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• Choosing a scripting language for game and implementing it

  - by Radius

  Hello, I am currently developing a 3D Action/RPG game in C++, and I would like some advice in choosing a scripting language to program the AI of the game. My team comes from a modding background, and in fact we are still finishing work on a mod of the game Gothic. In that game (which we also got our inspiration from) the language DAEDALUS (created by Piranha Bytes, the makers of the game) is used. Here is a full description of said language. The main thing to notice about this is that it uses instances moreso than classes. The game engine is closed, and so one can only guess about the internal implementation of this language, but the main thing I am looking for in a scripting language (which ideally would be quite similar but preferably also more powerful than DAEDALUS) is the fact that there are de facto 3 'separations' of classes - ie classes, instances and (instances of instances?). I think it will be easier to understand what I want if I provide an example. Take a regular NPC. First of all you have a class defined which (I understand) mirrors the (class or structure) inside the engine: CLASS C_NPC { VAR INT id ; // absolute ID des NPCs VAR STRING name [5] ; // Namen des NPC VAR STRING slot ; VAR INT npcType ; VAR INT flags ; VAR INT attribute [ATR_INDEX_MAX] ; VAR INT protection [PROT_INDEX_MAX]; VAR INT damage [DAM_INDEX_MAX] ; VAR INT damagetype ; VAR INT guild,level ; VAR FUNC mission [MAX_MISSIONS] ; var INT fight_tactic ; VAR INT weapon ; VAR INT voice ; VAR INT voicePitch ; VAR INT bodymass ; VAR FUNC daily_routine ; // Tagesablauf VAR FUNC start_aistate ; // Zustandsgesteuert // ********************** // Spawn // ********************** VAR STRING spawnPoint ; // Beim Tod, wo respawnen ? VAR INT spawnDelay ; // Mit Delay in (Echtzeit)-Sekunden // ********************** // SENSES // ********************** VAR INT senses ; // Sinne VAR INT senses_range ; // Reichweite der Sinne in cm // ********************** // Feel free to use // ********************** VAR INT aivar [50] ; VAR STRING wp ; // ********************** // Experience dependant // ********************** VAR INT exp ; // EXerience Points VAR INT exp_next ; // EXerience Points needed to advance to next level VAR INT lp ; // Learn Points }; Then, you can also define prototypes (which set some default values). But how you actually define an NPC is like this: instance BAU_900_Ricelord (Npc_Default) //Inherit from prototype Npc_Default { //-------- primary data -------- name = "Ryzowy Ksiaze"; npctype = NPCTYPE_GUARD; guild = GIL_BAU; level = 10; voice = 12; id = 900; //-------- abilities -------- attribute[ATR_STRENGTH] = 50; attribute[ATR_DEXTERITY] = 10; attribute[ATR_MANA_MAX] = 0; attribute[ATR_MANA] = 0; attribute[ATR_HITPOINTS_MAX]= 170; attribute[ATR_HITPOINTS] = 170; //-------- visuals -------- // animations Mdl_SetVisual (self,"HUMANS.MDS"); Mdl_ApplyOverlayMds (self,"Humans_Arrogance.mds"); Mdl_ApplyOverlayMds (self,"HUMANS_DZIDA.MDS"); // body mesh ,bdytex,skin,head mesh ,headtex,teethtex,ruestung Mdl_SetVisualBody (self,"Hum_Body_CookSmith",1,1,"Hum_Head_FatBald",91 , 0,-1); B_Scale (self); Mdl_SetModelFatness(self,2); fight_tactic = FAI_HUMAN_STRONG; //-------- Talente -------- Npc_SetTalentSkill (self,NPC_TALENT_1H,1); //-------- inventory -------- CreateInvItems (self, ItFoRice,10); CreateInvItem (self, ItFoWine); CreateInvItems(self, ItMiNugget,40); EquipItem (self, Heerscherstab); EquipItem (self, MOD_AMULETTDESREISLORDS); CreateInvItem (self, ItMi_Alchemy_Moleratlubric_01); //CreateInvItem (self,ItKey_RB_01); EquipItem (self, Ring_des_Lebens); //-------------Daily Routine------------- daily_routine = Rtn_start_900; }; FUNC VOID Rtn_start_900 () { TA_Boss (07,00,20,00,"NC_RICELORD"); TA_SitAround (20,00,24,00,"NC_RICELORD_SIT"); TA_Sleep (24,00,07,00,"NC_RICEBUNKER_10"); }; As you can see, the instance declaration is more like a constructor function, setting values and calling functions from within. This still wouldn't pose THAT much of a problem, if not for one more thing: multiple copies of this instance. For example, you can spawn multiple BAU_900_Ricelord's, and each of them keeps track of its own AI state, hitpoints etc. Now I think the instances are represented as ints (maybe even as the id of the NPC) inside the engine, as whenever (inside the script) you use the expression BAU_900_Ricelord it can be only assigned to an int variable, and most functions that operate on NPCs take that int value. However to directly modify its hitpoints etc you have to do something like var C_NPC npc = GetNPC(Bau_900_Ricelord); npc.attribute[ATR_HITPOINTS] = 10; ie get the actual C_NPC object that represents it. To finally recap - is it possible to get this kind of behaviour in any scripting languages you know of, or am I stuck with having to make my own? Or maybe there is an even better way of representing NPC's and their behaviours that way. The IDEAL language for scripting for me would be C#, as I simply adore that language, but somehow I doubt it is possible or indeed feasible to try and implement a similar kind of behaviour in C#. Many thanks

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• SSL confirmation dialog popup auto closes in IE8 when re-accessing a JNLP file

  - by haylem

  I'm having this very annoying problem to troubleshoot and have been going at it for way too many days now, so have a go at it. The Environment We have 2 app-servers, which can be located on either the same machine or 2 different machines, and use the same signing certificate, and host 2 different web-apps. Though let's say, for the sake of our study case here, that they are on the same physical machine. So, we have: https://company.com/webapp1/ https://company.com/webapp2/ webapp1 is GWT-based rich-client which contains on one of its screens a menu with an item that is used to invoke a Java WebStart Client located on webapp2. It does so by performing a simple window.open call via this GWT call: Window.open("https://company.com/webapp2/app.jnlp", "_blank", null); Expected Behavior User merrilly goes to webapp1 User navigates to menu entry to start the WebStart app and clicks on it browser fires off a separate window/dialog which, depending on the browser and its security settings, will: request confirmation to navigate to this secure site, directly download the file, and possibly auto-execute a javaws process if there's a file association, otherwise the user can simply click on the file and start the app (or go about doing whatever it takes here). If you close the app, close the dialog, and re-click the menu entry, the same thing should happen again. Actual Behavior On Anything but God-forsaken IE 8 (Though I admit there's also all the god-forsaken pre-IE8 stuff, but the Requirements Lords being merciful we have already recently managed to make them drop these suckers. That was close. Let's hold hands and say a prayer of gratitude.) Stuff just works. JNLP gets downloaded, app executes just fine, you can close the app and re-do all the steps and it will restart happily. People rejoice. Puppies are safe and play on green hills in the sunshine. Developers can go grab a coffee and move on to more meaningful and rewarding tasks, like checking out on SO questions. Chrome doesn't want to execute the JNLP, but who cares? Customers won't get RSI from clicking a file every other week. On God-forsaken IE8 On the first visit, the dialog opens and requests confirmation for the user to continue to webapp2, though it could be unsafe (here be dragons, I tell you). The JNLP downloads and auto-opens, the app start. Your breathing is steady and slow. You close the app, close that SSL confirmation dialog, and re-click the menu entry. The dialog opens and auto-closes. Nothing starts, the file wasn't downloaded to any known location and Fiddler just reports the connection was closed. If you close IE and reach that menu item to click it again, it is now back to working correctly. Until you try again during the same session, of course. Your heart-rate goes up, you get some more coffee to make matters worse, and start looking for plain tickets online and a cheap but heavy golf-club on an online auction site to go clubbing baby polar seals to avenge your bloodthirst, as the gates to the IE team in Redmond are probably more secured than an ice block, as one would assume they get death threats often. Plus, the IE9 and IE10 teams are already hard at work fxing the crap left by their predecessors, so maybe you don't want to be too hard on them, and you don't have money to waste on a PI to track down the former devs responsible for this mess. Added Details I have come across many problems with IE8 not downloading files over SSL when it uses a no-cache header. This was indeed one of our problems, which seems to be worked out now. It downloads files fine, webapp2 uses the following headers to serve the JNLP file: response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "private, must-revalidate"); // IE8 happy response.setHeader("Pragma", "private"); // IE8 happy response.setHeader("Expires", "0"); // IE8 happy response.setHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*"); // allow to request via cross-origin AJAX response.setContentType("application/x-java-jnlp-file"); // please exec me As you might have inferred, we get some confirmation dialog because there's something odd with the SSL certificate. Unfortunately I have no control over that. Assuming that's only temporary and for development purposes as we usually don't get our hands on the production certs. So the SSL cert is expired and doesn't specify the server. And the confirmation dialog. Wouldn't be that bad if it weren't for IE, as other browsers don't care, just ask for confirmation, and execute as expected and consistantly. Please, pretty please, help me, or I might consider sacrificial killings as an option. And I think I just found a decently prized stainless steel golf-club, so I'm right on the edge of gore. Side Notes Might actually be related to IE8 window.open SSL Certificate issue. Though it doesn't explain why the dialog would auto-close (that really is beyong me...), it could help to not have the confirmation dialog and not need the dialog at all. For instance, I was thinking that just having a simple URL in that menu instead of have it entirely managed by GWT code to invoke a Window.open would solve the problem. But I don't have control on that menu, and also I'm very curious how this could be fixed otherwise and why the hell it happens in the first place...

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• Watching setTimeout loops so that only one is running at a time.

  - by DA

  I'm creating a content rotator in jQuery. 5 items total. Item 1 fades in, pauses 10 seconds, fades out, then item 2 fades in. Repeat. Simple enough. Using setTimeout I can call a set of functions that create a loop and will repeat the process indefinitely. I now want to add the ability to interrupt this rotator at any time by clicking on a navigation element to jump directly to one of the content items. I originally started going down the path of pinging a variable constantly (say every half second) that would check to see if a navigation element was clicked and, if so, abandon the loop, then restart the loop based on the item that was clicked. The challenge I ran into was how to actually ping a variable via a timer. The solution is to dive into JavaScript closures...which are a little over my head but definitely something I need to delve into more. However, in the process of that, I came up with an alternative option that actually seems to be better performance-wise (theoretically, at least). I have a sample running here: http://jsbin.com/uxupi/14 (It's using console.log so have fireBug running) Sample script: $(document).ready(function(){ var loopCount = 0; $('p#hello').click(function(){ loopCount++; doThatThing(loopCount); }) function doThatOtherThing(currentLoopCount) { console.log('doThatOtherThing-'+currentLoopCount); if(currentLoopCount==loopCount){ setTimeout(function(){doThatThing(currentLoopCount)},5000) } } function doThatThing(currentLoopCount) { console.log('doThatThing-'+currentLoopCount); if(currentLoopCount==loopCount){ setTimeout(function(){doThatOtherThing(currentLoopCount)},5000); } } }) The logic being that every click of the trigger element will kick off the loop passing into itself a variable equal to the current value of the global variable. That variable gets passed back and forth between the functions in the loop. Each click of the trigger also increments the global variable so that subsequent calls of the loop have a unique local variable. Then, within the loop, before the next step of each loop is called, it checks to see if the variable it has still matches the global variable. If not, it knows that a new loop has already been activated so it just ends the existing loop. Thoughts on this? Valid solution? Better options? Caveats? Dangers? UPDATE: I'm using John's suggestion below via the clearTimeout option. However, I can't quite get it to work. The logic is as such: var slideNumber = 0; var timeout = null; function startLoop(slideNumber) { ...do stuff here to set up the slide based on slideNumber... slideFadeIn() } function continueCheck(){ if (timeout != null) { // cancel the scheduled task. clearTimeout(timeout); timeout = null; return false; }else{ return true; } }; function slideFadeIn() { if (continueCheck){ // a new loop hasn't been called yet so proceed... // fade in the LI $currentListItem.fadeIn(fade, function() { if(multipleFeatures){ timeout = setTimeout(slideFadeOut,display); } }); }; function slideFadeOut() { if (continueLoop){ // a new loop hasn't been called yet so proceed... slideNumber=slideNumber+1; if(slideNumber==features.length) { slideNumber = 0; }; timeout = setTimeout(function(){startLoop(slideNumber)},100); }; startLoop(slideNumber); The above kicks of the looping. I then have navigation items that, when clicked, I want the above loop to stop, then restart with a new beginning slide: $(myNav).click(function(){ clearTimeout(timeout); timeout = null; startLoop(thisItem); }) If I comment out 'startLoop...' from the click event, it, indeed, stops the initial loop. However, if I leave that last line in, it doesn't actually stop the initial loop. Why? What happens is that both loops seem to run in parallel for a period. So, when I click my navigation, clearTimeout is called, which clears it.

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• OpenGL + cgFX Alpha Blending failure

  - by dopplex

  I have a shader that needs to additively blend to its output render target. While it had been fully implemented and working, I recently refactored and have done something that is causing the alpha blending to not work anymore. I'm pretty sure that the problem is somewhere in my calls to either OpenGL or cgfx - but I'm currently at a loss for where exactly the problem is, as everything looks like it is set up properly for alpha blending to occur. No OpenGL or cg framework errors are showing up, either. For some context, what I'm doing here is taking a buffer which contains screen position and luminance values for each pixel, copying it to a PBO, and using it as the vertex buffer for drawing GL_POINTS. Everything except for the alpha blending appears to be working as expected. I've confirmed both that the input vertex buffer has the correct values, and that my vertex and fragment shaders are outputting the points to the correct locations and with the correct luminance values. The way that I've arrived at the conclusion that the Alpha blending was broken is by making my vertex shader output every point to the same screen location and then setting the pixel shader to always output a value of float4(0.5) for that pixel. Invariably, the end color (dumped afterwards) ends up being float4(0.5). The confusing part is that as far as I can tell, everything is properly set for alpha blending to occur. The cgfx pass has the two following state assignments (among others - I'll put a full listing at the end): BlendEnable = true; BlendFunc = int2(One, One); This ought to be enough, since I am calling cgSetPassState() - and indeed, when I use glGets to check the values of GL_BLEND_SRC, GL_BLEND_DEST, GL_BLEND, and GL_BLEND_EQUATION they all look appropriate (GL_ONE, GL_ONE, GL_TRUE, and GL_FUNC_ADD). This check was done immediately after the draw call. I've been looking around to see if there's anything other than blending being enabled and the blending function being correctly set that would cause alpha blending not to occur, but without any luck. I considered that I could be doing something wrong with GL, but GL is telling me that blending is enabled. I doubt it's cgFX related (as otherwise the GL state wouldn't even be thinking it was enabled) but it still fails if I explicitly use GL calls to set the blend mode and enable it. Here's the trimmed down code for starting the cgfx pass and the draw call: CGtechnique renderTechnique = Filter->curTechnique; TEXUNITCHECK; CGpass pass = cgGetFirstPass(renderTechnique); TEXUNITCHECK; while (pass) { cgSetPassState(pass); cgUpdatePassParameters(pass); //drawFSPointQuadBuff((void*)PointQuad); drawFSPointQuadBuff((void*)LumPointBuffer); TEXUNITCHECK; cgResetPassState(pass); pass = cgGetNextPass(pass); }; and the function with the draw call: void drawFSPointQuadBuff(void* args) { PointBuffer* pointBuffer = (PointBuffer*)args; FBOERRCHECK; glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); GLERRCHECK; glPointSize(1.0); GLERRCHECK; glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); GLERRCHECK; glEnable(GL_POINT_SMOOTH); if (pointBuffer-BufferObject) { glBindBufferARB(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER_ARB, (unsigned int)pointBuffer-BufData); glVertexPointer(pointBuffer-numComp, GL_FLOAT, 0, 0); } else { glVertexPointer(pointBuffer-numComp, GL_FLOAT, 0, pointBuffer-BufData); }; GLERRCHECK; glDrawArrays(GL_POINTS, 0, pointBuffer-numElem); GLboolean testBool; glGetBooleanv(GL_BLEND, &testBool); int iblendColor, iblendDest, iblendEquation, iblendSrc; glGetIntegerv(GL_BLEND_SRC, &iblendSrc); glGetIntegerv(GL_BLEND_DST, &iblendDest); glGetIntegerv(GL_BLEND_EQUATION, &iblendEquation); if (iblendEquation == GL_FUNC_ADD) { cerr << "Correct func" << endl; }; GLERRCHECK; if (pointBuffer-BufferObject) { glBindBufferARB(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER_ARB,0); } GLERRCHECK; glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); GLERRCHECK; }; Finally, here is the full state setting of the shader: AlphaTestEnable = false; DepthTestEnable = false; DepthMask = false; ColorMask = true; CullFaceEnable = false; BlendEnable = true; BlendFunc = int2(One, One); FragmentProgram = compile glslf std_PS(); VertexProgram = compile glslv bilatGridVS2();

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• C++0x rvalue references - lvalues-rvalue binding

