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• Content Management for WebCenter Installation Guide

  - by Gary Niu

  Overvew As we known, there are two way to install Content Management for WebCenter. One way is install it by WebCenter installer wizard, another way is to install it use their own installer. This guide is for the later one. For SSO purpose, I also mentioned how to config OID identity store for Content Management for WebCenter. Content Management for WebCenter( 10.1.3.5.1) Oracle Enterprise Linux R5U4 Basic Installation -bash-3.2$ ./setup.sh Please select your locale from the list.           1. Chinese-Simplified           2. Chinese-Traditional           3. Deutsch          *4. English-US           5. English-UK           6. Español           7. Français           8. Italiano           9. Japanese          10. Korean          11. Nederlands          12. Português-Brazil Choice? Throughout the install, when entering a text value, you can press Enter to accept the default that appears between square brackets ([]). When selecting from a list, you can select the choice followed by an asterisk by pressing Enter. Select installation type from the list.         *1. Install new server          2. Update a server Choice? Content Server Installation Directory Please enter the full pathname to the installation directory. Content Server Core Folder [/oracle/ucm/server]:/opt/oracle/ucm/server Create Directory         *1. yes          2. no Choice? Java virtual machine         *1. Sun Java 1.5.0_11 JDK          2. Specify a custom Java virtual machine Choice? Installing with Java version 1.5.0_11. Enter the location of the native file repository. This directory contains the native files checked in by contributors. Content Server Native Vault Folder [/opt/oracle/ucm/server/vault/]: Create Directory         *1. yes          2. no Choice? Enter the location of the web-viewable file repository. This directory contains files that can be accessed through the web server. Content Server Weblayout Folder [/opt/oracle/ucm/server/weblayout/]: Create Directory         *1. yes          2. no Choice? This server can be configured to manage its own authentication or to allow another master to act as an authentication proxy. Configure this server as a master or proxied server.         *1. Configure as a master server.          2. Configure as server proxied by a local master server. Choice? During installation, an admin server can be installed and configured to manage this server. If there is already an admin server on this system, you can have the installer configure it to administrate this server instead. Select admin server configuration.         *1. Install an admin server to manage this server.          2. Configure an existing admin server to manage this server.          3. Don't configure an admin server. Choice? Enter the location of an executable to start your web browser. This browser will be used to display the online help. Web Browser Path [/usr/bin/firefox]: Content Server System locale           1. Chinese-Simplified           2. Chinese-Traditional           3. Deutsch          *4. English-US           5. English-UK           6. Español           7. Français           8. Italiano           9. Japanese          10. Korean          11. Nederlands          12. Português-Brazil Choice? Please select the region for your timezone from the list.         *1. Use the timezone setting for your operating system          2. Pacific          3. America          4. Atlantic          5. Europe          6. Africa          7. Asia          8. Indian          9. Australia Choice? Please enter the port number that will be used to connect to the Content Server. This port must be otherwise unused. Content Server Port [4444]: Please enter the port number that will be used to connect to the Admin Server. This port must be otherwise unused. Admin Server Port [4440]: Enter a security filter for the server port. Hosts which are allowed to communicate directly with the server port may access any resources managed by the server. Insure that hosts which need access are included in the filter. See the installation guide for more details. Incoming connection address filter [127.0.0.1]:*.*.*.* *** Content Server URL Prefix The URL prefix specified here is used when generating HTML pages that refer to the contents of the weblayout directory within the installation. This prefix must be mapped in the web server Additional Document Directories section of the Content Management administration menu to the physical location of the weblayout directory. For example, "/idc/" would be used in your installation to refer to the URL http://ucm.company.com/idc which would be mapped in the web server to the physical location /oracle/ucm/server/weblayout. Web Server Relative Root [/idc/]: Enter the name of the local mail server. The server will contact this system to deliver email. Company Mail Server [mail]: Enter the e-mail address for the system administrator. Administrator E-Mail Address [sysadmin@mail]: *** Web Server Address Many generated HTML pages refer to the web server you are using. The address specified here will be used when generating those pages. The address should include the host and domain name in most cases. If your webserver is running on a port other than 80, append a colon and the port number. Examples: www.company.com, ucm.company.com:90 Web Server HTTP Address [yekki]:yekki.cn.oracle.com:7777 Enter the name for this instance. This name should be unique across your entire enterprise. It may not contain characters other than letters, numbers, and underscores. Server Instance Name [idc]: Enter a short label for this instance. This label is used on web pages to identify this instance. It should be less than 12 characters long. Server Instance Label [idc]: Enter a long description for this instance. Server Description [Content Server idc]: Web Server         *1. Apache          2. Sun ONE          3. Configure manually Choice? Please select a database from the list below to use with the Content Server. Content Server Database         *1. Oracle          2. Microsoft SQL Server 2005          3. Microsoft SQL Server 2000          4. Sybase          5. DB2          6. Custom JDBC settings          7. Skip database configuration Choice? Manually configure JDBC settings for this database          1. yes         *2. no Choice? Oracle Server Hostname [localhost]: Oracle Listener Port Number [1521]: *** Database User ID The user name is used to log into the database used by the content server. Oracle User [user]:YEKKI_OCSERVER *** Database Password The password is used to log into the database used by the content server. Oracle Password []:oracle Oracle Instance Name [ORACLE]:orcl Configure the JVM to find the JDBC driver in a specific jar file          1. yes         *2. no Choice? The installer can attempt to create the database tables or you can manually create them. If you choose to manually create the tables, you should create them now. Attempt to create database tables          1. yes         *2. no Choice? Select components to install.          1. ContentFolios: Collect related items in folios          2. Folders_g: Organize content into hierarchical folders          3. LinkManager8: Hypertext link management support          4. OracleTextSearch: External Oracle 11g database as search indexer support          5. ThreadedDiscussions: Threaded discussion management Enter numbers separated by commas to toggle, 0 to unselect all, F to finish: 1,2,3,4,5         *1. ContentFolios: Collect related items in folios         *2. Folders_g: Organize content into hierarchical folders         *3. LinkManager8: Hypertext link management support         *4. OracleTextSearch: External Oracle 11g database as search indexer support         *5. ThreadedDiscussions: Threaded discussion management Enter numbers separated by commas to toggle, 0 to unselect all, F to finish: F Checking configuration. . . Configuration OK. Review install settings. . . Content Server Core Folder: /opt/oracle/ucm/server Java virtual machine: Sun Java 1.5.0_11 JDK Content Server Native Vault Folder: /opt/oracle/ucm/server/vault/ Content Server Weblayout Folder: /opt/oracle/ucm/server/weblayout/ Proxy authentication through another server: no Install admin server: yes Web Browser Path: /usr/bin/firefox Content Server System locale: English-US Content Server Port: 4444 Admin Server Port: 4440 Incoming connection address filter: *.*.*.* Web Server Relative Root: /idc/ Company Mail Server: mail Administrator E-Mail Address: sysadmin@mail Web Server HTTP Address: yekki.cn.oracle.com:7777 Server Instance Name: idc Server Instance Label: idc Server Description: Content Server idc Web Server: Apache Content Server Database: Oracle Manually configure JDBC settings for this database: false Oracle Server Hostname: localhost Oracle Listener Port Number: 1521 Oracle User: YEKKI_OCSERVER Oracle Password: 6GP1gBgzSyKa4JW10U8UqqPznr/lzkNn/Ojf6M8GJ8I= Oracle Instance Name: orcl Configure the JVM to find the JDBC driver in a specific jar file: false Attempt to create database tables: no Components: ContentFolios,Folders_g,LinkManager8,OracleTextSearch,ThreadedDiscussions Proceed with install         *1. Proceed          2. Change configuration          3. Recheck the configuration          4. Abort installation Choice? Finished install type Install with warnings at 4/2/10 12:32 AM. Run Scripts -bash-3.2$ ./wc_contentserverconfig.sh /opt/oracle/ucm/server /mnt/hgfs/SOFTWARE/ofm_ucm_generic_10.1.3.5.1_disk1_1of1/ContentServer/webcenter-conf Installing '/mnt/hgfs/SOFTWARE/ofm_ucm_generic_10.1.3.5.1_disk1_1of1/ContentServer/webcenter-conf/CS10gR35UpdateBundle.zip' Service 'DELETE_DOC' Extended Service 'DELETE_BYREV_REVISION' Extended Installing '/mnt/hgfs/SOFTWARE/ofm_ucm_generic_10.1.3.5.1_disk1_1of1/ContentServer/webcenter-conf/ContentAccess/ContentAccess-linux.zip' (internal)      04.02 00:40:38.019      main    updateDocMetaDefinitionV11: adding decimal column Installing '/opt/oracle/ucm/server/custom/CS10gR35UpdateBundle/extras/Folders_g.zip' Installing '/opt/oracle/ucm/server/custom/CS10gR35UpdateBundle/extras/FusionLibraries.zip' Installing '/opt/oracle/ucm/server/custom/CS10gR35UpdateBundle/extras/JpsUserProvider.zip' Installing '/mnt/hgfs/SOFTWARE/ofm_ucm_generic_10.1.3.5.1_disk1_1of1/ContentServer/webcenter-conf/WcConfigure.zip' Apr 2, 2010 12:41:24 AM oracle.security.jps.internal.core.util.JpsConfigUtil getPasswordCredential WARNING: A password credential is expected; instead found . Apr 2, 2010 12:41:24 AM oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.util.IdentityStoreUtil getUnamePwdFromCredStore WARNING: The credential with map JPS and key ldap.credential does not exist. Apr 2, 2010 12:41:27 AM oracle.security.jps.internal.core.util.JpsConfigUtil getPasswordCredential WARNING: A password credential is expected; instead found . Apr 2, 2010 12:41:27 AM oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.util.IdentityStoreUtil getUnamePwdFromCredStore WARNING: The credential with map JPS and key ldap.credential does not exist. Apr 2, 2010 12:41:28 AM oracle.security.jps.internal.core.util.JpsConfigUtil getPasswordCredential WARNING: A password credential is expected; instead found . Apr 2, 2010 12:41:28 AM oracle.security.jps.internal.idstore.util.IdentityStoreUtil getUnamePwdFromCredStore WARNING: The credential with map JPS and key ldap.credential does not exist. Restart Content Server to apply updates. Configuring Apache Web Server append the following lines at httpd.conf: include "/opt/oracle/ucm/server/data/users/apache22/apache.conf" Configuring the Identity Store( Optional ) 1.  Stop Oracle Content Server and the Admin Server 2.  Update the Oracle Content Server's JPS configuration file, jps-config.xml: a. add a service instance <serviceInstance provider="idstore.ldap.provider" name="idstore.oid"> <property name="subscriber.name" value="dc=cn,dc=oracle,dc=com"></property> <property name="idstore.type" value="OID"></property> <property name="security.principal.key" value="ldap.credential"></property> <property name="security.principal.alias" value="JPS"></property> <property name="ldap.url" value="ldap://yekki.cn.oracle.com:3060"></property> <extendedProperty> <name>user.search.bases</name> <values> <value>cn=users,dc=cn,dc=oracle,dc=com</value> </values> </extendedProperty> <extendedProperty> <name>group.search.bases</name> <values> <value>cn=groups,dc=cn,dc=oracle,dc=com</value> </values> </extendedProperty> <property name="username.attr" value="uid"></property> <property name="user.login.attr" value="uid"></property> <property name="groupname.attr" value="cn"></property> </serviceInstance> b. Ensure that the <jpsContext> entry in the jps-config.xml file refers to the new serviceInstance, that is, idstore.oid and not idstore.ldap: <jpsContext name="default"> <serviceInstanceRef ref="idstore.oid"/> 3. Run the new script to setup the credentials for idstore.oid in the credential store: cd CONTENT_SERVER_HOME/custom/FusionLibraries/tools -bash-3.2$ ./run_credtool.sh Buildfile: ./../tools/credtool.xml     [input] skipping input as property action has already been set.     [input] Alias: [JPS]     [input] Key: [ldap.credential]     [input] User Name: cn=orcladmin     [input] Password: welcome1     [input] JPS Config: [/opt/oracle/ucm/server/custom/FusionLibraries/tools/../../../config/jps-config.xml] manage-creds:      [echo] @@@ Help: run 'ant manage-creds' command to see the detailed usage      [java] Using default context in /opt/oracle/ucm/server/custom/FusionLibraries/tools/../../../config/jps-config.xml file for credential store.      [java] Credential store location : /opt/oracle/ucm/server/config      [java] Credential with map JPS key ldap.credential stored successfully!      [java]      [java]      [java]     Credential for map JPS and key ldap.credential is:      [java]             PasswordCredential name : cn=orcladmin      [java]             PasswordCredential password : welcome1 BUILD SUCCESSFUL Total time: 1 minute 27 seconds Testing 1. acces http://yekki.cn.oracle.com:7777/idc 2. login in with OID user, for example: orcladmin/welcome1 3. make sure your JpsUserProvider status is "good"

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• Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here.  The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here. ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features.  Some of the improvements include: Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type.  You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last 6 months Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with Razor Server-Side Comments with Razor Razor’s @: and <text> syntax Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor Layouts and Sections with Razor Today’s release supports full code intellisense support for Razor (both VB and C#) with Visual Studio 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. JavaScript Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3 enables richer JavaScript scenarios and takes advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. The AJAX and Validation helpers in ASP.NET MVC 3 now use an Unobtrusive JavaScript based approach.  Unobtrusive JavaScript avoids injecting inline JavaScript into HTML, and enables cleaner separation of behavior using the new HTML 5 “data-“ attribute convention (which conveniently works on older browsers as well – including IE6). This keeps your HTML tight and clean, and makes it easier to optionally swap out or customize JS libraries.  ASP.NET MVC 3 now includes built-in support for posting JSON-based parameters from client-side JavaScript to action methods on the server.  This makes it easier to exchange data across the client and server, and build rich JavaScript front-ends.  We think this capability will be particularly useful going forward with scenarios involving client templates and data binding (including the jQuery plugins the ASP.NET team recently contributed to the jQuery project).  Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC included the core jQuery library.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also now ships the jQuery Validate plugin (which our validation helpers use for client-side validation scenarios).  We are also now shipping and including jQuery UI by default as well (which provides a rich set of client-side JavaScript UI widgets for you to use within projects). Improved Validation ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a bunch of validation enhancements that make it even easier to work with data. Client-side validation is now enabled by default with ASP.NET MVC 3 (using an onbtrusive javascript implementation).  Today’s release also includes built-in support for Remote Validation - which enables you to annotate a model class with a validation attribute that causes ASP.NET MVC to perform a remote validation call to a server method when validating input on the client. The validation features introduced within .NET 4’s System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace are now supported by ASP.NET MVC 3.  This includes support for the new IValidatableObject interface – which enables you to perform model-level validation, and allows you to provide validation error messages specific to the state of the overall model, or between two properties within the model.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class in .NET 4.  ValidationAttribute now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated.  This enables richer scenarios where you can validate the current value based on another property of the model.  We’ve shipped a built-in [Compare] validation attribute  with ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses this support and makes it easy out of the box to compare and validate two property values. You can use any data access API or technology with ASP.NET MVC.  This past year, though, we’ve worked closely with the .NET data team to ensure that the new EF Code First library works really well for ASP.NET MVC applications.  These two posts of mine cover the latest EF Code First preview and demonstrates how to use it with ASP.NET MVC 3 to enable easy editing of data (with end to end client+server validation support).  The final release of EF Code First will ship in the next few weeks. Today we are also publishing the first preview of a new MvcScaffolding project.  It enables you to easily scaffold ASP.NET MVC 3 Controllers and Views, and works great with EF Code-First (and is pluggable to support other data providers).  You can learn more about it – and install it via NuGet today - from Steve Sanderson’s MvcScaffolding blog post. Output Caching Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC supported output caching content at a URL or action-method level. With ASP.NET MVC V3 we are also enabling support for partial page output caching – which allows you to easily output cache regions or fragments of a response as opposed to the entire thing.  This ends up being super useful in a lot of scenarios, and enables you to dramatically reduce the work your application does on the server.  The new partial page output caching support in ASP.NET MVC 3 enables you to easily re-use cached sub-regions/fragments of a page across multiple URLs on a site.  It supports the ability to cache the content either on the web-server, or optionally cache it within a distributed cache server like Windows Server AppFabric or memcached. I’ll post some tutorials on my blog that show how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC 3’s new output caching support for partial page scenarios in the future. Better Dependency Injection ASP.NET MVC 3 provides better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. With ASP.NET MVC 3 you no longer need to author custom ControllerFactory classes in order to enable DI with Controllers.  You can instead just register a Dependency Injection framework with ASP.NET MVC 3 and it will resolve dependencies not only for Controllers, but also for Views, Action Filters, Model Binders, Value Providers, Validation Providers, and Model Metadata Providers that you use within your application. This makes it much easier to cleanly integrate dependency injection within your projects. Other Goodies ASP.NET MVC 3 includes dozens of other nice improvements that help to both reduce the amount of code you write, and make the code you do write cleaner.  Here are just a few examples: Improved New Project dialog that makes it easy to start new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects from templates. Improved Add->View Scaffolding support that enables the generation of even cleaner view templates. New ViewBag property that uses .NET 4’s dynamic support to make it easy to pass late-bound data from Controllers to Views. Global Filters support that allows specifying cross-cutting filter attributes (like [HandleError]) across all Controllers within an app. New [AllowHtml] attribute that allows for more granular request validation when binding form posted data to models. Sessionless controller support that allows fine grained control over whether SessionState is enabled on a Controller. New ActionResult types like HttpNotFoundResult and RedirectPermanent for common HTTP scenarios. New Html.Raw() helper to indicate that output should not be HTML encoded. New Crypto helpers for salting and hashing passwords. And much, much more… Learn More about ASP.NET MVC 3 We will be posting lots of tutorials and samples on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the weeks ahead.  Below are two good ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials available on the site today: Build your First ASP.NET MVC 3 Application: VB and C# Building the ASP.NET MVC 3 Music Store We’ll post additional ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials and videos on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the future. Visit it regularly to find new tutorials as they are published. How to Upgrade Existing Projects ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it should be easy to update existing MVC projects to ASP.NET MVC 3.  The new features in ASP.NET MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release.  MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones. You can upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 2 projects by following the manual upgrade steps in the release notes.  Alternatively, you can use this automated ASP.NET MVC 3 upgrade tool to easily update your  existing projects. Localized Builds Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 release is available in English.  We will be releasing localized versions of ASP.NET MVC 3 (in 9 languages) in a few days.  I’ll blog pointers to the localized downloads once they are available. NuGet Today we are also shipping NuGet – a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries).  You can download and install it here. NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable.  The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on. NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects. Our goal with NuGet is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .NET projects.  NuGet Gallery This week we also launched a beta version of the http://nuget.org web-site – which allows anyone to easily search and browse an online gallery of open source packages available via NuGet.  The site also now allows developers to optionally submit new packages that they wish to share with others.  You can learn more about how to create and share a package here. There are hundreds of open-source .NET projects already within the NuGet Gallery today.  We hope to have thousands there in the future. IIS Express 7.5 Today we are also shipping IIS Express 7.5.  IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios.  It works for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types. We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS.  Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.  You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server.  The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express blog post to learn more about what it enables.  SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Today we are also shipping SQL Server Compact Edition 4 (aka SQL CE 4).  SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it.  You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine.  No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded.  SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax.  This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE.  This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios.  With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET).  This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments.  Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.  It is also totally free. Tooling Support with VS 2010 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for SQL CE 4 and ASP.NET Projects.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE 4 blog post to learn more about what it enables.  Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Today we are also releasing Microsoft Web Deploy V2 and Microsoft Web Farm Framework V2.  These services provide a flexible and powerful way to deploy ASP.NET applications onto either a single server, or across a web farm of machines. You can learn more about these capabilities from my previous blog posts on them: Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Visit the http://iis.net website to learn more and install them. Both are free. Orchard 1.0 Today we are also releasing Orchard v1.0.  Orchard is a free, open source, community based project.  It provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard).  Read these tutorials to learn more about how you can setup and manage your own Orchard site. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage).  Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it.  WebMatrix 1.0 WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to enable website development.  It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading an app template from an online gallery of web applications (which includes popular apps like Umbraco, DotNetNuke, Orchard, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla).  Alternatively it also enables developers to create and code web sites from scratch. WebMatrix is task focused and helps guide developers as they work on sites.  WebMatrix includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4, and ASP.NET - providing an integrated web-server, database and programming framework combination.  It also includes built-in web publishing support which makes it easy to find and deploy sites to web hosting providers. You can learn more about WebMatrix from my Introducing WebMatrix blog post this summer.  Visit http://microsoft.com/web to download and install it today. Summary I’m really excited about today’s releases – they provide a bunch of additional value that makes web development with ASP.NET, Visual Studio and the Microsoft Web Server a lot better.  A lot of folks worked hard to share this with you today. On behalf of my whole team – we hope you enjoy them! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Using LINQ Distinct: With an Example on ASP.NET MVC SelectListItem

  - by Joe Mayo

  One of the things that might be surprising in the LINQ Distinct standard query operator is that it doesn’t automatically work properly on custom classes. There are reasons for this, which I’ll explain shortly. The example I’ll use in this post focuses on pulling a unique list of names to load into a drop-down list. I’ll explain the sample application, show you typical first shot at Distinct, explain why it won’t work as you expect, and then demonstrate a solution to make Distinct work with any custom class. The technologies I’m using are  LINQ to Twitter, LINQ to Objects, Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC 2, and Visual Studio 2010. The function of the example program is to show a list of people that I follow.  In Twitter API vernacular, these people are called “Friends”; though I’ve never met most of them in real life. This is part of the ubiquitous language of social networking, and Twitter in particular, so you’ll see my objects named accordingly. Where Distinct comes into play is because I want to have a drop-down list with the names of the friends appearing in the list. Some friends are quite verbose, which means I can’t just extract names from each tweet and populate the drop-down; otherwise, I would end up with many duplicate names. Therefore, Distinct is the appropriate operator to eliminate the extra entries from my friends who tend to be enthusiastic tweeters. The sample doesn’t do anything with the drop-down list and I leave that up to imagination for what it’s practical purpose could be; perhaps a filter for the list if I only want to see a certain person’s tweets or maybe a quick list that I plan to combine with a TextBox and Button to reply to a friend. When the program runs, you’ll need to authenticate with Twitter, because I’m using OAuth (DotNetOpenAuth), for authentication, and then you’ll see the drop-down list of names above the grid with the most recent tweets from friends. Here’s what the application looks like when it runs: As you can see, there is a drop-down list above the grid. The drop-down list is where most of the focus of this article will be. There is some description of the code before we talk about the Distinct operator, but we’ll get there soon. This is an ASP.NET MVC2 application, written with VS 2010. Here’s the View that produces this screen: <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<TwitterFriendsViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="DistinctSelectList.Models" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">     Home Page </asp:Content><asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">     <fieldset>         <legend>Twitter Friends</legend>         <div>             <%= Html.DropDownListFor(                     twendVM => twendVM.FriendNames,                     Model.FriendNames,                     "<All Friends>") %>         </div>         <div>             <% Html.Telerik().Grid<TweetViewModel>(Model.Tweets)                    .Name("TwitterFriendsGrid")                    .Columns(cols =>                     {                         cols.Template(col =>                             { %>                                 <img src="<%= col.ImageUrl %>"                                      alt="<%= col.ScreenName %>" />                         <% });                         cols.Bound(col => col.ScreenName);                         cols.Bound(col => col.Tweet);                     })                    .Render(); %>         </div>     </fieldset> </asp:Content> As shown above, the Grid is from Telerik’s Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. The first column is a template that renders the user’s Avatar from a URL provided by the Twitter query. Both the Grid and DropDownListFor display properties that are collections from a TwitterFriendsViewModel class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// For finding friend info on screen /// public class TwitterFriendsViewModel { /// /// Display names of friends in drop-down list /// public List FriendNames { get; set; } /// /// Display tweets in grid /// public List Tweets { get; set; } } } I created the TwitterFreindsViewModel. The two Lists are what the View consumes to populate the DropDownListFor and Grid. Notice that FriendNames is a List of SelectListItem, which is an MVC class. Another custom class I created is the TweetViewModel (the type of the Tweets List), shown below: namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// Info on friend tweets /// public class TweetViewModel { /// /// User's avatar /// public string ImageUrl { get; set; } /// /// User's Twitter name /// public string ScreenName { get; set; } /// /// Text containing user's tweet /// public string Tweet { get; set; } } } The initial Twitter query returns much more information than we need for our purposes and this a special class for displaying info in the View.  Now you know about the View and how it’s constructed. Let’s look at the controller next. The controller for this demo performs authentication, data retrieval, data manipulation, and view selection. I’ll skip the description of the authentication because it’s a normal part of using OAuth with LINQ to Twitter. Instead, we’ll drill down and focus on the Distinct operator. However, I’ll show you the entire controller, below,  so that you can see how it all fits together: using System.Linq; using System.Web.Mvc; using DistinctSelectList.Models; using LinqToTwitter; namespace DistinctSelectList.Controllers { [HandleError] public class HomeController : Controller { private MvcOAuthAuthorization auth; private TwitterContext twitterCtx; /// /// Display a list of friends current tweets /// /// public ActionResult Index() { auth = new MvcOAuthAuthorization(InMemoryTokenManager.Instance, InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken); string accessToken = auth.CompleteAuthorize(); if (accessToken != null) { InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken = accessToken; } if (auth.CachedCredentialsAvailable) { auth.SignOn(); } else { return auth.BeginAuthorize(); } twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth); var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); var twendsVM = new TwitterFriendsViewModel { Tweets = friendTweets, FriendNames = friendNames }; return View(twendsVM); } public ActionResult About() { return View(); } } } The important part of the listing above are the LINQ to Twitter queries for friendTweets and friendNames. Both of these results are used in the subsequent population of the twendsVM instance that is passed to the view. Let’s dissect these two statements for clarification and focus on what is happening with Distinct. The query for friendTweets gets a list of the 20 most recent tweets (as specified by the Twitter API for friend queries) and performs a projection into the custom TweetViewModel class, repeated below for your convenience: var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); The LINQ to Twitter query above simplifies what we need to work with in the View and the reduces the amount of information we have to look at in subsequent queries. Given the friendTweets above, the next query performs another projection into an MVC SelectListItem, which is required for binding to the DropDownList.  This brings us to the focus of this blog post, writing a correct query that uses the Distinct operator. The query below uses LINQ to Objects, querying the friendTweets collection to get friendNames: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); The above implementation of Distinct seems normal, but it is deceptively incorrect. After running the query above, by executing the application, you’ll notice that the drop-down list contains many duplicates.  This will send you back to the code scratching your head, but there’s a reason why this happens. To understand the problem, we must examine how Distinct works in LINQ to Objects. Distinct has two overloads: one without parameters, as shown above, and another that takes a parameter of type IEqualityComparer<T>.  In the case above, no parameters, Distinct will call EqualityComparer<T>.Default behind the scenes to make comparisons as it iterates through the list. You don’t have problems with the built-in types, such as string, int, DateTime, etc, because they all implement IEquatable<T>. However, many .NET Framework classes, such as SelectListItem, don’t implement IEquatable<T>. So, what happens is that EqualityComparer<T>.Default results in a call to Object.Equals, which performs reference equality on reference type objects.  You don’t have this problem with value types because the default implementation of Object.Equals is bitwise equality. However, most of your projections that use Distinct are on classes, just like the SelectListItem used in this demo application. So, the reason why Distinct didn’t produce the results we wanted was because we used a type that doesn’t define its own equality and Distinct used the default reference equality. This resulted in all objects being included in the results because they are all separate instances in memory with unique references. As you might have guessed, the solution to the problem is to use the second overload of Distinct that accepts an IEqualityComparer<T> instance. If you were projecting into your own custom type, you could make that type implement IEqualityComparer<T>, but SelectListItem belongs to the .NET Framework Class Library.  Therefore, the solution is to create a custom type to implement IEqualityComparer<T>, as in the SelectListItemComparer class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { public class SelectListItemComparer : EqualityComparer { public override bool Equals(SelectListItem x, SelectListItem y) { return x.Value.Equals(y.Value); } public override int GetHashCode(SelectListItem obj) { return obj.Value.GetHashCode(); } } } The SelectListItemComparer class above doesn’t implement IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, but rather derives from EqualityComparer<SelectListItem>. Microsoft recommends this approach for consistency with the behavior of generic collection classes. However, if your custom type already derives from a base class, go ahead and implement IEqualityComparer<T>, which will still work. EqualityComparer is an abstract class, that implements IEqualityComparer<T> with Equals and GetHashCode abstract methods. For the purposes of this application, the SelectListItem.Value property is sufficient to determine if two items are equal.   Since SelectListItem.Value is type string, the code delegates equality to the string class. The code also delegates the GetHashCode operation to the string class.You might have other criteria in your own object and would need to define what it means for your object to be equal. Now that we have an IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, let’s fix the problem. The code below modifies the query where we want distinct values: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct(new SelectListItemComparer()) .ToList(); Notice how the code above passes a new instance of SelectListItemComparer as the parameter to the Distinct operator. Now, when you run the application, the drop-down list will behave as you expect, showing only a unique set of names. In addition to Distinct, other LINQ Standard Query Operators have overloads that accept IEqualityComparer<T>’s, You can use the same techniques as shown here, with SelectListItemComparer, with those other operators as well. Now you know how to resolve problems with getting Distinct to work properly and also have a way to fix problems with other operators that require equality comparisons. @JoeMayo

