DE_END

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• Thoughts on the Nomination Committee Campaign 2014

  - by Testas

  Congratulations to Erin, Andy and Allen on making the Nomination Committee for 2014. As Mark Broadbent (@retracement) stated in his tweet, there’s a great set of individuals for the Nom Com, and I could not agree more. I know Erin and Allen, and I know how much value they will bring to the process. I don’t know Andy as well, but I am sure he will do a great job and I hope I can meet him at PASS soon. The final candidate appointed by the PASS board is Rick Bolesta, who brings a wealth of experience to the process. I also want to take the opportunity to thank all who have voted. Not just for me, but for all the candidates during the election. Your contribution is greatly appreciated. Would I apply for the Nom Com again?  Yes I would. My first election experience has been a learning experience in itself. So I accept the result and look forward to applying next year. Moving on from this, I do want to express my opinion about the lack of international representation in the election process. One of the tweets that I saw after the result was from Adam Machanic (@AdamMachanic) who commented on the lack of international members on the Nom Com. If truth be told, I was disappointed – when the candidate list was released -- that for the second time in recent elections there was a lack of international candidates on the candidate list. It feels that only Brits and Americans partake in such elections. This is a real shame, and I can’t help thinking why this is the case. Hugo Kornelis (@Hugo_Kornelis) wrote a blog here to express his thoughts. He did raise some valid points. I don’t know why there is an absence of international candidates. I know that the team at PASS are looking to improve the situation, so I do not want to give the impression that PASS are doing nothing. For reference please see Bill Graziano’ s article here to see how PASS are addressing the situation. There is a clear direction to change the rules within PASS to give greater inclusion of international members. In addition to this, I wanted to explore a couple of potential approaches to address the situation. I am not saying that they are the right answer, but when I see challenges, I like to bring potential solutions to the table. 1.       Use the PASS mission statement to define a tactical objective that engages community leaders into the election process. If you are not familiar with the PASS mission statement, let me provide it here as laid out on the PASS website. “Empower data professionals who leverage Microsoft technologies to connect, share, and learn through networking, knowledge sharing, and peer-based learning” PASS fulfil this mission statement regularly. Whether you attend SQL Saturday, SQLRally, SQLPASS and BA conference itself. The biggest value of PASS is the ability to bring our profession together. And the 24 hour hop allows you to learn from the comfort of your own office/home. This mission should be extended to define a tactical objectives that bring greater networking and knowledge sharing between PASS Chapter leaders/Regional Mentors and PASS HQ. It should help educate the leaders about the opportunities of elections and how leaders can become involved. I know PASS engage with Chapter leaders on a regular basis to discuss community matters for the benefit of PASS members. How could this be achieved? Perhaps PASS could perform a quarterly virtual meeting that specifically looks at helping leaders become more involved with the election process 2.       Evolve the Global Growth Strategy into a Global Engagement Strategy. One of the remits of the PASS board over the last couple of years is the Global Growth strategy. This has been very successful as we have seen the massive growth of events across the world. For that, I congratulate the board for this success. Perhaps the time is now right to look at solidifying this success, through a Global Engagement Strategy that starts with the collaboration of Chapter Leaders, Regional Mentors and Evangelists in their respective Countries or Regions. The engagement strategy should look at increasing collaboration between community leaders for the benefit of their respective communities. It should also provide a channel for encouraging leaders to put themselves forward for the elections. How could this be achieved? In the UK, there has been a big growth in PASS Chapters and SQL Server Events that was approaching saturation point. The introduction of the Community Engagement Day -- channelled through the SQLBits conference -- has enabled Chapter Leaders to collaborate, connect and share with PASS, Sponsors and Microsoft. It also provides the ability for Chapter Leaders to speak directly to the PASS representatives from PASSHQ. This brings with it the ability for PASS community evangelists to communicate PASS objectives. It has also been the event where we have found out; and/or encouraged, Chapter Leaders to put themselves forward for elections. People like encouragement and validation when going for something like an election, and being able to discuss this with peers at a dedicated event provides a useful platform. PASS has the people in place already to facilitate such an event. Regional Mentors could potentially help organise such events on an annual basis, with PASSHQ providing support in providing a room/Lync access for the event to take place. It would be really good if a PASSHQ representative could attend in person as well.   3.       Restrict candidates to serve only a limited number of terms. A frequent comment I saw on social networking was that the elections can be seen by some as a popularity conference. Perhaps by limiting the number of terms that an individual can serve on either the Nom Com or the BOD, other candidates may be encouraged to be more actively involved within the PASS election process. I don’t think that the current byelaws deal with this particular suggestion. I also saw a couple of tweets that stated that more active community members did not apply for the Nom Com. I struggled to understand how the individuals of the tweets measured “more active”. It just also further solidified the subjective nature of elections. In the absence of how candidates are put forward for the elections. Then a restriction of terms enables the opportunity to be extended to others. How could this be achieved? Set a resolution that is put to a community vote as to the viability of such a solution. For example, the questions for the vote could be: Should individuals in the Nom Com and BoD be limited to a certain number of terms?  Yes/No. What is the maximum number of terms a candidate could serve?   It would be simple to execute such a vote, and the community will have an opportunity to have a say in an important aspect of the PASS organisation. And is the change is successful, then add it as a byelaw.   So there are some of my thoughts. I am not saying they are right or wrong. But I do hope that there is a concerted effort to encourage more candidates from other reaches of the Globe to become involved with future elections.   It would be good to hear your thoughts   Thanks   Chris

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• Girl's Day 2012 in Potsdam

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Every year in April 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} , technical enterprises and other organisations are invited to organise an open day for girls – called Girl´s Day. It has become a tradition for Oracle for more than 6 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} years, to participate in this special day and to encourage girls to discover technical work environments.   On the 26th of April 2012, 27 pupils aged 12 to 15 came to Oracle’s office in Potsdam in order to obtain interesting insights about Oracle´s business practices. An interactive 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} four-hour program was specifically organized for all participants. At first, all pupils got to know Oracle as an enterprise with it’s different departments and it’s particular „business language“. What is hardware and software? Why do companies need a database? Questions as such were tailored and simply illustrated by 13 colleagues from the areas of Sales, Sales Consulting, Support and Recruitment.   Followed by a short introduction about career paths from our female colleagues and their respective departments, the girls decided, according to their interests, which business area they would like to get more insights from. Based on their decision the groups were set up and the girls than discovered the work places. This helped everyone to dive deep into the everyday work life, how the offices are structured and how communication with clients is done via web conferences. All girls were encouraged to take part in the conference together with their Oracle advisor. 12 o´clock – lunch time. Besides a well-prepared buffet 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} , all girls had now the opportunity to get all open questions clarified or to ask questions they did not dare to ask in front of a big group. After the lunch break, Anja Raack from the Graduate Recruitment team presented more about recruitment topics and gave useful advice on how to write professional emails.   After a short group assignment, where all participants had to identify common mistakes done in an email, a quiz completed this special day. All 5 groups showed a lot of enthusiasm during this game but no one had to worry as every single participant was rewarded with a prize and certificate.   To sum it up, we were very proud to host the girls for half a day and were impressed by their dedication. Hopefully, sooner or later, we will see some of them coming back to Oracle – either for the next Girl´s Day or one of our entry level positions. This day has shown that everyone can start a challenging career within an exciting industry. What matters is dedication and commitment to strive for the best.  Do you want to find out more about our job opportunities? Follow us on http://campus.oracle.com.

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