  - by Doug

  This is a follow-on question to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2748866/c0x-rvalue-references-and-temporaries In the previous question, I asked how this code should work: void f(const std::string &); //less efficient void f(std::string &&); //more efficient void g(const char * arg) { f(arg); } It seems that the move overload should probably be called because of the implicit temporary, and this happens in GCC but not MSVC (or the EDG front-end used in MSVC's Intellisense). What about this code? void f(std::string &&); //NB: No const string & overload supplied void g1(const char * arg) { f(arg); } void g2(const std::string & arg) { f(arg); } It seems that, based on the answers to my previous question that function g1 is legal (and is accepted by GCC 4.3-4.5, but not by MSVC). However, GCC and MSVC both reject g2 because of clause 13.3.3.1.4/3, which prohibits lvalues from binding to rvalue ref arguments. I understand the rationale behind this - it is explained in N2831 "Fixing a safety problem with rvalue references". I also think that GCC is probably implementing this clause as intended by the authors of that paper, because the original patch to GCC was written by one of the authors (Doug Gregor). However, I don't this is quite intuitive. To me, (a) a const string & is conceptually closer to a string && than a const char *, and (b) the compiler could create a temporary string in g2, as if it were written like this: void g2(const std::string & arg) { f(std::string(arg)); } Indeed, sometimes the copy constructor is considered to be an implicit conversion operator. Syntactically, this is suggested by the form of a copy constructor, and the standard even mentions this specifically in clause 13.3.3.1.2/4, where the copy constructor for derived-base conversions is given a higher conversion rank than other implicit conversions: A conversion of an expression of class type to the same class type is given Exact Match rank, and a conversion of an expression of class type to a base class of that type is given Conversion rank, in spite of the fact that a copy/move constructor (i.e., a user-defined conversion function) is called for those cases. (I assume this is used when passing a derived class to a function like void h(Base), which takes a base class by value.) Motivation My motivation for asking this is something like the question asked in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2696156/how-to-reduce-redundant-code-when-adding-new-c0x-rvalue-reference-operator-over ("How to reduce redundant code when adding new c++0x rvalue reference operator overloads"). If you have a function that accepts a number of potentially-moveable arguments, and would move them if it can (e.g. a factory function/constructor: Object create_object(string, vector<string>, string) or the like), and want to move or copy each argument as appropriate, you quickly start writing a lot of code. If the argument types are movable, then one could just write one version that accepts the arguments by value, as above. But if the arguments are (legacy) non-movable-but-swappable classes a la C++03, and you can't change them, then writing rvalue reference overloads is more efficient. So if lvalues did bind to rvalues via an implicit copy, then you could write just one overload like create_object(legacy_string &&, legacy_vector<legacy_string> &&, legacy_string &&) and it would more or less work like providing all the combinations of rvalue/lvalue reference overloads - actual arguments that were lvalues would get copied and then bound to the arguments, actual arguments that were rvalues would get directly bound. Questions My questions are then: Is this a valid interpretation of the standard? It seems that it's not the conventional or intended one, at any rate. Does it make intuitive sense? Is there a problem with this idea that I"m not seeing? It seems like you could get copies being quietly created when that's not exactly expected, but that's the status quo in places in C++03 anyway. Also, it would make some overloads viable when they're currently not, but I don't see it being a problem in practice. Is this a significant enough improvement that it would be worth making e.g. an experimental patch for GCC?

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• Yet another C# Deadlock Debugging Question

  - by Roo

  Hi All, I have a multi-threaded application build in C# using VS2010 Professional. It's quite a large application and we've experienced the classing GUI cross-threading and deadlock issues before, but in the past month we've noticed the appears to lock up when left idle for around 20-30 minutes. The application is irresponsive and although it will repaint itself when other windows are dragged in front of the application and over it, the GUI still appears to be locked... interstingly (unlike if the GUI thread is being used for a considerable amount of time) the Close, Maximise and minimise buttons are also irresponsive and when clicked the little (Not Responding...) text is not displayed in the title of the application i.e. Windows still seems to think it's running fine. If I break/pause the application using the debugger, and view the threads that are running. There are 3 threads of our managed code that are running, and a few other worker threads whom the source code cannot be displayed for. The 3 threads that run are: The main/GUI thread A thread that loops indefinitely A thread that loops indefinitely If I step into threads 2 and 3, they appear to be looping correctly. They do not share locks (even with the main GUI thread) and they are not using the GUI thread at all. When stepping into the main/GUI thread however, it's broken on Application.Run... This problem screams deadlock to me, but what I don't understand is if it's deadlock, why can't I see the line of code the main/GUI thread is hanging on? Any help will be greatly appreciated! Let me know if you need more information... Cheers, Roo -----------------------------------------------------SOLUTION-------------------------------------------------- Okay, so the problem is now solved. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions! Much appreciated! I've marked the answer that solved my initial problem of determining where on the main/UI thread the application hangs (I handn't turned off the "Enable Just My Code" option). The overall issue I was experiencing was indeed Deadlock, however. After obtaining the call-stack and popping the top half of it into Google I came across this which explains exactly what I was experiencing... http://timl.net/ This references a lovely guide to debugging the issue... http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2008/12/15/debugging-ui/ This identified a control I was constructing off the GUI thread. I did know this, however, and was marshalling calls correctly, but what I didn't realise was that behind the scenes this Control was subscribing to an event or set of events that are triggered when e.g. a Windows session is unlocked or the screensaver exits. These calls are always made on the main/UI thread and were blocking when it saw the call was made on the incorrect thread. Kim explains in more detail here... http://krgreenlee.blogspot.com/2007/09/onuserpreferencechanged-hang.html In the end I found an alternative solution which did not require this Control off the main/UI thread. That appears to have solved the problem and the application no longer hangs. I hope this helps anyone who's confronted by a similar problem. Thanks again to everyone on here who helped! (and indirectly, the delightful bloggers I've referenced above!) Roo -----------------------------------------------------SOLUTION II-------------------------------------------------- Aren't threading issues delightful...you think you've solved it, and a month down the line it pops back up again. I still believe the solution above resolved an issue that would cause simillar behaviour, but we encountered the problem again. As we spent a while debugging this, I thought I'd update this question with our (hopefully) final solution: The problem appears to have been a bug in the Infragistics components in the WinForms 2010.1 release (no hot fixes). We had been running from around the time the freeze issue appeared (but had also added a bunch of other stuff too). After upgrading to WinForms 2010.3, we've yet to reproduce the issue (deja vu). See my question here for a bit more information: 'http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4077822/net-4-0-and-the-dreaded-onuserpreferencechanged-hang'. Hans has given a nice summary of the general issue. I hope this adds a little to the suggestions/information surrounding the nutorious OnUserPreferenceChanged Hang (or whatever you'd like to call it). Cheers, Roo

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• clicking a button via javascript does not cause a post

  - by Andreas Niedermair

  hi there! <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.2/jquery-ui.js"></script> </head> <body> <form id="fooForm"> <script type="text/javascript"> function FooMethod() { alert('hello'); } var fooButton; var fooForm; $(document).ready(function() { InitializeVariables(); InitiliazeDialog(); InitiliazeForm(); }); function InitializeVariables() { fooButton = $('#fooButton'); fooForm = $('#fooForm'); } function InitiliazeDialog() { var dialog = $('<div/>'); dialog.css('display', 'none'); var content = $('<p/>'); var icon = $('<span/>'); icon.addClass('ui-icon ui-icon-alert'); icon.css('float', 'left'); icon.css('margin', '0px 7px 20px 0px'); content.text('do you really want to hurt me?'); icon.prependTo(content); content.appendTo(dialog); var dialogOpenMethod = function () { dialog.dialog('open'); return false; }; var dialogOpenHandlerMethod = function (event, ui) { var widget = dialog.dialog('widget'); widget.appendTo(fooForm); var overlay = widget.prev(); overlay.css('z-index', 999); overlay.appendTo(fooForm); widget.css('position', 'fixed'); widget.css('top', '50%'); widget.css('margin-top', widget.height() / 2 * -1); widget.css('left', '50%'); widget.css('margin-left', widget.width() / 2 * -1); }; var submitMethod = function () { dialog.dialog('option', 'closeOnEscape', false); var widget = dialog.dialog('widget'); var yesButton = $(':button:eq(0)', widget); var noButton = $(':button:eq(1)', widget); var closeButton = $('a.ui-dialog-titlebar-close', widget); noButton.remove(); closeButton.remove(); fooButton.unbind('click', dialogOpenMethod); fooButton.click(); }; dialog.dialog({ autoOpen: false, modal: true, buttons: { 'Ja': submitMethod, 'Nein': function () { dialog.dialog('close'); } }, open: dialogOpenHandlerMethod }); fooButton.bind('click', dialogOpenMethod); } function InitiliazeForm() { fooButton.button(); fooForm.submit(function () { alert('doing a submit'); }); } </script> <input type="submit" id="fooButton" value="submit it!" onclick="FooMethod();"></input> </form> </body> </html> what am i doing? i want a modal-confirmation: user clicks on button, confirmation "do you really want to...?", user clicks "yes", this click unbinds the original click-handler and clicks the button again (which should cause a submit). what/why is not working? indeed you need a special case. this demo won't work, unless you set modal: false. interesting to mention: the original handler (onclick="FooMethod();") is called in modal and non-modal dialog. can anybody help me out? thanks in advance! i also opened a ticket on jqueryUI for this

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• ASp.Net Mvc 1.0 Dynamic Images Returned from Controller taking 154 seconds+ to display in IE8, firef

  - by julian guppy

  I have a curious problem with IE, IIS 6.0 dynamic PNG files and I am baffled as to how to fix.. Snippet from Helper (this returns the URL to the view for requesting the images from my Controller. string url = LinkBuilder.BuildUrlFromExpression(helper.ViewContext.RequestContext, helper.RouteCollection, c = c.FixHeight(ir.Filename, ir.AltText, "FFFFFF")); url = url.Replace("&", "&"); sb.Append(string.Format("<removed id=\"TheImage\" src=\"{0}\" alt=\"\" /", url)+Environment.NewLine); This produces a piece of html as follows:- img id="TheImage" src="/ImgText/FixHeight?sFile=Images%2FUser%2FJulianGuppy%2FMediums%2Fconservatory.jpg&backgroundColour=FFFFFF" alt="" / brackets missing because i cant post an image... even though I dont want to post an image I jsut want to post the markup... sigh Snippet from Controller ImgTextController /// <summary> /// This function fixes the height of the image /// </summary> /// <param name="sFile"></param> /// <param name="alternateText"></param> /// <param name="backgroundColour"></param> /// <returns></returns> [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)] public ActionResult FixHeight(string sFile, string alternateText, string backgroundColour) { #region File if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(sFile)) { return new ImgTextResult(); } // MVC specific change to prepend the new directory if (sFile.IndexOf("Content") == -1) { sFile = "~/Content/" + sFile; } // open the file System.Drawing.Image img; try { img = System.Drawing.Image.FromFile(Server.MapPath(sFile)); } catch { img = null; } // did we fail? if (img == null) { return new ImgTextResult(); } #endregion File #region Width // Sort out the width from the image passed to me Int32 nWidth = img.Width; #endregion Width #region Height Int32 nHeight = img.Height; #endregion Height // What is the ideal height given a width of 2100 this should be 1400. var nIdealHeight = (int)(nWidth / 1.40920096852); // So is the actual height of the image already greater than the ideal height? Int32 nSplit; if (nIdealHeight < nHeight) { // Yes, do nothing, well i need to return the iamge... nSplit = 0; } else { // rob wants to not show the white at the top or bottom, so if we were to crop the image how would be do it // 1. Calculate what the width should be If we dont adjust the heigt var newIdealWidth = (int)(nHeight * 1.40920096852); // 2. This newIdealWidth should be smaller than the existing width... so work out the split on that Int32 newSplit = (nWidth - newIdealWidth) / 2; // 3. Now recrop the image using 0-nHeight as the height (i.e. full height) // but crop the sides so that its the correct aspect ration var newRect = new Rectangle(newSplit, 0, newIdealWidth, nHeight); img = CropImage(img, newRect); nHeight = img.Height; nWidth = img.Width; nSplit = 0; } // No, so I want to place this image on a larger canvas and we do this by Creating a new image to be the size that we want System.Drawing.Image canvas = new Bitmap(nWidth, nIdealHeight, PixelFormat.Format24bppRgb); Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(canvas); #region Color // Whilst we can set the background colour we shall default to white if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(backgroundColour)) { backgroundColour = "FFFFFF"; } Color bc = ColorTranslator.FromHtml("#" + backgroundColour); #endregion Color // Filling the background (which gives us our broder) Brush backgroundBrush = new SolidBrush(bc); g.FillRectangle(backgroundBrush, -1, -1, nWidth + 1, nIdealHeight + 1); // draw the image at the position var rect = new Rectangle(0, nSplit, nWidth, nHeight); g.DrawImage(img, rect); return new ImgTextResult { Image = canvas, ImageFormat = ImageFormat.Png }; } My ImgTextResult is a class that returns an Action result for me but embedding the image from a memory stream into the response.outputstream. snippet from my ImageResults /// <summary> /// Execute the result /// </summary> /// <param name="context"></param> public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { // output context.HttpContext.Response.Clear(); context.HttpContext.Response.ContentType = "image/png"; try { var memStream = new MemoryStream(); Image.Save(memStream, ImageFormat.Png); context.HttpContext.Response.BinaryWrite(memStream.ToArray()); context.HttpContext.Response.Flush(); context.HttpContext.Response.Close(); memStream.Dispose(); Image.Dispose(); } catch (Exception ex) { string a = ex.Message; } } Now all of this works locally and lovely, and indeed all of this works on my production server BUT Only for Firefox, Safari, Chrome (and other browsers) IE has a fit and decides that it either wont display the image or it does display the image after approx 154seconds of waiting..... I have made sure my HTML is XHTML compliant, I have made sure I am getting no Routing errors or crashes in my event log on the server.... Now obviously I have been a muppet and have done something wrong... but what I cant fathom is why in development all works fine, and in production all non IE browsers also work fine, but IE 8 using IIS 6.0 production server is having some kind of problem in returning this PNG and I dont have an error to trace... so what I am looking for is guidance as to how I can debug this problem.

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• Something like a manual refresh is needed angularjs, and a $digest() iterations error

  - by Tony Ennis

  (post edited again, new comments follow this line) I'm changing the title of this posting since it was misleading - I was trying to fix a symptom. I was unable to figure out why the code was breaking with a $digest() iterations error. A plunk of my code worked fine. I was totally stuck, so I decided to make my code a little more Angular-like. One anti-pattern I had implemented was to hide my model behind my controller by adding getters/setters to the controller. I tore all that out and instead put the model into the $scope since I had read that was proper Angular. To my surprise, the $digest() iterations error went away. I do not exactly know why and I do not have the intestinal fortitude to put the old code back and figure it out. I surmise that by involving the controller in the get/put of the data I added a dependency under the hood. I do not understand it. edit #2 ends here. (post edited, see EDIT below) I was working through my first Error: 10 $digest() iterations reached. Aborting! error today. I solved it this way: <div ng-init="lineItems = ctrl.getLineItems()"> <tr ng-repeat="r in lineItems"> <td>{{r.text}}</td> <td>...</td> <td>{{r.price | currency}}</td> </tr </div> Now a new issue has arisen - the line items I'm producing can be modified by another control on the page. It's a text box for a promo code. The promo code adds a discount to the lineItem array. It would show up if I could ng-repeat over ctrl.getLineItems(). Since the ng-repeat is looking at a static variable, not the actual model, it doesn't see that the real line items have changed and thus the promotional discount doesn't get displayed until I refresh the browser. Here's the HTML for the promo code: <input type="text" name="promo" ng-model="ctrl.promoCode"/> <button ng-click="ctrl.applyPromoCode()">apply promo code</button> The input tag is writing the value to the model. The bg-click in the button is invoking a function that will apply the code. This could change the data behind the lineItems. I have been advised to use $scope.apply(...). However, since this is applied as a matter of course by ng-click is isn't going to do anything. Indeed, if I add it to ctrl.applyPromoCode(), I get an error since an .apply() is already in progress. I'm at a loss. EDIT The issue above is probably the result of me fixing of symptom, not a problem. Here is the original HTML that was dying with the 10 $digest() iterations error. <table> <tr ng-repeat="r in ctrl.getLineItems()"> <td>{{r.text}}</td> <td>...</td> <td>{{r.price | currency}}</td> </tr> </table> The ctrl.getLineItems() function doesn't do much but invoke a model. I decided to keep the model out of the HTML as much as I could. this.getLineItems = function() { var total = 0; this.lineItems = []; this.lineItems.push({text:"Your quilt will be "+sizes[this.size].block_size+" squares", price:sizes[this.size].price}); total = sizes[this.size].price; this.lineItems.push({text: threads[this.thread].narrative, price:threads[this.thread].price}); total = total + threads[this.thread].price; if (this.sashing) { this.lineItems.push({text:"Add sashing", price: this.getSashingPrice()}); total = total + sizes[this.size].sashing; } else { this.lineItems.push({text:"No sashing", price:0}); } if(isNaN(this.promo)) { this.lineItems.push({text:"No promo code", price:0}); } else { this.lineItems.push({text:"Promo code", price: promos[this.promo].price}); total = total + promos[this.promo].price; } this.lineItems.push({text:"Shipping", price:this.shipping}); total = total + this.shipping; this.lineItems.push({text:"Order Total", price:total}); return this.lineItems; }; And the model code assembled an array of objects based upon the items selected. I'll abbreviate the class as it croaks as long as the array has a row. function OrderModel() { this.lineItems = []; // Result of the lineItems call ... this.getLineItems = function() { var total = 0; this.lineItems = []; ... this.lineItems.push({text:"Order Total", price:total}); return this.lineItems; }; }

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• TextField breaking MOUSE_OVER in as3: only after moving it!