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• Windows Azure: Backup Services Release, Hyper-V Recovery Manager, VM Enhancements, Enhanced Enterprise Management Support

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a huge set of updates to Windows Azure.  These new capabilities include: Backup Services: General Availability of Windows Azure Backup Services Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Public preview of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Configuration Active Directory: Securely manage hundreds of SaaS applications Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure SDK 2.2: A massive update of our SDK + Visual Studio tooling support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately.  Below are more details about them. Backup Service: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Backup Today we are releasing Windows Azure Backup Service as a general availability service.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. Windows Azure Backup is a cloud based backup solution for Windows Server which allows files and folders to be backed up and recovered from the cloud, and provides off-site protection against data loss. The service provides IT administrators and developers with the option to back up and protect critical data in an easily recoverable way from any location with no upfront hardware cost. Windows Azure Backup is built on the Windows Azure platform and uses Windows Azure blob storage for storing customer data. Windows Server uses the downloadable Windows Azure Backup Agent to transfer file and folder data securely and efficiently to the Windows Azure Backup Service. Along with providing cloud backup for Windows Server, Windows Azure Backup Service also provides capability to backup data from System Center Data Protection Manager and Windows Server Essentials, to the cloud. All data is encrypted onsite before it is sent to the cloud, and customers retain and manage the encryption key (meaning the data is stored entirely secured and can’t be decrypted by anyone but yourself). Getting Started To get started with the Windows Azure Backup Service, create a new Backup Vault within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Click New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Backup Vault to do this: Once the backup vault is created you’ll be presented with a simple tutorial that will help guide you on how to register your Windows Servers with it: Once the servers you want to backup are registered, you can use the appropriate local management interface (such as the Microsoft Management Console snap-in, System Center Data Protection Manager Console, or Windows Server Essentials Dashboard) to configure the scheduled backups and to optionally initiate recoveries. You can follow these tutorials to learn more about how to do this: Tutorial: Schedule Backups Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with setting up a backup schedule for your registered Windows Servers. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to set up a custom backup schedule. Tutorial: Recover Files and Folders Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with recovering data from a backup. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to do the same tasks. Below are some of the key benefits the Windows Azure Backup Service provides: Simple configuration and management. Windows Azure Backup Service integrates with the familiar Windows Server Backup utility in Windows Server, the Data Protection Manager component in System Center and Windows Server Essentials, in order to provide a seamless backup and recovery experience to a local disk, or to the cloud. Block level incremental backups. The Windows Azure Backup Agent performs incremental backups by tracking file and block level changes and only transferring the changed blocks, hence reducing the storage and bandwidth utilization. Different point-in-time versions of the backups use storage efficiently by only storing the changes blocks between these versions. Data compression, encryption and throttling. The Windows Azure Backup Agent ensures that data is compressed and encrypted on the server before being sent to the Windows Azure Backup Service over the network. As a result, the Windows Azure Backup Service only stores encrypted data in the cloud storage. The encryption key is not available to the Windows Azure Backup Service, and as a result the data is never decrypted in the service. Also, users can setup throttling and configure how the Windows Azure Backup service utilizes the network bandwidth when backing up or restoring information. Data integrity is verified in the cloud. In addition to the secure backups, the backed up data is also automatically checked for integrity once the backup is done. As a result, any corruptions which may arise due to data transfer can be easily identified and are fixed automatically. Configurable retention policies for storing data in the cloud. The Windows Azure Backup Service accepts and implements retention policies to recycle backups that exceed the desired retention range, thereby meeting business policies and managing backup costs. Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Now Available in Public Preview I’m excited to also announce the public preview of a new Windows Azure Service – the Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM). Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager helps protect your business critical services by coordinating the replication and recovery of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 private clouds at a secondary location. With automated protection, asynchronous ongoing replication, and orderly recovery, the Hyper-V Recovery Manager service can help you implement Disaster Recovery and restore important services accurately, consistently, and with minimal downtime. Application data in an Hyper-V Recovery Manager scenarios always travels on your on-premise replication channel. Only metadata (such as names of logical clouds, virtual machines, networks etc.) that is needed for orchestration is sent to Azure. All traffic sent to/from Azure is encrypted. You can begin using Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery today by clicking New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Hyper-V Recovery Manager within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can read more about Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager in Brad Anderson’s 9-part series, Transform the datacenter. To learn more about setting up Hyper-V Recovery Manager follow our detailed step-by-step guide. Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Today’s Windows Azure release includes a number of nice updates to Windows Azure Virtual Machines.  These improvements include: Ability to Delete both VM Instances + Attached Disks in One Operation Prior to today’s release, when you deleted VMs within Windows Azure we would delete the VM instance – but not delete the drives attached to the VM.  You had to manually delete these yourself from the storage account.  With today’s update we’ve added a convenience option that now allows you to either retain or delete the attached disks when you delete the VM:   We’ve also added the ability to delete a cloud service, its deployments, and its role instances with a single action. This can either be a cloud service that has production and staging deployments with web and worker roles, or a cloud service that contains virtual machines.  To do this, simply select the Cloud Service within the Windows Azure Management Portal and click the “Delete” button: Warnings on Availability Sets with Only One Virtual Machine In Them One of the nice features that Windows Azure Virtual Machines supports is the concept of “Availability Sets”.  An “availability set” allows you to define a tier/role (e.g. webfrontends, databaseservers, etc) that you can map Virtual Machines into – and when you do this Windows Azure separates them across fault domains and ensures that at least one of them is always available during servicing operations.  This enables you to deploy applications in a high availability way. One issue we’ve seen some customers run into is where they define an availability set, but then forget to map more than one VM into it (which defeats the purpose of having an availability set).  With today’s release we now display a warning in the Windows Azure Management Portal if you have only one virtual machine deployed in an availability set to help highlight this: You can learn more about configuring the availability of your virtual machines here. Configuring SQL Server Always On SQL Server Always On is a great feature that you can use with Windows Azure to enable high availability and DR scenarios with SQL Server. Today’s Windows Azure release makes it even easier to configure SQL Server Always On by enabling “Direct Server Return” endpoints to be configured and managed within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Previously, setting this up required using PowerShell to complete the endpoint configuration.  Starting today you can enable this simply by checking the “Direct Server Return” checkbox: You can learn more about how to use direct server return for SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups here. Active Directory: Application Access Enhancements This summer we released our initial preview of our Application Access Enhancements for Windows Azure Active Directory.  This service enables you to securely implement single-sign-on (SSO) support against SaaS applications (including Office 365, SalesForce, Workday, Box, Google Apps, GitHub, etc) as well as LOB based applications (including ones built with the new Windows Azure AD support we shipped last week with ASP.NET and VS 2013). Since the initial preview we’ve enhanced our SAML federation capabilities, integrated our new password vaulting system, and shipped multi-factor authentication support. We've also turned on our outbound identity provisioning system and have it working with hundreds of additional SaaS Applications: Earlier this month we published an update on dates and pricing for when the service will be released in general availability form.  In this blog post we announced our intention to release the service in general availability form by the end of the year.  We also announced that the below features would be available in a free tier with it: SSO to every SaaS app we integrate with – Users can Single Sign On to any app we are integrated with at no charge. This includes all the top SAAS Apps and every app in our application gallery whether they use federation or password vaulting. Application access assignment and removal – IT Admins can assign access privileges to web applications to the users in their active directory assuring that every employee has access to the SAAS Apps they need. And when a user leaves the company or changes jobs, the admin can just as easily remove their access privileges assuring data security and minimizing IP loss User provisioning (and de-provisioning) – IT admins will be able to automatically provision users in 3rd party SaaS applications like Box, Salesforce.com, GoToMeeting, DropBox and others. We are working with key partners in the ecosystem to establish these connections, meaning you no longer have to continually update user records in multiple systems. Security and auditing reports – Security is a key priority for us. With the free version of these enhancements you'll get access to our standard set of access reports giving you visibility into which users are using which applications, when they were using them and where they are using them from. In addition, we'll alert you to un-usual usage patterns for instance when a user logs in from multiple locations at the same time. Our Application Access Panel – Users are logging in from every type of devices including Windows, iOS, & Android. Not all of these devices handle authentication in the same manner but the user doesn't care. They need to access their apps from the devices they love. Our Application Access Panel will support the ability for users to access access and launch their apps from any device and anywhere. You can learn more about our plans for application management with Windows Azure Active Directory here.  Try out the preview and start using it today. Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure Active Directory provides the ability to manage your organization in a directory which is hosted entirely in the cloud, or alternatively kept in sync with an on-premises Windows Server Active Directory solution (allowing you to seamlessly integrate with the directory you already have).  With today’s Windows Azure release we are integrating Windows Azure Active Directory even more within the core Windows Azure management experience, and enabling an even richer enterprise security offering.  Specifically: 1) All Windows Azure accounts now have a default Windows Azure Active Directory created for them.  You can create and map any users you want into this directory, and grant administrative rights to manage resources in Windows Azure to these users. 2) You can keep this directory entirely hosted in the cloud – or optionally sync it with your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory.  Both options are free.  The later approach is ideal for companies that wish to use their corporate user identities to sign-in and manage Windows Azure resources.  It also ensures that if an employee leaves an organization, his or her access control rights to the company’s Windows Azure resources are immediately revoked. 3) The Windows Azure Service Management APIs have been updated to support using Windows Azure Active Directory credentials to sign-in and perform management operations.  Prior to today’s release customers had to download and use management certificates (which were not scoped to individual users) to perform management operations.  We still support this management certificate approach (don’t worry – nothing will stop working).  But we think the new Windows Azure Active Directory authentication support enables an even easier and more secure way for customers to manage resources going forward.  4) The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release (which is also shipping today) includes built-in support for the new Service Management APIs that authenticate with Windows Azure Active Directory, and now allow you to create and manage Windows Azure applications and resources directly within Visual Studio using your Active Directory credentials.  This, combined with updated PowerShell scripts that also support Active Directory, enables an end-to-end enterprise authentication story with Windows Azure. Below are some details on how all of this works: Subscriptions within a Directory As part of today’s update, we have associated all existing Window Azure accounts with a Windows Azure Active Directory (and created one for you if you don’t already have one). When you login to the Windows Azure Management Portal you’ll now see the directory name in the URI of the browser.  For example, in the screen-shot below you can see that I have a “scottgu” directory that my subscriptions are hosted within: Note that you can continue to use Microsoft Accounts (formerly known as Microsoft Live IDs) to sign-into Windows Azure.  These map just fine to a Windows Azure Active Directory – so there is no need to create new usernames that are specific to a directory if you don’t want to.  In the scenario above I’m actually logged in using my @hotmail.com based Microsoft ID which is now mapped to a “scottgu” active directory that was created for me.  By default everything will continue to work just like you used to before. Manage your Directory You can manage an Active Directory (including the one we now create for you by default) by clicking the “Active Directory” tab in the left-hand side of the portal.  This will list all of the directories in your account.  Clicking one the first time will display a getting started page that provides documentation and links to perform common tasks with it: You can use the built-in directory management support within the Windows Azure Management Portal to add/remove/manage users within the directory, enable multi-factor authentication, associate a custom domain (e.g. mycompanyname.com) with the directory, and/or rename the directory to whatever friendly name you want (just click the configure tab to do this).  You can also setup the directory to automatically sync with an on-premises Active Directory using the “Directory Integration” tab. Note that users within a directory by default do not have admin rights to login or manage Windows Azure based resources.  You still need to explicitly grant them co-admin permissions on a subscription for them to login or manage resources in Windows Azure.  You can do this by clicking the Settings tab on the left-hand side of the portal and then by clicking the administrators tab within it. Sign-In Integration within Visual Studio If you install the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release, you can now connect to Windows Azure from directly inside Visual Studio without having to download any management certificates.  You can now just right-click on the “Windows Azure” icon within the Server Explorer and choose the “Connect to Windows Azure” context menu option to do so: Doing this will prompt you to enter the email address of the username you wish to sign-in with (make sure this account is a user in your directory with co-admin rights on a subscription): You can use either a Microsoft Account (e.g. Windows Live ID) or an Active Directory based Organizational account as the email.  The dialog will update with an appropriate login prompt depending on which type of email address you enter: Once you sign-in you’ll see the Windows Azure resources that you have permissions to manage show up automatically within the Visual Studio server explorer and be available to start using: No downloading of management certificates required.  All of the authentication was handled using your Windows Azure Active Directory! Manage Subscriptions across Multiple Directories If you have already have multiple directories and multiple subscriptions within your Windows Azure account, we have done our best to create a good default mapping of your subscriptions->directories as part of today’s update.  If you don’t like the default subscription-to-directory mapping we have done you can click the Settings tab in the left-hand navigation of the Windows Azure Management Portal and browse to the Subscriptions tab within it: If you want to map a subscription under a different directory in your account, simply select the subscription from the list, and then click the “Edit Directory” button to choose which directory to map it to.  Mapping a subscription to a different directory takes only seconds and will not cause any of the resources within the subscription to recycle or stop working.  We’ve made the directory->subscription mapping process self-service so that you always have complete control and can map things however you want. Filtering By Directory and Subscription Within the Windows Azure Management Portal you can filter resources in the portal by subscription (allowing you to show/hide different subscriptions).  If you have subscriptions mapped to multiple directory tenants, we also now have a filter drop-down that allows you to filter the subscription list by directory tenant.  This filter is only available if you have multiple subscriptions mapped to multiple directories within your Windows Azure Account:   Windows Azure SDK 2.2 Today we are also releasing a major update of our Windows Azure SDK.  The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release adds some great new features including: Visual Studio 2013 Support Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter I’ll post a follow-up blog shortly with more details about all of the above. Additional Updates In addition to the above enhancements, today’s release also includes a number of additional improvements: AutoScale: Richer time and date based scheduling support (set different rules on different dates) AutoScale: Ability to Scale to Zero Virtual Machines (very useful for Dev/Test scenarios) AutoScale: Support for time-based scheduling of Mobile Service AutoScale rules Operation Logs: Auditing support for Service Bus management operations Today we also shipped a major update to the Windows Azure SDK – Windows Azure SDK 2.2.  It has so much goodness in it that I have a whole second blog post coming shortly on it! :-) Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a bunch of great new scenarios, and enables a much richer enterprise authentication offering. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 27, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET MVC ScriptBehind: Dynamic, developer & designer friendly script inclusion, compression and optimization for ASP.NET MVCCSLib.Net: CSLib.Net (Common Solutions Library) is yet another library with commonly used utilities, helpers, extensions and etc.DNN Module - Google Analytic Dashboard: Here is a Google Analytic Dashboard DNN Module which contain following sub modules. * Visitors Overview * World Map Overlay * Traf...dotUML: dotUML is a toolkit that enables developers to create and visualize UML diagrams like sequence, use case or component diagrams. EventRegistration: Event Registration ProgramGameStore League Manager: GameStore League Manager makes it easier for gaming store managers to run local leagues for card games, board games and any game where there is a h...GibberIM: GibberIM (Gibberish IM) is yet another Jabber instant messanger implementation.HTTP Compression Library for Heavy Load Web Server: Deflater is a HTTP Compression Library, supporting Deflate (RFC 1950, RFC 1951) and GZip (RFC 1952). It is designed to encode and compress HTML con...HydroLiDAR: This is a research project intended to explore algorithms and techniques for extracting Hydrographic features (rivers, watersheds, ponds, pits, etc...Lan Party Manager: Lan Party ManagerMAPS SQL Analysis Project: This solution demonstrates how to build a Business Intelligence solution on top of the MAPS databaseMMDB Parallax ALM: An open source Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system, being built by Mike Mooney of MMDB Solutions, as a learning/teaching exercise. MyColorSprite: This Silverlight app is a color selection tool especially great for creating gredient color brushes for the xaml code. It allows a user create/pic...PDF Form Bubble Up: Bubble Up takes PDF Forms stored in SharePoint document libraries and "bubbles up" the data in the PDF Form to the library. This means the data tha...PostBack Blog Engine: A modified Oxite open-source blog engine on top of the DB4O object database engine.Project Otto: A Silverlight Isometric Rendering Engine and Demo GameQFrac: Fraktalų generatorius parašytas naudojant Qt karkasą.RapidIoC: RapidIoC provides lightning fast IoC capabilities including Dependency Injection & AOP. The modular framework will allow for constructor, property,...Shatranj: A WPF / Silverlight based frontend to Huo Chess. This project was conceived as a way to learn key WPF / Silverlight concepts. At the release, it...WHS SkyDrive Backup Add In: This project allows for Windows Home Server to backup selected folders to your free 25GB Live SkyDrive. Simply dump the Home Server Add In, into y...Workflow Type Browser for WF4: This Workflow Type Browser displays type information for all arguments and variables in a WF4 workflow. It is designed for use in a rehosted desig...ZoomBarPlus: Windows Mobile Service designed for the HTC Touch Pro 2. Adds additional functionality to the zoom bar at the bottom of the screen. You can map key...New ReleasesBCryptTool: BCryptTool v0.2: The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (SP1) is needed to run this program.Braintree Client Library: Braintree-1.1.1: Braintree-1.1.1CC.Utilities: CC.Utilities 1.0.10.226: Minor bug fixes. A few new functions in the Interop namespace. DoubleBufferedGraphics now exposes the underlying memory Image through the Mem...CC.Votd: CC.Votd 1.0.10.227: This release includes several bug fixes and enchancements. The most notable enhancement is the RssItemCache which will allow the screensaver to f...DNN Module - Google Analytic Dashboard: DNN Module - Google Analytic Dashboard: Here is a Google Analytic Dashboard DNN Module which contain following sub modules. * Visitors Overview * World Map Overlay * Traffic ...Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.008: Fixed Message Box to appear in front as expected. Added ColorWheel.getRandomColor() Including Recipes and Concept slides as part of releaseFolderSize: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.5.0: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.5.0 A simple utility intended to be used to scan harddrives for the folders that take most place and display this to the user...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.4 beta Released: Hi, Today we are releasing the much awaited Zooming feature. In this version of Zooming you will be able to zoom/scale the PlotArea of the chart. ...GameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0: Rough and ready first version. You will need to have SQL Server Express 2005 or 2008 installed on your machine to use this software. Unzip to a l...Google Maps API 3 Visual Studio Intellisense: google-maps-3-vs-1-0-vsdoc: google-maps-3-vs-1-0 provides Visual Studio intellisense in-line api documentation and code completion for Google Maps API V3. Updated 02/25/10 A...HaoRan_WebCam: HaoRan.WebCam.Web beta2: 在年前发布的那一版基于silverlight4(beta)版的摄像头应用之后。经过最近一段时间的完善。目前已推出了beta2版，在修改了原有程序bug的基础上，做了如下变化： 1.将图片载入修改成为按原图宽高比进行缩放，所以以前沿X,Y轴变化就变成了一个缩放条同比例变化了。 ...IQToolkit Contrib: IQToolkitContrib.zip (v1.0.17.1): Update to DataServiceClientRepository - added ExecuteNonEntity to deal with calling Wcf Data Service methods for Dto classes (opposed to Entity cla...kdar: KDAR 0.0.15: KDAR - Kernel Debugger Anti Rootkit - new module cheks added - bugs fixedLogJoint - Log Viewer: logjoint 1.5: - Added support for more formats - Timeline improvement - Unicode logs and encodings supportMyColorSprite: MyColorSprite: MyColorSprite This Silverlight app is a color selection tool especially great for creating gredient color brushes for the xaml code. It allows a ...OAuthLib: OAuthLib (1.6.0.1): Difference between 1.6.0.0 is just version number.Picasa Downloader: PicasaDownloader Setup (41085): Changelog: Fixed workitem 10296 (Saving at resolutions above 1600px), Added experimental support for a modifier of the image download url (inse...Prolog.NET: Prolog.NET 1.0 Beta 1.1: Installer includes: primary Prolog.NET assembly Prolog.NET Workbench PrologTest console application all required dependencies Beta 1.1 in...QFrac: QFrac 1.0: Pirmoji stabili QFrac versija.SharepointApplicationFramework: SAF QuickPoll: Release Notes: This web part is written in VS2010 beta2 and uses Microsoft Chart Controls. Packaged into a single WSP. This wsp creates a quick po...Star System Simulator: Star System Simulator 2.2: An minor update to Version 2.1. Changes in this release: User interface enhancements/fixes with toolbar and icons. Features in this release: Mod...ToDoListReminder: Version 1.0.1.0: Bugs fixed: 10316, 10317 Handler for "Window Closing" event was added Error handling for XML parsing was addedVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30226.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWindows Remote Assistance For Skype: Beta 1.0.1: Major changes: 1) Now using Skype4COM to interact with Skype 2) InvitationXML is compressed 3) Showing warning on first run to Allow Access to SkypeWorkflow Type Browser for WF4: Release 1.0: There has been much surprise and disappointment expressed by the WF4 developer community since Microsoft made it clear that Intellisense woould not...Most Popular ProjectsData Dictionary CreatorOutlook 2007 Messaging API (MAPI) Code SamplesCommon Data Parameters ModuleTeam System - Work Item Spell Checker (All Languages)Tyrannt Online (Client/Server RPG)Ray Tracer StarterMeeting DemoNick BerardiScreenslayerRawrMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrBlogEngine.NETMapWindow GISSLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality ToolkitInfoServiceSharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLRCommon Context Adapterspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, April 12, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, April 12, 2010New Projects3 Hour Game Design Contest: The 3 Hour Game Design Contest is a programming contest for making simple games in 3 hours. 3 hours may not seem like enough time to make a game, b...BI Monkey SSIS ETL Framework: The BI Monkey SSIS ETL Framework is an ETL Execution, Control and Logging system for ETL projects using SSIS. It is supported by a SQL Server metad...Blend Sample Data Helpers: Helper behavior classes to generate sample images and data from Internet sources such as Flickr images. Bold TCP for Delphi 7: Open Sourcing the Bold TCP for Delphi 7.cfThreadingTools: This library project contains classes and extensions which will allow easy handling of multi-threaded UI-accesses.CuBiX_SDL: CuBiX_SDL : CuBiX est un projet personnel.Draglets: Draglets makes it easier for editors and CMS-developers to move and reorder content at their web sites. It's developed in ASP.NET, C# with WCF and ...DSQLT - Dynamic SQL Templates: DSQLT - Dynamic SQL Templates Use Stored Procedures as templates for dynamic SQL statements. Substitute parameters @0-@9 with values like objectna...Edtter: Edtter is a sample web application built on ASP.NET MVC 2 Framework. (Japanese Version Only)Forms Based Authentication Management - SharePoint2007FBA: This is my own update to Stacy Draper's FBABasic project for Forms Based Authentication in MOSS 2007. In additon to managing your fba user's roles,...Height Map to 3D World at XNA: Height Map to 3D World is a XNA project that developed firstly by Eric Grossinger and secondly improved by Karadeniz Technical University Computer ...HouseFly: A simple contact and note taking applicationITM 495 - iPhone Web App: School ProjectKaufleute: This will be finished laterLR: this project is about connecting toPowerShell Integration Services: A set of tools aimed at Extract Transform and Load tasks. Focused on getting the most common ETL tasks done without SSIS. Salient: A collection of, hopefully, useful libraries.Samurai.Validation: Extensible and flexible .Net object validation frameworkSamurai.Workflow: Samurai Workflow is a slim, easy-to-use workflow framework for WPF applications.SharePoint User Management WebPart: SharePoint User Management WebPartUrl shorte(ne)r: It's simple Url Shortener (like: http://tinyurl.com) Currently only Polish language is supported. In future will be provided multi language suppor...Yasbg: Yasbg (pronounced yas-bug) is Yet Another Static Blog Generator. It is made in C# using MarkdownSharp for markdown. Currently in alpha. New Releases.NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library: Release 2010.06: Added an universal approach for grouping extension methods like conversions. Conversion are now available on any data type (it's actually extension...3 Hour Game Design Contest: 3H-GDC mVII: This is the collection of game files for the 7th 3H-GDCB&W Port Scanner: Black`n`White Port Scanner 3.0: B&W Port Scanner 3 includes FTP Server detection tool, Better stability, Optimized memory management, Saving & Opening Result sets ... and more new...BI Monkey SSIS ETL Framework: Framework v1 Alpha: This Alpha release is not fully tested and some functionality is not operating as intended.Bluetooth Radar: Version 1.7: UI Changes Device UserControl Randomly placed devices.BugTracker.NET: BugTracker.NET 3.4.1: For the tasks/time tracking feature, added a way of viewing all the tasks at once, not just the tasks for one bug. Also added a way of exporting a...cfThreadingTools: cfThreadingTools 0.1.1.8: This is the first public available release. Following items are included: BaseTools-class which allows thread-safe setting of properties and callin...DeepZoom Pivot Constructor: DeepZoom Pivot Constructor v0.1: This is a test release of the library platform - Targets .NET 3.5 No samples yet, etc., but it works well :-)DSQLT - Dynamic SQL Templates: Initial release with License Included: nothing changed but license print procedure included the zip file contains database backup SQL script readmeForms Based Authentication Management - SharePoint2007FBA: SharePoint2007FBA 1.0.0.0: Downloads for the Project solution and the WSP package. Please read the Setup Guide. If you are unfamiliar with setting up Forms Based Authenticati...Foursquare BlogEngine Widget: foursquare widget for BlogEngine.NET version 0.3: To see the changes which have been made, visit http://philippkueng.ch/post/Foursquare-BlogEngineNET-widget-version-03.aspx For installation instruc...Framework Detector: FrameworkDetect Support .NET 4 v2: FrameworkDetect Support .NET 4Happy Turtle Plugins for BVI :: Repository Based Versioning for Visual Studio: Happy Turtle 1.0.46860: This is the second beta release of the SVN based version incrementor. Please feel free to create a thread in the discussion tabs and provide feedb...Height Map to 3D World at XNA: 3DWorld: Just open .rar file and extract it any folder and run Proje2Dto3D.exe file.HTML Ruby: 6.20.2: Removed rubyLineSpace option Improved options panel Fixed ruby text font-size rendering issue with complex ruby annotation Removed more waste...HTML Ruby: 6.20.3: Removed unused code Temporary partial fix for Firefox 3.7a4pre nightly buildHTML Ruby: 6.21.0: Added support for current HTML5 ruby annotation format. All ruby annotations are converted to XHTML 1.1 complex ruby annotation.Kooboo HTML form: Kooboo HTML Form Module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo Menu: Kooboo CMS Menu for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo Meta: Kooboo Meta Module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo PageMenu: Kooboo CMS PageMenu for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo Search: Kooboo CMS Search module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Numina Application/Security Framework: Numina.Framework Core 50212: Added bulk import user page Added General settings page for updating Company Name, Theme, and API Key Add/Edit application calls Full URL to h...Rawr: Rawr 2.3.14: - Rawr3: Tons of fixes for Rawr3 compatability and UI. - Significant performance improvements all around. - More fixes and improvements to Wowhea...Rich Ajax empowered Web/Cloud Applications: 6.4 beta 2: The first fully featured version of Visual webGui offering web/cloud development tool that puts all ASP.NET Ajax limits behind with enhanced perfor...SharePoint User Management WebPart: User Management Web part 1.0: Most of the organization have one SharePoint Site which is configured with windows authenticated which is for internal employees having AD authenti...SkeinLibManaged: SkeinLibManaged 1.1.0.0 (Beta): This is the compiled DLL with XML documentation, so there should be plenty of context sensitive help and Intellisense. This is the Release version,...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30411.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVFPX: Code References 1.1 Beta: Visit the Code References Info Page for complete information about this release.VisioAutomation: VisioAutomation 2.5.0: VisioAutomation 2.5.0- General cleanup/bugfixes - Many low-level changes the the VisioAutomation extension methods - these are far fewer now - This...Visual Studio DSite: English To Spanish Translator (Visual C++ 2008): A simple english to spanish translator made in visual c 2008, using the Google Translate API.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.10.00: Whats NewFile Browser: Inherits Folder Permissions from DotNetNuke Updated the Editor to Version 3.2.1 revision 5372 Added CkEditor jQuery Adap...Web/Cloud Applications Development Framework | Visual WebGui: 6.4 beta 2: The first fully featured version of Visual webGui offering web/cloud development tool that puts all ASP.NET Ajax limits behind with unique develope...WPF Data Virtualization: 1.0.0.0: First ReleaseYasbg: Yasbg Alpha: ReadmeYet Another Static Blog Generator is a command line utility that generates static html files for blogs. Currently, it is NOT feed enabled. I...異世界の新着動画: Ver. 10-04-12: ニコ生の仕様変更に対応 アンケート時間の設定追加Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsRawrnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.AutoPocopatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryShweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with PexFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterBlogEngine.NETBeanProxy