  - by Franz

  I'm having a really weird problem with the MOUSE_OVER event. I'm building dynamic tabs representing mp3 songs containing textfields with info and a dynamic image for the cover art. I am trying to get a simple MOUSE_OVER working over the whole tab, such that you can select the next song to play. I am using a Sprite with alpha 0 that overlays my whole tab (incl. the textFields) as a Listener for MOUSE_OVER and _OUT... I've checked by setting the alpha to something visible and it indeed covers my tab and follows it around as I move it (just making sure I'm not moving the tab without moving the hotspot). Also, I only create it once my cover art is loaded, ensuring that it will cover that too. Now, when the tab is in the top position, everything is dandy. As soon as I move the tab to make space for the next tab, the textFields break my roll behaviour... just like that noob mistake of overlaying a sprite over the one that you're listening for MouseEvents on. But... the roll area is still on top of the field, I've set selectable and mouseEnabled to false on the textFields... nothing. It is as if the mere fact of moving the whole tab now puts the textField on top of everything in my tab (whereas visually, it's still in its expected layer). I'm using pixel fonts but tried it with system fonts, same thing... at my wits end here. public function Tab(tune:Tune) { _tune = tune; mainSprite = new Sprite(); addChild(mainSprite); drawBorder(); createFormat(); placeArtist(); placeTitle(); placeAlbum(); coverArt(); } private function placeButton():void { _button = new Sprite(); _button.graphics.beginFill(0xFF000,0); _button.graphics.drawRect(0,0,229,40); _button.graphics.endFill(); _button.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, mouseListener); _button.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT, mouseListener); _button.buttonMode = true; mainSprite.addChild(_button); } private function mouseListener(event:MouseEvent):void { switch(event.type){ case MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER : hilite(true); break; case MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT : hilite(false); break; } } private function createFormat():void { _format = new TextFormat(); _format.font = "FFF Neostandard"; _format.size = 8; _format.color = 0xFFFFFF; } private function placeArtist():void { var artist : TextField = new TextField(); artist.selectable = false; artist.defaultTextFormat = _format; artist.x = 41; artist.y = 3; artist.width = 135; artist.text = _tune.artist; artist.mouseEnabled = false; mainSprite.addChild(artist); } private function placeTitle():void { var title : TextField = new TextField(); title.selectable = false; title.defaultTextFormat = _format; title.x = 41; title.y = 14; title.width = 135; title.text = _tune.title; title.mouseEnabled = false; mainSprite.addChild(title); } private function placeAlbum():void { var album : TextField = new TextField(); album.selectable = false; album.defaultTextFormat = _format; album.x = 41; album.y = 25; album.width = 135; album.text = _tune.album; album.mouseEnabled = false; mainSprite.addChild(album); } private function drawBorder():void { _border = new Sprite(); _border.graphics.lineStyle(1, 0x545454); _border.graphics.drawRect (0,0,229,40); mainSprite.addChild(_border); } private function coverArt():void { _image = new Sprite(); var imageLoader : Loader = new Loader(); _loaderInfo = imageLoader.contentLoaderInfo; _loaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, coverLoaded) var image:URLRequest = new URLRequest(_tune.coverArt); imageLoader.load(image); _image.x = 1.5; _image.y = 2; _image.addChild(imageLoader); } private function coverLoaded(event:Event):void { _loaderInfo.removeEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, coverLoaded); var scaling : Number = IMAGE_SIZE / _image.width; _image.scaleX = scaling; _image.scaleY = scaling; mainSprite.addChild (_image); placeButton(); } public function hilite(state:Boolean):void{ var col : ColorTransform = new ColorTransform(); if(state){ col.color = 0xFFFFFF; } else { col.color = 0x545454; } _border.transform.colorTransform = col; }

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• Linked lists in Java - Help with writing methods

  - by user368241

  Representation of a string in linked lists In every intersection in the list there will be 3 fields : The letter itself. The number of times it appears consecutively. A pointer to the next intersection in the list. The following class CharNode represents a intersection in the list : public class CharNode { private char _data; private int _value; private charNode _next; public CharNode (char c, int val, charNode n) { _data = c; _value = val; _next = n; } public charNode getNext() { return _next; } public void setNext (charNode node) { _next = node; } public int getValue() { return _value; } public void setValue (int v) { value = v; } public char getData() { return _data; } public void setData (char c) { _data = c; } } The class StringList represents the whole list : public class StringList { private charNode _head; public StringList() { _head = null; } public StringList (CharNode node) { _head = node; } } Add methods to the class StringList according to the details : (I will add methods gradually according to my specific questions) (Pay attention, these are methods from the class String and we want to fulfill them by the representation of a string by a list as explained above) Pay attention to all the possible error cases. Write what is the time complexity and space complexity of every method that you wrote. Make sure the methods you wrote are effective. It is NOT allowed to use ready classes of Java. It is NOT allowed to move to string and use string operations. 1) public int indexOf (int ch) - returns the index in the string it is operated on of the first appeareance of the char "ch". If the char "ch" doesn't appear in the string, returns -1. If the value of fromIndex isn't in the range, returns -1. Here is my try : public int indexOf (int ch) { int count = 0; charNode pos = _head; if (pos == null ) { return -1; } for (pos = _head; pos!=null && pos.getData()!=ch; pos = pos.getNext()) { count = count + pos.getValue(); } if (pos==null) return -1; return count; } Time complexity = O(N) Space complexity = O(1) EDIT : I have a problem. I tested it in BlueJ and if the char ch doesn't appear it returns -1 but if it does, it always returns 0 and I don't understand why... I am confused. How can the compiler know that the value is the number of times the letter appears consecutively? Can I assume this because its given on the question or what? If it's true and I can assume this, then my code should be correct right? Ok I just spoke with my instructor and she said it isn't required to write it in the exercise but in order for me to test that it indeed works, I need to open a new class and write a code for making a list so that the the value of every node is the number of times the letter appears consecutively. Can someone please assist me? So I will copy+paste to BlueJ and this way I will be able to test all the methods. Meanwhile I am moving on to the next methods. 2) public int indexOf (int ch, int fromIndex) - returns the index in the string it is operated on of the first appeareance of the char "ch", as the search begins in the index "fromIndex". If the char "ch" doesn't appear in the string, returns -1. If the value of fromIndex doesn't appear in the range, returns -1. Here is my try: public int indexOf (int ch, int fromIndex) { int count = 0, len=0, i; charNode pos = _head; CharNode cur = _head; for (pos = _head; pos!=null; pos = pos.getNext()) { len = len+1; } if (fromIndex<0 || fromIndex>=len) return -1; for (i=0; i<fromIndex; i++) { cur = cur.getNext(); } if (cur == null ) { return -1; } for (cur = _head; cur!=null && cur.getData()!=ch; cur = cur.getNext()) { count = count + cur.getValue(); } if (cur==null) return -1; return count; } Time complexity = O(N) ? Space complexity = O(1) 3) public StringList concat (String str) - returns a string that consists of the string that it is operated on and in its end the string "str" is concatenated. Here is my try : public StringList concat (String str) { String str = ""; charNode pos = _head; if (str == null) return -1; for (pos = _head; pos!=null; pos = pos.getNext()) { str = str + pos.getData(); } str = str + "str"; return str; } Time complexity = O(N) Space complexity = O(1)

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5 Part 1: Table per Hierarchy (TPH)

  - by mortezam

  A simple strategy for mapping classes to database tables might be “one table for every entity persistent class.” This approach sounds simple enough and, indeed, works well until we encounter inheritance. Inheritance is such a visible structural mismatch between the object-oriented and relational worlds because object-oriented systems model both “is a” and “has a” relationships. SQL-based models provide only "has a" relationships between entities; SQL database management systems don’t support type inheritance—and even when it’s available, it’s usually proprietary or incomplete. There are three different approaches to representing an inheritance hierarchy: Table per Hierarchy (TPH): Enable polymorphism by denormalizing the SQL schema, and utilize a type discriminator column that holds type information. Table per Type (TPT): Represent "is a" (inheritance) relationships as "has a" (foreign key) relationships. Table per Concrete class (TPC): Discard polymorphism and inheritance relationships completely from the SQL schema.I will explain each of these strategies in a series of posts and this one is dedicated to TPH. In this series we'll deeply dig into each of these strategies and will learn about "why" to choose them as well as "how" to implement them. Hopefully it will give you a better idea about which strategy to choose in a particular scenario. Inheritance Mapping with Entity Framework Code FirstAll of the inheritance mapping strategies that we discuss in this series will be implemented by EF Code First CTP5. The CTP5 build of the new EF Code First library has been released by ADO.NET team earlier this month. EF Code-First enables a pretty powerful code-centric development workflow for working with data. I’m a big fan of the EF Code First approach, and I’m pretty excited about a lot of productivity and power that it brings. When it comes to inheritance mapping, not only Code First fully supports all the strategies but also gives you ultimate flexibility to work with domain models that involves inheritance. The fluent API for inheritance mapping in CTP5 has been improved a lot and now it's more intuitive and concise in compare to CTP4. A Note For Those Who Follow Other Entity Framework ApproachesIf you are following EF's "Database First" or "Model First" approaches, I still recommend to read this series since although the implementation is Code First specific but the explanations around each of the strategies is perfectly applied to all approaches be it Code First or others. A Note For Those Who are New to Entity Framework and Code-FirstIf you choose to learn EF you've chosen well. If you choose to learn EF with Code First you've done even better. To get started, you can find a great walkthrough by Scott Guthrie here and another one by ADO.NET team here. In this post, I assume you already setup your machine to do Code First development and also that you are familiar with Code First fundamentals and basic concepts. You might also want to check out my other posts on EF Code First like Complex Types and Shared Primary Key Associations. A Top Down Development ScenarioThese posts take a top-down approach; it assumes that you’re starting with a domain model and trying to derive a new SQL schema. Therefore, we start with an existing domain model, implement it in C# and then let Code First create the database schema for us. However, the mapping strategies described are just as relevant if you’re working bottom up, starting with existing database tables. I’ll show some tricks along the way that help you dealing with nonperfect table layouts. Let’s start with the mapping of entity inheritance. -- The Domain ModelIn our domain model, we have a BillingDetail base class which is abstract (note the italic font on the UML class diagram below). We do allow various billing types and represent them as subclasses of BillingDetail class. As for now, we support CreditCard and BankAccount: Implement the Object Model with Code First As always, we start with the POCO classes. Note that in our DbContext, I only define one DbSet for the base class which is BillingDetail. Code First will find the other classes in the hierarchy based on Reachability Convention. public abstract class BillingDetail  {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }             public string Number { get; set; } } public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } } public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }                     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } } public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; } } This object model is all that is needed to enable inheritance with Code First. If you put this in your application you would be able to immediately start working with the database and do CRUD operations. Before going into details about how EF Code First maps this object model to the database, we need to learn about one of the core concepts of inheritance mapping: polymorphic and non-polymorphic queries. Polymorphic Queries LINQ to Entities and EntitySQL, as object-oriented query languages, both support polymorphic queries—that is, queries for instances of a class and all instances of its subclasses, respectively. For example, consider the following query: IQueryable<BillingDetail> linqQuery = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; List<BillingDetail> billingDetails = linqQuery.ToList(); Or the same query in EntitySQL: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE b FROM BillingDetails AS b"; ObjectQuery<BillingDetail> objectQuery = ((IObjectContextAdapter)context).ObjectContext                                                                          .CreateQuery<BillingDetail>(eSqlQuery); List<BillingDetail> billingDetails = objectQuery.ToList(); linqQuery and eSqlQuery are both polymorphic and return a list of objects of the type BillingDetail, which is an abstract class but the actual concrete objects in the list are of the subtypes of BillingDetail: CreditCard and BankAccount. Non-polymorphic QueriesAll LINQ to Entities and EntitySQL queries are polymorphic which return not only instances of the specific entity class to which it refers, but all subclasses of that class as well. On the other hand, Non-polymorphic queries are queries whose polymorphism is restricted and only returns instances of a particular subclass. In LINQ to Entities, this can be specified by using OfType<T>() Method. For example, the following query returns only instances of BankAccount: IQueryable<BankAccount> query = from b in context.BillingDetails.OfType<BankAccount>() select b; EntitySQL has OFTYPE operator that does the same thing: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE b FROM OFTYPE(BillingDetails, Model.BankAccount) AS b"; In fact, the above query with OFTYPE operator is a short form of the following query expression that uses TREAT and IS OF operators: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE TREAT(b as Model.BankAccount)                       FROM BillingDetails AS b                       WHERE b IS OF(Model.BankAccount)"; (Note that in the above query, Model.BankAccount is the fully qualified name for BankAccount class. You need to change "Model" with your own namespace name.) Table per Class Hierarchy (TPH)An entire class hierarchy can be mapped to a single table. This table includes columns for all properties of all classes in the hierarchy. The concrete subclass represented by a particular row is identified by the value of a type discriminator column. You don’t have to do anything special in Code First to enable TPH. It's the default inheritance mapping strategy: This mapping strategy is a winner in terms of both performance and simplicity. It’s the best-performing way to represent polymorphism—both polymorphic and nonpolymorphic queries perform well—and it’s even easy to implement by hand. Ad-hoc reporting is possible without complex joins or unions. Schema evolution is straightforward. Discriminator Column As you can see in the DB schema above, Code First has to add a special column to distinguish between persistent classes: the discriminator. This isn’t a property of the persistent class in our object model; it’s used internally by EF Code First. By default, the column name is "Discriminator", and its type is string. The values defaults to the persistent class names —in this case, “BankAccount” or “CreditCard”. EF Code First automatically sets and retrieves the discriminator values. TPH Requires Properties in SubClasses to be Nullable in the Database TPH has one major problem: Columns for properties declared by subclasses will be nullable in the database. For example, Code First created an (INT, NULL) column to map CardType property in CreditCard class. However, in a typical mapping scenario, Code First always creates an (INT, NOT NULL) column in the database for an int property in persistent class. But in this case, since BankAccount instance won’t have a CardType property, the CardType field must be NULL for that row so Code First creates an (INT, NULL) instead. If your subclasses each define several non-nullable properties, the loss of NOT NULL constraints may be a serious problem from the point of view of data integrity. TPH Violates the Third Normal FormAnother important issue is normalization. We’ve created functional dependencies between nonkey columns, violating the third normal form. Basically, the value of Discriminator column determines the corresponding values of the columns that belong to the subclasses (e.g. BankName) but Discriminator is not part of the primary key for the table. As always, denormalization for performance can be misleading, because it sacrifices long-term stability, maintainability, and the integrity of data for immediate gains that may be also achieved by proper optimization of the SQL execution plans (in other words, ask your DBA). Generated SQL QueryLet's take a look at the SQL statements that EF Code First sends to the database when we write queries in LINQ to Entities or EntitySQL. For example, the polymorphic query for BillingDetails that you saw, generates the following SQL statement: SELECT  [Extent1].[Discriminator] AS [Discriminator],  [Extent1].[BillingDetailId] AS [BillingDetailId],  [Extent1].[Owner] AS [Owner],  [Extent1].[Number] AS [Number],  [Extent1].[BankName] AS [BankName],  [Extent1].[Swift] AS [Swift],  [Extent1].[CardType] AS [CardType],  [Extent1].[ExpiryMonth] AS [ExpiryMonth],  [Extent1].[ExpiryYear] AS [ExpiryYear] FROM [dbo].[BillingDetails] AS [Extent1] WHERE [Extent1].[Discriminator] IN ('BankAccount','CreditCard') Or the non-polymorphic query for the BankAccount subclass generates this SQL statement: SELECT  [Extent1].[BillingDetailId] AS [BillingDetailId],  [Extent1].[Owner] AS [Owner],  [Extent1].[Number] AS [Number],  [Extent1].[BankName] AS [BankName],  [Extent1].[Swift] AS [Swift] FROM [dbo].[BillingDetails] AS [Extent1] WHERE [Extent1].[Discriminator] = 'BankAccount' Note how Code First adds a restriction on the discriminator column and also how it only selects those columns that belong to BankAccount entity. Change Discriminator Column Data Type and Values With Fluent API Sometimes, especially in legacy schemas, you need to override the conventions for the discriminator column so that Code First can work with the schema. The following fluent API code will change the discriminator column name to "BillingDetailType" and the values to "BA" and "CC" for BankAccount and CreditCard respectively: protected override void OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {     modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()                 .Map<BankAccount>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue("BA"))                 .Map<CreditCard>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue("CC")); } Also, changing the data type of discriminator column is interesting. In the above code, we passed strings to HasValue method but this method has been defined to accepts a type of object: public void HasValue(object value); Therefore, if for example we pass a value of type int to it then Code First not only use our desired values (i.e. 1 & 2) in the discriminator column but also changes the column type to be (INT, NOT NULL): modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()             .Map<BankAccount>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue(1))             .Map<CreditCard>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue(2)); SummaryIn this post we learned about Table per Hierarchy as the default mapping strategy in Code First. The disadvantages of the TPH strategy may be too serious for your design—after all, denormalized schemas can become a major burden in the long run. Your DBA may not like it at all. In the next post, we will learn about Table per Type (TPT) strategy that doesn’t expose you to this problem. References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: Blue; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } p.MsoNormal { margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: "Calibri" , "sans-serif"; }

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• SQL SERVER – Securing TRUNCATE Permissions in SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  Download the Script of this article from here. On December 11, 2010, Vinod Kumar, a Databases & BI technology evangelist from Microsoft Corporation, graced Ahmedabad by spending some time with the Community during the Community Tech Days (CTD) event. As he was running through a few demos, Vinod asked the audience one of the most fundamental and common interview questions – “What is the difference between a DELETE and TRUNCATE?“ Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Expert Nakul Vachhrajani has come up with excellent solutions of the same. I must congratulate Nakul for this excellent solution and as a encouragement to User Group member, I am publishing the same article over here. Nakul Vachhrajani is a Software Specialist and systems development professional with Patni Computer Systems Limited. He has functional experience spanning legacy code deprecation, system design, documentation, development, implementation, testing, maintenance and support of complex systems, providing business intelligence solutions, database administration, performance tuning, optimization, product management, release engineering, process definition and implementation. He has comprehensive grasp on Database Administration, Development and Implementation with MS SQL Server and C, C++, Visual C++/C#. He has about 6 years of total experience in information technology. Nakul is an member of the Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Groups, and actively contributes to the community by actively participating in multiple forums and websites like SQLAuthority.com, BeyondRelational.com, SQLServerCentral.com and many others. Please note: The opinions expressed herein are Nakul own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. All data from everywhere here on Earth go through a series of  four distinct operations, identified by the words: CREATE, READ, UPDATE and DELETE, or simply, CRUD. Putting in Microsoft SQL Server terms, is the process goes like this: INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE/TRUNCATE. Quite a few interesting responses were received and evaluated live during the session. To summarize them, the most important similarity that came out was that both DELETE and TRUNCATE participate in transactions. The major differences (not all) that came out of the exercise were: DELETE: DELETE supports a WHERE clause DELETE removes rows from a table, row-by-row Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it acquires a row-level lock Depending upon the recovery model of the database, DELETE is a fully-logged operation. Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it can fire off triggers TRUNCATE: TRUNCATE does not support a WHERE clause TRUNCATE works by directly removing the individual data pages of a table TRUNCATE directly occupies a table-level lock. (Because a lock is acquired, and because TRUNCATE can also participate in a transaction, it has to be a logged operation) TRUNCATE is, therefore, a minimally-logged operation; again, this depends upon the recovery model of the database Triggers are not fired when TRUNCATE is used (because individual row deletions are not logged) Finally, Vinod popped the big homework question that must be critically analyzed: “We know that we can restrict a DELETE operation to a particular user, but how can we restrict the TRUNCATE operation to a particular user?” After returning home and having a nice cup of coffee, I noticed that my gray cells immediately started to work. Below was the result of my research. As what is always said, the devil is in the details. Upon looking at the Permissions section for the TRUNCATE statement in Books On Line, the following jumps right out: “The minimum permission required is ALTER on table_name. TRUNCATE TABLE permissions default to the table owner, members of the sysadmin fixed server role, and the db_owner and db_ddladmin fixed database roles, and are not transferable. However, you can incorporate the TRUNCATE TABLE statement within a module, such as a stored procedure, and grant appropriate permissions to the module using the EXECUTE AS clause.“ Now, what does this mean? Unlike DELETE, one cannot directly assign permissions to a user/set of users allowing or revoking TRUNCATE rights. However, there is a way to circumvent this. It is important to recall that in Microsoft SQL Server, database engine security surrounds the concept of a “securable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). urable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). SETTING UP THE ENVIRONMENT – (01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. By the end of this demo, one will be able to do all the CRUD operations, except the TRUNCATE, and the other will only be able to execute the TRUNCATE. All you will need for this test is any edition of SQL Server 2008. (With minor changes, these scripts can be made to work with SQL 2005.) We begin by creating the following: 1.       A test database 2.        Two database roles: associated logins and users 3.       Switch over to the test database and create a test table. Then, add some data into it. I am using row constructors, which is new to SQL 2008. Creating the modules that will be used to enforce permissions 1.       We have already created one of the modules that we will be assigning permissions to. That module is the table: TruncatePermissionsTest 2.       We will now create two stored procedures; one is for the DELETE operation and the other for the TRUNCATE operation. Please note that for all practical purposes, the end result is the same – all data from the table TruncatePermissionsTest is removed Assigning the permissions Now comes the most important part of the demonstration – assigning permissions. A permissions matrix can be worked out as under: To apply the security rights, we use the GRANT and DENY clauses, as under: That’s it! We are now ready for our big test! THE TEST (01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. I will now need two separate SSMS connections, one with the login AllowedTruncate and the other with the login RestrictedTruncate. Running the test is simple; all that’s required is to run through the script – 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql. What I will demonstrate here via screen-shots is the behavior of SQL Server when logged in as the AllowedTruncate user. There are a few other combinations than what are highlighted here. I will leave the reader the right to explore the behavior of the RestrictedTruncate user and these additional scenarios, as a form of self-study. 1.       Testing SELECT permissions 2.       Testing TRUNCATE permissions (Remember, “deny by default”?) 3.       Trying to circumvent security by trying to TRUNCATE the table using the stored procedure Hence, we have now proved that a user can indeed be assigned permissions to specifically assign TRUNCATE permissions. I also hope that the above has sparked curiosity towards putting some security around the probably “destructive” operations of DELETE and TRUNCATE. I would like to wish each and every one of the readers a very happy and secure time with Microsoft SQL Server. (Please find the scripts – 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql and 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql that have been used in this demonstration. Please note that these scripts contain purely test-level code only. These scripts must not, at any cost, be used in the reader’s production environments). 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Run through, step-by-step through the sequence till Step 08 to create a test database 2. Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows, one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and the other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Come back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 13, 2010 - NAV - Updated to add a security matrix and improve code readability when applying security December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 01: Create a new test database CREATE DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 02: Add roles and users to demonstrate the security of the Truncate operation -- 2a. Create the new roles CREATE ROLE AllowedTruncateRole; GO CREATE ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole; GO -- 2b. Create new logins CREATE LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO CREATE LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO -- 2c. Create new Users using the roles and logins created aboave CREATE USER TruncateUser FOR LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO CREATE USER NoTruncateUser FOR LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO -- 2d. Add the newly created login to the newly created role sp_addrolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_addrolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO -- Step 03: Change over to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 04: Create a test table within the test databse CREATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest (Id INT IDENTITY(1,1), Name NVARCHAR(50)) GO -- Step 05: Populate the required data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Delhi'), (N'Mumbai'), (N'Ahmedabad') GO -- Step 06: Encapsulate the DELETE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_DeleteMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS DELETE FROM TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 07: Encapsulate the TRUNCATE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_TruncateMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS TRUNCATE TABLE TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 08: Apply Security /* *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** =================================================================================== Object                   | Permissions |                 Login |             | AllowedTruncate   |   RestrictedTruncate |             |User:NoTruncateUser|   User:TruncateUser =================================================================================== TruncatePermissionsTest  | SELECT,     |      GRANT        |      (Default) | INSERT,     |                   | | UPDATE,     |                   | | DELETE      |                   | -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- TruncatePermissionsTest  | ALTER       |      DENY         |      (Default) -------------------------+-------------+----*/----------------+----------------------- proc_DeleteMyTable | EXECUTE | GRANT | DENY -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- proc_TruncateMyTable | EXECUTE | DENY | GRANT -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** */ /* Table: TruncatePermissionsTest*/ GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY ALTER ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_DeleteMyTable*/ GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO TruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_TruncateMyTable*/ DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO TruncateUser GO -- Step 09: Test --Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows: --    1. one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and --    2. the other as 'AllowedTruncate' -- Step 10: Cleanup sp_droprolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_droprolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO DROP USER TruncateUser GO DROP USER NoTruncateUser GO DROP LOGIN AllowedTruncate GO DROP LOGIN RestrictedTruncate GO DROP ROLE AllowedTruncateRole GO DROP ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Switch over to this from "Truncate Table Permissions.sql", Step #09 2. Execute this step-by-step in two different SSMS windows a. One where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and b. The other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 09A: Switch to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 09B: Ensure that we have valid data SELECT * FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The SELECT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09C: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table without using the stored procedure TRUNCATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur) --  Msg 1088, Level 16, State 7, Line 2 --  Cannot find the object "TruncatePermissionsTest" because it does not exist or you do not have permissions. -- Step 09D:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'London'), (N'Paris'), (N'Berlin') GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The INSERT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09E: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_TruncateMyTable GO -- (Expected: Will execute successfully with 'AllowedTruncate' user, will error out as under with 'RestrictedTruncate') -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_TruncateMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_TruncateMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09F:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Madrid'), (N'Rome'), (N'Athens') GO --Step 09G: Attempt to Delete Data from the table without using the stored procedure DELETE FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 2 -- The DELETE permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09H:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Spain'), (N'Italy'), (N'Greece') GO --Step 09I: Attempt to Delete Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_DeleteMyTable GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_DeleteMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_DeleteMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09J: Close this SSMS window and return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" Thank you Nakul to take up the challenge and prove that Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Group has talent to solve difficult problems. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Pinal Dave, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• HTG Reviews the CODE Keyboard: Old School Construction Meets Modern Amenities

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  There’s nothing quite as satisfying as the smooth and crisp action of a well built keyboard. If you’re tired of  mushy keys and cheap feeling keyboards, a well-constructed mechanical keyboard is a welcome respite from the $10 keyboard that came with your computer. Read on as we put the CODE mechanical keyboard through the paces. What is the CODE Keyboard? The CODE keyboard is a collaboration between manufacturer WASD Keyboards and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror (the guy behind the Stack Exchange network and Discourse forum software). Atwood’s focus was incorporating the best of traditional mechanical keyboards and the best of modern keyboard usability improvements. In his own words: The world is awash in terrible, crappy, no name how-cheap-can-we-make-it keyboards. There are a few dozen better mechanical keyboard options out there. I’ve owned and used at least six different expensive mechanical keyboards, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of them, either: they didn’t have backlighting, were ugly, had terrible design, or were missing basic functions like media keys. That’s why I originally contacted Weyman Kwong of WASD Keyboards way back in early 2012. I told him that the state of keyboards was unacceptable to me as a geek, and I proposed a partnership wherein I was willing to work with him to do whatever it takes to produce a truly great mechanical keyboard. Even the ardent skeptic who questions whether Atwood has indeed created a truly great mechanical keyboard certainly can’t argue with the position he starts from: there are so many agonizingly crappy keyboards out there. Even worse, in our opinion, is that unless you’re a typist of a certain vintage there’s a good chance you’ve never actually typed on a really nice keyboard. Those that didn’t start using computers until the mid-to-late 1990s most likely have always typed on modern mushy-key keyboards and never known the joy of typing on a really responsive and crisp mechanical keyboard. Is our preference for and love of mechanical keyboards shining through here? Good. We’re not even going to try and hide it. So where does the CODE keyboard stack up in pantheon of keyboards? Read on as we walk you through the simple setup and our experience using the CODE. Setting Up the CODE Keyboard Although the setup of the CODE keyboard is essentially plug and play, there are two distinct setup steps that you likely haven’t had to perform on a previous keyboard. Both highlight the degree of care put into the keyboard and the amount of customization available. Inside the box you’ll find the keyboard, a micro USB cable, a USB-to-PS2 adapter, and a tool which you may be unfamiliar with: a key puller. We’ll return to the key puller in a moment. Unlike the majority of keyboards on the market, the cord isn’t permanently affixed to the keyboard. What does this mean for you? Aside from the obvious need to plug it in yourself, it makes it dead simple to repair your own keyboard cord if it gets attacked by a pet, mangled in a mechanism on your desk, or otherwise damaged. It also makes it easy to take advantage of the cable routing channels in on the underside of the keyboard to  route your cable exactly where you want it. While we’re staring at the underside of the keyboard, check out those beefy rubber feet. By peripherals standards they’re huge (and there is six instead of the usual four). Once you plunk the keyboard down where you want it, it might as well be glued down the rubber feet work so well. After you’ve secured the cable and adjusted it to your liking, there is one more task  before plug the keyboard into the computer. On the bottom left-hand side of the keyboard, you’ll find a small recess in the plastic with some dip switches inside: The dip switches are there to switch hardware functions for various operating systems, keyboard layouts, and to enable/disable function keys. By toggling the dip switches you can change the keyboard from QWERTY mode to Dvorak mode and Colemak mode, the two most popular alternative keyboard configurations. You can also use the switches to enable Mac-functionality (for Command/Option keys). One of our favorite little toggles is the SW3 dip switch: you can disable the Caps Lock key; goodbye accidentally pressing Caps when you mean to press Shift. You can review the entire dip switch configuration chart here. The quick-start for Windows users is simple: double check that all the switches are in the off position (as seen in the photo above) and then simply toggle SW6 on to enable the media and backlighting function keys (this turns the menu key on the keyboard into a function key as typically found on laptop keyboards). After adjusting the dip switches to your liking, plug the keyboard into an open USB port on your computer (or into your PS/2 port using the included adapter). Design, Layout, and Backlighting The CODE keyboard comes in two flavors, a traditional 87-key layout (no number pad) and a traditional 104-key layout (number pad on the right hand side). We identify the layout as traditional because, despite some modern trapping and sneaky shortcuts, the actual form factor of the keyboard from the shape of the keys to the spacing and position is as classic as it comes. You won’t have to learn a new keyboard layout and spend weeks conditioning yourself to a smaller than normal backspace key or a PgUp/PgDn pair in an unconventional location. Just because the keyboard is very conventional in layout, however, doesn’t mean you’ll be missing modern amenities like media-control keys. The following additional functions are hidden in the F11, F12, Pause button, and the 2×6 grid formed by the Insert and Delete rows: keyboard illumination brightness, keyboard illumination on/off, mute, and then the typical play/pause, forward/backward, stop, and volume +/- in Insert and Delete rows, respectively. While we weren’t sure what we’d think of the function-key system at first (especially after retiring a Microsoft Sidewinder keyboard with a huge and easily accessible volume knob on it), it took less than a day for us to adapt to using the Fn key, located next to the right Ctrl key, to adjust our media playback on the fly. Keyboard backlighting is a largely hit-or-miss undertaking but the CODE keyboard nails it. Not only does it have pleasant and easily adjustable through-the-keys lighting but the key switches the keys themselves are attached to are mounted to a steel plate with white paint. Enough of the light reflects off the interior cavity of the keys and then diffuses across the white plate to provide nice even illumination in between the keys. Highlighting the steel plate beneath the keys brings us to the actual construction of the keyboard. It’s rock solid. The 87-key model, the one we tested, is 2.0 pounds. The 104-key is nearly a half pound heavier at 2.42 pounds. Between the steel plate, the extra-thick PCB board beneath the steel plate, and the thick ABS plastic housing, the keyboard has very solid feel to it. Combine that heft with the previously mentioned thick rubber feet and you have a tank-like keyboard that won’t budge a millimeter during normal use. Examining The Keys This is the section of the review the hardcore typists and keyboard ninjas have been waiting for. We’ve looked at the layout of the keyboard, we’ve looked at the general construction of it, but what about the actual keys? There are a wide variety of keyboard construction techniques but the vast majority of modern keyboards use a rubber-dome construction. The key is floated in a plastic frame over a rubber membrane that has a little rubber dome for each key. The press of the physical key compresses the rubber dome downwards and a little bit of conductive material on the inside of the dome’s apex connects with the circuit board. Despite the near ubiquity of the design, many people dislike it. The principal complaint is that dome keyboards require a complete compression to register a keystroke; keyboard designers and enthusiasts refer to this as “bottoming out”. In other words, the register the “b” key, you need to completely press that key down. As such it slows you down and requires additional pressure and movement that, over the course of tens of thousands of keystrokes, adds up to a whole lot of wasted time and fatigue. The CODE keyboard features key switches manufactured by Cherry, a company that has manufactured key switches since the 1960s. Specifically the CODE features Cherry MX Clear switches. These switches feature the same classic design of the other Cherry switches (such as the MX Blue and Brown switch lineups) but they are significantly quieter (yes this is a mechanical keyboard, but no, your neighbors won’t think you’re firing off a machine gun) as they lack the audible click found in most Cherry switches. This isn’t to say that they keyboard doesn’t have a nice audible key press sound when the key is fully depressed, but that the key mechanism isn’t doesn’t create a loud click sound when triggered. One of the great features of the Cherry MX clear is a tactile “bump” that indicates the key has been compressed enough to register the stroke. For touch typists the very subtle tactile feedback is a great indicator that you can move on to the next stroke and provides a welcome speed boost. Even if you’re not trying to break any word-per-minute records, that little bump when pressing the key is satisfying. The Cherry key switches, in addition to providing a much more pleasant typing experience, are also significantly more durable than dome-style key switch. Rubber dome switch membrane keyboards are typically rated for 5-10 million contacts whereas the Cherry mechanical switches are rated for 50 million contacts. You’d have to write the next War and Peace  and follow that up with A Tale of Two Cities: Zombie Edition, and then turn around and transcribe them both into a dozen different languages to even begin putting a tiny dent in the lifecycle of this keyboard. So what do the switches look like under the classicly styled keys? You can take a look yourself with the included key puller. Slide the loop between the keys and then gently beneath the key you wish to remove: Wiggle the key puller gently back and forth while exerting a gentle upward pressure to pop the key off; You can repeat the process for every key, if you ever find yourself needing to extract piles of cat hair, Cheeto dust, or other foreign objects from your keyboard. There it is, the naked switch, the source of that wonderful crisp action with the tactile bump on each keystroke. The last feature worthy of a mention is the N-key rollover functionality of the keyboard. This is a feature you simply won’t find on non-mechanical keyboards and even gaming keyboards typically only have any sort of key roller on the high-frequency keys like WASD. So what is N-key rollover and why do you care? On a typical mass-produced rubber-dome keyboard you cannot simultaneously press more than two keys as the third one doesn’t register. PS/2 keyboards allow for unlimited rollover (in other words you can’t out type the keyboard as all of your keystrokes, no matter how fast, will register); if you use the CODE keyboard with the PS/2 adapter you gain this ability. If you don’t use the PS/2 adapter and use the native USB, you still get 6-key rollover (and the CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT don’t count towards the 6) so realistically you still won’t be able to out type the computer as even the more finger twisting keyboard combos and high speed typing will still fall well within the 6-key rollover. The rollover absolutely doesn’t matter if you’re a slow hunt-and-peck typist, but if you’ve read this far into a keyboard review there’s a good chance that you’re a serious typist and that kind of quality construction and high-number key rollover is a fantastic feature.  The Good, The Bad, and the Verdict We’ve put the CODE keyboard through the paces, we’ve played games with it, typed articles with it, left lengthy comments on Reddit, and otherwise used and abused it like we would any other keyboard. The Good: The construction is rock solid. In an emergency, we’re confident we could use the keyboard as a blunt weapon (and then resume using it later in the day with no ill effect on the keyboard). The Cherry switches are an absolute pleasure to type on; the Clear variety found in the CODE keyboard offer a really nice middle-ground between the gun-shot clack of a louder mechanical switch and the quietness of a lesser-quality dome keyboard without sacrificing quality. Touch typists will love the subtle tactile bump feedback. Dip switch system makes it very easy for users on different systems and with different keyboard layout needs to switch between operating system and keyboard layouts. If you’re investing a chunk of change in a keyboard it’s nice to know you can take it with you to a different operating system or “upgrade” it to a new layout if you decide to take up Dvorak-style typing. The backlighting is perfect. You can adjust it from a barely-visible glow to a blazing light-up-the-room brightness. Whatever your intesity preference, the white-coated steel backplate does a great job diffusing the light between the keys. You can easily remove the keys for cleaning (or to rearrange the letters to support a new keyboard layout). The weight of the unit combined with the extra thick rubber feet keep it planted exactly where you place it on the desk. The Bad: While you’re getting your money’s worth, the $150 price tag is a shock when compared to the $20-60 price tags you find on lower-end keyboards. People used to large dedicated media keys independent of the traditional key layout (such as the large buttons and volume controls found on many modern keyboards) might be off put by the Fn-key style media controls on the CODE. The Verdict: The keyboard is clearly and heavily influenced by the needs of serious typists. Whether you’re a programmer, transcriptionist, or just somebody that wants to leave the lengthiest article comments the Internet has ever seen, the CODE keyboard offers a rock solid typing experience. Yes, $150 isn’t pocket change, but the quality of the CODE keyboard is so high and the typing experience is so enjoyable, you’re easily getting ten times the value you’d get out of purchasing a lesser keyboard. Even compared to other mechanical keyboards on the market, like the Das Keyboard, you’re still getting more for your money as other mechanical keyboards don’t come with the lovely-to-type-on Cherry MX Clear switches, back lighting, and hardware-based operating system keyboard layout switching. If it’s in your budget to upgrade your keyboard (especially if you’ve been slogging along with a low-end rubber-dome keyboard) there’s no good reason to not pickup a CODE keyboard. Key animation courtesy of Geekhack.org user Lethal Squirrel.       