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• Conheça a nova Windows Azure

  - by Leniel Macaferi

  Hoje estamos lançando um grande conjunto de melhorias para a Windows Azure. A seguir está um breve resumo de apenas algumas destas melhorias: Novo Portal de Administração e Ferramentas de Linha de Comando O lançamento de hoje vem com um novo portal para a Windows Azure, o qual lhe permitirá gerenciar todos os recursos e serviços oferecidos na Windows Azure de uma forma perfeitamente integrada. O portal é muito rápido e fluido, suporta filtragem e classificação dos dados (o que o torna muito fácil de usar em implantações/instalações de grande porte), funciona em todos os navegadores, e oferece um monte de ótimos e novos recursos - incluindo suporte nativo à VM (máquina virtual), Web site, Storage (armazenamento), e monitoramento de Serviços hospedados na Nuvem. O novo portal é construído em cima de uma API de gerenciamento baseada no modelo REST dentro da Windows Azure - e tudo o que você pode fazer através do portal também pode ser feito através de programação acessando esta Web API. Também estamos lançando hoje ferramentas de linha de comando (que, igualmente ao portal, chamam as APIs de Gerenciamento REST) para tornar ainda ainda mais fácil a criação de scripts e a automatização de suas tarefas de administração. Estamos oferecendo para download um conjunto de ferramentas para o Powershell (Windows) e Bash (Mac e Linux). Como nossos SDKs, o código destas ferramentas está hospedado no GitHub sob uma licença Apache 2. Máquinas Virtuais ( Virtual Machines [ VM ] ) A Windows Azure agora suporta a capacidade de implantar e executar VMs duráveis/permanentes ??na nuvem. Você pode criar facilmente essas VMs usando uma nova Galeria de Imagens embutida no novo Portal da Windows Azure ou, alternativamente, você pode fazer o upload e executar suas próprias imagens VHD customizadas. Máquinas virtuais são duráveis ??(o que significa que qualquer coisa que você instalar dentro delas persistirá entre as reinicializações) e você pode usar qualquer sistema operacional nelas. Nossa galeria de imagens nativa inclui imagens do Windows Server (incluindo o novo Windows Server 2012 RC), bem como imagens do Linux (incluindo Ubuntu, CentOS, e as distribuições SUSE). Depois de criar uma instância de uma VM você pode facilmente usar o Terminal Server ou SSH para acessá-las a fim de configurar e personalizar a máquina virtual da maneira como você quiser (e, opcionalmente, capturar uma snapshot (cópia instantânea da imagem atual) para usar ao criar novas instâncias de VMs). Isto te proporciona a flexibilidade de executar praticamente qualquer carga de trabalho dentro da plataforma Windows Azure.   A novo Portal da Windows Azure fornece um rico conjunto de recursos para o gerenciamento de Máquinas Virtuais - incluindo a capacidade de monitorar e controlar a utilização dos recursos dentro delas.  Nosso novo suporte à Máquinas Virtuais também permite a capacidade de facilmente conectar múltiplos discos nas VMs (os quais você pode então montar e formatar como unidades de disco). Opcionalmente, você pode ativar o suporte à replicação geográfica (geo-replication) para estes discos - o que fará com que a Windows Azure continuamente replique o seu armazenamento em um data center secundário (criando um backup), localizado a pelo menos 640 quilômetros de distância do seu data-center principal. Nós usamos o mesmo formato VHD que é suportado com a virtualização do Windows hoje (o qual nós lançamos como uma especificação aberta), de modo a permitir que você facilmente migre cargas de trabalho existentes que você já tenha virtualizado na Windows Azure.  Também tornamos fácil fazer o download de VHDs da Windows Azure, o que também oferece a flexibilidade para facilmente migrar cargas de trabalho das VMs baseadas na nuvem para um ambiente local. Tudo o que você precisa fazer é baixar o arquivo VHD e inicializá-lo localmente - nenhuma etapa de importação/exportação é necessária. Web Sites A Windows Azure agora suporta a capacidade de rapidamente e facilmente implantar web-sites ASP.NET, Node.js e PHP em um ambiente na nuvem altamente escalável que te permite começar pequeno (e de maneira gratuita) de modo que você possa em seguida, adaptar/escalar sua aplicação de acordo com o crescimento do seu tráfego. Você pode criar um novo web site na Azure e tê-lo pronto para implantação em menos de 10 segundos: O novo Portal da Windows Azure oferece suporte integrado para a administração de Web sites, incluindo a capacidade de monitorar e acompanhar a utilização dos recursos em tempo real: Você pode fazer o deploy (implantação) para web-sites em segundos usando FTP, Git, TFS e Web Deploy. Também estamos lançando atualizações para as ferramentas do Visual Studio e da Web Matrix que permitem aos desenvolvedores uma fácil instalação das aplicações ASP.NET nesta nova oferta. O suporte de publicação do VS e da Web Matrix inclui a capacidade de implantar bancos de dados SQL como parte da implantação do site - bem como a capacidade de realizar a atualização incremental do esquema do banco de dados com uma implantação realizada posteriormente. Você pode integrar a publicação de aplicações web com o controle de código fonte ao selecionar os links "Set up TFS publishing" (Configurar publicação TFS) ou "Set up Git publishing" (Configurar publicação Git) que estão presentes no dashboard de um web-site: Ao fazer isso, você habilitará a integração com o nosso novo serviço online TFS (que permite um fluxo de trabalho do TFS completo - incluindo um build elástico e suporte a testes), ou você pode criar um repositório Git e referenciá-lo como um remote para executar implantações automáticas. Uma vez que você executar uma implantação usando TFS ou Git, a tab/guia de implantações/instalações irá acompanhar as implantações que você fizer, e permitirá que você selecione uma implantação mais antiga (ou mais recente) para que você possa rapidamente voltar o seu site para um estado anterior do seu código. Isso proporciona uma experiência de fluxo de trabalho muito poderosa.   A Windows Azure agora permite que você implante até 10 web-sites em um ambiente de hospedagem gratuito e compartilhado entre múltiplos usuários e bancos de dados (onde um site que você implantar será um dos vários sites rodando em um conjunto compartilhado de recursos do servidor). Isso te fornece uma maneira fácil para começar a desenvolver projetos sem nenhum custo envolvido. Você pode, opcionalmente, fazer o upgrade do seus sites para que os mesmos sejam executados em um "modo reservado" que os isola, de modo que você seja o único cliente dentro de uma máquina virtual: E você pode adaptar elasticamente a quantidade de recursos que os seus sites utilizam - o que te permite por exemplo aumentar a capacidade da sua instância reservada/particular de acordo com o aumento do seu tráfego: A Windows Azure controla automaticamente o balanceamento de carga do tráfego entre as instâncias das VMs, e você tem as mesmas opções de implantação super rápidas (FTP, Git, TFS e Web Deploy), independentemente de quantas instâncias reservadas você usar. Com a Windows Azure você paga por capacidade de processamento por hora - o que te permite dimensionar para cima e para baixo seus recursos para atender apenas o que você precisa. Serviços da Nuvem (Cloud Services) e Cache Distribuído (Distributed Caching) A Windows Azure também suporta a capacidade de construir serviços que rodam na nuvem que suportam ricas arquiteturas multicamadas, gerenciamento automatizado de aplicações, e que podem ser adaptados para implantações extremamente grandes. Anteriormente nós nos referíamos a esta capacidade como "serviços hospedados" - com o lançamento desta semana estamos agora rebatizando esta capacidade como "serviços da nuvem". Nós também estamos permitindo um monte de novos recursos com eles. Cache Distribuído Um dos novos recursos muito legais que estão sendo habilitados com os serviços da nuvem é uma nova capacidade de cache distribuído que te permite usar e configurar um cache distribuído de baixa latência, armazenado na memória (in-memory) dentro de suas aplicações. Esse cache é isolado para uso apenas por suas aplicações, e não possui limites de corte. Esse cache pode crescer e diminuir dinamicamente e elasticamente (sem que você tenha que reimplantar a sua aplicação ou fazer alterações no código), e suporta toda a riqueza da API do Servidor de Cache AppFabric (incluindo regiões, alta disponibilidade, notificações, cache local e muito mais). Além de suportar a API do Servidor de Cache AppFabric, esta nova capacidade de cache pode agora também suportar o protocolo Memcached - o que te permite apontar código escrito para o Memcached para o cache distribuído (sem que alterações de código sejam necessárias). O novo cache distribuído pode ser configurado para ser executado em uma de duas maneiras: 1) Utilizando uma abordagem de cache co-localizado (co-located). Nesta opção você aloca um percentual de memória dos seus roles web e worker existentes para que o mesmo seja usado ??pelo cache, e então o cache junta a memória em um grande cache distribuído.  Qualquer dado colocado no cache por uma instância do role pode ser acessado por outras instâncias do role em sua aplicação - independentemente de os dados cacheados estarem armazenados neste ou em outro role. O grande benefício da opção de cache "co-localizado" é que ele é gratuito (você não precisa pagar nada para ativá-lo) e ele te permite usar o que poderia ser de outra forma memória não utilizada dentro das VMs da sua aplicação. 2) Alternativamente, você pode adicionar "cache worker roles" no seu serviço na nuvem que são utilizados unicamente para o cache. Estes também serão unidos em um grande anel de cache distribuído que outros roles dentro da sua aplicação podem acessar. Você pode usar esses roles para cachear dezenas ou centenas de GBs de dados na memória de forma extramente eficaz - e o cache pode ser aumentado ou diminuído elasticamente durante o tempo de execução dentro da sua aplicação: Novos SDKs e Ferramentas de Suporte Nós atualizamos todos os SDKs (kits para desenvolvimento de software) da Windows Azure com o lançamento de hoje para incluir novos recursos e capacidades. Nossos SDKs estão agora disponíveis em vários idiomas, e todo o código fonte deles está publicado sob uma licença Apache 2 e é mantido em repositórios no GitHub. O SDK .NET para Azure tem em particular um monte de grandes melhorias com o lançamento de hoje, e agora inclui suporte para ferramentas, tanto para o VS 2010 quanto para o VS 2012 RC. Estamos agora também entregando downloads do SDK para Windows, Mac e Linux nos idiomas que são oferecidos em todos esses sistemas - de modo a permitir que os desenvolvedores possam criar aplicações Windows Azure usando qualquer sistema operacional durante o desenvolvimento. Muito, Muito Mais O resumo acima é apenas uma pequena lista de algumas das melhorias que estão sendo entregues de uma forma preliminar ou definitiva hoje - há muito mais incluído no lançamento de hoje. Dentre estas melhorias posso citar novas capacidades para Virtual Private Networking (Redes Privadas Virtuais), novo runtime do Service Bus e respectivas ferramentas de suporte, o preview público dos novos Azure Media Services, novos Data Centers, upgrade significante para o hardware de armazenamento e rede, SQL Reporting Services, novos recursos de Identidade, suporte para mais de 40 novos países e territórios, e muito, muito mais. Você pode aprender mais sobre a Windows Azure e se cadastrar para experimentá-la gratuitamente em http://windowsazure.com.  Você também pode assistir a uma apresentação ao vivo que estarei realizando às 1pm PDT (17:00Hs de Brasília), hoje 7 de Junho (hoje mais tarde), onde eu vou passar por todos os novos recursos. Estaremos abrindo as novas funcionalidades as quais me referi acima para uso público poucas horas após o término da apresentação. Nós estamos realmente animados para ver as grandes aplicações que você construirá com estes novos recursos. Espero que ajude, - Scott   Texto traduzido do post original por Leniel Macaferi.

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• Node.js Adventure - Host Node.js on Windows Azure Worker Role

  - by Shaun

  In my previous post I demonstrated about how to develop and deploy a Node.js application on Windows Azure Web Site (a.k.a. WAWS). WAWS is a new feature in Windows Azure platform. Since it’s low-cost, and it provides IIS and IISNode components so that we can host our Node.js application though Git, FTP and WebMatrix without any configuration and component installation. But sometimes we need to use the Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS) and host our Node.js on worker role. Below are some benefits of using worker role. - WAWS leverages IIS and IISNode to host Node.js application, which runs in x86 WOW mode. It reduces the performance comparing with x64 in some cases. - WACS worker role does not need IIS, hence there’s no restriction of IIS, such as 8000 concurrent requests limitation. - WACS provides more flexibility and controls to the developers. For example, we can RDP to the virtual machines of our worker role instances. - WACS provides the service configuration features which can be changed when the role is running. - WACS provides more scaling capability than WAWS. In WAWS we can have at most 3 reserved instances per web site while in WACS we can have up to 20 instances in a subscription. - Since when using WACS worker role we starts the node by ourselves in a process, we can control the input, output and error stream. We can also control the version of Node.js.   Run Node.js in Worker Role Node.js can be started by just having its execution file. This means in Windows Azure, we can have a worker role with the “node.exe” and the Node.js source files, then start it in Run method of the worker role entry class. Let’s create a new windows azure project in Visual Studio and add a new worker role. Since we need our worker role execute the “node.exe” with our application code we need to add the “node.exe” into our project. Right click on the worker role project and add an existing item. By default the Node.js will be installed in the “Program Files\nodejs” folder so we can navigate there and add the “node.exe”. Then we need to create the entry code of Node.js. In WAWS the entry file must be named “server.js”, which is because it’s hosted by IIS and IISNode and IISNode only accept “server.js”. But here as we control everything we can choose any files as the entry code. For example, I created a new JavaScript file named “index.js” in project root. Since we created a C# Windows Azure project we cannot create a JavaScript file from the context menu “Add new item”. We have to create a text file, and then rename it to JavaScript extension. After we added these two files we should set their “Copy to Output Directory” property to “Copy Always”, or “Copy if Newer”. Otherwise they will not be involved in the package when deployed. Let’s paste a very simple Node.js code in the “index.js” as below. As you can see I created a web server listening at port 12345. 1: var http = require("http"); 2: var port = 12345; 3:  4: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 5: res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" }); 6: res.end("Hello World\n"); 7: }).listen(port); 8:  9: console.log("Server running at port %d", port); Then we need to start “node.exe” with this file when our worker role was started. This can be done in its Run method. I found the Node.js and entry JavaScript file name, and then create a new process to run it. Our worker role will wait for the process to be exited. If everything is OK once our web server was opened the process will be there listening for incoming requests, and should not be terminated. The code in worker role would be like this. 1: public override void Run() 2: { 3: // This is a sample worker implementation. Replace with your logic. 4: Trace.WriteLine("NodejsHost entry point called", "Information"); 5:  6: // retrieve the node.exe and entry node.js source code file name. 7: var node = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(@"%RoleRoot%\approot\node.exe"); 8: var js = "index.js"; 9:  10: // prepare the process starting of node.exe 11: var info = new ProcessStartInfo(node, js) 12: { 13: CreateNoWindow = false, 14: ErrorDialog = true, 15: WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Normal, 16: UseShellExecute = false, 17: WorkingDirectory = Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables(@"%RoleRoot%\approot") 18: }; 19: Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1}", node, js), "Information"); 20:  21: // start the node.exe with entry code and wait for exit 22: var process = Process.Start(info); 23: process.WaitForExit(); 24: } Then we can run it locally. In the computer emulator UI the worker role started and it executed the Node.js, then Node.js windows appeared. Open the browser to verify the website hosted by our worker role. Next let’s deploy it to azure. But we need some additional steps. First, we need to create an input endpoint. By default there’s no endpoint defined in a worker role. So we will open the role property window in Visual Studio, create a new input TCP endpoint to the port we want our website to use. In this case I will use 80. Even though we created a web server we should add a TCP endpoint of the worker role, since Node.js always listen on TCP instead of HTTP. And then changed the “index.js”, let our web server listen on 80. 1: var http = require("http"); 2: var port = 80; 3:  4: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 5: res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "text/plain" }); 6: res.end("Hello World\n"); 7: }).listen(port); 8:  9: console.log("Server running at port %d", port); Then publish it to Windows Azure. And then in browser we can see our Node.js website was running on WACS worker role. We may encounter an error if we tried to run our Node.js website on 80 port at local emulator. This is because the compute emulator registered 80 and map the 80 endpoint to 81. But our Node.js cannot detect this operation. So when it tried to listen on 80 it will failed since 80 have been used.   Use NPM Modules When we are using WAWS to host Node.js, we can simply install modules we need, and then just publish or upload all files to WAWS. But if we are using WACS worker role, we have to do some extra steps to make the modules work. Assuming that we plan to use “express” in our application. Firstly of all we should download and install this module through NPM command. But after the install finished, they are just in the disk but not included in the worker role project. If we deploy the worker role right now the module will not be packaged and uploaded to azure. Hence we need to add them to the project. On solution explorer window click the “Show all files” button, select the “node_modules” folder and in the context menu select “Include In Project”. But that not enough. We also need to make all files in this module to “Copy always” or “Copy if newer”, so that they can be uploaded to azure with the “node.exe” and “index.js”. This is painful step since there might be many files in a module. So I created a small tool which can update a C# project file, make its all items as “Copy always”. The code is very simple. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: if (args.Length < 1) 4: { 5: Console.WriteLine("Usage: copyallalways [project file]"); 6: return; 7: } 8:  9: var proj = args[0]; 10: File.Copy(proj, string.Format("{0}.bak", proj)); 11:  12: var xml = new XmlDocument(); 13: xml.Load(proj); 14: var nsManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(xml.NameTable); 15: nsManager.AddNamespace("pf", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"); 16:  17: // add the output setting to copy always 18: var contentNodes = xml.SelectNodes("//pf:Project/pf:ItemGroup/pf:Content", nsManager); 19: UpdateNodes(contentNodes, xml, nsManager); 20: var noneNodes = xml.SelectNodes("//pf:Project/pf:ItemGroup/pf:None", nsManager); 21: UpdateNodes(noneNodes, xml, nsManager); 22: xml.Save(proj); 23:  24: // remove the namespace attributes 25: var content = xml.InnerXml.Replace("<CopyToOutputDirectory xmlns=\"\">", "<CopyToOutputDirectory>"); 26: xml.LoadXml(content); 27: xml.Save(proj); 28: } 29:  30: static void UpdateNodes(XmlNodeList nodes, XmlDocument xml, XmlNamespaceManager nsManager) 31: { 32: foreach (XmlNode node in nodes) 33: { 34: var copyToOutputDirectoryNode = node.SelectSingleNode("pf:CopyToOutputDirectory", nsManager); 35: if (copyToOutputDirectoryNode == null) 36: { 37: var n = xml.CreateNode(XmlNodeType.Element, "CopyToOutputDirectory", null); 38: n.InnerText = "Always"; 39: node.AppendChild(n); 40: } 41: else 42: { 43: if (string.Compare(copyToOutputDirectoryNode.InnerText, "Always", true) != 0) 44: { 45: copyToOutputDirectoryNode.InnerText = "Always"; 46: } 47: } 48: } 49: } Please be careful when use this tool. I created only for demo so do not use it directly in a production environment. Unload the worker role project, execute this tool with the worker role project file name as the command line argument, it will set all items as “Copy always”. Then reload this worker role project. Now let’s change the “index.js” to use express. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3:  4: var port = 80; 5:  6: app.configure(function () { 7: }); 8:  9: app.get("/", function (req, res) { 10: res.send("Hello Node.js!"); 11: }); 12:  13: app.get("/User/:id", function (req, res) { 14: var id = req.params.id; 15: res.json({ 16: "id": id, 17: "name": "user " + id, 18: "company": "IGT" 19: }); 20: }); 21:  22: app.listen(port); Finally let’s publish it and have a look in browser.   Use Windows Azure SQL Database We can use Windows Azure SQL Database (a.k.a. WACD) from Node.js as well on worker role hosting. Since we can control the version of Node.js, here we can use x64 version of “node-sqlserver” now. This is better than if we host Node.js on WAWS since it only support x86. Just install the “node-sqlserver” module from NPM, copy the “sqlserver.node” from “Build\Release” folder to “Lib” folder. Include them in worker role project and run my tool to make them to “Copy always”. Finally update the “index.js” to use WASD. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var sql = require("node-sqlserver"); 3:  4: var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=tcp:{SERVER NAME}.database.windows.net,1433;Database={DATABASE NAME};Uid={LOGIN}@{SERVER NAME};Pwd={PASSWORD};Encrypt=yes;Connection Timeout=30;"; 5: var port = 80; 6:  7: var app = express(); 8:  9: app.configure(function () { 10: app.use(express.bodyParser()); 11: }); 12:  13: app.get("/", function (req, res) { 14: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 15: if (err) { 16: console.log(err); 17: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 18: } 19: else { 20: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 21: if (err) { 22: console.log(err); 23: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 24: } 25: else { 26: res.json(results); 27: } 28: }); 29: } 30: }); 31: }); 32:  33: app.get("/text/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 34: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 35: if (err) { 36: console.log(err); 37: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 38: } 39: else { 40: var key = req.params.key; 41: var culture = req.params.culture; 42: var command = "SELECT * FROM [Resource] WHERE [Key] = '" + key + "' AND [Culture] = '" + culture + "'"; 43: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 44: if (err) { 45: console.log(err); 46: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 47: } 48: else { 49: res.json(results); 50: } 51: }); 52: } 53: }); 54: }); 55:  56: app.get("/sproc/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 57: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 58: if (err) { 59: console.log(err); 60: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 61: } 62: else { 63: var key = req.params.key; 64: var culture = req.params.culture; 65: var command = "EXEC GetItem '" + key + "', '" + culture + "'"; 66: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 67: if (err) { 68: console.log(err); 69: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 70: } 71: else { 72: res.json(results); 73: } 74: }); 75: } 76: }); 77: }); 78:  79: app.post("/new", function (req, res) { 80: var key = req.body.key; 81: var culture = req.body.culture; 82: var val = req.body.val; 83:  84: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 85: if (err) { 86: console.log(err); 87: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 88: } 89: else { 90: var command = "INSERT INTO [Resource] VALUES ('" + key + "', '" + culture + "', N'" + val + "')"; 91: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 92: if (err) { 93: console.log(err); 94: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 95: } 96: else { 97: res.send(200, "Inserted Successful"); 98: } 99: }); 100: } 101: }); 102: }); 103:  104: app.listen(port); Publish to azure and now we can see our Node.js is working with WASD through x64 version “node-sqlserver”.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to host our Node.js in Windows Azure Cloud Service worker role. By using worker role we can control the version of Node.js, as well as the entry code. And it’s possible to do some pre jobs before the Node.js application started. It also removed the IIS and IISNode limitation. I personally recommended to use worker role as our Node.js hosting. But there are some problem if you use the approach I mentioned here. The first one is, we need to set all JavaScript files and module files as “Copy always” or “Copy if newer” manually. The second one is, in this way we cannot retrieve the cloud service configuration information. For example, we defined the endpoint in worker role property but we also specified the listening port in Node.js hardcoded. It should be changed that our Node.js can retrieve the endpoint. But I can tell you it won’t be working here. In the next post I will describe another way to execute the “node.exe” and Node.js application, so that we can get the cloud service configuration in Node.js. I will also demonstrate how to use Windows Azure Storage from Node.js by using the Windows Azure Node.js SDK.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OAUG Collaborate 12