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• Working with PivotTables in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  PivotTables are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Excel.  They allow large amounts of data to be analyzed and summarized in just a few mouse clicks. In this article, we explore PivotTables, understand what they are, and learn how to create and customize them. Note:  This article is written using Excel 2010 (Beta).  The concept of a PivotTable has changed little over the years, but the method of creating one has changed in nearly every iteration of Excel.  If you are using a version of Excel that is not 2010, expect different screens from the ones you see in this article. A Little History In the early days of spreadsheet programs, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost.  Its dominance was so complete that people thought it was a waste of time for Microsoft to bother developing their own spreadsheet software (Excel) to compete with Lotus.  Flash-forward to 2010, and Excel’s dominance of the spreadsheet market is greater than Lotus’s ever was, while the number of users still running Lotus 1-2-3 is approaching zero.  How did this happen?  What caused such a dramatic reversal of fortunes? Industry analysts put it down to two factors:  Firstly, Lotus decided that this fancy new GUI platform called “Windows” was a passing fad that would never take off.  They declined to create a Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 (for a few years, anyway), predicting that their DOS version of the software was all anyone would ever need.  Microsoft, naturally, developed Excel exclusively for Windows.  Secondly, Microsoft developed a feature for Excel that Lotus didn’t provide in 1-2-3, namely PivotTables.  The PivotTables feature, exclusive to Excel, was deemed so staggeringly useful that people were willing to learn an entire new software package (Excel) rather than stick with a program (1-2-3) that didn’t have it.  This one feature, along with the misjudgment of the success of Windows, was the death-knell for Lotus 1-2-3, and the beginning of the success of Microsoft Excel. Understanding PivotTables So what is a PivotTable, exactly? Put simply, a PivotTable is a summary of some data, created to allow easy analysis of said data.  But unlike a manually created summary, Excel PivotTables are interactive.  Once you have created one, you can easily change it if it doesn’t offer the exact insights into your data that you were hoping for.  In a couple of clicks the summary can be “pivoted” – rotated in such a way that the column headings become row headings, and vice versa.  There’s a lot more that can be done, too.  Rather than try to describe all the features of PivotTables, we’ll simply demonstrate them… The data that you analyze using a PivotTable can’t be just any data – it has to be raw data, previously unprocessed (unsummarized) – typically a list of some sort.  An example of this might be the list of sales transactions in a company for the past six months. Examine the data shown below: Notice that this is not raw data.  In fact, it is already a summary of some sort.  In cell B3 we can see $30,000, which apparently is the total of James Cook’s sales for the month of January.  So where is the raw data?  How did we arrive at the figure of $30,000?  Where is the original list of sales transactions that this figure was generated from?  It’s clear that somewhere, someone must have gone to the trouble of collating all of the sales transactions for the past six months into the summary we see above.  How long do you suppose this took?  An hour?  Ten?  Probably. If we were to track down the original list of sales transactions, it might look something like this: You may be surprised to learn that, using the PivotTable feature of Excel, we can create a monthly sales summary similar to the one above in a few seconds, with only a few mouse clicks.  We can do this – and a lot more too! How to Create a PivotTable First, ensure that you have some raw data in a worksheet in Excel.  A list of financial transactions is typical, but it can be a list of just about anything:  Employee contact details, your CD collection, or fuel consumption figures for your company’s fleet of cars. So we start Excel… …and we load such a list… Once we have the list open in Excel, we’re ready to start creating the PivotTable. Click on any one single cell within the list: Then, from the Insert tab, click the PivotTable icon: The Create PivotTable box appears, asking you two questions:  What data should your new PivotTable be based on, and where should it be created?  Because we already clicked on a cell within the list (in the step above), the entire list surrounding that cell is already selected for us ($A$1:$G$88 on the Payments sheet, in this example).  Note that we could select a list in any other region of any other worksheet, or even some external data source, such as an Access database table, or even a MS-SQL Server database table.  We also need to select whether we want our new PivotTable to be created on a new worksheet, or on an existing one.  In this example we will select a new one: The new worksheet is created for us, and a blank PivotTable is created on that worksheet: Another box also appears:  The PivotTable Field List.  This field list will be shown whenever we click on any cell within the PivotTable (above): The list of fields in the top part of the box is actually the collection of column headings from the original raw data worksheet.  The four blank boxes in the lower part of the screen allow us to choose the way we would like our PivotTable to summarize the raw data.  So far, there is nothing in those boxes, so the PivotTable is blank.  All we need to do is drag fields down from the list above and drop them in the lower boxes.  A PivotTable is then automatically created to match our instructions.  If we get it wrong, we only need to drag the fields back to where they came from and/or drag new fields down to replace them. The Values box is arguably the most important of the four.  The field that is dragged into this box represents the data that needs to be summarized in some way (by summing, averaging, finding the maximum, minimum, etc).  It is almost always numerical data.  A perfect candidate for this box in our sample data is the “Amount” field/column.  Let’s drag that field into the Values box: Notice that (a) the “Amount” field in the list of fields is now ticked, and “Sum of Amount” has been added to the Values box, indicating that the amount column has been summed. If we examine the PivotTable itself, we indeed find the sum of all the “Amount” values from the raw data worksheet: We’ve created our first PivotTable!  Handy, but not particularly impressive.  It’s likely that we need a little more insight into our data than that. Referring to our sample data, we need to identify one or more column headings that we could conceivably use to split this total.  For example, we may decide that we would like to see a summary of our data where we have a row heading for each of the different salespersons in our company, and a total for each.  To achieve this, all we need to do is to drag the “Salesperson” field into the Row Labels box: Now, finally, things start to get interesting!  Our PivotTable starts to take shape….   With a couple of clicks we have created a table that would have taken a long time to do manually. So what else can we do?  Well, in one sense our PivotTable is complete.  We’ve created a useful summary of our source data.  The important stuff is already learned!  For the rest of the article, we will examine some ways that more complex PivotTables can be created, and ways that those PivotTables can be customized. First, we can create a two-dimensional table.  Let’s do that by using “Payment Method” as a column heading.  Simply drag the “Payment Method” heading to the Column Labels box: Which looks like this: Starting to get very cool! Let’s make it a three-dimensional table.  What could such a table possibly look like?  Well, let’s see… Drag the “Package” column/heading to the Report Filter box: Notice where it ends up…. This allows us to filter our report based on which “holiday package” was being purchased.  For example, we can see the breakdown of salesperson vs payment method for all packages, or, with a couple of clicks, change it to show the same breakdown for the “Sunseekers” package: And so, if you think about it the right way, our PivotTable is now three-dimensional.  Let’s keep customizing… If it turns out, say, that we only want to see cheque and credit card transactions (i.e. no cash transactions), then we can deselect the “Cash” item from the column headings.  Click the drop-down arrow next to Column Labels, and untick “Cash”: Let’s see what that looks like…As you can see, “Cash” is gone. Formatting This is obviously a very powerful system, but so far the results look very plain and boring.  For a start, the numbers that we’re summing do not look like dollar amounts – just plain old numbers.  Let’s rectify that. A temptation might be to do what we’re used to doing in such circumstances and simply select the whole table (or the whole worksheet) and use the standard number formatting buttons on the toolbar to complete the formatting.  The problem with that approach is that if you ever change the structure of the PivotTable in the future (which is 99% likely), then those number formats will be lost.  We need a way that will make them (semi-)permanent. First, we locate the “Sum of Amount” entry in the Values box, and click on it.  A menu appears.  We select Value Field Settings… from the menu: The Value Field Settings box appears. Click the Number Format button, and the standard Format Cells box appears: From the Category list, select (say) Accounting, and drop the number of decimal places to 0.  Click OK a few times to get back to the PivotTable… As you can see, the numbers have been correctly formatted as dollar amounts. While we’re on the subject of formatting, let’s format the entire PivotTable.  There are a few ways to do this.  Let’s use a simple one… Click the PivotTable Tools/Design tab: Then drop down the arrow in the bottom-right of the PivotTable Styles list to see a vast collection of built-in styles: Choose any one that appeals, and look at the result in your PivotTable:   Other Options We can work with dates as well.  Now usually, there are many, many dates in a transaction list such as the one we started with.  But Excel provides the option to group data items together by day, week, month, year, etc.  Let’s see how this is done. First, let’s remove the “Payment Method” column from the Column Labels box (simply drag it back up to the field list), and replace it with the “Date Booked” column: As you can see, this makes our PivotTable instantly useless, giving us one column for each date that a transaction occurred on – a very wide table! To fix this, right-click on any date and select Group… from the context-menu: The grouping box appears.  We select Months and click OK: Voila!  A much more useful table: (Incidentally, this table is virtually identical to the one shown at the beginning of this article – the original sales summary that was created manually.) Another cool thing to be aware of is that you can have more than one set of row headings (or column headings): …which looks like this…. You can do a similar thing with column headings (or even report filters). Keeping things simple again, let’s see how to plot averaged values, rather than summed values. First, click on “Sum of Amount”, and select Value Field Settings… from the context-menu that appears: In the Summarize value field by list in the Value Field Settings box, select Average: While we’re here, let’s change the Custom Name, from “Average of Amount” to something a little more concise.  Type in something like “Avg”: Click OK, and see what it looks like.  Notice that all the values change from summed totals to averages, and the table title (top-left cell) has changed to “Avg”: If we like, we can even have sums, averages and counts (counts = how many sales there were) all on the same PivotTable! Here are the steps to get something like that in place (starting from a blank PivotTable): Drag “Salesperson” into the Column Labels Drag “Amount” field down into the Values box three times For the first “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Total” and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the second “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Average”, its function to Average and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the third “Amount” field, change its name to “Count” and its function to Count Drag the automatically created field from Column Labels to Row Labels Here’s what we end up with: Total, average and count on the same PivotTable! Conclusion There are many, many more features and options for PivotTables created by Microsoft Excel – far too many to list in an article like this.  To fully cover the potential of PivotTables, a small book (or a large website) would be required.  Brave and/or geeky readers can explore PivotTables further quite easily:  Simply right-click on just about everything, and see what options become available to you.  There are also the two ribbon-tabs: PivotTable Tools/Options and Design.  It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – it’s easy to delete the PivotTable and start again – a possibility old DOS users of Lotus 1-2-3 never had. We’ve included an Excel that should work with most versions of Excel, so you can download to practice your PivotTable skills. Download Our Practice Excel File Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Magnify Selected Cells In Excel 2007Share Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer

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• SQL Monitor’s data repository: Alerts