  - by Max Arderius

  Members of our E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group will be at the OAUG Collaborate 12 conference at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 22 to 26, 2012.  Please drop by any of our sessions to hear the latest news and meet up with us. Speaker Sessions Session 9675Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to 12.1 and BeyondAnne Carlson, Senior Director, Applications Technology Group, OracleSunday, April 22, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pmLocation: Jasmine B Attend this session to hear the latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade planning tips gleaned from customers who have already performed the upgrade. Youll get specific, cross-product advice on how to decide your project's scope, understand the factors that affect your project's duration, develop a robust testing strategy, leverage Oracle Support resources, and more. In a nutshell, this session tells you things you need to know before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. Session 9401Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance DowntimesElke Phelps, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleKevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, OracleSunday, April 22, 2:10 pm - 3:10 pmLocation: South Seas EThis session starts with an architecture review of Oracle E-Business Suite fundamentals and then moves to a practical view of the different tools and approaches for downtimes. Topics include patching shortcuts, merging patches, distributing worker processes across multiple servers, running ADPatch in no-interactive mode, staged APPL_TOPs, shared file systems, deferring system-wide database tasks, avoiding resource bottlenecks etc... This session also describes the online patching capabilities coming in Release 12.2. Session 9368Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and RoadmapLisa Parekh, Vice President, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Sunday, April 22, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pmLocation: South Seas EThis session provides an overview of Oracle E-Business Suite technology strategy, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, as well as a review of the product roadmap. As a cornerstone session for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, come hear about the latest usability enhancements, systems administration and configuration management tools, security-related updates, and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating the Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Session 10709Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Strategy and General Manager UpdateCliff Godwin, Sr. VP, Application Development, OracleMonday, April 23, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pmLocation: Mandalay Bay DIn this session, hear from Oracle E-Business Suite General Manager Cliff Godwin as he delivers an update on the Oracle E-Business Suite product line. The session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite applications, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle’s overall applications strategy. You will come away with an understanding of the value Oracle E-Business Suite applications deliver now and in the future. Session 9398How to Reduce TCO Using Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business SuiteAngelo Rosado, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleKenneth Baxter, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Management Pack Fusion Middleware Management, OracleTuesday, April 24, 8:00 am - 9:00 amLocation: Breakers GThis session covers the methods and tools you can use to gain insights into your end users, troubleshoot performance problems, define service-level objectives, and proactively monitor your end-to-end Oracle E-Business Suite environment to meet your availability and performance targets. Come hear how you can manage, diagnose, and monitor the Oracle E-Business Suite environment from a single console by using Oracle Enterprise Manager together with the Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. Session 9370 Coexistence of Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Applications: Platform Perspective Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy, Oracle Tuesday, April 24, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Location: South Seas E Join us at this session if you are wondering which tools to integrate your data, your processes and your User Interface. Or what tools to customize and extend your screens and reports (OAF, Forms, ADF, Oracle Reports, BI etc....), what tools to secure, protect and manage your Oracle E-Business Suite etc... Or simply if you are looking for a technical roadmap for your Oracle E-Business Suite infrastructure to CO-EXIST with the rest of your enterprise applications including Oracle Fusion Applications. Session 9375 Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Deployment and System AdministrationMax Arderius, Manager, Applications Development Group, OracleTuesday, April 24, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pmLocation: Breakers GWhat's coming in the next major version of Oracle E-Business Suite 12? This session covers the latest technology stack, including the use of Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database 11g Release 2. Topics include an architectural overview, installation and upgrade options, new configuration options, and new tools for hot-cloning and automated "lights out" cloning. Learn about how online patching will reduce your database patching downtimes to the time it takes to bounce your database server.Session 9369Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and RoadmapSteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Wednesday, April 25, 8:15 am - 9:15 amLocation: South Seas FThis Oracle Development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, including database releases/options, Java, Oracle Forms, Oracle Containers for J2EE, desktop OS, browsers, JRE releases, Office/OpenOffice, development and Web authoring tools, user authentication and management, BI, security options, clouds, Oracle VM etc.... It also covers the most-commonly-asked questions about technology stack component support dates and upgrade implications. Session 9407The Latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release User Interface and Usability EnhancementsGustavo Jimenez, Sr. Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Wednesday, April 25, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pmLocation: South Seas GIn this session, developers will get a detailed look at new features designed to enhance usability, offer more capabilities for personalization and extensions, and support the development and use of dashboards and Web services. Topics include rich new UI capabilities such as new home page features, Navigator and Favorites pull-down menus, Oracle ADF task flows etc.... In addition, we will cover the personalization/extensibility enhancements, business layer extensions, Oracle ADF integration and much more. Session 9374Best Practices for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance Tuning and Upgrade OptimizationIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, OracleUdayan Parvate, Director, Release Engineering, Quality and Release Management, Oracle Thursday, April 26, 8:30 am - 9:30 amLocation: South Seas FThis presentation will offer tips and techniques on tuning all the layers of the Oracle E-Business Suite stack including the various tiers of the Oracle E-Business Suite environment. You will learn about tuning Oracle Forms, Concurrent Manager, Apache, and Oracle Discoverer. Track down memory leaks and other issues on the Java and Java Virtual Machine layers. The session also covers Oracle E-Business Suite product-level tuning, including Oracle Workflow, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Payroll, and other modules.Session 9412 Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Desktop Integration: Beyond Oracle Applications Desktop IntegratorGustavo Jimenez, Sr. Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleThursday, April 26, 8:30 am - 9:30 amLocation: Breakers GThis session describes the new expanded functionality in Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator, Oracle Report Manager, and dedicated integrators. You have more options for desktop integration now, not fewer. Topics include an overview of prepackaged solutions for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel, Word, and Projects. The session also discusses how you can use the Desktop Integration Framework feature to create your own integrators quickly and easily.Session 9533 Upgrading your Customizations to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1Sara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Thursday, April 26, 11:00 am - 12:00 pmLocation: South Seas FHave you personalized Forms or OA Framework screens? Have you used mod_plsql or Applications Express to tailor your Release 11i functionality? Have you extended or customized your Release 11i environment using other tools? This session will help you understand customization scenarios, use cases, tools, and technologies for ensuring that your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 environment fits your users' needs closely and that any future customizations will be easy to upgrade. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Session 10535OAUG Database SIG- Part IMichael Brown, Colibri Limited Company Sunday, April 22, 3:20 pm - 4:20 pmLocation: South Seas FThis is the annual meeting of the Database SIG at Collaborate. The call for candidates for the chair will be closed at the meeting. Plans include a speaker from Oracle and a presentation on applications performance. The details of the meeting will be posted on http://www.dbsig.com. Guest Presentation: Oracle E-Business Suite Database PerformanceIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Session 10720OAUG EBS Applications Technology SIG- Part ISrini Chaval, Cummins Monday, April 23, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pmLocation: South Seas F Guest Presentation:Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification RoadmapSteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Session 10510OAUG EBS Applications Technology SIG- Part IISrini Chaval, CumminsMonday, April 23, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pmLocation: South Seas F Guest Presentation:Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Online Patching Kevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Session 10522 OAUG Upgrade SIG- Part IISandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Wednesday, April 25, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pmLocation: South Seas FUpgrade SIG will host a business meeting followed by panel (Q&A) related to EBS Upgrade topics and Oracle presentation. Guest Presentation:Upgrading E-Business Suite Amrita Mehrok, Director, Financials Product Strategy, Oracle Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy, Oracle Session 10722OAUG Upgrade SIG- Part IISandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Wednesday, April 25, 4:15 pm - 5:15 pmLocation: South Seas FUpgrade SIG will host a business meeting followed by panel (Q&A) related to EBS Upgrade topics and Oracle presentation. Guest Presentation:Tuning the Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade Isam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Panels Session 9360Oracle E-Business Suite Cloning PanelSandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Guest Speaker: Max Arderius, Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleWednesday, April 25, 9:30 am - 10:30 amLocation: South Seas FThis panel will discuss differences between available release 11i, R12 and R12.1 cloning methods. Advantages and disadvantages of each cloning method will be discussed in depth. This panel of experienced database administrators will lead a discussion focusing on the questions such as “which cloning method is best to use in your particular environment”. Attendees will gain practical knowledge, tips and tricks to assist with cloning of Oracle E-Business Suite release 11i, R12 and R12.1 environments. Session 10022Oracle Applications Tuning PanelMark Farnham, Rightsizing, Inc.Guest Speaker: Isam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, OracleThursday, April 26, 09:45 am - 10:45 amLocation: South Seas FThis applications performance panel session, sponsored by the OAUG Database SIG, provides a Q&A forum focused on helping you address your Oracle Applications (Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise and Siebel applications) performance- and scalability-related issues. The panel comprises several well-known Oracle Applications performance experts. Topic areas include Oracle Database; the network; and the applications tier, including patching and upgrade performance. For complete listing of all speaker sessions and other activities, please visit the OAUG Collaborate Web Site.

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• Calling Web Service Functions Asynchronously from a Web Page

  - by SGWellens

  Over on the Asp.Net forums where I moderate, a user had a problem calling a Web Service from a web page asynchronously. I tried his code on my machine and was able to reproduce the problem. I was able to solve his problem, but only after taking the long scenic route through some of the more perplexing nuances of Web Services and Proxies. Here is the fascinating story of that journey. Start with a simple Web Service     public class Service1 : System.Web.Services.WebService    {        [WebMethod]        public string HelloWorld()        {            // sleep 10 seconds            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10 * 1000);            return "Hello World";        }    } The 10 second delay is added to make calling an asynchronous function more apparent. If you don't call the function asynchronously, it takes about 10 seconds for the page to be rendered back to the client. If the call is made from a Windows Forms application, the application freezes for about 10 seconds. Add the web service to a web site. Right-click the project and select "Add Web Reference…" Next, create a web page to call the Web Service. Note: An asp.net web page that calls an 'Async' method must have the Async property set to true in the page's header: <%@ Page Language="C#"          AutoEventWireup="true"          CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs"          Inherits="_Default"           Async='true'  %> Here is the code to create the Web Service proxy and connect the event handler. Shrewdly, we make the proxy object a member of the Page class so it remains instantiated between the various events. public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page {    localhost.Service1 MyService;  // web service proxy     // ---- Page_Load ---------------------------------     protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyService = new localhost.Service1();        MyService.HelloWorldCompleted += EventHandler;          } Here is the code to invoke the web service and handle the event:     // ---- Async and EventHandler (delayed render) --------------------------     protected void ButtonHelloWorldAsync_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        // blocks        ODS("Pre HelloWorldAsync...");        MyService.HelloWorldAsync();        ODS("Post HelloWorldAsync");    }    public void EventHandler(object sender, localhost.HelloWorldCompletedEventArgs e)    {        ODS("EventHandler");        ODS("    " + e.Result);    }     // ---- ODS ------------------------------------------------    //    // Helper function: Output Debug String     public static void ODS(string Msg)    {        String Out = String.Format("{0}  {1}", DateTime.Now.ToString("hh:mm:ss.ff"), Msg);        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(Out);    } I added a utility function I use a lot: ODS (Output Debug String). Rather than include the library it is part of, I included it in the source file to keep this example simple. Fire up the project, open up a debug output window, press the button and we get this in the debug output window: 11:29:37.94 Pre HelloWorldAsync... 11:29:37.94 Post HelloWorldAsync 11:29:48.94 EventHandler 11:29:48.94 Hello World   Sweet. The asynchronous call was made and returned immediately. About 10 seconds later, the event handler fires and we get the result. Perfect….right? Not so fast cowboy. Watch the browser during the call: What the heck? The page is waiting for 10 seconds. Even though the asynchronous call returned immediately, Asp.Net is waiting for the event to fire before it renders the page. This is NOT what we wanted. I experimented with several techniques to work around this issue. Some may erroneously describe my behavior as 'hacking' but, since no ingesting of Twinkies was involved, I do not believe hacking is the appropriate term. If you examine the proxy that was automatically created, you will find a synchronous call to HelloWorld along with an additional set of methods to make asynchronous calls. I tried the other asynchronous method supplied in the proxy:     // ---- Begin and CallBack ----------------------------------     protected void ButtonBeginHelloWorld_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        ODS("Pre BeginHelloWorld...");        MyService.BeginHelloWorld(AsyncCallback, null);        ODS("Post BeginHelloWorld");    }    public void AsyncCallback(IAsyncResult ar)    {        String Result = MyService.EndHelloWorld(ar);         ODS("AsyncCallback");        ODS("    " + Result);    } The BeginHelloWorld function in the proxy requires a callback function as a parameter. I tested it and the debug output window looked like this: 04:40:58.57 Pre BeginHelloWorld... 04:40:58.57 Post BeginHelloWorld 04:41:08.58 AsyncCallback 04:41:08.58 Hello World It works the same as before except for one critical difference: The page rendered immediately after the function call. I was worried the page object would be disposed after rendering the page but the system was smart enough to keep the page object in memory to handle the callback. Both techniques have a use: Delayed Render: Say you want to verify a credit card, look up shipping costs and confirm if an item is in stock. You could have three web service calls running in parallel and not render the page until all were finished. Nice. You can send information back to the client as part of the rendered page when all the services are finished. Immediate Render: Say you just want to start a service running and return to the client. You can do that too. However, the page gets sent to the client before the service has finished running so you will not be able to update parts of the page when the service finishes running. Summary: YourFunctionAsync() and an EventHandler will not render the page until the handler fires. BeginYourFunction() and a CallBack function will render the page as soon as possible. I found all this to be quite interesting and did a lot of searching and researching for documentation on this subject….but there isn't a lot out there. The biggest clues are the parameters that can be sent to the WSDL.exe program: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7h3ystb6(VS.100).aspx Two parameters are oldAsync and newAsync. OldAsync will create the Begin/End functions; newAsync will create the Async/Event functions. Caveat: I haven't tried this but it was stated in this article. I'll leave confirming this as an exercise for the student J. Included Code: I'm including the complete test project I created to verify the findings. The project was created with VS 2008 SP1. There is a solution file with 3 projects, the 3 projects are: Web Service Asp.Net Application Windows Forms Application To decide which program runs, you right-click a project and select "Set as Startup Project". I created and played with the Windows Forms application to see if it would reveal any secrets. I found that in the Windows Forms application, the generated proxy did NOT include the Begin/Callback functions. Those functions are only generated for Asp.Net pages. Probably for the reasons discussed earlier. Maybe those Microsoft boys and girls know what they are doing. I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 30, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 30, 2010New ProjectsAcres2: This is the new hotnessAsoraX.de - AirlineTycoon: EntwicklungsPhase von AsoraX.deazshop: Ecommerce macros and user controls based on Commerce4Umbraco from Umbraco CMS Project.BioPhotoAnalyzer: Some exercises with F#, WPF and Mathematical methods for quantitative analysis of biological photos, such as those obtained from microscopy, PAGE etcCECS622 - Simulations - South Computing Center: This simulation will be used to study the traffic flow of the South Computing Center (SCC) on the UofL campus. Document.Viewer: Basic document viewer for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 that supports FlowDocument, Rich and Plan Text FormatsDotNetNuke 5 Thai Language Pack: DotNetNuke Thai Language PackDotNetNuke Skins Pack: We derive html/css template from www.freecsstemplates.org and apply to DotNetNuke 4 & 5 Skins Pack.Dynamics AX Business Intelligence: Sample code for creating and using Dynamics AX Business Intelligence Easy Chat: Very simple kind of chat; it got DOS interface. It's just to start the server start the client enter the IP, enter your name, and you're ready to go!Html Source Transmitter Control: This web control allows getting a source of a web page, that will displayed before submit. So, developer can store a view of the html page, that wa...HydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Server: HydroServer is a set of software applications for publishing hydrologic datasets on the Internet. HydroServer leverages commercial software such a...Lisp.NET: Lisp.NET is a project that demonstrates how the Embedded Common Lisp (ECL) environment can be loaded and used from .NET. This enables Common Lisp ...Live-Exchange Calendar Sync: Live - Exchange Calendar Sync synchronizes calendars of users between 2 Exchange servers (it can be Live Calendar also). It's developed in C#. It u...MaLoRT : Mac Lovin' RayTracer: RaytracerMojo Workflow Web UI: Mojo Workflow Web UIMoonRover - Enter Island: Simple Graphics consumer application that simulates Moon RoversMVC Music Store: MVC Music Store is a tutorial application built on ASP.NET MVC 2. It's a lightweight sample store which sells albums online, demonstrating ASP.NET ...OpenPOS: OpenPOS, a completely open and free point-of-sale systemPgcDemuxCLI: A modified version of PgcDemux (http://download.videohelp.com/jsoto/dvdtools.htm) that has better CLI support and progress reporting.Sample 01: basic summarySharedEx: App dev in VS2010 RTM and Silverlight 4.0 for Windows Phone 7!SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata WebPart: This SharePoint 2010 webpart creates a navigation control from a Managed Metadata column assigned to a list/library. The Termset the column relates...SharePoint 2010 Service Manager: The SharePoint Service manager let's you start and stop all the SharePoint 2010 services on your workstation. This is useful if you are running S...Sharp DOM: Sharp DOM is a view engine for ASP.NET MVC platform allowing developers to design extendable and maintenable dynamic HTML layouts using C# 4.0 lang...simple fx: simple framework written in javascriptSimpleGFC.NET: Simple GFC is a .NET library written in C# for simplifying the connection to Google Friend Connect. It is designed to be simple and concise, not a...SPSS & PSPP file library: Library for importing SPSS (now called PASW) & PSPP .sav datafiles, developed in C#. Support for writing and SPSS portable-files will be implemente...TailspinSpyworks - WebForms Sample Application: Tailspin Spyworks demonstrates how extraordinarily simple it is to create powerful, scalable applications for the .NET platform. It shows off how t...VividBed: Business website.卢融凯的个人主页: 卢融凯的个人主页New ReleasesAssemblyVerifier: 4.0.0.0 Release: Updated to target .NET 4.0Bricks' Bane: Bricks' Bane Editor v1.0.0.4: I've added functionality to the editor, after some personal use. Plus I fixed a bug that was occurring on file loading mostly when the file was mod...Dambach Linear Algebra Framework: Linear Algebra Framework - Sneak Peak: This is just to get the code out there into the hands of potential users and to elicit feedback.DevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: Social Budgeting Web Software, DevTreks alpha 4a: DevTreks calculators, analyzers, and story tellers are being upgraded so that they can be extended by third parties using either add-ins (Managed ...DirectQ: Release 1.8.3c: Fixes some more late-breaking bugs and adds some optimizations from the forthcoming 1.8.4 release. No Windows 98 build this time. I may add one a...Document Assembly from a SharePoint Library using the Open XML SDK: Solution for March 2010 rel of the Open XML SDK: Microsoft changed some class names between the December 2009 CTP and the March 2010 release of the Open XML SDK which means that old solution will ...Document.Viewer: 0.9.0: Whats New?: New icon set Bug fix'sDotNetNuke Skins Pack: DNN 80 Skins Pack: This released is the first for DNN 4 & 5 with Skin Token Design (legacy skin support on DNN 4 & 5)DotNetWinService: Release 1.0.0.0: This release includes four different scheduled tasks: 1) TaskURL: Petition a specific URL: when working on a ASP.NET website, it's sometimes ...Hammock for REST: Hammock v1.0.1: v1.0.1 ChangesFixes to improve OAuth stability Fixes for asynchronous timeouts Fixes and simplification for retries v1.0 FeaturesSimple, clean...Home Access Plus+: v4.1.1: v4.1.1 Change Log: Added Enable for Booking Resource to allow Resources to be disabled but not deleted Updated HAP.Config for above File Changes...HouseFly controls: HouseFly controls alpha 0.9.6.0: HouseFly controls release 0.9.6.0 alphaHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Server: ODM Data Loader 1.1.3: Version 1.1.3 of the ODM Data Loader is only compatible with version 1.1 of ODM This Version Addresses : Memory issues in Version 1.1.2 that were ...Jobping Url Shortener: Source Code v0.1: Source code for the 0.1 release.LinkedIn® for Windows Mobile: LinkedIn for Windows Mobile v0.6: Fixed the crash after accepting the use of internet access.mojoPortal: 2.3.4.3: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2343-released.aspxMoonRover - Enter Island: Moon Rover: Simulates Rover Moves on MoonNanoPrompt: Release 0.4.1 - Beta 1.1: Now released: Beta 1.1 for .NET 4.0ORAYLIS BI.SmartDiff: Release 1.0.0: see change log for detailsQuickStart Engine (3D Game Engine for XNA): QuickStart Engine v0.22: Main FeaturesClean engine architecture Makes it easy to make your own game using the engine. Messaging system allows you to communicate between s...SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata WebPart: Taxonomy WebPart 0.0.1: Initial version releasedSharePoint 2010 Service Manager: SharePoint Service Manager 2010 v1: Starts and stops all SharePoint services Works with both Microsoft SQL Server and SQL Server Express Edition (for SharePoint) Supports disablin...Shweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with Pex: Shweet RTM Release: Shweet has been updated to work with the RTM of SharePoint and the latest version of Pex Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools. Know issues: Continuous I...Silverlight Testing Automation Tool: StatLight v1.0 - Beta 1: Things still to accomplish (before official v1 release)Item # 10716: Release build hangs on x64 machine Still awaiting UnitDriven change feedback...SPSS & PSPP file library: 0.1 alpha: This first test release allows to read an .sav SPSS/PSPP/PASW file and retreive the data, either in the form of a .net DataReader or as a custom Sp...SqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data Sources: SqlDiffFramework 1.0.0.0: Initial Public Release Requirements: .NET Framework 2.0 SqlDiffFramework is designed for the enterprise! Check with your system administrator (or...sqwarea: Sqwarea 0.0.210.0 (alpha): First public release. Deploy package contains : the documentation for classes. the azure package with the Web Role. the zip with assemblies wh...Sweeper: Sweeper Alpha 2: SweeperA Visual Studio Add-in for C# Code Formatting - Visual Studio 2008 Includes: A UI for options, Enable or disable any specific task you want ...TailspinSpyworks - WebForms Sample Application: TailspinSpyworks-v0.8: ASP.NET 4 ECommerce ApplicationTweetSharp: TweetSharp Release Candidate: New FeaturesComplete core rewrite for stability and speed, introducing Hammock http://hammock.codeplex.com Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 4 OOB (El...Wicked Compression ASP.NET HTTP Module: Wicked Compression ASP.NET HTTP Module Beta: Now supports AJAX from .NET Framework 2.0 through 4.0! Bug Fix for Excluded Paths! Binary Release Included for .NET Framework 2.0 through 4.0!Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)iTuner - The iTunes CompanionASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ServerGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationParticle Plot Pivotpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceSqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data SourcesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleN2 CMS

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• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Providers

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction This will be the first of a number of posts on ASP.NET extensibility. At this moment I don’t know exactly how many will be and I only know a couple of subjects that I want to talk about, so more will come in the next days. I have the sensation that the providers offered by ASP.NET are not widely know, although everyone uses, for example, sessions, they may not be aware of the extensibility points that Microsoft included. This post won’t go into details of how to configure and extend each of the providers, but will hopefully give some pointers on that direction. Canonical These are the most widely known and used providers, coming from ASP.NET 1, chances are, you have used them already. Good support for invoking client side, either from a .NET application or from JavaScript. Lots of server-side controls use them, such as the Login control for example. Membership The Membership provider is responsible for managing registered users, including creating new ones, authenticating them, changing passwords, etc. ASP.NET comes with two implementations, one that uses a SQL Server database and another that uses the Active Directory. The base class is Membership and new providers are registered on the membership section on the Web.config file, as well as parameters for specifying minimum password lengths, complexities, maximum age, etc. One reason for creating a custom provider would be, for example, storing membership information in a different database engine. 1: <membership defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 4: </providers> 5: </membership> Role The Role provider assigns roles to authenticated users. The base class is Role and there are three out of the box implementations: XML-based, SQL Server and Windows-based. Also registered on Web.config through the roleManager section, where you can also say if your roles should be cached on a cookie. If you want your roles to come from a different place, implement a custom provider. 1: <roleManager defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> 4: </providers> 5: </roleManager> Profile The Profile provider allows defining a set of properties that will be tied and made available to authenticated or even anonymous ones, which must be tracked by using anonymous authentication. The base class is Profile and the only included implementation stores these settings in a SQL Server database. Configured through profile section, where you also specify the properties to make available, a custom provider would allow storing these properties in different locations. 1: <profile defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 4: </providers> 5: </profile> Basic OK, I didn’t know what to call these, so Basic is probably as good as a name as anything else. Not supported client-side (doesn’t even make sense). Session The Session provider allows storing data tied to the current “session”, which is normally created when a user first accesses the site, even when it is not yet authenticated, and remains all the way. The base class and only included implementation is SessionStateStoreProviderBase and it is capable of storing data in one of three locations: In the process memory (default, not suitable for web farms or increased reliability); A SQL Server database (best for reliability and clustering); The ASP.NET State Service, which is a Windows Service that is installed with the .NET Framework (ok for clustering). The configuration is made through the sessionState section. By adding a custom Session provider, you can store the data in different locations – think for example of a distributed cache. 1: <sessionState customProvider=”MyProvider”> 2: <providers> 3: <add name=”MyProvider” type=”MyClass, MyAssembly” /> 4: </providers> 5: </sessionState> Resource A not so known provider, allows you to change the origin of localized resource elements. By default, these come from RESX files and are used whenever you use the Resources expression builder or the GetGlobalResourceObject and GetLocalResourceObject methods, but if you implement a custom provider, you can have these elements come from some place else, such as a database. The base class is ResourceProviderFactory and there’s only one internal implementation which uses these RESX files. Configuration is through the globalization section. 1: <globalization resourceProviderFactoryType="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Health Monitoring Health Monitoring is also probably not so well known, and actually not a good name for it. First, in order to understand what it does, you have to know that ASP.NET fires “events” at specific times and when specific things happen, such as when logging in, an exception is raised. These are not user interface events and you can create your own and fire them, nothing will happen, but the Health Monitoring provider will detect it. You can configure it to do things when certain conditions are met, such as a number of events being fired in a certain amount of time. You define these rules and route them to a specific provider, which must inherit from WebEventProvider. Out of the box implementations include sending mails, logging to a SQL Server database, writing to the Windows Event Log, Windows Management Instrumentation, the IIS 7 Trace infrastructure or the debugger Trace. Its configuration is achieved by the healthMonitoring section and a reason for implementing a custom provider would be, for example, locking down a web application in the event of a significant number of failed login attempts occurring in a small period of time. 1: <healthMonitoring> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 4: </providers> 5: </healthMonitoring> Sitemap The Sitemap provider allows defining the site’s navigation structure and associated required permissions for each node, in a tree-like fashion. Usually this is statically defined, and the included provider allows it, by supplying this structure in a Web.sitemap XML file. The base class is SiteMapProvider and you can extend it in order to supply you own source for the site’s structure, which may even be dynamic. Its configuration must be done through the siteMap section. 1: <siteMap defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers><add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> 3: </providers> 4: </siteMap> Web Part Personalization Web Parts are better known by SharePoint users, but since ASP.NET 2.0 they are included in the core Framework. Web Parts are server-side controls that offer certain possibilities of configuration by clients visiting the page where they are located. The infrastructure handles this configuration per user or globally for all users and this provider is responsible for just that. The base class is PersonalizationProvider and the only included implementation stores settings on SQL Server. Add new providers through the personalization section. 1: <webParts> 2: <personalization defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 3: <providers> 4: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 5: </providers> 6: </personalization> 7: </webParts> Build The Build provider is responsible for compiling whatever files are present on your web folder. There’s a base class, BuildProvider, and, as can be expected, internal implementations for building pages (ASPX), master pages (Master), user web controls (ASCX), handlers (ASHX), themes (Skin), XML Schemas (XSD), web services (ASMX, SVC), resources (RESX), browser capabilities files (Browser) and so on. You would write a build provider if you wanted to generate code from any kind of non-code file so that you have strong typing at development time. Configuration goes on the buildProviders section and it is per extension. 1: <buildProviders> 2: <add extension=".ext" type="MyClass, MyAssembly” /> 3: </buildProviders> New in ASP.NET 4 Not exactly new since they exist since 2010, but in ASP.NET terms, still new. Output Cache The Output Cache for ASPX pages and ASCX user controls is now extensible, through the Output Cache provider, which means you can implement a custom mechanism for storing and retrieving cached data, for example, in a distributed fashion. The base class is OutputCacheProvider and the only implementation is private. Configuration goes on the outputCache section and on each page and web user control you can choose the provider you want to use. 1: <caching> 2: <outputCache defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 3: <providers> 4: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 5: </providers> 6: </outputCache> 7: </caching> Request Validation A big change introduced in ASP.NET 4 (and refined in 4.5, by the way) is the introduction of extensible request validation, by means of a Request Validation provider. This means we are not limited to either enabling or disabling event validation for all pages or for a specific page, but we now have fine control over each of the elements of the request, including cookies, headers, query string and form values. The base provider class is RequestValidator and the configuration goes on the httpRuntime section. 1: <httpRuntime requestValidationType="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Browser Capabilities The Browser Capabilities provider is new in ASP.NET 4, although the concept exists from ASP.NET 2. The idea is to map a browser brand and version to its supported capabilities, such as JavaScript version, Flash support, ActiveX support, and so on. Previously, this was all hardcoded in .Browser files located in %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework(64)\vXXXXX\Config\Browsers, but now you can have a class inherit from HttpCapabilitiesProvider and implement your own mechanism. Register in on the browserCaps section. 1: <browserCaps provider="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Encoder The Encoder provider is responsible for encoding every string that is sent to the browser on a page or header. This includes for example converting special characters for their standard codes and is implemented by the base class HttpEncoder. Another implementation takes care of Anti Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. Build your own by inheriting from one of these classes if you want to add some additional processing to these strings. The configuration will go on the httpRuntime section. 1: <httpRuntime encoderType="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Conclusion That’s about it for ASP.NET providers. It was by no means a thorough description, but I hope I managed to raise your interest on this subject. There are lots of pointers on the Internet, so I only included direct references to the Framework classes and configuration sections. Stay tuned for more extensibility!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 04, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 04, 2010New Projects23 Umbraco addons: 23 Umbraco addonsAdd-ons for EPiServer Relate+: In the Add-ons for EPiServer Relate+ you will find add-ons, extensions and modules that work together with EPiServer Relate+.Advanced Mail Merge (AMM) for Microsoft Office: Advanced Mail Merge for Microsoft Word 2007/2010, offers great extensable functionality: - Merge to document (PDF) - Merge to attachment - Use Out...Cenobith RLS Sample: Simple implementation of Row Level Security for Microsoft SQL ServerCodingWheels.DataTypes: DataTypes tries to make it easier for developers to have concrete typesafe objects for working with many common forms of data. Many times these dat...DigitArchive: Digit Archive makes it easy for the DIGIT magazine readers to find the correct software or movie bundled in the media along with the magazine. You'...dNet.DB: dNetDB is a .net framework that simplifies model and data access by providing a database independent object-based persistence, where objects are pe...Dynamic Application Framework: The Dynamic Application Framework provides a highly flexible environment for creating applications. Multiple UI and Execution Environments, along w...ECoG: ECoG toolkitFB Toolkit with Contracts: This is a research project where I have inserted code contracts into the Facebook Toolkit source code., version 3.1 beta. This delivers an efficien...GeneCMS: GeneCMS allows users to generate static HTML based websites by offering an ASP.NET editing front-end that can be run in the local machine. It is ta...HooIzDat: HooIzDat is game that asks, who the heck is that?! It's a two player game where your task is to guess your opponent's person before he or she guess...JingQiao.Interacting: JingQiao Interacting MessagingKanbanBoard: Visual task board for Kanban and Scrum.Learning CSharp: Just Learning CSharpMammoth: mammothMapWindow Mobile: MapWindow Mobile is mobile GIS Software which can run on windows mobile, developed in C# .NET Compact Framework. It provides basic GIS functionalit...Mindless Setback: Setback is a card game popular in New England. This project uses a combination of brute force and Monte Carlo methods to play Setback. This is an e...MSNCore(DirectUI) Element Viewer: MSNCore Element Viewer is an application designed to enumerate the elements with in applications built with MSNCore.dll and UXCore.dll. This appli...MSVN Team: bài tập thầy lườngNugget: Web Socket Server: A web socket server implemented in c#. The goal of the projects is to create an easy way to start using HTML5 web sockets in .NET web applications.oSoft ColorPicker Control for Visual Studio 2010: oSoft ColorPicker is an user control that can be used instead of the ColorDialog when you want to allow your users to select a color in a windows f...Prism Software Factory: The Prism Software Factory is a software factory for Visual Studio 2010 assisting developers in the process of building WPF & Silverlight applicati...Project Lion: Project lion is forum developed in Silverlight technology. Refix - .NET dependency management: Refix is an attempt to solve the problem of binary dependency management in large .NET solutions. It will achieve the goal using (amongst other thi...Rich Task List: Rich Task List is a tutorial project for DotNetNuke Module Development.SharePoint PowerRSS: Easy/Clean way to get SharePoint list data via more standard RSS feed. I found CleanRSS.aspx as part of SPRSS: Enhanced RSS Functionality for WSS ...SOAPI - StackOverflow API Generator: Generates, directly from the self documenting StackOverflow API specification, an end-to-end, fully documented API wrapper library with Visual Stu...SQL Script Application Utility: This C# project allows you to apply scripts to a database for table creation, data creation, etc. You can keep DDL in separate SQL scripts which c...Sql Server Reports Viewer: Sql Server Reports Viewer makes it easier to render Sql Server Reports without the need to setup a SSRS Server. This makes deployments a breeze. ...StorageHD: StorageHD system for large video filesUrzaGatherer: UrzaGatherer is a WPF 4.0 client application to handle Magic The Gathering cards collections. You can manage expansions, blocks and all informatio...webrel: This tool executes simple relational algebra expressions. It is useful for learning of Database course. Javascript and xhtml is used to develop thi...World Wide Grab: World Wide Grab allows retrieval and integration of various semi-structured data sorces, expecially Web applications. It turns every available res...New Releases3FD - Framework For Fast Development (C++): Alpha 3: This release was compiled in Visual Studio Release mode. It means you can use it in whatever compiler you want. However, the compatibility with ano...Advanced Mail Merge (AMM) for Microsoft Office: Advanced MailMerge 2007.zip: Release 1.1.0.0Army Bodger: Bodger 3 Archetype Test: Ok so it's later and I've largely finished it. Right now the Space Wolves have their Troops written and one HQ unit. The equipment panel largely wo...AwesomiumDotNet: AwesomiumDotNet 1.6 beta: Preview of AwesomiumDotNet 1.6.Bojinx: Bojinx Core V4.6: New features in this release: Greatly improved logging for INFO and DEBUG. Improved the getClassName function in ObjectUtils. Added the ability ...Cenobith RLS Sample: Sample App: Change connection strings in App.config and Web.config files.Christoc's DotNetNuke C# Module Development Template: 00.00.02: A minor update from the original release with a few fixes including Localization and some updated documentation.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V25: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...DEWD: DEWD for Umbraco v1.0: Beta release of the package. Functional feature set and fairly stable. Since the alpha: Validation on input fields Custom view controls Ability...DotNetNuke Developers Help File: DNNHelpSystem 05.04.02: Release of the developer core API help documentation of DotNetNuke in MSDN style format, both as .CHM stand alone file as well as a html website ba...Drive Backup: Drive Backup V.0604: This release includes the following fixes/features: * Fixed incompatibility with some USB drives (those marked as “fixed” by Windows) * Ad...Event Scavenger: Version 3.3 (Refresh): Archiving bit added to database plus archiving stored procedure updated. Rest of items just refreshed. Database set to version 3.3Expression Encoder Batch Processor: Expression Batch v0.3: Now set the newly-converted file's Created DateTime to equal the source file's. This helps keep your videos sorterd chronologically in media librar...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.6.1: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.6.1), with Mini-Menu bug fixes and 'Help' feature - all the instructions needed to use the software (If y...Genesis Smart Client Framework: Genesis v2.0 - Ruby User Experience Platform (UXP): This is the start of the rewrite of the entire framework. The rewrite will include support for XAML through WPF and Silverlight, WCF, Workflow Serv...Global: http requester tool: Added a brnad new console app for making http requests.GMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & Presentation: Hot Build: this is latest change-set build, unstable previewHERB.IQ: Alpha 0.1 Source code release 4: As of 6-23-10 @ 9:48ESTInfragistics Analytics Framework: Infragistics Analytics Framework 1.0: This project includes wrappers for the Infragistics controls that integrate with the recently launched Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. T...Innovative Games: Cube Mapper: Cube Mapper is a small tool that takes in six textures and outputs a cube map that is a combination of the six textures. Cube Mapper supports .tga...jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services: SPServices 0.5.6: This release is in an alpha state. Please only download it if you know what you are getting and are willing to test it. In any case, it's a bad ide...linq to jquery: jlinq v1.00 no doc: First public version of jlinq! no doc yet, soon too come!LinqSpecs: Version 1.0.1: Fabio Maulo has sent several patchs in order to make LinqSpecs to work with any linq provider other than in memory. Big KUDOS for him.mojoPortal: 2.3.4.4: see release notes on mojoportal.com Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on ...Nugget: Web Socket Server: Initial POC release: The initial proof of concept release. To try it out, open the Sample App.sln, set the ChatServer project as the start-up project, start debugging ...oSoft ColorPicker Control for Visual Studio 2010: oSoft ColorPicker Control for VS 2010 Beta 1: Beta 1Refix - .NET dependency management: Refix v0.1.0.48 ALPHA: First preview version of Refix command-line tool.SharePoint 2010 CSV Bulk Term Set Importer: Bulk Term Set Importer: Initial ReleaseSOAPI - StackOverflow API Generator: SOAPI Wrappers: SOAPI-JS First release as SOAPI-JS, SOAPI-CS coming shortly. Tests and example includedSQL Compact Toolbox: Beta 0.8.1: Initial test release - mind the bumps. Requires Visual Studio 2010.Thumb nail creator and image resizer: ThumbnailCreator1.2: this release fixes and issue that was occuring when the control was used inside paged dataTS3QueryLib.Net: TS3QueryLib.Net Version 0.23.17.0: Changelog Added Properties "IsSpacer" and "SpacerInfo" to ChannelListEntry. "IsSpacer" allows you to check whether the channel is a spacer channel ...UI Accessibility Checker: UI Accessibility Checker v.2.0: We are excited to announce the release of AccChecker 2.0! In addition to numerous bug fixes and usability improvements, these major features have...webrel: webrel 1.0: webrel 1.0WindStyle SlugHelper for Windows Live Writer: 1.2.0.0: 增加：可以配置是否忽略已经包含slug的日志，请在插件选项中配置； 增加：插件图标； 更新：支持最新Windows Live Writer，版本号14.0.8117.416。Work Recorder - Hold on own time!: WorkRecorder 1.1: +Only one instance can run #Change histogram to pie chartMost Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)PHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeRawrIonics Isapi Rewrite Filterpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationN2 CMSBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineMain projectMirror Testing System

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• Basic Spatial Data with SQL Server and Entity Framework 5.0

  - by Rick Strahl

  In my most recent project we needed to do a bit of geo-spatial referencing. While spatial features have been in SQL Server for a while using those features inside of .NET applications hasn't been as straight forward as could be, because .NET natively doesn't support spatial types. There are workarounds for this with a few custom project like SharpMap or a hack using the Sql Server specific Geo types found in the Microsoft.SqlTypes assembly that ships with SQL server. While these approaches work for manipulating spatial data from .NET code, they didn't work with database access if you're using Entity Framework. Other ORM vendors have been rolling their own versions of spatial integration. In Entity Framework 5.0 running on .NET 4.5 the Microsoft ORM finally adds support for spatial types as well. In this post I'll describe basic geography features that deal with single location and distance calculations which is probably the most common usage scenario. SQL Server Transact-SQL Syntax for Spatial Data Before we look at how things work with Entity framework, lets take a look at how SQL Server allows you to use spatial data to get an understanding of the underlying semantics. The following SQL examples should work with SQL 2008 and forward. Let's start by creating a test table that includes a Geography field and also a pair of Long/Lat fields that demonstrate how you can work with the geography functions even if you don't have geography/geometry fields in the database. Here's the CREATE command:CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Geo]( [id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [Location] [geography] NULL, [Long] [float] NOT NULL, [Lat] [float] NOT NULL ) Now using plain SQL you can insert data into the table using geography::STGeoFromText SQL CLR function:insert into Geo( Location , long, lat ) values ( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(-121.527200 45.712113)', 4326), -121.527200, 45.712113 ) insert into Geo( Location , long, lat ) values ( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(-121.517265 45.714240)', 4326), -121.517265, 45.714240 ) insert into Geo( Location , long, lat ) values ( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(-121.511536 45.714825)', 4326), -121.511536, 45.714825) The STGeomFromText function accepts a string that points to a geometric item (a point here but can also be a line or path or polygon and many others). You also need to provide an SRID (Spatial Reference System Identifier) which is an integer value that determines the rules for how geography/geometry values are calculated and returned. For mapping/distance functionality you typically want to use 4326 as this is the format used by most mapping software and geo-location libraries like Google and Bing. The spatial data in the Location field is stored in binary format which looks something like this: Once the location data is in the database you can query the data and do simple distance computations very easily. For example to calculate the distance of each of the values in the database to another spatial point is very easy to calculate. Distance calculations compare two points in space using a direct line calculation. For our example I'll compare a new point to all the points in the database. Using the Location field the SQL looks like this:-- create a source point DECLARE @s geography SET @s = geography:: STGeomFromText('POINT(-121.527200 45.712113)' , 4326); --- return the ids select ID, Location as Geo , Location .ToString() as Point , @s.STDistance( Location) as distance from Geo order by distance The code defines a new point which is the base point to compare each of the values to. You can also compare values from the database directly, but typically you'll want to match a location to another location and determine the difference for which you can use the geography::STDistance function. This query produces the following output: The STDistance function returns the straight line distance between the passed in point and the point in the database field. The result for SRID 4326 is always in meters. Notice that the first value passed was the same point so the difference is 0. The other two points are two points here in town in Hood River a little ways away - 808 and 1256 meters respectively. Notice also that you can order the result by the resulting distance, which effectively gives you results that are ordered radially out from closer to further away. This is great for searches of points of interest near a central location (YOU typically!). These geolocation functions are also available to you if you don't use the Geography/Geometry types, but plain float values. It's a little more work, as each point has to be created in the query using the string syntax, but the following code doesn't use a geography field but produces the same result as the previous query.--- using float fields select ID, geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(' + STR (long, 15,7 ) + ' ' + Str(lat ,15, 7) + ')' , 4326), geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(' + STR (long, 15,7 ) + ' ' + Str(lat ,15, 7) + ')' , 4326). ToString(), @s.STDistance( geography::STGeomFromText ('POINT(' + STR(long ,15, 7) + ' ' + Str(lat ,15, 7) + ')' , 4326)) as distance from geo order by distance Spatial Data in the Entity Framework Prior to Entity Framework 5.0 on .NET 4.5 consuming of the data above required using stored procedures or raw SQL commands to access the spatial data. In Entity Framework 5 however, Microsoft introduced the new DbGeometry and DbGeography types. These immutable location types provide a bunch of functionality for manipulating spatial points using geometry functions which in turn can be used to do common spatial queries like I described in the SQL syntax above. The DbGeography/DbGeometry types are immutable, meaning that you can't write to them once they've been created. They are a bit odd in that you need to use factory methods in order to instantiate them - they have no constructor() and you can't assign to properties like Latitude and Longitude. Creating a Model with Spatial Data Let's start by creating a simple Entity Framework model that includes a Location property of type DbGeography: public class GeoLocationContext : DbContext { public DbSet<GeoLocation> Locations { get; set; } } public class GeoLocation { public int Id { get; set; } public DbGeography Location { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } } That's all there's to it. When you run this now against SQL Server, you get a Geography field for the Location property, which looks the same as the Location field in the SQL examples earlier. Adding Spatial Data to the Database Next let's add some data to the table that includes some latitude and longitude data. An easy way to find lat/long locations is to use Google Maps to pinpoint your location, then right click and click on What's Here. Click on the green marker to get the GPS coordinates. To add the actual geolocation data create an instance of the GeoLocation type and use the DbGeography.PointFromText() factory method to create a new point to assign to the Location property:[TestMethod] public void AddLocationsToDataBase() { var context = new GeoLocationContext(); // remove all context.Locations.ToList().ForEach( loc => context.Locations.Remove(loc)); context.SaveChanges(); var location = new GeoLocation() { // Create a point using native DbGeography Factory method Location = DbGeography.PointFromText( string.Format("POINT({0} {1})", -121.527200,45.712113) ,4326), Address = "301 15th Street, Hood River" }; context.Locations.Add(location); location = new GeoLocation() { Location = CreatePoint(45.714240, -121.517265), Address = "The Hatchery, Bingen" }; context.Locations.Add(location); location = new GeoLocation() { // Create a point using a helper function (lat/long) Location = CreatePoint(45.708457, -121.514432), Address = "Kaze Sushi, Hood River" }; context.Locations.Add(location); location = new GeoLocation() { Location = CreatePoint(45.722780, -120.209227), Address = "Arlington, OR" }; context.Locations.Add(location); context.SaveChanges(); } As promised, a DbGeography object has to be created with one of the static factory methods provided on the type as the Location.Longitude and Location.Latitude properties are read only. Here I'm using PointFromText() which uses a "Well Known Text" format to specify spatial data. In the first example I'm specifying to create a Point from a longitude and latitude value, using an SRID of 4326 (just like earlier in the SQL examples). You'll probably want to create a helper method to make the creation of Points easier to avoid that string format and instead just pass in a couple of double values. Here's my helper called CreatePoint that's used for all but the first point creation in the sample above:public static DbGeography CreatePoint(double latitude, double longitude) { var text = string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.NumberFormat, "POINT({0} {1})", longitude, latitude); // 4326 is most common coordinate system used by GPS/Maps return DbGeography.PointFromText(text, 4326); } Using the helper the syntax becomes a bit cleaner, requiring only a latitude and longitude respectively. Note that my method intentionally swaps the parameters around because Latitude and Longitude is the common format I've seen with mapping libraries (especially Google Mapping/Geolocation APIs with their LatLng type). When the context is changed the data is written into the database using the SQL Geography type which looks the same as in the earlier SQL examples shown. Querying Once you have some location data in the database it's now super easy to query the data and find out the distance between locations. A common query is to ask for a number of locations that are near a fixed point - typically your current location and order it by distance. Using LINQ to Entities a query like this is easy to construct:[TestMethod] public void QueryLocationsTest() { var sourcePoint = CreatePoint(45.712113, -121.527200); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); // find any locations within 5 kilometers ordered by distance var matches = context.Locations .Where(loc => loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) < 5000) .OrderBy( loc=> loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) ) .Select( loc=> new { Address = loc.Address, Distance = loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) }); Assert.IsTrue(matches.Count() > 0); foreach (var location in matches) { Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1:n0} meters)", location.Address, location.Distance); } } This example produces: 301 15th Street, Hood River (0 meters)The Hatchery, Bingen (809 meters)Kaze Sushi, Hood River (1,074 meters)   The first point in the database is the same as my source point I'm comparing against so the distance is 0. The other two are within the 5 mile radius, while the Arlington location which is 65 miles or so out is not returned. The result is ordered by distance from closest to furthest away. In the code, I first create a source point that is the basis for comparison. The LINQ query then selects all locations that are within 5km of the source point using the Location.Distance() function, which takes a source point as a parameter. You can either use a pre-defined value as I'm doing here, or compare against another database DbGeography property (say when you have to points in the same database for things like routes). What's nice about this query syntax is that it's very clean and easy to read and understand. You can calculate the distance and also easily order by the distance to provide a result that shows locations from closest to furthest away which is a common scenario for any application that places a user in the context of several locations. It's now super easy to accomplish this. Meters vs. Miles As with the SQL Server functions, the Distance() method returns data in meters, so if you need to work with miles or feet you need to do some conversion. Here are a couple of helpers that might be useful (can be found in GeoUtils.cs of the sample project):/// <summary> /// Convert meters to miles /// </summary> /// <param name="meters"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static double MetersToMiles(double? meters) { if (meters == null) return 0F; return meters.Value * 0.000621371192; } /// <summary> /// Convert miles to meters /// </summary> /// <param name="miles"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static double MilesToMeters(double? miles) { if (miles == null) return 0; return miles.Value * 1609.344; } Using these two helpers you can query on miles like this:[TestMethod] public void QueryLocationsMilesTest() { var sourcePoint = CreatePoint(45.712113, -121.527200); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); // find any locations within 5 miles ordered by distance var fiveMiles = GeoUtils.MilesToMeters(5); var matches = context.Locations .Where(loc => loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) <= fiveMiles) .OrderBy(loc => loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint)) .Select(loc => new { Address = loc.Address, Distance = loc.Location.Distance(sourcePoint) }); Assert.IsTrue(matches.Count() > 0); foreach (var location in matches) { Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1:n1} miles)", location.Address, GeoUtils.MetersToMiles(location.Distance)); } } which produces: 301 15th Street, Hood River (0.0 miles)The Hatchery, Bingen (0.5 miles)Kaze Sushi, Hood River (0.7 miles) Nice 'n simple. .NET 4.5 Only Note that DbGeography and DbGeometry are exclusive to Entity Framework 5.0 (not 4.4 which ships in the same NuGet package or installer) and requires .NET 4.5. That's because the new DbGeometry and DbGeography (and related) types are defined in the 4.5 version of System.Data.Entity which is a CLR assembly and is only updated by major versions of .NET. Why this decision was made to add these types to System.Data.Entity rather than to the frequently updated EntityFramework assembly that would have possibly made this work in .NET 4.0 is beyond me, especially given that there are no native .NET framework spatial types to begin with. I find it also odd that there is no native CLR spatial type. The DbGeography and DbGeometry types are specific to Entity Framework and live on those assemblies. They will also work for general purpose, non-database spatial data manipulation, but then you are forced into having a dependency on System.Data.Entity, which seems a bit silly. There's also a System.Spatial assembly that's apparently part of WCF Data Services which in turn don't work with Entity framework. Another example of multiple teams at Microsoft not communicating and implementing the same functionality (differently) in several different places. Perplexed as a I may be, for EF specific code the Entity framework specific types are easy to use and work well. Working with pre-.NET 4.5 Entity Framework and Spatial Data If you can't go to .NET 4.5 just yet you can also still use spatial features in Entity Framework, but it's a lot more work as you can't use the DbContext directly to manipulate the location data. You can still run raw SQL statements to write data into the database and retrieve results using the same TSQL syntax I showed earlier using Context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(). Here's code that you can use to add location data into the database:[TestMethod] public void RawSqlEfAddTest() { string sqlFormat = @"insert into GeoLocations( Location, Address) values ( geography::STGeomFromText('POINT({0} {1})', 4326),@p0 )"; var sql = string.Format(sqlFormat,-121.527200, 45.712113); Console.WriteLine(sql); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); Assert.IsTrue(context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(sql,"301 N. 15th Street") > 0); } Here I'm using the STGeomFromText() function to add the location data. Note that I'm using string.Format here, which usually would be a bad practice but is required here. I was unable to use ExecuteSqlCommand() and its named parameter syntax as the longitude and latitude parameters are embedded into a string. Rest assured it's required as the following does not work:string sqlFormat = @"insert into GeoLocations( Location, Address) values ( geography::STGeomFromText('POINT(@p0 @p1)', 4326),@p2 )";context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(sql, -121.527200, 45.712113, "301 N. 15th Street") Explicitly assigning the point value with string.format works however. There are a number of ways to query location data. You can't get the location data directly, but you can retrieve the point string (which can then be parsed to get Latitude and Longitude) and you can return calculated values like distance. Here's an example of how to retrieve some geo data into a resultset using EF's and SqlQuery method:[TestMethod] public void RawSqlEfQueryTest() { var sqlFormat = @" DECLARE @s geography SET @s = geography:: STGeomFromText('POINT({0} {1})' , 4326); SELECT Address, Location.ToString() as GeoString, @s.STDistance( Location) as Distance FROM GeoLocations ORDER BY Distance"; var sql = string.Format(sqlFormat, -121.527200, 45.712113); var context = new GeoLocationContext(); var locations = context.Database.SqlQuery<ResultData>(sql); Assert.IsTrue(locations.Count() > 0); foreach (var location in locations) { Console.WriteLine(location.Address + " " + location.GeoString + " " + location.Distance); } } public class ResultData { public string GeoString { get; set; } public double Distance { get; set; } public string Address { get; set; } } Hopefully you don't have to resort to this approach as it's fairly limited. Using the new DbGeography/DbGeometry types makes this sort of thing so much easier. When I had to use code like this before I typically ended up retrieving data pks only and then running another query with just the PKs to retrieve the actual underlying DbContext entities. This was very inefficient and tedious but it did work. Summary For the current project I'm working on we actually made the switch to .NET 4.5 purely for the spatial features in EF 5.0. This app heavily relies on spatial queries and it was worth taking a chance with pre-release code to get this ease of integration as opposed to manually falling back to stored procedures or raw SQL string queries to return spatial specific queries. Using native Entity Framework code makes life a lot easier than the alternatives. It might be a late addition to Entity Framework, but it sure makes location calculations and storage easy. Where do you want to go today? ;-) Resources Download Sample Project© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ADO.NET  Sql Server  .NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• NINE Questions with Michelle Juett

  - by NINEQuestions

  Michelle Juett is one of the more interesting people I know, even though we’ve never met face to face. She’s part artist, part techie and all cool. We “met” via my good buddy George Clingerman and have plotting to take over the world, errr… I mean “collaborating” ever since. If you happen to live in the Seattle area, you can catch her and her work at Sakura Con on April 2-4, 2010 and various other gamer and art cons throughout the year. You can also find her on Twitter as @Shelldragon. Now that you know a little bit, I’ll let her tell you the rest of the story in these NINE Questions: 1. Where are you from? I was born in Clearwater, Florida. I like to tell people I'm from the Bermuda Triangle, it just makes explaining myself so much easier. My family moved to Washington when I was 5 and I've been in the Pacific Northwest ever since. We like to QQ about the rain but we really love the green trees and clean water. 2. What do you do? I fight evil by moonlight and win love by daylight.. or something like that.  I’ve been in quality assurance for games during the day since January 2008 and an artist for life. I currently work in QA for a really awesome game company in Bellevue.  At home, I work on personal digital art, making game assets as well as other random freelance projects as they pop up. 3. How did you get to where you are now? I'm still not where I want to be but I'm getting closer. The biggest piece of advice I can give is to work hard and never settle for the minimum required. I tend to overwork myself but I've never regretted it. You can want something really bad but if you aren't willing to work for it, then you can't expect it to just happen. I've always drawn and had an unhealthy love for video games that I was told I’d grow out of.  I knew I would not ‘grow out’ of games and that real adults make them and I could too. After I graduated, in searching for jobs, I discovered game testing. I figured this would be a good way to get my foot in the door and start networking. I’ve worked with consoles, websites and now, PC games.  I stuck with my journey, although it has been a rocky one, daylighting as a tester and moonlighting as an artist. I'm still on that journey but I wouldn't have it any other way. Test has given me a perspective that is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain any other way. It gives an unconditional respect for other hard working testers and an insight into creative problem solving. 4. So video game testing probably sounds WAY cooler than the reality. What's it like? What's a given day for you? Game testers don't get a lot of respect because of their stigmas and the fact most people don't actually know what we do.  People hear about the opening and closing disc trays all day. Many places do treat their testers like numbers. It all depends on where you work and how awesome your company is. I've had to deal with a lot of bad work situations to get to a really good one. QA exists to ensure the game is as flawless and enjoyable as it can be by the time it has to leave the nest and go out into the world. This includes everything obvious: “can I beat the level and save the princess?” to the more obscure: ‘What happens when I lose internet connection while trying to save right before falling into a pit to my death while holding the jump key then my cat pulls out my memory card and hides it in her litter box?” On the dev side, for developers, testers can be very scary people. Especially when the test team is not in house and you can’t see each other’s faces.  I've seen both sides. We don't mean to hurt your feelings. We really DO love you and want your game to be the best it can be! It can be some serious tough love. 5. You are also an accomplished artist. Got any major projects right now you'd like to talk about? LOL, I don't know if I’d say I'm an accomplished artist just yet. I’m still a long way from where I want to be. I figure that’s what makes you grow though: the desire to never stop improving. I like QA but I want to be a full time artist. I was lucky enough to register for a table at Sakura Con in the 11 second window that the tables sold out. As such, I’ll be selling my wares in the Artist Alley April 2-4th. Part of preparing for this is actually making the art to be sold there. Anime is a fun pass time but I don’t draw a whole lot of it so I’m making up for lost time. As I seem to enjoy burying myself in work, I’m an art lead for a secret project that’s so secret I might be killed tonight for even mentioning it. I also take on various freelance projects and do what I can to help out indie games. I discovered the XNA community a year and a half ago and developed a love for Indies when I was writing a weekly newsletter on XBLA news. I’m a little late to the party but I find myself in a unique position where I am an artist and also have technical skills in games. While not programmer myself, I have a lot of game sense and experience. I hope to make some awesome happen. Lastly, I have an ongoing web comic Shell’s Angels) that tends to get neglected when I get busy. I still love drawing comics and keep a little book with me to sketch down ideas as they pop into my head. I may pick it back up again as a larger project sometime in the future. 6. Can you talk about any of the other freelance projects you're doing or are you sworn to secrecy on those too? We wouldn't want a team of game developer ninjas to take you out or anything. All my projects are currently 2d. I have personal projects such as the ongoing comic as well as a graphic novel I've been picking at here and there. My main focus until April is Sakura Con, Sakura Con, Sakura Con.  I see it as a great way to get exposure and convention experience. I found out I love conventions a couple years ago and I want to get more involved in them. 7. As an artist, what is your weapon of choice? What do you use to get most of your stuff done? I am a Photoshop Hero and I have the hoodie to prove it. (http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pah090011.html) I've dabbled in other paint programs but I always gravitate back to Photoshop. She is my one true love. I'd like to learn programs like Flash or Anime Studio when I get a bit more time because of their animation abilities. I've worked on frame by frame animation forever but I would love to learn 2d rigging. Still, nothing can compare to a simple sketchpad and a pencil. I always have one on me in case I come across or think of something interesting and can't get to a computer. If the Courier ever comes to exist it will be an ideal weapon for me. 8. You did some videos too, depicting the art creation process. What was the motivation behind those? The creative process is just as important as the final product, if not more so.  I've always loved watching speed paint videos and wanted to try it out myself. Turns out it's a lot of work and time but it's definitely fun to go back and rewatch them. Art isn't always the end result and is more often the process itself. 9. Got any interesting tattoos? Designed any for yourself or other people? Not yet, but not for lack of desire. I've toiled over what and where for years. Last year, I finally decided the back of my shoulders would be the place. Like anything permanent, I want it to have meaning. I thought of somehow incorporating games but I couldn't find something I felt would stand the test of time even with all the classic sprite games. I'm very picky so we'll see if I can get something solid decided. Come see me at Sakura Con April 2 -4!!!