  - by Chris Lambrou

  In my previous post, I introduced the SQL Monitor data repository, and described how the monitored objects are stored in a hierarchy in the data schema, in a series of tables with a _Keys suffix. In this post I had planned to describe how the actual data for the monitored objects is stored in corresponding tables with _StableSamples and _UnstableSamples suffixes. However, I’m going to postpone that until my next post, as I’ve had a request from a SQL Monitor user to explain how alerts are stored. In the SQL Monitor data repository, alerts are stored in tables belonging to the alert schema, which contains the following five tables: alert.Alert alert.Alert_Cleared alert.Alert_Comment alert.Alert_Severity alert.Alert_Type In this post, I’m only going to cover the alert.Alert and alert.Alert_Type tables. I may cover the other three tables in a later post. The most important table in this schema is alert.Alert, as each row in this table corresponds to a single alert. So let’s have a look at it. SELECT TOP 100 AlertId, AlertType, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert ORDER BY AlertId DESC;  AlertIdAlertTypeTargetObjectReadSubType 165550397:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,10 265549387:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,7:Machine,1,4:Name,s0:,10 365548187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 465547157:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 565546147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 665545187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 765544157:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 865543147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 965542187:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 1065541147:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 11…     So what are we seeing here, then? Well, AlertId is an auto-incrementing identity column, so ORDER BY AlertId DESC ensures that we see the most recent alerts first. AlertType indicates the type of each alert, such as Job failed (6), Backup overdue (14) or Long-running query (12). The TargetObject column indicates which monitored object the alert is associated with. The Read column acts as a flag to indicate whether or not the alert has been read. And finally the SubType column is used in the case of a Custom metric (40) alert, to indicate which custom metric the alert pertains to. Okay, now lets look at some of those columns in more detail. The AlertType column is an easy one to start with, and it brings use nicely to the next table, data.Alert_Type. Let’s have a look at what’s in this table: SELECT AlertType, Event, Monitoring, Name, Description FROM alert.Alert_Type ORDER BY AlertType;  AlertTypeEventMonitoringNameDescription 1100Processor utilizationProcessor utilization (CPU) on a host machine stays above a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration 2210SQL Server error log entryAn error is written to the SQL Server error log with a severity level above a specified value. 3310Cluster failoverThe active cluster node fails, causing the SQL Server instance to switch nodes. 4410DeadlockSQL deadlock occurs. 5500Processor under-utilizationProcessor utilization (CPU) on a host machine remains below a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration 6610Job failedA job does not complete successfully (the job returns an error code). 7700Machine unreachableHost machine (Windows server) cannot be contacted on the network. 8800SQL Server instance unreachableThe SQL Server instance is not running or cannot be contacted on the network. 9900Disk spaceDisk space used on a logical disk drive is above a defined threshold for longer than a specified duration. 101000Physical memoryPhysical memory (RAM) used on the host machine stays above a threshold percentage for longer than a specified duration. 111100Blocked processSQL process is blocked for longer than a specified duration. 121200Long-running queryA SQL query runs for longer than a specified duration. 131400Backup overdueNo full backup exists, or the last full backup is older than a specified time. 141500Log backup overdueNo log backup exists, or the last log backup is older than a specified time. 151600Database unavailableDatabase changes from Online to any other state. 161700Page verificationTorn Page Detection or Page Checksum is not enabled for a database. 171800Integrity check overdueNo entry for an integrity check (DBCC DBINFO returns no date for dbi_dbccLastKnownGood field), or the last check is older than a specified time. 181900Fragmented indexesFragmentation level of one or more indexes is above a threshold percentage. 192400Job duration unusualThe duration of a SQL job duration deviates from its baseline duration by more than a threshold percentage. 202501Clock skewSystem clock time on the Base Monitor computer differs from the system clock time on a monitored SQL Server host machine by a specified number of seconds. 212700SQL Server Agent Service statusThe SQL Server Agent Service status matches the status specified. 222800SQL Server Reporting Service statusThe SQL Server Reporting Service status matches the status specified. 232900SQL Server Full Text Search Service statusThe SQL Server Full Text Search Service status matches the status specified. 243000SQL Server Analysis Service statusThe SQL Server Analysis Service status matches the status specified. 253100SQL Server Integration Service statusThe SQL Server Integration Service status matches the status specified. 263300SQL Server Browser Service statusThe SQL Server Browser Service status matches the status specified. 273400SQL Server VSS Writer Service statusThe SQL Server VSS Writer status matches the status specified. 283501Deadlock trace flag disabledThe monitored SQL Server’s trace flag cannot be enabled. 293600Monitoring stopped (host machine credentials)SQL Monitor cannot contact the host machine because authentication failed. 303700Monitoring stopped (SQL Server credentials)SQL Monitor cannot contact the SQL Server instance because authentication failed. 313800Monitoring error (host machine data collection)SQL Monitor cannot collect data from the host machine. 323900Monitoring error (SQL Server data collection)SQL Monitor cannot collect data from the SQL Server instance. 334000Custom metricThe custom metric value has passed an alert threshold. 344100Custom metric collection errorSQL Monitor cannot collect custom metric data from the target object. Basically, alert.Alert_Type is just a big reference table containing information about the 34 different alert types supported by SQL Monitor (note that the largest id is 41, not 34 – some alert types have been retired since SQL Monitor was first developed). The Name and Description columns are self evident, and I’m going to skip over the Event and Monitoring columns as they’re not very interesting. The AlertId column is the primary key, and is referenced by AlertId in the alert.Alert table. As such, we can rewrite our earlier query to join these two tables, in order to provide a more readable view of the alerts: SELECT TOP 100 AlertId, Name, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType ORDER BY AlertId DESC;  AlertIdNameTargetObjectReadSubType 165550Monitoring error (SQL Server data collection)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,00 265549Monitoring error (host machine data collection)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s29:srp-mr03.testnet.red-gate.com,7:Machine,1,4:Name,s0:,00 365548Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 465547Log backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 565546Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s15:FavouriteThings,00 665545Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 765544Log backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 865543Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,00 965542Integrity check overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 1065541Backup overdue7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s4:msdb,00 Okay, the next column to discuss in the alert.Alert table is TargetObject. Oh boy, this one’s a bit tricky! The TargetObject of an alert is a serialized string representation of the position in the monitored object hierarchy of the object to which the alert pertains. The serialization format is somewhat convenient for parsing in the C# source code of SQL Monitor, and has some helpful characteristics, but it’s probably very awkward to manipulate in T-SQL. I could document the serialization format here, but it would be very dry reading, so perhaps it’s best to consider an example from the table above. Have a look at the alert with an AlertID of 65543. It’s a Backup overdue alert for the SqlMonitorData database running on the default instance of granger, my laptop. Each different alert type is associated with a specific type of monitored object in the object hierarchy (I described the hierarchy in my previous post). The Backup overdue alert is associated with databases, whose position in the object hierarchy is root → Cluster → SqlServer → Database. The TargetObject value identifies the target object by specifying the key properties at each level in the hierarchy, thus: Cluster: Name = "granger" SqlServer: Name = "" (an empty string, denoting the default instance) Database: Name = "SqlMonitorData" Well, look at the actual TargetObject value for this alert: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData,". It is indeed composed of three parts, one for each level in the hierarchy: Cluster: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger," SqlServer: "9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:," Database: "8:Database,1,4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData," Each part is handled in exactly the same way, so let’s concentrate on the first part, "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,". It comprises the following: "7:Cluster," – This identifies the level in the hierarchy. "1," – This indicates how many different key properties there are to uniquely identify a cluster (we saw in my last post that each cluster is identified by a single property, its Name). "4:Name,s14:SqlMonitorData," – This represents the Name property, and its corresponding value, SqlMonitorData. It’s split up like this: "4:Name," – Indicates the name of the key property. "s" – Indicates the type of the key property, in this case, it’s a string. "14:SqlMonitorData," – Indicates the value of the property. At this point, you might be wondering about the format of some of these strings. Why is the string "Cluster" stored as "7:Cluster,"? Well an encoding scheme is used, which consists of the following: "7" – This is the length of the string "Cluster" ":" – This is a delimiter between the length of the string and the actual string’s contents. "Cluster" – This is the string itself. 7 characters. "," – This is a final terminating character that indicates the end of the encoded string. You can see that "4:Name,", "8:Database," and "14:SqlMonitorData," also conform to the same encoding scheme. In the example above, the "s" character is used to indicate that the value of the Name property is a string. If you explore the TargetObject property of alerts in your own SQL Monitor data repository, you might find other characters used for other non-string key property values. The different value types you might possibly encounter are as follows: "I" – Denotes a bigint value. For example, "I65432,". "g" – Denotes a GUID value. For example, "g32116732-63ae-4ab5-bd34-7dfdfb084c18,". "d" – Denotes a datetime value. For example, "d634815384796832438,". The value is stored as a bigint, rather than a native SQL datetime value. I’ll describe how datetime values are handled in the SQL Monitor data repostory in a future post. I suggest you have a look at the alerts in your own SQL Monitor data repository for further examples, so you can see how the TargetObject values are composed for each of the different types of alert. Let me give one further example, though, that represents a Custom metric alert, as this will help in describing the final column of interest in the alert.Alert table, SubType. Let me show you the alert I’m interested in: SELECT AlertId, a.AlertType, Name, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType WHERE AlertId = 65769;  AlertIdAlertTypeNameTargetObjectReadSubType 16576940Custom metric7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master,12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2,02 An AlertType value of 40 corresponds to the Custom metric alert type. The Name taken from the alert.Alert_Type table is simply Custom metric, but this doesn’t tell us anything about the specific custom metric that this alert pertains to. That’s where the SubType value comes in. For custom metric alerts, this provides us with the Id of the specific custom alert definition that can be found in the settings.CustomAlertDefinitions table. I don’t really want to delve into custom alert definitions yet (maybe in a later post), but an extra join in the previous query shows us that this alert pertains to the CPU pressure (avg runnable task count) custom metric alert. SELECT AlertId, a.AlertType, at.Name, cad.Name AS CustomAlertName, TargetObject, [Read], SubType FROM alert.Alert a JOIN alert.Alert_Type at ON a.AlertType = at.AlertType JOIN settings.CustomAlertDefinitions cad ON a.SubType = cad.Id WHERE AlertId = 65769;  AlertIdAlertTypeNameCustomAlertNameTargetObjectReadSubType 16576940Custom metricCPU pressure (avg runnable task count)7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger,9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:,8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master,12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2,02 The TargetObject value in this case breaks down like this: "7:Cluster,1,4:Name,s7:granger," – Cluster named "granger". "9:SqlServer,1,4:Name,s0:," – SqlServer named "" (the default instance). "8:Database,1,4:Name,s6:master," – Database named "master". "12:CustomMetric,1,8:MetricId,I2," – Custom metric with an Id of 2. Note that the hierarchy for a custom metric is slightly different compared to the earlier Backup overdue alert. It’s root → Cluster → SqlServer → Database → CustomMetric. Also notice that, unlike Cluster, SqlServer and Database, the key property for CustomMetric is called MetricId (not Name), and the value is a bigint (not a string). Finally, delving into the custom metric tables is beyond the scope of this post, but for the sake of avoiding any future confusion, I’d like to point out that whilst the SubType references a custom alert definition, the MetricID value embedded in the TargetObject value references a custom metric definition. Although in this case both the custom metric definition and custom alert definition share the same Id value of 2, this is not generally the case. Okay, that’s enough for now, not least because as I’m typing this, it’s almost 2am, I have to go to work tomorrow, and my alarm is set for 6am – eek! In my next post, I’ll either cover the remaining three tables in the alert schema, or I’ll delve into the way SQL Monitor stores its monitoring data, as I’d originally planned to cover in this post.

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• The Windows Store... why did I sign up with this mess again?

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed that the Windows Store is now open to all developers in a wide range of countries and locations. For the people who think "wtf is the 'Windows Store'?", it's the central place where Windows 8 users will be able to find, download and purchase applications (or as we now have to say to not look like a computer illiterate: <accent style="Kentucky">aaaaappss</accent>) for Windows 8. As this is the store which is integrated into Windows 8, it's an interesting place for ISVs, as potential customers might very well look there first. This of course isn't true for all kinds of software, and developer tools in general aren't the kind of applications most users will download from the Windows store, but a presence there can't hurt. Now, this Windows Store hosts two kinds of applications: 'Metro-style' applications and 'Desktop' applications. The 'Metro-style' applications are applications created for the new 'Metro' UI which is present on Windows 8 desktop and Windows RT (the single color/big font fingerpaint-oriented UI). 'Desktop' applications are the applications we all run and use on Windows today. Our software are desktop applications. The Windows Store hosts all Metro-style applications locally in the store and handles the payment for these applications. This means you upload your application (sorry, 'app') to the store, jump through a lot of hoops, Microsoft verifies that your application is not violating a tremendous long list of rules and after everything is OK, it's published and hopefully you get customers and thus earn money. Money which Microsoft will pay you on a regular basis after customers buy your application. Desktop applications are not following this path however. Desktop applications aren't hosted by the Windows Store. Instead, the Windows Store more or less hosts a page with the application's information and where to get the goods. I.o.w.: it's nothing more than a product's Facebook page. Microsoft will simply redirect a visitor of the Windows Store to your website and the visitor will then use your site's system to purchase and download the application. This last bit of information is very important. So, this morning I started with fresh energy to register our company 'Solutions Design bv' at the Windows Store and our two applications, LLBLGen Pro and ORM Profiler. First I went to the Windows Store dashboard page. If you don't have an account, you have to log in or sign up if you don't have a live account. I signed in with my live account. After that, it greeted me with a page where I had to fill in a code which was mailed to me. My local mail server polls every several minutes for email so I had to kick it to get it immediately. I grabbed the code from the email and I was presented with a multi-step process to register myself as a company or as an individual. In red I was warned that this choice was permanent and not changeable. I chuckled: Microsoft apparently stores its data on paper, not in digital form. I chose 'company' and was presented with a lengthy form to fill out. On the form there were two strange remarks: Per company there can just be 1 (one, uno, not zero, not two or more) registered developer, and only that developer is able to upload stuff to the store. I have no idea how this works with large companies, oh the overhead nightmares... "Sorry, but John, our registered developer with the Windows Store is on holiday for 3 months, backpacking through Australia, no, he's not reachable at this point. M'yeah, sorry bud. Hey, did you fill in those TPS reports yesterday?" A separate Approver has to be specified, which has to be a different person than the registered developer. Apparently to Microsoft a company with just 1 person is not a company. Luckily we're with two people! *pfew*, dodged that one, otherwise I would be stuck forever: the choice I already made was not reversible! After I had filled out the form and it was all well and good and accepted by the Microsoft lackey who had to write it all down in some paper notebook ("Hey, be warned! It's a permanent choice! Written down in ink, can't be changed!"), I was presented with the question how I wanted to pay for all this. "Pay for what?" I wondered. Must be the paper they were scribbling the information on, I concluded. After all, there's a financial crisis going on! How could I forget! Silly me. "Ok fair enough". The price was 75 Euros, not the end of the world. I could only pay by credit card, so it was accepted quickly. Or so I thought. You see, Microsoft has a different idea about CC payments. In the normal world, you type in your CC number, some date, a name and a security code and that's it. But Microsoft wants to verify this even more. They want to make a verification purchase of a very small amount and are doing that with a special code in the description. You then have to type in that code in a special form in the Windows Store dashboard and after that you're verified. Of course they'll refund the small amount they pull from your card. Sounds simple, right? Well... no. The problem starts with the fact that I can't see the CC activity on some website: I have a bank issued CC card. I get the CC activity once a month on a piece of paper sent to me. The bank's online website doesn't show them. So it's possible I have to wait for this code till October 12th. One month. "So what, I'm not going to use it anyway, Desktop applications don't use the payment system", I thought. "Haha, you're so naive, dear developer!" Microsoft won't allow you to publish any applications till this verification is done. So no application publishing for a month. Wouldn't it be nice if things were, you know, digital, so things got done instantly? But of course, that lackey who scribbled everything in the Big Windows Store Registration Book isn't that quick. Can't blame him though. He's just doing his job. Now, after the payment was done, I was presented with a page which tells me Microsoft is going to use a third party company called 'Symantec', which will verify my identity again. The page explains to me that this could be done through email or phone and that they'll contact the Approver to verify my identity. "Phone?", I thought... that's a little drastic for a developer account to publish a single page of information about an external hosted software product, isn't it? On Facebook I just added a page, done. And paying you, Microsoft, took less information: you were happy to take my money before my identity was even 'verified' by this 3rd party's minions! "Double standards!", I roared. No-one cared. But it's the thought of getting it off your chest, you know. Luckily for me, everyone at Symantec was asleep when I was registering so they went for the fallback option in case phone calls were not possible: my Approver received an email. Imagine you have to explain the idiot web of security theater I was caught in to someone else who then has to reply a random person over the internet that I indeed was who I said I was. As she's a true sweetheart, she gave me the benefit of the doubt and assured that for now, I was who I said I was. Remember, this is for a desktop application, which is only a link to a website, some pictures and a piece of text. No file hosting, no payment processing, nothing, just a single page. Yeah, I also thought I was crazy. But we're not at the end of this quest yet. I clicked around in the confusing menus of the Windows Store dashboard and found the 'Desktop' section. I get a helpful screen with a warning in red that it can't find any certified 'apps'. True, I'm just getting started, buddy. I see a link: "Check the Windows apps you submitted for certification". Well, I haven't submitted anything, but let's see where it brings me. Oh the thrill of adventure! I click the link and I end up on this site: the hardware/desktop dashboard account registration. "Erm... but I just registered...", I mumbled to no-one in particular. Apparently for desktop registration / verification I have to register again, it tells me. But not only that, the desktop application has to be signed with a certificate. And not just some random el-cheapo certificate you can get at any mall's discount store. No, this certificate is special. It's precious. This certificate, the 'Microsoft Authenticode' Digital Certificate, is the only certificate that's acceptable, and jolly, it can be purchased from VeriSign for the price of only ... $99.-, but be quick, because this is a limited time offer! After that it's, I kid you not, $499.-. 500 dollars for a certificate to sign an executable. But, I do feel special, I got a special price. Only for me! I'm glowing. Not for long though. Here I started to wonder, what the benefit of it all was. I now again had to pay money for a shiny certificate which will add 'Solutions Design bv' to our installer as the publisher instead of 'unknown', while our customers download the file from our website. Not only that, but this was all about a Desktop application, which wasn't hosted by Microsoft. They only link to it. And make no mistake. These prices aren't single payments. Every year these have to be renewed. Like a membership of an exclusive club: you're special and privileged, but only if you cough up the dough. To give you an example how silly this all is: I added LLBLGen Pro and ORM Profiler to the Visual Studio Gallery some time ago. It's the same thing: it's a central place where one can find software which adds to / extends / works with Visual Studio. I could simply create the pages, add the information and they show up inside Visual Studio. No files are hosted at Microsoft, they're downloaded from our website. Exactly the same system. As I have to wait for the CC transcripts to arrive anyway, I can't proceed with publishing in this new shiny store. After the verification is complete I have to wait for verification of my software by Microsoft. Even Desktop applications need to be verified using a long list of rules which are mainly focused on Metro-style applications. Even while they're not hosted by Microsoft. I wonder what they'll find. "Your application wasn't approved. It violates rule 14 X sub D: it provides more value than our own competing framework". While I was writing this post, I tried to check something in the Windows Store Dashboard, to see whether I remembered it correctly. I was presented again with the question, after logging in with my live account, to enter the code that was just mailed to me. Not the previous code, a brand new one. Again I had to kick my mail server to pull the email to proceed. This was it. This 'experience' is so beyond miserable, I'm afraid I have to say goodbye for now to the 'Windows Store'. It's simply not worth my time. Now, about live accounts. You might know this: live accounts are tied to everything you do with Microsoft. So if you have an MSDN subscription, e.g. the one which costs over $5000.-, it's tied to this same live account. But the fun thing is, you can login with your live account to the MSDN subscriptions with just the account id and password. No additional code is mailed to you. While it gives you access to all Microsoft software available, including your licenses. Why the draconian security theater with this Windows Store, while all I want is to publish some desktop applications while on other Microsoft sites it's OK to simply sign in with your live account: no codes needed, no verification and no certificates? Microsoft, one thing you need with this store and that's: apps. Apps, apps, apps, apps, aaaaaaaaapps. Sorry, my bad, got carried away. I just can't stand the word 'app'. This store's shelves have to be filled to the brim with goods. But instead of being welcomed into the store with open arms, I have to fight an uphill battle with an endless list of rules and bullshit to earn the privilege to publish in this shiny store. As if I have to be thrilled to be one of the exclusive club called 'Windows Store Publishers'. As if Microsoft doesn't want it to succeed. Craig Stuntz sent me a link to an old blog post of his regarding code signing and uploading to Microsoft's old mobile store from back in the WinMo5 days: http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2006/10/11/28357/. Good read and good background info about how little things changed over the years. I hope this helps Microsoft make things more clearer and smoother and also helps ISVs with their decision whether to go with the Windows Store scheme or ignore it. For now, I don't see the advantage of publishing there, especially not with the nonsense rules Microsoft cooked up. Perhaps it changes in the future, who knows.