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• Migrating from SQL Trace to Extended Events

  - by extended_events

  In SQL Server codenamed “Denali” we are moving our diagnostic tracing capabilities forward by building a system on top of Extended Events. With every new system you face the specter of migration which is always a bit of a hassle. I’m obviously motivated to see everyone move their diagnostic tracing systems over to the new extended events based system, so I wanted to make sure we lowered the bar for the migration process to help ease your trials. In my initial post on Denali CTP 1 I described a couple tables that we created that will help map the existing SQL Trace Event Classes to the equivalent Extended Events events. In this post I’ll describe the tables in a bit more details, explain the relationship between the SQL Trace objects (Event Class & Column) and Extended Event objects (Events & Actions) and at the end provide some sample code for a managed stored procedure that will take an existing SQL Trace session (eg. a trace that you can see in sys.Traces) and converts it into event session DDL. Can you relate? In some ways, SQL Trace and Extended Events is kind of like the Standard and Metric measuring systems in the United States. If you spend too much time trying to figure out how to convert between the two it will probably make your head hurt. It’s often better to just use the new system without trying to translate between the two. That said, people like to relate new things to the things they’re comfortable with, so, with some trepidation, I will now explain how these two systems are related to each other. First, some terms… SQL Trace is made up of Event Classes and Columns. The Event Class occurs as the result of some activity in the database engine, for example, SQL:Batch Completed fires when a batch has completed executing on the server. Each Event Class can have any number of Columns associated with it and those Columns contain the data that is interesting about the Event Class, such as the duration or database name. In Extended Events we have objects named Events, EventData field and Actions. The Event (some people call this an xEvent but I’ll stick with Event) is equivalent to the Event Class in SQL Trace since it is the thing that occurs as the result of some activity taking place in the server. An  EventData field (from now on I’ll just refer to these as fields) is a piece of information that is highly correlated with the event and is always included as part of the schema of an Event. An Action is something that can be associated with any Event and it will cause some additional “action” to occur when ever the parent Event occurs. Actions can do a number of different things for example, there are Actions that collect additional data and, take memory dumps. When mapping SQL Trace onto Extended Events, Columns are covered by a combination of both fields and Actions. Knowing exactly where a Column is covered by a field and where it is covered by an Action is a bit of an art, so we created the mapping tables to make you an Artist without the years of practice. Let me draw you a map. Event Mapping The table dbo.trace_xe_event_map exists in the master database with the following structure: Column_name Type trace_event_id smallint package_name nvarchar xe_event_name nvarchar By joining this table sys.trace_events using trace_event_id and to the sys.dm_xe_objects using xe_event_name you can get a fair amount of information about how Event Classes are related to Events. The most basic query this lends itself to is to match an Event Class with the corresponding Event. SELECT     t.trace_event_id,     t.name [event_class],     e.package_name,     e.xe_event_name FROM sys.trace_events t INNER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_event_map e     ON t.trace_event_id = e.trace_event_id There are a couple things you’ll notice as you peruse the output of this query: For the most part, the names of Events are fairly close to the original Event Class; eg. SP:CacheMiss == sp_cache_miss, and so on. We’ve mostly stuck to a one to one mapping between Event Classes and Events, but there are a few cases where we have combined when it made sense. For example, Data File Auto Grow, Log File Auto Grow, Data File Auto Shrink & Log File Auto Shrink are now all covered by a single event named database_file_size_change. This just seemed like a “smarter” implementation for this type of event, you can get all the same information from this single event (grow/shrink, Data/Log, Auto/Manual growth) without having multiple different events. You can use Predicates if you want to limit the output to just one of the original Event Class measures. There are some Event Classes that did not make the cut and were not migrated. These fall into two categories; there were a few Event Classes that had been deprecated, or that just did not make sense, so we didn’t migrate them. (You won’t find an Event related to mounting a tape – sorry.) The second class is bigger; with rare exception, we did not migrate any of the Event Classes that were related to Security Auditing using SQL Trace. We introduced the SQL Audit feature in SQL Server 2008 and that will be the compliance and auditing feature going forward. Doing this is a very deliberate decision to support separation of duties for DBAs. There are separate permissions required for SQL Audit and Extended Events tracing so you can assign these tasks to different people if you choose. (If you’re wondering, the permission for Extended Events is ALTER ANY EVENT SESSION, which is covered by CONTROL SERVER.) Action Mapping The table dbo.trace_xe_action_map exists in the master database with the following structure: Column_name Type trace_column_id smallint package_name nvarchar xe_action_name nvarchar You can find more details by joining this to sys.trace_columns on the trace_column_id field. SELECT     c.trace_column_id,     c.name [column_name],     a.package_name,     a.xe_action_name FROM sys.trace_columns c INNER JOIN    dbo.trace_xe_action_map a     ON c.trace_column_id = a.trace_column_id If you examine this list, you’ll notice that there are relatively few Actions that map to SQL Trace Columns given the number of Columns that exist. This is not because we forgot to migrate all the Columns, but because much of the data for individual Event Classes is included as part of the EventData fields of the equivalent Events so there is no need to specify them as Actions. Putting it all together If you’ve spent a bunch of time figuring out the inner workings of SQL Trace, and who hasn’t, then you probably know that the typically set of Columns you find associated with any given Event Class in SQL Profiler is not fix, but is determine by the contents of the table sys.trace_event_bindings. We’ve used this table along with the mapping tables to produce a list of Event + Action combinations that duplicate the SQL Profiler Event Class definitions using the following query, which you can also find in the Books Online topic How To: View the Extended Events Equivalents to SQL Trace Event Classes. USE MASTER; GO SELECT DISTINCT    tb.trace_event_id,    te.name AS 'Event Class',    em.package_name AS 'Package',    em.xe_event_name AS 'XEvent Name',    tb.trace_column_id,    tc.name AS 'SQL Trace Column',    am.xe_action_name as 'Extended Events action' FROM (sys.trace_events te LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_event_map em    ON te.trace_event_id = em.trace_event_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN sys.trace_event_bindings tb    ON em.trace_event_id = tb.trace_event_id LEFT OUTER JOIN sys.trace_columns tc    ON tb.trace_column_id = tc.trace_column_id LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_action_map am    ON tc.trace_column_id = am.trace_column_id ORDER BY te.name, tc.name As you might imagine, it’s also possible to map an existing trace definition to the equivalent event session by judicious use of fn_trace_geteventinfo joined with the two mapping tables. This query extracts the list of Events and Actions equivalent to the trace with ID = 1, which is most likely the Default Trace. You can find this query, along with a set of other queries and steps required to migrate your existing traces over to Extended Events in the Books Online topic How to: Convert an Existing SQL Trace Script to an Extended Events Session. USE MASTER; GO DECLARE @trace_id int SET @trace_id = 1 SELECT DISTINCT el.eventid, em.package_name, em.xe_event_name AS 'event'    , el.columnid, ec.xe_action_name AS 'action' FROM (sys.fn_trace_geteventinfo(@trace_id) AS el    LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_event_map AS em       ON el.eventid = em.trace_event_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_action_map AS ec    ON el.columnid = ec.trace_column_id WHERE em.xe_event_name IS NOT NULL AND ec.xe_action_name IS NOT NULL You’ll notice in the output that the list doesn’t include any of the security audit Event Classes, as I wrote earlier, those were not migrated. But wait…there’s more! If this were an infomercial there’d by some obnoxious guy next to me blogging “Well Mike…that’s pretty neat, but I’m sure you can do more. Can’t you make it even easier to migrate from SQL Trace?”  Needless to say, I’d blog back, in an overly excited way, “You bet I can' obnoxious blogger side-kick!” What I’ve got for you here is a Extended Events Team Blog only special – this tool will not be sold in any store; it’s a special offer for those of you reading the blog. I’ve wrapped all the logic of pulling the configuration information out of an existing trace and and building the Extended Events DDL statement into a handy, dandy CLR stored procedure. Once you load the assembly and register the procedure you just supply the trace id (from sys.traces) and provide a name for the event session. Run the procedure and out pops the DDL required to create an equivalent session. Any aspects of the trace that could not be duplicated are included in comments within the DDL output. This procedure does not actually create the event session – you need to copy the DDL out of the message tab and put it into a new query window to do that. It also requires an existing trace (but it doesn’t have to be running) to evaluate; there is no functionality to parse t-sql scripts. I’m not going to spend a bunch of time explaining the code here – the code is pretty well commented and hopefully easy to follow. If not, you can always post comments or hit the feedback button to send us some mail. Sample code: TraceToExtendedEventDDL   Installing the procedure Just in case you’re not familiar with installing CLR procedures…once you’ve compile the assembly you can load it using a script like this: -- Context to master USE master GO -- Create the assembly from a shared location. CREATE ASSEMBLY TraceToXESessionConverter FROM 'C:\Temp\TraceToXEventSessionConverter.dll' WITH PERMISSION_SET = SAFE GO -- Create a stored procedure from the assembly. CREATE PROCEDURE CreateEventSessionFromTrace @trace_id int, @session_name nvarchar(max) AS EXTERNAL NAME TraceToXESessionConverter.StoredProcedures.ConvertTraceToExtendedEvent GO Enjoy! -Mike

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• Entity Framework v1 &ndash; tips and Tricks Part 3

  - by Rohit Gupta

  General Tips on Entity Framework v1 & Linq to Entities: ToTraceString() If you need to know the underlying SQL that the EF generates for a Linq To Entities query, then use the ToTraceString() method of the ObjectQuery class. (or use LINQPAD) Note that you need to cast the LINQToEntities query to ObjectQuery before calling TotraceString() as follows: 1: string efSQL = ((ObjectQuery)from c in ctx.Contact 2: where c.Address.Any(a => a.CountryRegion == "US") 3: select c.ContactID).ToTraceString(); ================================================================================ MARS or MultipleActiveResultSet When you create a EDM Model (EDMX file) from the database using Visual Studio, it generates a connection string with the same name as the name of the EntityContainer in CSDL. In the ConnectionString so generated it sets the MultipleActiveResultSet attribute to true by default. So if you are running the following query then it streams multiple readers over the same connection: 1: using (BAEntities context = new BAEntities()) 2: { 3: var cons = 4: from con in context.Contacts 5: where con.FirstName == "Jose" 6: select con; 7: foreach (var c in cons) 8: { 9: if (c.AddDate < new System.DateTime(2007, 1, 1)) 10: { 11: c.Addresses.Load(); 12: } 13: } 14: } ================================================================================= Explicitly opening and closing EntityConnection When you call ToList() or foreach on a LINQToEntities query the EF automatically closes the connection after all the records from the query have been consumed. Thus if you need to run many LINQToEntities queries over the same connection then explicitly open and close the connection as follows: 1: using (BAEntities context = new BAEntities()) 2: { 3: context.Connection.Open(); 4: var cons = from con in context.Contacts where con.FirstName == "Jose" 5: select con; 6: var conList = cons.ToList(); 7: var allCustomers = from con in context.Contacts.OfType<Customer>() 8: select con; 9: var allcustList = allCustomers.ToList(); 10: context.Connection.Close(); 11: } ====================================================================== Dispose ObjectContext only if required After you retrieve entities using the ObjectContext and you are not explicitly disposing the ObjectContext then insure that your code does consume all the records from the LinqToEntities query by calling .ToList() or foreach statement, otherwise the the database connection will remain open and will be closed by the garbage collector when it gets to dispose the ObjectContext. Secondly if you are making updates to the entities retrieved using LinqToEntities then insure that you dont inadverdently dispose of the ObjectContext after the entities are retrieved and before calling .SaveChanges() since you need the SAME ObjectContext to keep track of changes made to the Entities (by using ObjectStateEntry objects). So if you do need to explicitly dispose of the ObjectContext do so only after calling SaveChanges() and only if you dont need to change track the entities retrieved any further. ======================================================================= SQL InjectionAttacks under control with EFv1 LinqToEntities and LinqToSQL queries are parameterized before they are sent to the DB hence they are not vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks. EntitySQL may be slightly vulnerable to attacks since it does not use parameterized queries. However since the EntitySQL demands that the query be valid Entity SQL syntax and valid native SQL syntax at the same time. So the only way one can do a SQLInjection Attack is by knowing the SSDL of the EDM Model and be able to write the correct EntitySQL (note one cannot append regular SQL since then the query wont be a valid EntitySQL syntax) and append it to a parameter. ====================================================================== Improving Performance You can convert the EntitySets and AssociationSets in a EDM Model into precompiled Views using the edmgen utility. for e.g. the Customer Entity can be converted into a precompiled view using edmgen and all LinqToEntities query against the contaxt.Customer EntitySet will use the precompiled View instead of the EntitySet itself (the same being true for relationships (EntityReference & EntityCollections of a Entity)). The advantage being that when using precompiled views the performance will be much better. The syntax for generating precompiled views for a existing EF project is : edmgen /mode:ViewGeneration /inssdl:BAModel.ssdl /incsdl:BAModel.csdl /inmsl:BAModel.msl /p:Chap14.csproj Note that this will only generate precompiled views for EntitySets and Associations and not for existing LinqToEntities queries in the project.(for that use CompiledQuery.Compile<>) Secondly if you have a LinqToEntities query that you need to run multiple times, then one should precompile the query using CompiledQuery.Compile method. The CompiledQuery.Compile<> method accepts a lamda expression as a parameter, which denotes the LinqToEntities query  that you need to precompile. The following is a example of a lamda that we can pass into the CompiledQuery.Compile() method 1: Expression<Func<BAEntities, string, IQueryable<Customer>>> expr = (BAEntities ctx1, string loc) => 2: from c in ctx1.Contacts.OfType<Customer>() 3: where c.Reservations.Any(r => r.Trip.Destination.DestinationName == loc) 4: select c; Then we call the Compile Query as follows: 1: var query = CompiledQuery.Compile<BAEntities, string, IQueryable<Customer>>(expr); 2:  3: using (BAEntities ctx = new BAEntities()) 4: { 5: var loc = "Malta"; 6: IQueryable<Customer> custs = query.Invoke(ctx, loc); 7: var custlist = custs.ToList(); 8: foreach (var item in custlist) 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine(item.FullName); 11: } 12: } Note that if you created a ObjectQuery or a Enitity SQL query instead of the LINQToEntities query, you dont need precompilation for e.g. 1: An Example of EntitySQL query : 2: string esql = "SELECT VALUE c from Contacts AS c where c is of(BAGA.Customer) and c.LastName = 'Gupta'"; 3: ObjectQuery<Customer> custs = CreateQuery<Customer>(esql); 1: An Example of ObjectQuery built using ObjectBuilder methods: 2: from c in Contacts.OfType<Customer>().Where("it.LastName == 'Gupta'") 3: select c This is since the Query plan is cached and thus the performance improves a bit, however since the ObjectQuery or EntitySQL query still needs to materialize the results into Entities hence it will take the same amount of performance hit as with LinqToEntities. However note that not ALL EntitySQL based or QueryBuilder based ObjectQuery plans are cached. So if you are in doubt always create a LinqToEntities compiled query and use that instead ============================================================ GetObjectStateEntry Versus GetObjectByKey We can get to the Entity being referenced by the ObjectStateEntry via its Entity property and there are helper methods in the ObjectStateManager (osm.TryGetObjectStateEntry) to get the ObjectStateEntry for a entity (for which we know the EntityKey). Similarly The ObjectContext has helper methods to get an Entity i.e. TryGetObjectByKey(). TryGetObjectByKey() uses GetObjectStateEntry method under the covers to find the object, however One important difference between these 2 methods is that TryGetObjectByKey queries the database if it is unable to find the object in the context, whereas TryGetObjectStateEntry only looks in the context for existing entries. It will not make a trip to the database ============================================================= POCO objects with EFv1: To create POCO objects that can be used with EFv1. We need to implement 3 key interfaces: IEntityWithKey IEntityWithRelationships IEntityWithChangeTracker Implementing IEntityWithKey is not mandatory, but if you dont then we need to explicitly provide values for the EntityKey for various functions (for e.g. the functions needed to implement IEntityWithChangeTracker and IEntityWithRelationships). Implementation of IEntityWithKey involves exposing a property named EntityKey which returns a EntityKey object. Implementation of IEntityWithChangeTracker involves implementing a method named SetChangeTracker since there can be multiple changetrackers (Object Contexts) existing in memory at the same time. 1: public void SetChangeTracker(IEntityChangeTracker changeTracker) 2: { 3: _changeTracker = changeTracker; 4: } Additionally each property in the POCO object needs to notify the changetracker (objContext) that it is updating itself by calling the EntityMemberChanged and EntityMemberChanging methods on the changeTracker. for e.g.: 1: public EntityKey EntityKey 2: { 3: get { return _entityKey; } 4: set 5: { 6: if (_changeTracker != null) 7: { 8: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanging("EntityKey"); 9: _entityKey = value; 10: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanged("EntityKey"); 11: } 12: else 13: _entityKey = value; 14: } 15: } 16: ===================== Custom Property ==================================== 17:  18: [EdmScalarPropertyAttribute(IsNullable = false)] 19: public System.DateTime OrderDate 20: { 21: get { return _orderDate; } 22: set 23: { 24: if (_changeTracker != null) 25: { 26: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanging("OrderDate"); 27: _orderDate = value; 28: _changeTracker.EntityMemberChanged("OrderDate"); 29: } 30: else 31: _orderDate = value; 32: } 33: } Finally you also need to create the EntityState property as follows: 1: public EntityState EntityState 2: { 3: get { return _changeTracker.EntityState; } 4: } The IEntityWithRelationships involves creating a property that returns RelationshipManager object: 1: public RelationshipManager RelationshipManager 2: { 3: get 4: { 5: if (_relManager == null) 6: _relManager = RelationshipManager.Create(this); 7: return _relManager; 8: } 9: } ============================================================ Tip : ProviderManifestToken – change EDMX File to use SQL 2008 instead of SQL 2005 To use with SQL Server 2008, edit the EDMX file (the raw XML) changing the ProviderManifestToken in the SSDL attributes from "2005" to "2008" ============================================================= With EFv1 we cannot use Structs to replace a anonymous Type while doing projections in a LINQ to Entities query. While the same is supported with LINQToSQL, it is not with LinqToEntities. For e.g. the following is not supported with LinqToEntities since only parameterless constructors and initializers are supported in LINQ to Entities. (the same works with LINQToSQL) 1: public struct CompanyInfo 2: { 3: public int ID { get; set; } 4: public string Name { get; set; } 5: } 6: var companies = (from c in dc.Companies 7: where c.CompanyIcon == null 8: select new CompanyInfo { Name = c.CompanyName, ID = c.CompanyId }).ToList(); ;

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• Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

  - by Manesh Karunakaran

  It’s been more than a month since SharePoint 2010 RTMed. And a lot of people have downloaded and set up their very own SharePoint 2010 development rigs. And quite a few people have written blogs about setting up good development environments, there is even an MSDN article on it. Two of the blogs worth noting are from MVPs Sahil Malik and Wictor Wilén. Make sure that you check these out as well. Part of the bad side-effects of being a geek is the need to do the technical stuff the best way possible (pragmatic or otherwise), but the problem with this is that what is considered “best” is relative. Precisely the reason why you are reading this post now. Most of the posts that I read are out dated/need updations or are using the wrong OS’es or virtualization solutions (again, opinions vary) or using them the wrong way. Here’s a developer’s view of Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Rig. If you are a sales guy, it’s time to close this window. Confusion 1: Which Host Operating System and Virtualization Solution to use? This point has been beaten to death in numerous blog posts in the past, if you have time to invest, read this excellent post by our very own SharePoint Joel on this subject. But if you are planning to build the Ultimate Development Rig, then Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the option that you should be looking at. I have been using this as my primary OS for about 6-7 months now, and I haven’t had any Driver issue or Application compatibility issue. In my experience all the Windows 7 drivers work fine with WIN2008 R2 also. You can enable Aero for eye candy (and the Windows 7 look and feel) and except for a few things like the Hibernation support (which a can be enabled if you really want it), Windows Server 2008 R2, is the best Workstation OS that I have used till date. But frankly the answer to this question of which OS to use depends primarily on one question - Are you willing to change your primary OS? If the answer to that is ‘Yes’, then Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the best option, if not look at vmWare or VirtualBox, both are equally good. Those who are familiar with a Virtual PC background might prefer Sun VirtualBox. Besides, these provide support for running 64 bit guest machines on 32 bit hosts if the underlying hardware is truly 64 bit. See my earlier post on this. Since we are going to make the ultimate rig, we will use Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, for reasons mentioned above. Confusion 2: Should I use a multi-(virtual) server set up? A lot of people use multiple servers for their development environments - like Wictor Wilén is suggesting - one server hosting the Active directory, one hosting SharePoint Server and another one for SQL Server. True, this mimics the production environment the best possible way, but as somebody who has fallen for this set up earlier, I can tell you that you don’t really get anything by doing this. Microsoft has done well to ensure that if you can do it on one machine, you can do it in a farm environment as well. Besides, when you run multiple Server class machine instances in parallel, there are a lot of unwanted processor cycles wasted for no good use. In my personal experience, as somebody who needs to switch between MOSS 2007/SharePoint 2010 environments from time to time, the best possible solution is to Make the host Windows Server 2008 R2 machine your Domain Controller (AD Server) Make all your Virtual Guest OS’es join this domain. Have each Individual Guest OS Image have it’s own local SQL Server instance. The advantages are that you can reuse the users and groups in each of the Guest operating systems, you can manage the users in one place, AD is light weight and doesn't take too much resources on your host machine and also having separate SQL instances for each of the Development images gives you maximum flexibility in terms of configuration, for example your SharePoint rigs can have simpler DB configurations, compared to your MS BI blast pits. Confusion 3: Which Operating System should I use to run SharePoint 2010 Now that’s a no brainer. Use Windows 2008 R2 as your Guest OS. When you are building the ultimate rig, why compromise? If you are planning to run Windows Server 2008 as your Guest OS, there are a few patches that you need to install at different times during the installation, for that follow the steps mentioned here Okay now that we have made our choices, let’s get to the interesting part of building the rig, Step 1: Prepare the host machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on your best Desktop/Laptop. If you have read this far, I am quite sure that you are somebody who can install an OS on your own, so go ahead and do that. Make sure that you run the compatibility wizard before you go ahead and nuke your current OS. There are plenty of blogs telling you how to make a good Windows 2008 R2 Workstation that feels and behaves like a Windows 7 machine, follow one and once you are done, head to Step 2. Step 2: Configure the host machine as a Domain Controller Before we begin this, let me tell you, this step is completely optional, you don’t really need to do this, you can simply use the local users on the Guest machines instead, but if this is a much cleaner approach to manage users and groups if you run multiple guest operating systems.  This post neatly explains how to configure your Windows Server 2008 R2 host machine as a Domain Controller. Follow those simple steps and you are good to go. If you are not able to get it to work, try this. Step 3: Prepare the guest machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Open Hyper-V Manager Choose to Create a new Guest Operating system Allocate at least 2 GB of Memory to the Guest OS Choose the Windows 2008 R2 Installation Media Start the Virtual Machine to commence installation. Once the Installation is done, Activate the OS. Step 4: Make the Guest operating systems Join the Domain This step is quite simple, just follow these steps below, Fire up Hyper-V Manager, open your Guest OS Click on Start, and Right click on ‘Computer’ and choose ‘Properties’ On the window that pops-up, click on ‘Change Settings’ On the ‘System Properties’ Window that comes up, Click on the ‘Change’ button Now a window named ‘Computer Name/Domain Changes’ opens up, In the text box titled Domain, type in the Domain name from Step 2. Click Ok and windows will show you the welcome to domain message and ask you to restart the machine, click OK to restart. If the addition to domain fails, that means that you have not set up networking in Hyper-V for the Guest OS to communicate with the Host. To enable it, follow the steps I had mentioned in this post earlier. Step 5: Install SQL Server 2008 R2 on the Guest Machine SQL Server 2008 R2 gets installed with out hassle on Windows Server 2008 R2. SQL Server 2008 needs SP2 to work properly on WIN2008 R2. Also SQL Server 2008 R2 allows you to directly add PowerPivot support to SharePoint. Choose to install in SharePoint Integrated Mode in Reporting Server Configuration. Step 6: Install KB971831 and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites Now install the WCF Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB971831) from this location, and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites from the SP2010 Installation media. Step 7: Install and Configure SharePoint 2010 Install SharePoint 2010 from the installation media, after the installation is complete, you are prompted to start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. If you are using a local instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, install the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 before starting the wizard. If your development environment uses a remote instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or if it has a pre-existing installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 on which KB 970315 x64 has already been applied, this step is not necessary. With the wizard open, do the following: Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64. After the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 installation is finished, complete the wizard. Alternatively, you can choose not to run the wizard by clearing the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard check box and closing the completed installation dialog box. Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64, and then manually start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard by opening a Command Prompt window and executing the following command: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared Debug\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN\psconfigui.exe The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard may fail if you are using a computer that is joined to a domain but that is not connected to a domain controller. Step 8: Install Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 SDK Install Visual Studio 2010 Download and Install the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK Step 9: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint and Configure Reporting Services Pop-In the SQLServer 2008 R2 installation media once again and install PowerPivot for SharePoint. This will get added as another instance named POWERPIVOT. Configure Reporting Services by following the steps mentioned here, if you need to get down to the details on how the integration between SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 works, see Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010 an excellent article by Alan Le Marquand Step 10: Download and Install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 SharePoint 2010 comes with a lot of cool stuff like PerformancePoint Services and BCS, if you need to try these out, you need to have data in your databases. So if you want to save yourself the trouble of creating sample data for your PerformancePoint and BCS experiments, download and install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 from CodePlex. And you are done! Fire up your Visual Studio 2010 and Start Coding away!!