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• You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down.  Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you.  :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer:  “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields.  You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well.  Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET,  sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast!  Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe.  Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible.  Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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• URL Rewrite – Protocol (http/https) in the Action

  - by OWScott

  IIS URL Rewrite supports server variables for pretty much every part of the URL and http header. However, there is one commonly used server variable that isn’t readily available.  That’s the protocol—HTTP or HTTPS. You can easily check if a page request uses HTTP or HTTPS, but that only works in the conditions part of the rule.  There isn’t a variable available to dynamically set the protocol in the action part of the rule.  What I wish is that there would be a variable like {HTTP_PROTOCOL} which would have a value of ‘HTTP’ or ‘HTTPS’.  There is a server variable called {HTTPS}, but the values of ‘on’ and ‘off’ aren’t practical in the action.  You can also use {SERVER_PORT} or {SERVER_PORT_SECURE}, but again, they aren’t useful in the action. Let me illustrate.  The following rule will redirect traffic for http(s)://localtest.me/ to http://www.localtest.me/. <rule name="Redirect to www"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> The problem is that it forces the request to HTTP even if the original request was for HTTPS. Interestingly enough, I planned to blog about this topic this week when I noticed in my twitter feed yesterday that Jeff Graves, a former colleague of mine, just wrote an excellent blog post about this very topic.  He beat me to the punch by just a couple days.  However, I figured I would still write my blog post on this topic.  While his solution is a excellent one, I personally handle this another way most of the time.  Plus, it’s a commonly asked question that isn’t documented well enough on the web yet, so having another article on the web won’t hurt. I can think of four different ways to handle this, and depending on your situation you may lean towards any of the four.  Don’t let the choices overwhelm you though.  Let’s keep it simple, Option 1 is what I use most of the time, Option 2 is what Jeff proposed and is the safest option, and Option 3 and Option 4 need only be considered if you have a more unique situation.  All four options will work for most situations. Option 1 – CACHE_URL, single rule There is a server variable that has the protocol in it; {CACHE_URL}.  This server variable contains the entire URL string (e.g. http://www.localtest.me:80/info.aspx?id=5)  All we need to do is extract the HTTP or HTTPS and we’ll be set. This tends to be my preferred way to handle this situation. Indeed, Jeff did briefly mention this in his blog post: … you could use a condition on the CACHE_URL variable and a back reference in the rewritten URL. The problem there is that you then need to match all of the conditions which could be a problem if your rule depends on a logical “or” match for conditions. Thus the problem.  If you have multiple conditions set to “Match Any” rather than “Match All” then this option won’t work.  However, I find that 95% of all rules that I write use “Match All” and therefore, being the lazy administrator that I am I like this simple solution that only requires adding a single condition to a rule.  The caveat is that if you use “Match Any” then you must consider one of the next two options. Enough with the preamble.  Here’s how it works.  Add a condition that checks for {CACHE_URL} with a pattern of “^(.+)://” like so: How you have a back-reference to the part before the ://, which is our treasured HTTP or HTTPS.  In URL Rewrite 2.0 or greater you can check the “Track capture groups across conditions”, make that condition the first condition, and you have yourself a back-reference of {C:1}. The “Redirect to www” example with support for maintaining the protocol, will become: <rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions trackAllCaptures="true"> <add input="{CACHE_URL}" pattern="^(.+)://" /> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{C:1}://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> It’s not as easy as it would be if Microsoft gave us a built-in {HTTP_PROTOCOL} variable, but it’s pretty close. I also like this option since I often create rule examples for other people and this type of rule is portable since it’s self-contained within a single rule. Option 2 – Using a Rewrite Map For a safer rule that works for both “Match Any” and “Match All” situations, you can use the Rewrite Map solution that Jeff proposed.  It’s a perfectly good solution with the only drawback being the ever so slight extra effort to set it up since you need to create a rewrite map before you create the rule.  In other words, if you choose to use this as your sole method of handling the protocol, you’ll be safe. After you create a Rewrite Map called MapProtocol, you can use “{MapProtocol:{HTTPS}}” for the protocol within any rule action.  Following is an example using a Rewrite Map. <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{MapProtocol:{HTTPS}}://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> </rules> <rewriteMaps> <rewriteMap name="MapProtocol"> <add key="on" value="https" /> <add key="off" value="http" /> </rewriteMap> </rewriteMaps> </rewrite> Option 3 – CACHE_URL, Multi-rule If you have many rules that will use the protocol, you can create your own server variable which can be used in subsequent rules. This option is no easier to set up than Option 2 above, but you can use it if you prefer the easier to remember syntax of {HTTP_PROTOCOL} vs. {MapProtocol:{HTTPS}}. The potential issue with this rule is that if you don’t have access to the server level (e.g. in a shared environment) then you cannot set server variables without permission. First, create a rule and place it at the top of the set of rules.  You can create this at the server, site or subfolder level.  However, if you create it at the site or subfolder level then the HTTP_PROTOCOL server variable needs to be approved at the server level.  This can be achieved in IIS Manager by navigating to URL Rewrite at the server level, clicking on “View Server Variables” from the Actions pane, and added HTTP_PROTOCOL. If you create the rule at the server level then this step is not necessary.  Following is an example of the first rule to create the HTTP_PROTOCOL and then a rule that uses it.  The Create HTTP_PROTOCOL rule only needs to be created once on the server. <rule name="Create HTTP_PROTOCOL"> <match url=".*" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{CACHE_URL}" pattern="^(.+)://" /> </conditions> <serverVariables> <set name="HTTP_PROTOCOL" value="{C:1}" /> </serverVariables> <action type="None" /> </rule>   <rule name="Redirect to www" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{HTTP_PROTOCOL}://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> Option 4 – Multi-rule Just to be complete I’ll include an example of how to achieve the same thing with multiple rules. I don’t see any reason to use it over the previous examples, but I’ll include an example anyway.  Note that it will only work with the “Match All” setting for the conditions. <rule name="Redirect to www - http" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="off" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> <rule name="Redirect to www - https" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^localtest\.me$" /> <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="on" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="https://www.localtest.me/{R:1}" /> </rule> Conclusion Above are four working examples of methods to call the protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) from the action of a URL Rewrite rule.  You can use whichever method you most prefer.  I’ve listed them in the order that I favor them, although I could see some people preferring Option 2 as their first choice.  In any of the cases, hopefully you can use this as a reference for when you need to use the protocol in the rule’s action when writing your URL Rewrite rules. Further information: Viewing all Server Variable for a site. URL Parts available to URL Rewrite Rules Further URL Rewrite articles

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• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentDictionary

  - by Simon Cooper

  Using locks to implement a thread-safe collection is rather like using a sledgehammer - unsubtle, easy to understand, and tends to make any other tool redundant. Unlike the previous two collections I looked at, ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue, ConcurrentDictionary uses locks quite heavily. However, it is careful to wield locks only where necessary to ensure that concurrency is maximised. This will, by necessity, be a higher-level look than my other posts in this series, as there is quite a lot of code and logic in ConcurrentDictionary. Therefore, I do recommend that you have ConcurrentDictionary open in a decompiler to have a look at all the details that I skip over. The problem with locks There's several things to bear in mind when using locks, as encapsulated by the lock keyword in C# and the System.Threading.Monitor class in .NET (if you're unsure as to what lock does in C#, I briefly covered it in my first post in the series): Locks block threads The most obvious problem is that threads waiting on a lock can't do any work at all. No preparatory work, no 'optimistic' work like in ConcurrentQueue and ConcurrentStack, nothing. It sits there, waiting to be unblocked. This is bad if you're trying to maximise concurrency. Locks are slow Whereas most of the methods on the Interlocked class can be compiled down to a single CPU instruction, ensuring atomicity at the hardware level, taking out a lock requires some heavy lifting by the CLR and the operating system. There's quite a bit of work required to take out a lock, block other threads, and wake them up again. If locks are used heavily, this impacts performance. Deadlocks When using locks there's always the possibility of a deadlock - two threads, each holding a lock, each trying to aquire the other's lock. Fortunately, this can be avoided with careful programming and structured lock-taking, as we'll see. So, it's important to minimise where locks are used to maximise the concurrency and performance of the collection. Implementation As you might expect, ConcurrentDictionary is similar in basic implementation to the non-concurrent Dictionary, which I studied in a previous post. I'll be using some concepts introduced there, so I recommend you have a quick read of it. So, if you were implementing a thread-safe dictionary, what would you do? The naive implementation is to simply have a single lock around all methods accessing the dictionary. This would work, but doesn't allow much concurrency. Fortunately, the bucketing used by Dictionary allows a simple but effective improvement to this - one lock per bucket. This allows different threads modifying different buckets to do so in parallel. Any thread making changes to the contents of a bucket takes the lock for that bucket, ensuring those changes are thread-safe. The method that maps each bucket to a lock is the GetBucketAndLockNo method: private void GetBucketAndLockNo( int hashcode, out int bucketNo, out int lockNo, int bucketCount) { // the bucket number is the hashcode (without the initial sign bit) // modulo the number of buckets bucketNo = (hashcode & 0x7fffffff) % bucketCount; // and the lock number is the bucket number modulo the number of locks lockNo = bucketNo % m_locks.Length; } However, this does require some changes to how the buckets are implemented. The 'implicit' linked list within a single backing array used by the non-concurrent Dictionary adds a dependency between separate buckets, as every bucket uses the same backing array. Instead, ConcurrentDictionary uses a strict linked list on each bucket: This ensures that each bucket is entirely separate from all other buckets; adding or removing an item from a bucket is independent to any changes to other buckets. Modifying the dictionary All the operations on the dictionary follow the same basic pattern: void AlterBucket(TKey key, ...) { int bucketNo, lockNo; 1: GetBucketAndLockNo( key.GetHashCode(), out bucketNo, out lockNo, m_buckets.Length); 2: lock (m_locks[lockNo]) { 3: Node headNode = m_buckets[bucketNo]; 4: Mutate the node linked list as appropriate } } For example, when adding another entry to the dictionary, you would iterate through the linked list to check whether the key exists already, and add the new entry as the head node. When removing items, you would find the entry to remove (if it exists), and remove the node from the linked list. Adding, updating, and removing items all follow this pattern. Performance issues There is a problem we have to address at this point. If the number of buckets in the dictionary is fixed in the constructor, then the performance will degrade from O(1) to O(n) when a large number of items are added to the dictionary. As more and more items get added to the linked lists in each bucket, the lookup operations will spend most of their time traversing a linear linked list. To fix this, the buckets array has to be resized once the number of items in each bucket has gone over a certain limit. (In ConcurrentDictionary this limit is when the size of the largest bucket is greater than the number of buckets for each lock. This check is done at the end of the TryAddInternal method.) Resizing the bucket array and re-hashing everything affects every bucket in the collection. Therefore, this operation needs to take out every lock in the collection. Taking out mutiple locks at once inevitably summons the spectre of the deadlock; two threads each hold a lock, and each trying to acquire the other lock. How can we eliminate this? Simple - ensure that threads never try to 'swap' locks in this fashion. When taking out multiple locks, always take them out in the same order, and always take out all the locks you need before starting to release them. In ConcurrentDictionary, this is controlled by the AcquireLocks, AcquireAllLocks and ReleaseLocks methods. Locks are always taken out and released in the order they are in the m_locks array, and locks are all released right at the end of the method in a finally block. At this point, it's worth pointing out that the locks array is never re-assigned, even when the buckets array is increased in size. The number of locks is fixed in the constructor by the concurrencyLevel parameter. This simplifies programming the locks; you don't have to check if the locks array has changed or been re-assigned before taking out a lock object. And you can be sure that when a thread takes out a lock, another thread isn't going to re-assign the lock array. This would create a new series of lock objects, thus allowing another thread to ignore the existing locks (and any threads controlling them), breaking thread-safety. Consequences of growing the array Just because we're using locks doesn't mean that race conditions aren't a problem. We can see this by looking at the GrowTable method. The operation of this method can be boiled down to: private void GrowTable(Node[] buckets) { try { 1: Acquire first lock in the locks array // this causes any other thread trying to take out // all the locks to block because the first lock in the array // is always the one taken out first // check if another thread has already resized the buckets array // while we were waiting to acquire the first lock 2: if (buckets != m_buckets) return; 3: Calculate the new size of the backing array 4: Node[] array = new array[size]; 5: Acquire all the remaining locks 6: Re-hash the contents of the existing buckets into array 7: m_buckets = array; } finally { 8: Release all locks } } As you can see, there's already a check for a race condition at step 2, for the case when the GrowTable method is called twice in quick succession on two separate threads. One will successfully resize the buckets array (blocking the second in the meantime), when the second thread is unblocked it'll see that the array has already been resized & exit without doing anything. There is another case we need to consider; looking back at the AlterBucket method above, consider the following situation: Thread 1 calls AlterBucket; step 1 is executed to get the bucket and lock numbers. Thread 2 calls GrowTable and executes steps 1-5; thread 1 is blocked when it tries to take out the lock in step 2. Thread 2 re-hashes everything, re-assigns the buckets array, and releases all the locks (steps 6-8). Thread 1 is unblocked and continues executing, but the calculated bucket and lock numbers are no longer valid. Between calculating the correct bucket and lock number and taking out the lock, another thread has changed where everything is. Not exactly thread-safe. Well, a similar problem was solved in ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue by storing a local copy of the state, doing the necessary calculations, then checking if that state is still valid. We can use a similar idea here: void AlterBucket(TKey key, ...) { while (true) { Node[] buckets = m_buckets; int bucketNo, lockNo; GetBucketAndLockNo( key.GetHashCode(), out bucketNo, out lockNo, buckets.Length); lock (m_locks[lockNo]) { // if the state has changed, go back to the start if (buckets != m_buckets) continue; Node headNode = m_buckets[bucketNo]; Mutate the node linked list as appropriate } break; } } TryGetValue and GetEnumerator And so, finally, we get onto TryGetValue and GetEnumerator. I've left these to the end because, well, they don't actually use any locks. How can this be? Whenever you change a bucket, you need to take out the corresponding lock, yes? Indeed you do. However, it is important to note that TryGetValue and GetEnumerator don't actually change anything. Just as immutable objects are, by definition, thread-safe, read-only operations don't need to take out a lock because they don't change anything. All lockless methods can happily iterate through the buckets and linked lists without worrying about locking anything. However, this does put restrictions on how the other methods operate. Because there could be another thread in the middle of reading the dictionary at any time (even if a lock is taken out), the dictionary has to be in a valid state at all times. Every change to state has to be made visible to other threads in a single atomic operation (all relevant variables are marked volatile to help with this). This restriction ensures that whatever the reading threads are doing, they never read the dictionary in an invalid state (eg items that should be in the collection temporarily removed from the linked list, or reading a node that has had it's key & value removed before the node itself has been removed from the linked list). Fortunately, all the operations needed to change the dictionary can be done in that way. Bucket resizes are made visible when the new array is assigned back to the m_buckets variable. Any additions or modifications to a node are done by creating a new node, then splicing it into the existing list using a single variable assignment. Node removals are simply done by re-assigning the node's m_next pointer. Because the dictionary can be changed by another thread during execution of the lockless methods, the GetEnumerator method is liable to return dirty reads - changes made to the dictionary after GetEnumerator was called, but before the enumeration got to that point in the dictionary. It's worth listing at this point which methods are lockless, and which take out all the locks in the dictionary to ensure they get a consistent view of the dictionary: Lockless: TryGetValue GetEnumerator The indexer getter ContainsKey Takes out every lock (lockfull?): Count IsEmpty Keys Values CopyTo ToArray Concurrent principles That covers the overall implementation of ConcurrentDictionary. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of this sophisticated collection. That I leave to you. However, we've looked at enough to be able to extract some useful principles for concurrent programming: Partitioning When using locks, the work is partitioned into independant chunks, each with its own lock. Each partition can then be modified concurrently to other partitions. Ordered lock-taking When a method does need to control the entire collection, locks are taken and released in a fixed order to prevent deadlocks. Lockless reads Read operations that don't care about dirty reads don't take out any lock; the rest of the collection is implemented so that any reading thread always has a consistent view of the collection. That leads us to the final collection in this little series - ConcurrentBag. Lacking a non-concurrent analogy, it is quite different to any other collection in the class libraries. Prepare your thinking hats!