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• Oracle Coherence & Oracle Service Bus: REST API Integration

  - by Nino Guarnacci

  This post aims to highlight one of the features found in Oracle Coherence which allows it to be easily added and integrated inside a wider variety of projects.  The features in question are the REST API exposed by the Coherence nodes, with which you can interact in the wider mode in memory data grid.Oracle Coherence and Oracle Service Bus are natively integrated through a feature found in the Oracle Service Bus, which allows you to use the coherence grid cache during the configuration phase of a business service. This feature allows you to use an intermediate layer of cache to retrieve the answers from previous invocations of the same service, without necessarily having to invoke the real business service again. Directly from the web console of Oracle Service Bus, you can decide the policies of eviction of the objects / answers and define the discriminating parameters that identify their uniqueness.The coherence REST APIs, however, allow you to integrate both products for other necessities enabling realization of new architectures design.  Consider coherence’s node as a simple service which interoperates through the stardard services and in particular REST (with JSON and XML). Thinking of coherence as a company’s shared service, able to have an implementation of a centralized “map and reduce” which you can access  by a huge variety of protocols (transport and envelopes).An amazing step forward for those who still imagine connectors and code. This type of integration does not require writing custom code or complex implementation to be self-supported. The added value is made unique by the incredible value of both products independently, and still more out of their simple and robust integration.As already mentioned this scenario discovers a hidden new door behind the columns of these two products. The door leads to new ideas and perspectives for enterprise architectures that increasingly wink to next-generation applications: simple and dynamic, perhaps towards the mobile and web 2.0.Below, a small and simple demo useful to demonstrate how easily is to integrate these two products using the Coherence REST API. This demo is also intended to imagine new enterprise architectures using this approach.The idea is to create a centralized system of alerting, fed easily from any company’s application, regardless of the technology with which they were built . Then use a representation standard protocol: RSS, using a service exposed by the service bus; So you can browse and search only the alerts that you are interested on, by category, author, title, date, etc etc.. The steps needed to implement this system are very simple and very few. Here they are listed below and described to be easily replicated within your environment. I would remind you that the demo is only meant to demonstrate how easily is to integrate Oracle Coherence and the Oracle Service Bus, and stimulate your imagination to new technological approaches.1) Install the two products: In this demo used (if necessary, consult the installation guides of 2 products)  - Oracle Service Bus ver. 11.1.1.5.0 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/service-bus/downloads/index.html - Oracle Coherence ver. 3.7.1 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/coherence/downloads/index.html 2) Because you choose to create a centralized alerting system, we need to define a structure type containing some alerting attributes useful to preserve and organize the information of the various alerts sent by the different applications. Here, then it was built a java class named Alert containing the canonical properties of an alarm information:- Title- Description- System- Time- Severity 3) Therefore, we need to create two configuration files for the coherence node, in order to save the Alert objects within the grid, through the rest/http protocol (more than the native API for Java, C + +, C,. Net). Here are the two minimal configuration files for Coherence:coherence-rest-config.xml resty-server-config.xml This minimum configuration allows me to use a distributed cache named "alerts" that can  also be accessed via http - rest on the host "localhost" over port "8080", objects are of type “oracle.cohsb.Alert”. 4) Below  a simple Java class that represents the type of alert messages: 5) At this point we just need to startup our coherence node, able to listen on http protocol to manage the “alerts” cache, which will receive incoming XML or JSON objects of type Alert. Remember to include in the classpath of the coherence node, the Alert java class and the following coherence libraries and configuration files:  At this point, just run the coherence class node “com.tangosol.net.DefaultCacheServer”advising you to set the following parameters:-Dtangosol.coherence.log.level=9 -Dtangosol.coherence.log=stdout -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=[PATH_TO_THE_FILE]\resty-server-config.xml 6) Let's create a procedure to test our configuration of Coherence and in order to insert some custom alerts in our cache. The technology with which you want to achieve this functionality is fully not considerable: Javascript, Python, Ruby, Scala, C + +, Java.... Because the protocol to communicate with Coherence is simply HTTP / JSON or XML. For this little demo i choose Java: A method to send/put the alert to the cache: A method to query and view the content of the cache: Finally the main method that execute our methods:  No special library added in the classpath for our class (json struct static defined), when it will be executed, it asks some information such as title, description,... in order to compose and send an alert to the cache and then it will perform an inquiry, to the same cache. At this point, a good exercise at this point, may be to create the same procedure using other technologies, such as a simple html page containing some JavaScript code, and then using Python, Ruby, and so on.7) Now we are ready to start configuring the Oracle Service Bus in order to integrate the two products. First integrate the internal alerting system of Oracle Service Bus with our centralized alerting system based on coherence node. This ensures that by monitoring, or directly from within our Proxy Message Flow, we can throw alerts and save them directly into the Coherence node. To do this I choose to use the jms technology, natively present inside the Oracle Weblogic / Service Bus. Access to the Oracle WebLogic Administration console and create and configure a new JMS connection factory and a new jms destination (queue). Now we should create a new resource of type “alert destination” within our Oracle Service Bus project. The new “alert destination” resource should be configured using the newly created connection factory jms and jms destination. Finally, in order to withdraw the message alert enqueued in our JMS destination and send it to our coherence node, we just need to create a new business service and proxy service within our Oracle Service Bus project.Our business service is responsible for sending a message to our REST service Coherence using as a method action: PUT Finally our proxy service have to collect all messages enqueued on the destination, execute an xquery transformation on those messages  in order to translate them into valid XML / alert objects useful to be sent to our coherence service, through the newly created business service. The message flow pipeline containing the xquery transformation: Incredibly,  we just did a basic first integration between the native alerting system of Oracle Service Bus and our centralized alerting system by simply configuring our coherence node without developing anything.It's time to test it out. To do this I create a proxy service able to generate an alert using our "alert destination", whenever the proxy is invoked. After some invocation to our proxy that generates fake alerts, we could open an Internet browser and type the URL  http://localhost: 8080/alerts/  so we could see what has been inserted within the coherence node. 8) We are ready for the final step.  We would create a new message flow, that can be used to search and display the results in standard mode. To do this I choosen the standard representation of RSS, to display a formatted result on a huge variety of devices such as readers for the iPhone and Android. The inquiry may be defined already at the time of the request able to return only feed / items related to our needs. To do this we need to create a new business service, a new proxy service, and finally a new XQuery Transformation to take care of translating the collection of alerts that will be return from our coherence node in a nicely formatted RSS standard document.So we start right from this resource (xquery), which has the task of transforming a collection of alerts / xml returned from the node coherence in a type well-formatted feed RSS 2.0 our new business service that will search the alerts on our coherence node using the Rest API. And finally, our last resource, the proxy service that will be exposed as an RSS / feeds to various mobile devices and traditional web readers, in which we will intercept any search query, and transform the result returned by the business service in an RSS feed 2.0. The message flow with the transformation phase (Alert TO Feed Items): Finally some little tricks to follow during the routing to the business service, - check for any queries present in the url to require a subset of alerts  - the http header "Accept" to help get an answer XML instead of JSON: In our little demo we also static added some coherence parameters to the request:sort=time:desc;start=0;count=100I would like to get from Coherence that the results will be sorted by date, and starting from 1 up to a maximum of 100.Done!!Just incredible, our centralized alerting system is ready. Inheriting all the qualities and capabilities of the two products involved Oracle Coherence & Oracle Service Bus: - RASP (Reliability, Availability, Scalability, Performance)Now try to use your mobile device, or a normal Internet browser by accessing the RSS just published: Some urls you may test: Search for the last 100 alerts : http://localhost:7001/alarmsSearch for alerts that do not have time set to null (time is not null):http://localhost:7001/alarms?q=time+is+not+nullSearch for alerts that the system property is “Web Browser” (system = ‘Web Browser’):http://localhost:7001/alarms?q=system+%3D+%27Web+Browser%27Search for alerts that the system property is “Web Browser” and the severity property is “Fatal” and the title property contain the word “Javascript”  (system = ‘Web Broser’ and severity = ‘Fatal’ and title like ‘%Javascript%’)http://localhost:8080/alerts?q=system+%3D+%27Web+Browser%27+AND+severity+%3D+%27Fatal%27+AND+title+LIKE+%27%25Javascript%25%27 To compose more complex queries about your need I would suggest you to read the chapter in the coherence documentation inherent the Cohl language (Coherence Query Language) http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E24290_01/coh.371/e22837/api_cq.htm . Some useful links: - Oracle Coherence REST API Documentation http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E24290_01/coh.371/e22839/rest_intro.htm - Oracle Service Bus Documentation http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/soa.htm#osb - REST explanation from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer At this URL could be downloaded the whole materials of this demo http://blogs.oracle.com/slc/resource/cosb/coh-sb-demo.zip Author: Nino Guarnacci.

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• T-SQL Tuesday #33: Trick Shots: Undocumented, Underdocumented, and Unknown Conspiracies!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Mike Fal (b | t) is hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday on Trick Shots.  I love this choice because I've been preoccupied with sneaky/tricky/evil SQL Server stuff for a long time and have been presenting on it for the past year.  Mike's directives were "Show us a cool trick or process you developed…It doesn’t have to be useful", which most of my blogging definitely fits, and "Tell us what you learned from this trick…tell us how it gave you insight in to how SQL Server works", which is definitely a new concept.  I've done a lot of reading and watching on SQL Server Internals and even attended training, but sometimes I need to go explore on my own, using my own tools and techniques.  It's an itch I get every few months, and, well, it sure beats workin'. I've found some people to be intimidated by SQL Server's internals, and I'll admit there are A LOT of internals to keep track of, but there are tons of excellent resources that clearly document most of them, and show how knowing even the basics of internals can dramatically improve your database's performance.  It may seem like rocket science, or even brain surgery, but you don't have to be a genius to understand it. Although being an "evil genius" can help you learn some things they haven't told you about. ;) This blog post isn't a traditional "deep dive" into internals, it's more of an approach to find out how a program works.  It utilizes an extremely handy tool from an even more extremely handy suite of tools, Sysinternals.  I'm not the only one who finds Sysinternals useful for SQL Server: Argenis Fernandez (b | t), Microsoft employee and former T-SQL Tuesday host, has an excellent presentation on how to troubleshoot SQL Server using Sysinternals, and I highly recommend it.  Argenis didn't cover the Strings.exe utility, but I'll be using it to "hack" the SQL Server executable (DLL and EXE) files. Please note that I'm not promoting software piracy or applying these techniques to attack SQL Server via internal knowledge. This is strictly educational and doesn't reveal any proprietary Microsoft information.  And since Argenis works for Microsoft and demonstrated Sysinternals with SQL Server, I'll just let him take the blame for it. :P (The truth is I've used Strings.exe on SQL Server before I ever met Argenis.) Once you download and install Strings.exe you can run it from the command line.  For our purposes we'll want to run this in the Binn folder of your SQL Server instance (I'm referencing SQL Server 2012 RTM): cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn" C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.dll > sqldll.txt C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.exe > sqlexe.txt   I've limited myself to DLLs and EXEs that have "sql" in their names.  There are quite a few more but I haven't examined them in any detail. (Homework assignment for you!) If you run this yourself you'll get 2 text files, one with all the extracted strings from every SQL DLL file, and the other with the SQL EXE strings.  You can open these in Notepad, but you're better off using Notepad++, EditPad, Emacs, Vim or another more powerful text editor, as these will be several megabytes in size. And when you do open it…you'll find…a TON of gibberish.  (If you think that's bad, just try opening the raw DLL or EXE file in Notepad.  And by the way, don't do this in production, or even on a running instance of SQL Server.)  Even if you don't clean up the file, you can still use your editor's search function to find a keyword like "SELECT" or some other item you expect to be there.  As dumb as this sounds, I sometimes spend my lunch break just scanning the raw text for anything interesting.  I'm boring like that. Sometimes though, having these files available can lead to some incredible learning experiences.  For me the most recent time was after reading Joe Sack's post on non-parallel plan reasons.  He mentions a new SQL Server 2012 execution plan element called NonParallelPlanReason, and demonstrates a query that generates "MaxDOPSetToOne".  Joe (formerly on the Microsoft SQL Server product team, so he knows this stuff) mentioned that this new element was not currently documented and tried a few more examples to see what other reasons could be generated. Since I'd already run Strings.exe on the SQL Server DLLs and EXE files, it was easy to run grep/find/findstr for MaxDOPSetToOne on those extracts.  Once I found which files it belonged to (sqlmin.dll) I opened the text to see if the other reasons were listed.  As you can see in my comment on Joe's blog, there were about 20 additional non-parallel reasons.  And while it's not "documentation" of this underdocumented feature, the names are pretty self-explanatory about what can prevent parallel processing. I especially like the ones about cursors – more ammo! - and am curious about the PDW compilation and Cloud DB replication reasons. One reason completely stumped me: NoParallelHekatonPlan.  What the heck is a hekaton?  Google and Wikipedia were vague, and the top results were not in English.  I found one reference to Greek, stating "hekaton" can be translated as "hundredfold"; with a little more Wikipedia-ing this leads to hecto, the prefix for "one hundred" as a unit of measure.  I'm not sure why Microsoft chose hekaton for such a plan name, but having already learned some Greek I figured I might as well dig some more in the DLL text for hekaton.  Here's what I found: hekaton_slow_param_passing Occurs when a Hekaton procedure call dispatch goes to slow parameter passing code path The reason why Hekaton parameter passing code took the slow code path hekaton_slow_param_pass_reason sp_deploy_hekaton_database sp_undeploy_hekaton_database sp_drop_hekaton_database sp_checkpoint_hekaton_database sp_restore_hekaton_database e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\hkproc.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matgen.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matquery.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\sqlmeta.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\resultset.cpp Interesting!  The first 4 entries (in red) mention parameters and "slow code".  Could this be the foundation of the mythical DBCC RUNFASTER command?  Have I been passing my parameters the slow way all this time? And what about those sp_xxxx_hekaton_database procedures (in blue)? Could THEY be the secret to a faster SQL Server? Could they promise a "hundredfold" improvement in performance?  Are these special, super-undocumented DIB (databases in black)? I decided to look in the SQL Server system views for any objects with hekaton in the name, or references to them, in hopes of discovering some new code that would answer all my questions: SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE name LIKE '%hekaton%' SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%hekaton%' Which revealed: name ------------------------ (0 row(s) affected) name ------------------------ sp_createstats sp_recompile sp_updatestats (3 row(s) affected)   Hmm.  Well that didn't find much.  Looks like these procedures are seriously undocumented, unknown, perhaps forbidden knowledge. Maybe a part of some unspeakable evil? (No, I'm not paranoid, I just like mysteries and thought that punching this up with that kind of thing might keep you reading.  I know I'd fall asleep without it.) OK, so let's check out those 3 procedures and see what they reveal when I search for "Hekaton": sp_createstats: -- filter out local temp tables, Hekaton tables, and tables for which current user has no permissions -- Note that OBJECTPROPERTY returns NULL on type="IT" tables, thus we only call it on type='U' tables   OK, that's interesting, let's go looking down a little further: ((@table_type<>'U') or (0 = OBJECTPROPERTY(@table_id, 'TableIsInMemory'))) and -- Hekaton table   Wellllll, that tells us a few new things: There's such a thing as Hekaton tables (UPDATE: I'm not the only one to have found them!) They are not standard user tables and probably not in memory UPDATE: I misinterpreted this because I didn't read all the code when I wrote this blog post. The OBJECTPROPERTY function has an undocumented TableIsInMemory option Let's check out sp_recompile: -- (3) Must not be a Hekaton procedure.   And once again go a little further: if (ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsExecuted') <> 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsInlineFunction') = 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsView') = 0 AND -- Hekaton procedure cannot be recompiled -- Make them go through schema version bumping branch, which will fail ObjectProperty(@objid, 'ExecIsCompiledProc') = 0)   And now we learn that hekaton procedures also exist, they can't be recompiled, there's a "schema version bumping branch" somewhere, and OBJECTPROPERTY has another undocumented option, ExecIsCompiledProc.  (If you experiment with this you'll find this option returns null, I think it only works when called from a system object.) This is neat! Sadly sp_updatestats doesn't reveal anything new, the comments about hekaton are the same as sp_createstats.  But we've ALSO discovered undocumented features for the OBJECTPROPERTY function, which we can now search for: SELECT name, object_definition(OBJECT_ID) FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%OBJECTPROPERTY(%'   I'll leave that to you as more homework.  I should add that searching the system procedures was recommended long ago by the late, great Ken Henderson, in his Guru's Guide books, as a great way to find undocumented features.  That seems to be really good advice! Now if you're a programmer/hacker, you've probably been drooling over the last 5 entries for hekaton (in green), because these are the names of source code files for SQL Server!  Does this mean we can access the source code for SQL Server?  As The Oracle suggested to Neo, can we return to The Source??? Actually, no. Well, maybe a little bit.  While you won't get the actual source code from the compiled DLL and EXE files, you'll get references to source files, debugging symbols, variables and module names, error messages, and even the startup flags for SQL Server.  And if you search for "DBCC" or "CHECKDB" you'll find a really nice section listing all the DBCC commands, including the undocumented ones.  Granted those are pretty easy to find online, but you may be surprised what those web sites DIDN'T tell you! (And neither will I, go look for yourself!)  And as we saw earlier, you'll also find execution plan elements, query processing rules, and who knows what else.  It's also instructive to see how Microsoft organizes their source directories, how various components (storage engine, query processor, Full Text, AlwaysOn/HADR) are split into smaller modules. There are over 2000 source file references, go do some exploring! So what did we learn?  We can pull strings out of executable files, search them for known items, browse them for unknown items, and use the results to examine internal code to learn even more things about SQL Server.  We've even learned how to use command-line utilities!  We are now 1337 h4X0rz!  (Not really.  I hate that leetspeak crap.) Although, I must confess I might've gone too far with the "conspiracy" part of this post.  I apologize for that, it's just my overactive imagination.  There's really no hidden agenda or conspiracy regarding SQL Server internals.  It's not The Matrix.  It's not like you'd find anything like that in there: Attach Matrix Database DM_MATRIX_COMM_PIPELINES MATRIXXACTPARTICIPANTS dm_matrix_agents   Alright, enough of this paranoid ranting!  Microsoft are not really evil!  It's not like they're The Borg from Star Trek: ALTER FEDERATION DROP ALTER FEDERATION SPLIT DROP FEDERATION   #tsql2sday

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• When Your Boss Doesn't Want you to Succeed

  - by Phil Factor

  You're working hard to get an application finished. You are programming long into the evenings sometimes, and eating sandwiches at your desk instead of taking a lunch break. Then one day you glance up at the IT manager, serene in his mysterious round of meetings, and think 'Does he actually care whether this project succeeds or not?'. The question may seem absurd. Of course the project must succeed. The truth, as always, is often far more complex. Your manager may even be doing his best to make sure you don't succeed. Why? There have always been rich pickings for the unscrupulous in IT.  In extreme cases, where administrators struggle with scarcely-comprehended technical issues, huge sums of money can be lost and gained without any perceptible results. In a very few cases can fraud be proven: most of the time, the intricacies of the 'game' are such that one can do little more than harbor suspicion.  Where does over-enthusiastic salesmanship end and fraud begin? The Business of Information Technology provides rich opportunities for White-collar crime. The poor developer has his, or her, hands full with the task of wrestling with the sheer complexity of building an application. He, or she, has no time for following the complexities of the chicanery of the management that is directing affairs.  Most likely, the developers wouldn't even suspect that their company management had ulterior motives. I'll illustrate what I mean with an entirely fictional, hypothetical, example. The Opportunist and the Aged Charities often do good, unexciting work that is funded by the income from a bequest that dates back maybe hundreds of years.  In our example, it isn't exciting work, for it involves the welfare of elderly people who have fallen on hard times.  Volunteers visit, giving a smile and a chat, and check that they are all right, but are able to spend a little money on their discretion to ameliorate any pressing needs for these old folk.  The money is made to work very hard and the charity averts a great deal of suffering and eases the burden on the state. Daisy hears the garden gate creak as Mrs Rainer comes up the path. She looks forward to her twice-weekly visit from the nice lady from the trust. She always asked ‘is everything all right, Love’. Cheeky but nice. She likes her cheery manner. She seems interested in hearing her memories, and talking about her far-away family. She helps her with those chores in the house that she couldn’t manage and once even paid to fill the back-shed with coke, the other year. Nice, Mrs. Rainer is, she thought as she goes to open the door. The trustees are getting on in years themselves, and worry about the long-term future of the charity: is it relevant to modern society? Is it likely to attract a new generation of workers to take it on. They are instantly attracted by the arrival to the board of a smartly dressed University lecturer with the ear of the present Government. Alain 'Stalin' Jones is earnest, persuasive and energetic. The trustees welcome him to the board and quickly forgive his humorless political-correctness. He talks of 'diversity', 'relevance', 'social change', 'equality' and 'communities', but his eye is on that huge bequest. Alain first came to notice as a Trotskyite union official, who insinuated himself into one of the duller Trades Unions and turned it, through his passionate leadership, into a radical, headline-grabbing organization.  Middle age, and the rise of European federal socialism, had brought him quiet prosperity and charcoal suits, an ear in the current government, and a wide influence as a member of various Quangos (government bodies staffed by well-paid unelected courtiers).  He was employed as a 'consultant' by several organizations that relied on government contracts. After gaining the confidence of the trustees, and showing a surprising knowledge of mundane processes and the regulatory framework of charities, Alain launches his plan.  The trust will expand their work by means of a bold IT initiative that will coordinate the interventions of several 'caring agencies', and provide  emergency cover, a special Website so anxious relatives can see how their elderly charges are doing, and a vastly more efficient way of coordinating the work of the volunteer carers. It will also provide a special-purpose site that gives 'social networking' facilities, rather like Facebook, to the few elderly folk on the lists with access to the internet. The trustees perk up. Their own experience of the internet is restricted to the occasional scanning of railway timetables, but they can see that it is 'relevant'. In his next report to the other trustees, Alain proudly announces that all this glamorous and exciting technology can be paid for by a grant from the government. He admits darkly that he has influence. True to his word, the government promises a grant of a size that is an order of magnitude greater than any budget that the trustees had ever handled. There was the understandable proviso that the company that would actually do the IT work would have to be one of the government's preferred suppliers and the work would need to be tendered under EU competition rules. The only company that tenders, a multinational IT company with a long track record of government work, quotes ten million pounds for the work. A trustee questions the figure as it seems enormous for the reasonably trivial internet facilities being built, but the IT Salesmen dazzle them with presentations and three-letter acronyms until they subside into quiescent acceptance. After all, they can’t stay locked in the Twentieth century practices can they? The work is put in hand with a large project team, in a splendid glass building near west London. The trustees see rooms of programmers working diligently at screens, and who talk with enthusiasm of the project. Paul, the project manager, looked through his resource schedule with growing unease. His initial excitement at being given his first major project hadn’t lasted. He’d been allocated a lackluster team of developers whose skills didn’t seem right, and he was allowed only a couple of contractors to make good the deficit. Strangely, the presentation he’d given to his management, where he’d saved time and resources with a OTS solution to a great deal of the development work, and a sound conservative architecture, hadn’t gone down nearly as big as he’d hoped. He almost got the feeling they wanted a more radical and ambitious solution. The project starts slipping its dates. The costs build rapidly. There are certain uncomfortable extra charges that appear, such as the £600-a-day charge by the 'Business Manager' appointed to act as a point of liaison between the charity and the IT Company.  When he appeared, his face permanently split by a 'Mr Sincerity' smile, they'd thought he was provided at the cost of the IT Company. Derek, the DBA, didn’t have to go to the server room quite some much as he did: but It got him away from the poisonous despair of the development group. Wave after wave of events had conspired to delay the project.  Why the management had imposed hideous extra bureaucracy to cover ISO 9000 and 9001:2008 accreditation just as the project was struggling to get back on-schedule was  beyond belief.  Then  the Business manager was coming back with endless changes in scope, sorrowing saying that the Trustees were very insistent, though hopelessly out in touch with the reality of technical challenges. Suddenly, the costs mount to the point of consuming the government grant in its entirety. The project remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Alain Jones gives an emotional rallying speech at the trustees review meeting, urging them not to lose their nerve. Sadly, the trustees dip into the accumulated capital of the trust, the seed-corn of all their revenues, in order to save the IT project. A few months later it is all over. The IT project is never delivered, even though it had seemed so incredibly close.  With the trust's capital all gone, the activities it funded have to be terminated and the trust becomes just a shell. There aren't even the funds to mount a legal challenge against the IT company, even had the trust's solicitor advised such a foolish thing. Alain leaves as suddenly as he had arrived, only to pop up a few months later, bronzed and rested, at another charity. The IT workers who were permanent employees are dispersed to other projects, and the contractors leave to other contracts. Within months the entire project is but a vague memory. One or two developers remain  puzzled that their managers had been so obstructive when they should have welcomed progress toward completion of the project, but they put it down to incompetence and testosterone. Few suspected that they were actively preventing the project from getting finished. The relationships between the IT consultancy, and the government of the day are intricate, and made more complex by the Private Finance initiatives and political patronage.  The losers in this case were the taxpayers, and the beneficiaries of the trust, and, perhaps the soul of the original benefactor of the trust, whose bid to give his name some immortality had been scuppered by smooth-talking white-collar political apparatniks.  Even now, nobody is certain whether a crime was ever committed. The perfect heist, I guess. Where’s the victim? "I hear that Daisy’s cottage is up for sale. She’s had to go into a care home.  She didn’t want to at all, but then there is nobody to keep an eye on her since she had that minor stroke a while back.  A charity used to help out. The ‘social’ don’t have the funding, evidently for community care. Yes, her old cat was put down. There was a good clearout, and now the house is all scrubbed and cleared ready for sale. The skip was full of old photos and letters, memories. No room in her new ‘home’."

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The EventHandler and EventHandler&lt;TEventArgs&gt; delegates

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last two weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), and the Func family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. So this week, we are going to look at a handy pair of delegates that can be used to eliminate the need for defining custom delegates when creating events: the EventHandler and EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates. Events and delegates Before we begin, let’s quickly consider events in .NET.  According to the MSDN: An event in C# is a way for a class to provide notifications to clients of that class when some interesting thing happens to an object. So, basically, you can create an event in a type so that users of that type can subscribe to notifications of things of interest.  How is this different than some of the delegate programming that we talked about in the last two weeks?  Well, you can think of an event as a special access modifier on a delegate.  Some differences between the two are: Events are a special access case of delegates They behave much like delegates instances inside the type they are declared in, but outside of that type they can only be (un)subscribed to. Events can specify add/remove behavior explicitly If you want to do additional work when someone subscribes or unsubscribes to an event, you can specify the add and remove actions explicitly. Events have access modifiers, but these only specify the access level of those who can (un)subscribe A public event, for example, means anyone can (un)subscribe, but it does not mean that anyone can raise (invoke) the event directly.  Events can only be raised by the type that contains them In contrast, if a delegate is visible, it can be invoked outside of the object (not even in a sub-class!). Events tend to be for notifications only, and should be treated as optional Semantically speaking, events typically don’t perform work on the the class directly, but tend to just notify subscribers when something of note occurs. My basic rule-of-thumb is that if you are just wanting to notify any listeners (who may or may not care) that something has happened, use an event.  However, if you want the caller to provide some function to perform to direct the class about how it should perform work, make it a delegate. Declaring events using custom delegates To declare an event in a type, we simply use the event keyword and specify its delegate type.  For example, let’s say you wanted to create a new TimeOfDayTimer that triggers at a given time of the day (as opposed to on an interval).  We could write something like this: 1: public delegate void TimeOfDayHandler(object source, ElapsedEventArgs e); 2:  3: // A timer that will fire at time of day each day. 4: public class TimeOfDayTimer : IDisposable 5: { 6: // Event that is triggered at time of day. 7: public event TimeOfDayHandler Elapsed; 8:  9: // ... 10: } The first thing to note is that the event is a delegate type, which tells us what types of methods may subscribe to it.  The second thing to note is the signature of the event handler delegate, according to the MSDN: The standard signature of an event handler delegate defines a method that does not return a value, whose first parameter is of type Object and refers to the instance that raises the event, and whose second parameter is derived from type EventArgs and holds the event data. If the event does not generate event data, the second parameter is simply an instance of EventArgs. Otherwise, the second parameter is a custom type derived from EventArgs and supplies any fields or properties needed to hold the event data. So, in a nutshell, the event handler delegates should return void and take two parameters: An object reference to the object that raised the event. An EventArgs (or a subclass of EventArgs) reference to event specific information. Even if your event has no additional information to provide, you are still expected to provide an EventArgs instance.  In this case, feel free to pass the EventArgs.Empty singleton instead of creating new instances of EventArgs (to avoid generating unneeded memory garbage). The EventHandler delegate Because many events have no additional information to pass, and thus do not require custom EventArgs, the signature of the delegates for subscribing to these events is typically: 1: // always takes an object and an EventArgs reference 2: public delegate void EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) It would be insane to recreate this delegate for every class that had a basic event with no additional event data, so there already exists a delegate for you called EventHandler that has this very definition!  Feel free to use it to define any events which supply no additional event information: 1: public class Cache 2: { 3: // event that is raised whenever the cache performs a cleanup 4: public event EventHandler OnCleanup; 5:  6: // ... 7: } This will handle any event with the standard EventArgs (no additional information).  But what of events that do need to supply additional information?  Does that mean we’re out of luck for subclasses of EventArgs?  That’s where the generic for of EventHandler comes into play… The generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegate Starting with the introduction of generics in .NET 2.0, we have a generic delegate called EventHandler<TEventArgs>.  Its signature is as follows: 1: public delegate void EventHandler<TEventArgs>(object sender, TEventArgs e) 2: where TEventArgs : EventArgs This is similar to EventHandler except it has been made generic to support the more general case.  Thus, it will work for any delegate where the first argument is an object (the sender) and the second argument is a class derived from EventArgs (the event data). For example, let’s say we wanted to create a message receiver, and we wanted it to have a few events such as OnConnected that will tell us when a connection is established (probably with no additional information) and OnMessageReceived that will tell us when a new message arrives (probably with a string for the new message text). So for OnMessageReceived, our MessageReceivedEventArgs might look like this: 1: public sealed class MessageReceivedEventArgs : EventArgs 2: { 3: public string Message { get; set; } 4: } And since OnConnected needs no event argument type defined, our class might look something like this: 1: public class MessageReceiver 2: { 3: // event that is called when the receiver connects with sender 4: public event EventHandler OnConnected; 5:  6: // event that is called when a new message is received. 7: public event EventHandler<MessageReceivedEventArgs> OnMessageReceived; 8:  9: // ... 10: } Notice, nowhere did we have to define a delegate to fit our event definition, the EventHandler and generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates fit almost anything we’d need to do with events. Sidebar: Thread-safety and raising an event When the time comes to raise an event, we should always check to make sure there are subscribers, and then only raise the event if anyone is subscribed.  This is important because if no one is subscribed to the event, then the instance will be null and we will get a NullReferenceException if we attempt to raise the event. 1: // This protects against NullReferenceException... or does it? 2: if (OnMessageReceived != null) 3: { 4: OnMessageReceived(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 5: } The above code seems to handle the null reference if no one is subscribed, but there’s a problem if this is being used in multi-threaded environments.  For example, assume we have thread A which is about to raise the event, and it checks and clears the null check and is about to raise the event.  However, before it can do that thread B unsubscribes to the event, which sets the delegate to null.  Now, when thread A attempts to raise the event, this causes the NullReferenceException that we were hoping to avoid! To counter this, the simplest best-practice method is to copy the event (just a multicast delegate) to a temporary local variable just before we raise it.  Since we are inside the class where this event is being raised, we can copy it to a local variable like this, and it will protect us from multi-threading since multicast delegates are immutable and assignments are atomic: 1: // always make copy of the event multi-cast delegate before checking 2: // for null to avoid race-condition between the null-check and raising it. 3: var handler = OnMessageReceived; 4: 5: if (handler != null) 6: { 7: handler(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 8: } The very slight trade-off is that it’s possible a class may get an event after it unsubscribes in a multi-threaded environment, but this is a small risk and classes should be prepared for this possibility anyway.  For a more detailed discussion on this, check out this excellent Eric Lippert blog post on Events and Races. Summary Generic delegates give us a lot of power to make generic algorithms and classes, and the EventHandler delegate family gives us the flexibility to create events easily, without needing to redefine delegates over and over.  Use them whenever you need to define events with or without specialized EventArgs.   Tweet Technorati Tags: .NET, C#, CSharp, Little Wonders, Generics, Delegates, EventHandler

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• Looking into Entity Framework Code First Migrations

  - by nikolaosk

  In this post I will introduce you to Code First Migrations, an Entity Framework feature introduced in version 4.3 back in February of 2012.I have extensively covered Entity Framework in this blog. Please find my other Entity Framework posts here .   Before the addition of Code First Migrations (4.1,4.2 versions), Code First database initialisation meant that Code First would create the database if it does not exist (the default behaviour - CreateDatabaseIfNotExists). The other pattern we could use is DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges which means that Entity Framework, will drop the database if it realises that model has changes since the last time it created the database.The final pattern is DropCreateDatabaseAlways which means that Code First will recreate the database every time one runs the application.That is of course fine for the development database but totally unacceptable and catastrophic when you have a production database. We cannot lose our data because of the work that Code First works.Migrations solve this problem.With migrations we can modify the database without completely dropping it.We can modify the database schema to reflect the changes to the model without losing data.In version EF 5.0 migrations are fully included and supported. I will demonstrate migrations with a hands-on example.Let me say a few words first about Entity Framework first. The .Net framework provides support for Object Relational Mappingthrough EF. So EF is a an ORM tool and it is now the main data access technology that microsoft works on. I use it quite extensively in my projects. Through EF we have many things out of the box provided for us. We have the automatic generation of SQL code.It maps relational data to strongly types objects.All the changes made to the objects in the memory are persisted in a transactional way back to the data store. You can find in this post an example on how to use the Entity Framework to retrieve data from an SQL Server Database using the "Database/Schema First" approach.In this approach we make all the changes at the database level and then we update the model with those changes. In this post you can see an example on how to use the "Model First" approach when working with ASP.Net and the Entity Framework.This model was firstly introduced in EF version 4.0 and we could start with a blank model and then create a database from that model.When we made changes to the model , we could recreate the database from the new model. The Code First approach is the more code-centric than the other two. Basically we write POCO classes and then we persist to a database using something called DBContext.Code First relies on DbContext. We create 2,3 classes (e.g Person,Product) with properties and then these classes interact with the DbContext class we can create a new database based upon our POCOS classes and have tables generated from those classes.We do not have an .edmx file in this approach.By using this approach we can write much easier unit tests.DbContext is a new context class and is smaller,lightweight wrapper for the main context class which is ObjectContext (Schema First and Model First).Let's move on to our hands-on example.I have installed VS 2012 Ultimate edition in my Windows 8 machine. 1)  Create an empty asp.net web application. Give your application a suitable name. Choose C# as the development language2) Add a new web form item in your application. Leave the default name.3) Create a new folder. Name it CodeFirst .4) Add a new item in your application, a class file. Name it Footballer.cs. This is going to be a simple POCO class.Place this class file in the CodeFirst folder.The code follows    public class Footballer     {         public int FootballerID { get; set; }         public string FirstName { get; set; }         public string LastName { get; set; }         public double Weight { get; set; }         public double Height { get; set; }              }5) We will have to add EF 5.0 to our project. Right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer and select Manage NuGet Packages... for it.In the window that will pop up search for Entity Framework and install it.Have a look at the picture below   If you want to find out if indeed EF version is 5.0 version is installed have a look at the References. Have a look at the picture below to see what you will see if you have installed everything correctly.Have a look at the picture below 6) Then we need to create a context class that inherits from DbContext.Add a new class to the CodeFirst folder.Name it FootballerDBContext.Now that we have the entity classes created, we must let the model know.I will have to use the DbSet<T> property.The code for this class follows     public class FootballerDBContext:DbContext     {         public DbSet<Footballer> Footballers { get; set; }             }    Do not forget to add  (using System.Data.Entity;) in the beginning of the class file 7) We must take care of the connection string. It is very easy to create one in the web.config.It does not matter that we do not have a database yet.When we run the DbContext and query against it , it will use a connection string in the web.config and will create the database based on the classes.I will use the name "FootballTraining" for the database.In my case the connection string inside the web.config, looks like this    <connectionStrings>    <add name="CodeFirstDBContext" connectionString="server=.;integrated security=true; database=FootballTraining" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>                       </connectionStrings>8) Now it is time to create Linq to Entities queries to retrieve data from the database . Add a new class to your application in the CodeFirst folder.Name the file DALfootballer.csWe will create a simple public method to retrieve the footballers. The code for the class followspublic class DALfootballer     {         FootballerDBContext ctx = new FootballerDBContext();         public List<Footballer> GetFootballers()         {             var query = from player in ctx.Footballers select player;             return query.ToList();         }     } 9) Place a GridView control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name.Add an ObjectDataSource control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name. Set the DatasourceID property of the GridView control to the ID of the ObjectDataSource control.(DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1" ). Let's configure the ObjectDataSource control. Click on the smart tag item of the ObjectDataSource control and select Configure Data Source. In the Wizzard that pops up select the DALFootballer class and then in the next step choose the GetFootballers() method.Click Finish to complete the steps of the wizzard.Build and Run your application.  10) Obviously you will not see any records coming back from your database, because we have not inserted anything. The database is created, though.Have a look at the picture below.  11) Now let's change the POCO class. Let's add a new property to the Footballer.cs class.        public int Age { get; set; } Build and run your application again. You will receive an error. Have a look at the picture below 12) That was to be expected.EF Code First Migrations is not activated by default. We have to activate them manually and configure them according to your needs. We will open the Package Manager Console from the Tools menu within Visual Studio 2012.Then we will activate the EF Code First Migration Features by writing the command “Enable-Migrations”.  Have a look at the picture below. This adds a new folder Migrations in our project. A new auto-generated class Configuration.cs is created.Another class is also created [CURRENTDATE]_InitialCreate.cs and added to our project.The Configuration.cs  is shown in the picture below. The [CURRENTDATE]_InitialCreate.cs is shown in the picture below  13) ??w we are ready to migrate the changes in the database. We need to run the Add-Migration Age command in Package Manager ConsoleAdd-Migration will scaffold the next migration based on changes you have made to your model since the last migration was created.In the Migrations folder, the file 201211201231066_Age.cs is created.Have a look at the picture below to see the newly generated file and its contents. Now we can run the Update-Database command in Package Manager Console .See the picture above.Code First Migrations will compare the migrations in our Migrations folder with the ones that have been applied to the database. It will see that the Age migration needs to be applied, and run it.The EFMigrations.CodeFirst.FootballeDBContext database is now updated to include the Age column in the Footballers table.Build and run your application.Everything will work fine now.Have a look at the picture below to see the migrations applied to our table. 14) We may want it to automatically upgrade the database (by applying any pending migrations) when the application launches.Let's add another property to our Poco class.          public string TShirtNo { get; set; }We want this change to migrate automatically to the database.We go to the Configuration.cs we enable automatic migrations.     public Configuration()        {            AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = true;        } In the Page_Load event handling routine we have to register the MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion database initializer. A database initializer simply contains some logic that is used to make sure the database is setup correctly.   protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)        {            Database.SetInitializer(new MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion<FootballerDBContext, Configuration>());        } Build and run your application. It will work fine. Have a look at the picture below to see the migrations applied to our table in the database. Hope it helps!!!  

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 11, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 11, 2012Popular ReleasesZXMAK2: Version 2.7.2.0: show extended rzx error info fix reset lag for PROFI ULA 5.xx fix reset behavior fix PROFI ULA timings (thanks to solegstar) fix #FF port for PROFI ULA add ATM710 memory module add new predefined machine configs: ATM Turbo 2, PROFI 3.XX???????: Monitor 2012-11-11: This is the first releaseVidCoder: 1.4.5 Beta: Removed the old Advanced user interface and moved x264 preset/profile/tune there instead. The functionality is still available through editing the options string. Added ability to specify the H.264 level. Added ability to choose VidCoder's interface language. If you are interested in translating, we can get VidCoder in your language! Updated WPF text rendering to use the better Display mode. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5045. Removed logic that forced the .m4v extension in certain ...ImageGlass: Version 1.5: http://i1214.photobucket.com/albums/cc483/phapsuxeko/ImageGlass/1.png v1.5.4401.3015 Thumbnail bar: Increase loading speed Thumbnail image with ratio Support personal customization: mouse up, mouse down, mouse hover, selected item... Scroll to show all items Image viewer Zoom by scroll, or selected rectangle Speed up loading Zoom to cursor point New background design and customization and others... v1.5.4430.483 Thumbnail bar: Auto move scroll bar to selected image Show / Hi...Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML: Full Source Chapters 1 - 10 for Windows 8 Fix 002: This is the full source from all chapters of the book, compiled and tested on Windows 8 RTM. Includes: A fix for the Netflix example from Chapter 6 that was missing a service reference A fix for the ImageHelper issue (images were not being saved) - this was due to the buffer being inadequate and required streaming the writeable bitmap to a buffer first before encoding and savingmyCollections: Version 2.3.2.0: New in this version : Added TheGamesDB.net API for Games and NDS Added Support for Windows Media Center Added Support for myMovies Added Support for XBMC Added Support for Dune HD Added Support for Mede8er Added Support for WD HDTV Added Fast search options Added order by Artist/Album for music You can now create covers and background for games You can now update your ID3 tag with the info of myCollections Fixed several provider Performance improvement New Splash ...Draw: Draw 1.0: Drawing PadPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (v1.0): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 7 Ability to move control panel or individual elements outside media player. more info... New Entertainment app theme for out of the box support for Windows 8 Entertainment app guidelines. more info... VSIX reference names shortened. Allows seeing plugin name from "Add Reference" dialog without resizing. FreeWheel SmartXML now supports new "Standard" event callback type. Other minor misc fixes and improvements ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmo...WebSearch.Net: WebSearch.Net 3.1: WebSearch.Net is an open-source research platform that provides uniform data source access, data modeling, feature calculation, data mining, etc. It facilitates the experiments of web search researchers due to its high flexibility and extensibility. The platform can be used or extended by any language compatible for .Net 2 framework, from C# (recommended), VB.Net to C++ and Java. Thanks to the large coverage of knowledge in web search research, it is necessary to model the techniques and main...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.10.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.10.0. Whats newMVC support New request pipeline Many, many bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesWe have done all we can not to break backwards compatibility, but we had to do some minor breaking changes: Removed graphicHeadlineFormat config setting from umbracoSettings.config (an old relic from the 3.x days) U4-690 DynamicNode ChildrenAsList was fixed, altering it'...SQL Server Partitioned Table Framework: Partitioned Table Framework Release 1.0: SQL Server 2012 ReleaseSharePoint Manager 2013: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release ver 1.0.12.1106: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release (ver: 1.0.12.1106) is now ready for SharePoint 2013. The new version has an expanded view of the SharePoint object model and has been tested on SharePoint 2013 RTM. As a bonus, the new version is also available for SharePoint 2010 as a separate download.D3D9Client: D3D9Client R7: New release for Orbiter 2010-P1 - Added horizon/sun angle for night-lights into the configuration file (default 10deg) - Some runway lights related bugs are fixed - Added more configuration options for runway lightsFiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.2: Verzija 1.2. je, prije svega, odgovor na novu verziju Tehnicke specifikacije (v1.1.) koja je objavljena prije nekoliko dana. Pored novosti vezanih uz (sitne) izmjene u spomenutoj novoj verziji Tehnicke dokumentacije, projekt smo prošili sa nekim dodatnim feature-ima od kojih je vecina proizašla iz vaših prijedloga - hvala :) Novosti u v1.2. su: - Neusuglašenost zahtjeva (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/645) - Sample projekt - iznosi se množe sa 100 (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.c...MFCMAPI: October 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1036 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeDictationTool: DictationCool-WPF: • Open a media file to start a new dication. • Open a dct file to continue a dictation. • Compare your dictation with original text if exists. • Save your dictation to dct file, and restore it to continue later. • Save the compared result to html file.MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.7: Changelog for 2.3.7 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Improved performance of MP4 Fast and M4V Fast Profiles (no deinterlacing, removed --decomb) 2. Improved priority handling 3. Added support for Pausing and Resume conversions 4. Added support for fallback to source directory if network destination directory is unavailable 5. MCEBuddy now installs ShowAnalyzer during installation 6. Added support for long description atom in iTunesDyanamic Reports (RDLC) - SharePoint 2010 Visual WebPart: Initial Release: This is a Initial Release.HTML Renderer: HTML Renderer 1.0.0.0 (3): Major performance improvement (http://theartofdev.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/how-i-optimized-html-renderer-and-fell-in-love-with-vs-profiler/) Minor fixes raised in issue tracker and discussions.Window Manager: Window Manager 1.0: First releaseNew Projectsarteytex: este es una prueba blockworld: An implementation of a goal stack planner.Customer Note: customer note is windows store applicationDraw: ?????????????：??????、CAD??、????。Football Management: Football Management System is web management system for football (soccer) leagues, teams and players. Hijri Converter API: This project is aimed to create a simple RESTful API using VB and ASP.NET to do Hijri-to-Gregorian and Gregorian-to-Hijri conversion.httpclient?????????: httpclient?????????（1）??????????（2）?????????（3）??2012-11-06??，???????。 Imagine Cup 2013: Develop project to Imagine Cup 2013MyAppReji: MyAppN2F Request: The N2F Request object is used to handle interactions between N2F and the global $_REQUEST variable, sanitizing any results which are returned.Orchard Metro Theme: Orchard Metro Theme is a clean and flexible multi-zone theme.Poker Clock And Goodies: poker w8ProjectASPReviewer: Review website for notebooks, tablets and smartphones.Prototype: Its about making an proto type for the final project.Prototype - 7COM0207: 7COM0207 web scripting module, Assignment 2QuickToAD: QuickToAD is a foundational development project for the purpose of jump-starting data-driven application projects.Release Manager: Release Manager is a project to design and develop Windows based Release Management Software.ResW File Code Generator: A Visual Studio 2012 Custom Tool for generating a strongly typed helper class for accessing localized resources from a .ResW file.SEO Tools: This is a website containing some commonly used SEO tools. I have only added a blog ping utility at this time but there is more to come. Thales communicator: A C# library that helps communicate with Thales HSMTrivial: A trivia framework: Trivial is a C# framework that helps you creating custom trivia-like applications.

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• Optimizing Solaris 11 SHA-1 on Intel Processors

  - by danx

  SHA-1 is a "hash" or "digest" operation that produces a 160 bit (20 byte) checksum value on arbitrary data, such as a file. It is intended to uniquely identify text and to verify it hasn't been modified. Max Locktyukhin and others at Intel have improved the performance of the SHA-1 digest algorithm using multiple techniques. This code has been incorporated into Solaris 11 and is available in the Solaris Crypto Framework via the libmd(3LIB), the industry-standard libpkcs11(3LIB) library, and Solaris kernel module sha1. The optimized code is used automatically on systems with a x86 CPU supporting SSSE3 (Intel Supplemental SSSE3). Intel microprocessor architectures that support SSSE3 include Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge microprocessor families. Further optimizations are available for microprocessors that support AVX (such as Sandy Bridge). Although SHA-1 is considered obsolete because of weaknesses found in the SHA-1 algorithm—NIST recommends using at least SHA-256, SHA-1 is still widely used and will be with us for awhile more. Collisions (the same SHA-1 result for two different inputs) can be found with moderate effort. SHA-1 is used heavily though in SSL/TLS, for example. And SHA-1 is stronger than the older MD5 digest algorithm, another digest option defined in SSL/TLS. Optimizations Review SHA-1 operates by reading an arbitrary amount of data. The data is read in 512 bit (64 byte) blocks (the last block is padded in a specific way to ensure it's a full 64 bytes). Each 64 byte block has 80 "rounds" of calculations (consisting of a mixture of "ROTATE-LEFT", "AND", and "XOR") applied to the block. Each round produces a 32-bit intermediate result, called W[i]. Here's what each round operates: The first 16 rounds, rounds 0 to 15, read the 512 bit block 32 bits at-a-time. These 32 bits is used as input to the round. The remaining rounds, rounds 16 to 79, use the results from the previous rounds as input. Specifically for round i it XORs the results of rounds i-3, i-8, i-14, and i-16 and rotates the result left 1 bit. The remaining calculations for the round is a series of AND, XOR, and ROTATE-LEFT operators on the 32-bit input and some constants. The 32-bit result is saved as W[i] for round i. The 32-bit result of the final round, W[79], is the SHA-1 checksum. Optimization: Vectorization The first 16 rounds can be vectorized (computed in parallel) because they don't depend on the output of a previous round. As for the remaining rounds, because of step 2 above, computing round i depends on the results of round i-3, W[i-3], one can vectorize 3 rounds at-a-time. Max Locktyukhin found through simple factoring, explained in detail in his article referenced below, that the dependencies of round i on the results of rounds i-3, i-8, i-14, and i-16 can be replaced instead with dependencies on the results of rounds i-6, i-16, i-28, and i-32. That is, instead of initializing intermediate result W[i] with: W[i] = (W[i-3] XOR W[i-8] XOR W[i-14] XOR W[i-16]) ROTATE-LEFT 1 Initialize W[i] as follows: W[i] = (W[i-6] XOR W[i-16] XOR W[i-28] XOR W[i-32]) ROTATE-LEFT 2 That means that 6 rounds could be vectorized at once, with no additional calculations, instead of just 3! This optimization is independent of Intel or any other microprocessor architecture, although the microprocessor has to support vectorization to use it, and exploits one of the weaknesses of SHA-1. Optimization: SSSE3 Intel SSSE3 makes use of 16 %xmm registers, each 128 bits wide. The 4 32-bit inputs to a round, W[i-6], W[i-16], W[i-28], W[i-32], all fit in one %xmm register. The following code snippet, from Max Locktyukhin's article, converted to ATT assembly syntax, computes 4 rounds in parallel with just a dozen or so SSSE3 instructions: movdqa W_minus_04, W_TMP pxor W_minus_28, W // W equals W[i-32:i-29] before XOR // W = W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] palignr $8, W_minus_08, W_TMP // W_TMP = W[i-6:i-3], combined from // W[i-4:i-1] and W[i-8:i-5] vectors pxor W_minus_16, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25]) ^ W[i-16:i-13] pxor W_TMP, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) movdqa W, W_TMP // 4 dwords in W are rotated left by 2 psrld $30, W // rotate left by 2 W = (W >> 30) | (W << 2) pslld $2, W_TMP por W, W_TMP movdqa W_TMP, W // four new W values W[i:i+3] are now calculated paddd (K_XMM), W_TMP // adding 4 current round's values of K movdqa W_TMP, (WK(i)) // storing for downstream GPR instructions to read A window of the 32 previous results, W[i-1] to W[i-32] is saved in memory on the stack. This is best illustrated with a chart. Without vectorization, computing the rounds is like this (each "R" represents 1 round of SHA-1 computation): RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR With vectorization, 4 rounds can be computed in parallel: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR Optimization: AVX The new "Sandy Bridge" microprocessor architecture, which supports AVX, allows another interesting optimization. SSSE3 instructions have two operands, a input and an output. AVX allows three operands, two inputs and an output. In many cases two SSSE3 instructions can be combined into one AVX instruction. The difference is best illustrated with an example. Consider these two instructions from the snippet above: pxor W_minus_16, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25]) ^ W[i-16:i-13] pxor W_TMP, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) With AVX they can be combined in one instruction: vpxor W_minus_16, W, W_TMP // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) This optimization is also in Solaris, although Sandy Bridge-based systems aren't widely available yet. As an exercise for the reader, AVX also has 256-bit media registers, %ymm0 - %ymm15 (a superset of 128-bit %xmm0 - %xmm15). Can %ymm registers be used to parallelize the code even more? Optimization: Solaris-specific In addition to using the Intel code described above, I performed other minor optimizations to the Solaris SHA-1 code: Increased the digest(1) and mac(1) command's buffer size from 4K to 64K, as previously done for decrypt(1) and encrypt(1). This size is well suited for ZFS file systems, but helps for other file systems as well. Optimized encode functions, which byte swap the input and output data, to copy/byte-swap 4 or 8 bytes at-a-time instead of 1 byte-at-a-time. Enhanced the Solaris mdb(1) and kmdb(1) debuggers to display all 16 %xmm and %ymm registers (mdb "$x" command). Previously they only displayed the first 8 that are available in 32-bit mode. Can't optimize if you can't debug :-). Changed the SHA-1 code to allow processing in "chunks" greater than 2 Gigabytes (64-bits) Performance I measured performance on a Sun Ultra 27 (which has a Nehalem-class Xeon 5500 Intel W3570 microprocessor @3.2GHz). Turbo mode is disabled for consistent performance measurement. Graphs are better than words and numbers, so here they are: The first graph shows the Solaris digest(1) command before and after the optimizations discussed here, contained in libmd(3LIB). I ran the digest command on a half GByte file in swapfs (/tmp) and execution time decreased from 1.35 seconds to 0.98 seconds. The second graph shows the the results of an internal microbenchmark that uses the Solaris libpkcs11(3LIB) library. The operations are on a 128 byte buffer with 10,000 iterations. The results show operations increased from 320,000 to 416,000 operations per second. Finally the third graph shows the results of an internal kernel microbenchmark that uses the Solaris /kernel/crypto/amd64/sha1 module. The operations are on a 64Kbyte buffer with 100 iterations. third graph shows the results of an internal kernel microbenchmark that uses the Solaris /kernel/crypto/amd64/sha1 module. The operations are on a 64Kbyte buffer with 100 iterations. The results show for 1 kernel thread, operations increased from 410 to 600 MBytes/second. For 8 kernel threads, operations increase from 1540 to 1940 MBytes/second. Availability This code is in Solaris 11 FCS. It is available in the 64-bit libmd(3LIB) library for 64-bit programs and is in the Solaris kernel. You must be running hardware that supports Intel's SSSE3 instructions (for example, Intel Nehalem, Westmere, or Sandy Bridge microprocessor architectures). The easiest way to determine if SSSE3 is available is with the isainfo(1) command. For example, nehalem $ isainfo -v $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu If the output also shows "avx", the Solaris executes the even-more optimized 3-operand AVX instructions for SHA-1 mentioned above: sandybridge $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications avx xsave 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 avx xsave 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 code. Solaris libraries and kernel automatically determine if it's running on SSSE3 or AVX-capable machines and execute the correctly-tuned code for that microprocessor. Summary The Solaris 11 Crypto Framework, via the sha1 kernel module and libmd(3LIB) and libpkcs11(3LIB) libraries, incorporated a useful SHA-1 optimization from Intel for SSSE3-capable microprocessors. As with other Solaris optimizations, they come automatically "under the hood" with the current Solaris release. References "Improving the Performance of the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1)" by Max Locktyukhin (Intel, March 2010). The source for these SHA-1 optimizations used in Solaris "SHA-1", Wikipedia Good overview of SHA-1 FIPS 180-1 SHA-1 standard (FIPS, 1995) NIST Comments on Cryptanalytic Attacks on SHA-1 (2005, revised 2006)

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