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• Abstracting functionality

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/08/22/abstracting-functionality.aspxWhat is more important than data? Functionality. Yes, I strongly believe we should switch to a functionality over data mindset in programming. Or actually switch back to it. Focus on functionality Functionality once was at the core of software development. Back when algorithms were the first thing you heard about in CS classes. Sure, data structures, too, were important - but always from the point of view of algorithms. (Niklaus Wirth gave one of his books the title “Algorithms + Data Structures” instead of “Data Structures + Algorithms” for a reason.) The reason for the focus on functionality? Firstly, because software was and is about doing stuff. Secondly because sufficient performance was hard to achieve, and only thirdly memory efficiency. But then hardware became more powerful. That gave rise to a new mindset: object orientation. And with it functionality was devalued. Data took over its place as the most important aspect. Now discussions revolved around structures motivated by data relationships. (John Beidler gave his book the title “Data Structures and Algorithms: An Object Oriented Approach” instead of the other way around for a reason.) Sure, this data could be embellished with functionality. But nevertheless functionality was second. When you look at (domain) object models what you mostly find is (domain) data object models. The common object oriented approach is: data aka structure over functionality. This is true even for the most modern modeling approaches like Domain Driven Design. Look at the literature and what you find is recommendations on how to get data structures right: aggregates, entities, value objects. I´m not saying this is what object orientation was invented for. But I´m saying that´s what I happen to see across many teams now some 25 years after object orientation became mainstream through C++, Delphi, and Java. But why should we switch back? Because software development cannot become truly agile with a data focus. The reason for that lies in what customers need first: functionality, behavior, operations. To be clear, that´s not why software is built. The purpose of software is to be more efficient than the alternative. Money mainly is spent to get a certain level of quality (e.g. performance, scalability, security etc.). But without functionality being present, there is nothing to work on the quality of. What customers want is functionality of a certain quality. ASAP. And tomorrow new functionality needs to be added, existing functionality needs to be changed, and quality needs to be increased. No customer ever wanted data or structures. Of course data should be processed. Data is there, data gets generated, transformed, stored. But how the data is structured for this to happen efficiently is of no concern to the customer. Ask a customer (or user) whether she likes the data structured this way or that way. She´ll say, “I don´t care.” But ask a customer (or user) whether he likes the functionality and its quality this way or that way. He´ll say, “I like it” (or “I don´t like it”). Build software incrementally From this very natural focus of customers and users on functionality and its quality follows we should develop software incrementally. That´s what Agility is about. Deliver small increments quickly and often to get frequent feedback. That way less waste is produced, and learning can take place much easier (on the side of the customer as well as on the side of developers). An increment is some added functionality or quality of functionality.[1] So as it turns out, Agility is about functionality over whatever. But software developers’ thinking is still stuck in the object oriented mindset of whatever over functionality. Bummer. I guess that (at least partly) explains why Agility always hits a glass ceiling in projects. It´s a clash of mindsets, of cultures. Driving software development by demanding small increases in functionality runs against thinking about software as growing (data) structures sprinkled with functionality. (Excuse me, if this sounds a bit broad-brush. But you get my point.) The need for abstraction In the end there need to be data structures. Of course. Small and large ones. The phrase functionality over data does not deny that. It´s not functionality instead of data or something. It´s just over, i.e. functionality should be thought of first. It´s a tad more important. It´s what the customer wants. That´s why we need a way to design functionality. Small and large. We need to be able to think about functionality before implementing it. We need to be able to reason about it among team members. We need to be able to communicate our mental models of functionality not just by speaking about them, but also on paper. Otherwise reasoning about it does not scale. We learned thinking about functionality in the small using flow charts, Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams, pseudo code, or UML sequence diagrams. That´s nice and well. But it does not scale. You can use these tools to describe manageable algorithms. But it does not work for the functionality triggered by pressing the “1-Click Order” on an amazon product page for example. There are several reasons for that, I´d say. Firstly, the level of abstraction over code is negligible. It´s essentially non-existent. Drawing a flow chart or writing pseudo code or writing actual code is very, very much alike. All these tools are about control flow like code is.[2] In addition all tools are computationally complete. They are about logic which is expressions and especially control statements. Whatever you code in Java you can fully (!) describe using a flow chart. And then there is no data. They are about control flow and leave out the data altogether. Thus data mostly is assumed to be global. That´s shooting yourself in the foot, as I hope you agree. Even if it´s functionality over data that does not mean “don´t think about data”. Right to the contrary! Functionality only makes sense with regard to data. So data needs to be in the picture right from the start - but it must not dominate the thinking. The above tools fail on this. Bottom line: So far we´re unable to reason in a scalable and abstract manner about functionality. That´s why programmers are so driven to start coding once they are presented with a problem. Programming languages are the only tool they´ve learned to use to reason about functional solutions. Or, well, there might be exceptions. Mathematical notation and SQL may have come to your mind already. Indeed they are tools on a higher level of abstraction than flow charts etc. That´s because they are declarative and not computationally complete. They leave out details - in order to deliver higher efficiency in devising overall solutions. We can easily reason about functionality using mathematics and SQL. That´s great. Except for that they are domain specific languages. They are not general purpose. (And they don´t scale either, I´d say.) Bummer. So to be more precise we need a scalable general purpose tool on a higher than code level of abstraction not neglecting data. Enter: Flow Design. Abstracting functionality using data flows I believe the solution to the problem of abstracting functionality lies in switching from control flow to data flow. Data flow very naturally is not about logic details anymore. There are no expressions and no control statements anymore. There are not even statements anymore. Data flow is declarative by nature. With data flow we get rid of all the limiting traits of former approaches to modeling functionality. In addition, nomen est omen, data flows include data in the functionality picture. With data flows, data is visibly flowing from processing step to processing step. Control is not flowing. Control is wherever it´s needed to process data coming in. That´s a crucial difference and needs some rewiring in your head to be fully appreciated.[2] Since data flows are declarative they are not the right tool to describe algorithms, though, I´d say. With them you don´t design functionality on a low level. During design data flow processing steps are black boxes. They get fleshed out during coding. Data flow design thus is more coarse grained than flow chart design. It starts on a higher level of abstraction - but then is not limited. By nesting data flows indefinitely you can design functionality of any size, without losing sight of your data. Data flows scale very well during design. They can be used on any level of granularity. And they can easily be depicted. Communicating designs using data flows is easy and scales well, too. The result of functional design using data flows is not algorithms (too low level), but processes. Think of data flows as descriptions of industrial production lines. Data as material runs through a number of processing steps to be analyzed, enhances, transformed. On the top level of a data flow design might be just one processing step, e.g. “execute 1-click order”. But below that are arbitrary levels of flows with smaller and smaller steps. That´s not layering as in “layered architecture”, though. Rather it´s a stratified design à la Abelson/Sussman. Refining data flows is not your grandpa´s functional decomposition. That was rooted in control flows. Refining data flows does not suffer from the limits of functional decomposition against which object orientation was supposed to be an antidote. Summary I´ve been working exclusively with data flows for functional design for the past 4 years. It has changed my life as a programmer. What once was difficult is now easy. And, no, I´m not using Clojure or F#. And I´m not a async/parallel execution buff. Designing the functionality of increments using data flows works great with teams. It produces design documentation which can easily be translated into code - in which then the smallest data flow processing steps have to be fleshed out - which is comparatively easy. Using a systematic translation approach code can mirror the data flow design. That way later on the design can easily be reproduced from the code if need be. And finally, data flow designs play well with object orientation. They are a great starting point for class design. But that´s a story for another day. To me data flow design simply is one of the missing links of systematic lightweight software design. There are also other artifacts software development can produce to get feedback, e.g. process descriptions, test cases. But customers can be delighted more easily with code based increments in functionality. ? No, I´m not talking about the endless possibilities this opens for parallel processing. Data flows are useful independently of multi-core processors and Actor-based designs. That´s my whole point here. Data flows are good for reasoning and evolvability. So forget about any special frameworks you might need to reap benefits from data flows. None are necessary. Translating data flow designs even into plain of Java is possible. ?

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• Adding attachments to HumanTasks *beforehand*

  - by ccasares

  For an demo I'm preparing along with a partner, we need to add some attachments to a HumanTask beforehand, that is, the attachment must be associated already to the Task by the time the user opens its Form. How to achieve this?, indeed it's quite simple and just a matter of some mappings to the Task's input execData structure. Oracle BPM supports "default" attachments (which use BPM tables) or UCM-based ones. The way to insert attachments for both methods is pretty similar. With default attachments When using default attachments, first we need to have the attachment payload as part of the BPM process, that is, must be contained in a variable. Normally the attachment content is binary, so we'll need first to convert it to a base64-string (not covered on this blog entry). What we need to do is just to map the following execData parameters as part of the input of the HumanTask: execData.attachment[n].content            <-- the base64 payload data execData.attachment[n].mimeType           <-- depends on your attachment                                               (e.g.: "application/pdf") execData.attachment[n].name               <-- attachment name (just the name you want to                                               use. No need to be the original filename) execData.attachment[n].attachmentScope    <-- BPM or TASK (depending on your needs) execData.attachment[n].storageType        <-- TASK execData.attachment[n].doesBelongToParent <-- false (not sure if this one is really                                               needed, but it definitely doesn't hurt) execData.attachment[n].updatedBy          <-- username who is attaching it execData.attachment[n].updatedDate        <-- dateTime of when this attachment is                                               attached  Bear in mind that the attachment structure is a repetitive one. So if you need to add more than one attachment, you'll need to use XSLT mapping. If not, the Assign mapper automatically adds [1] for the iteration.  With UCM-based attachments With UCM-based attachments, the procedure is basically the same. We'll need to map some extra fields and not to map others. The tricky part with UCM-based attachments is what we need to know beforehand about the attachment itself. Of course, we don't need to have the payload, but a couple of information from the attachment that must be checked in already in UCM. First, let's see the mappings: execData.attachment[n].mimeType           <-- Document's dFormat attribute (1) execData.attachment[n].name               <-- attachment name (just the name you want to                                               use. No need to be the original filename) execData.attachment[n].attachmentScope    <-- BPM or TASK (depending on your needs) execData.attachment[n].storageType        <-- UCM execData.attachment[n].doesBelongToParent <-- false (not sure if this one is really                                               needed, but it definitely doesn't hurt) execData.attachment[n].updatedBy          <-- username who is attaching it execData.attachment[n].updatedDate        <-- dateTime of when this attachment is                                               attached  execData.attachment[n].uri                <-- "ecm://<dID>" where dID is document's dID                                      attribute (2) execData.attachment[n].ucmDocType         <-- Document's dDocType attribute (3) execData.attachment[n].securityGroup      <-- Document's dSecurityGroup attribute (4) execData.attachment[n].revision           <-- Document's dRevisionID attribute (5) execData.attachment[n].ucmMetadataItem[1].name  <-- "DocUrl" execData.attachment[n].ucmMetadataItem[1].type  <-- STRING execData.attachment[n].ucmMetadataItem[1].value <-- Document's url attribute (6)  Where to get those (n) fields? In my case I get those from a Search call to UCM (not covered on this blog entry) As I mentioned above, we must know which UCM document we're going to attach. We may know its ID, its name... whatever we need to uniquely identify it calling the IDC Search method. This method returns ALL the info we need to attach the different fields labeled with a number above.  The only tricky one is (6). UCM Search service returns the url attribute as a context-root without hostname:port. E.g.: /cs/groups/public/documents/document/dgvs/mdaw/~edisp/ccasareswcptel000239.pdf However we do need to include the full qualified URL when mapping (6). Where to get the http://<hostname>:<port> value? Honestly, I have no clue. What I use to do is to use a BPM property that can always be modified at runtime if needed. There are some other fields that might be needed in the execData.attachment structure, like account (if UCM's is using Accounts). But for demos I've never needed to use them, so I'm not sure whether it's necessary or not. Feel free to add some comments to this entry if you know it ;-)  That's all folks. Should you need help with the UCM Search service, let me know and I can write a quick entry on that topic.

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• Microsoft and jQuery

  - by Rick Strahl

  The jQuery JavaScript library has been steadily getting more popular and with recent developments from Microsoft, jQuery is also getting ever more exposure on the ASP.NET platform including now directly from Microsoft. jQuery is a light weight, open source DOM manipulation library for JavaScript that has changed how many developers think about JavaScript. You can download it and find more information on jQuery on www.jquery.com. For me jQuery has had a huge impact on how I develop Web applications and was probably the main reason I went from dreading to do JavaScript development to actually looking forward to implementing client side JavaScript functionality. It has also had a profound impact on my JavaScript skill level for me by seeing how the library accomplishes things (and often reviewing the terse but excellent source code). jQuery made an uncomfortable development platform (JavaScript + DOM) a joy to work on. Although jQuery is by no means the only JavaScript library out there, its ease of use, small size, huge community of plug-ins and pure usefulness has made it easily the most popular JavaScript library available today. As a long time jQuery user, I’ve been excited to see the developments from Microsoft that are bringing jQuery to more ASP.NET developers and providing more integration with jQuery for ASP.NET’s core features rather than relying on the ASP.NET AJAX library. Microsoft and jQuery – making Friends jQuery is an open source project but in the last couple of years Microsoft has really thrown its weight behind supporting this open source library as a supported component on the Microsoft platform. When I say supported I literally mean supported: Microsoft now offers actual tech support for jQuery as part of their Product Support Services (PSS) as jQuery integration has become part of several of the ASP.NET toolkits and ships in several of the default Web project templates in Visual Studio 2010. The ASP.NET MVC 3 framework (still in Beta) also uses jQuery for a variety of client side support features including client side validation and we can look forward toward more integration of client side functionality via jQuery in both MVC and WebForms in the future. In other words jQuery is becoming an optional but included component of the ASP.NET platform. PSS support means that support staff will answer jQuery related support questions as part of any support incidents related to ASP.NET which provides some piece of mind to some corporate development shops that require end to end support from Microsoft. In addition to including jQuery and supporting it, Microsoft has also been getting involved in providing development resources for extending jQuery’s functionality via plug-ins. Microsoft’s last version of the Microsoft Ajax Library – which is the successor to the native ASP.NET AJAX Library – included some really cool functionality for client templates, databinding and localization. As it turns out Microsoft has rebuilt most of that functionality using jQuery as the base API and provided jQuery plug-ins of these components. Very recently these three plug-ins were submitted and have been approved for inclusion in the official jQuery plug-in repository and been taken over by the jQuery team for further improvements and maintenance. Even more surprising: The jQuery-templates component has actually been approved for inclusion in the next major update of the jQuery core in jQuery V1.5, which means it will become a native feature that doesn’t require additional script files to be loaded. Imagine this – an open source contribution from Microsoft that has been accepted into a major open source project for a core feature improvement. Microsoft has come a long way indeed! What the Microsoft Involvement with jQuery means to you For Microsoft jQuery support is a strategic decision that affects their direction in client side development, but nothing stopped you from using jQuery in your applications prior to Microsoft’s official backing and in fact a large chunk of developers did so readily prior to Microsoft’s announcement. Official support from Microsoft brings a few benefits to developers however. jQuery support in Visual Studio 2010 means built-in support for jQuery IntelliSense, automatically added jQuery scripts in many projects types and a common base for client side functionality that actually uses what most developers are already using. If you have already been using jQuery and were worried about straying from the Microsoft line and their internal Microsoft Ajax Library – worry no more. With official support and the change in direction towards jQuery Microsoft is now following along what most in the ASP.NET community had already been doing by using jQuery, which is likely the reason for Microsoft’s shift in direction in the first place. ASP.NET AJAX and the Microsoft AJAX Library weren’t bad technology – there was tons of useful functionality buried in these libraries. However, these libraries never got off the ground, mainly because early incarnations were squarely aimed at control/component developers rather than application developers. For all the functionality that these controls provided for control developers they lacked in useful and easily usable application developer functionality that was easily accessible in day to day client side development. The result was that even though Microsoft shipped support for these tools in the box (in .NET 3.5 and 4.0), other than for the internal support in ASP.NET for things like the UpdatePanel and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit as well as some third party vendors, the Microsoft client libraries were largely ignored by the developer community opening the door for other client side solutions. Microsoft seems to be acknowledging developer choice in this case: Many more developers were going down the jQuery path rather than using the Microsoft built libraries and there seems to be little sense in continuing development of a technology that largely goes unused by the majority of developers. Kudos for Microsoft for recognizing this and gracefully changing directions. Note that even though there will be no further development in the Microsoft client libraries they will continue to be supported so if you’re using them in your applications there’s no reason to start running for the exit in a panic and start re-writing everything with jQuery. Although that might be a reasonable choice in some cases, jQuery and the Microsoft libraries work well side by side so that you can leave existing solutions untouched even as you enhance them with jQuery. The Microsoft jQuery Plug-ins – Solid Core Features One of the most interesting developments in Microsoft’s embracing of jQuery is that Microsoft has started contributing to jQuery via standard mechanism set for jQuery developers: By submitting plug-ins. Microsoft took some of the nicest new features of the unpublished Microsoft Ajax Client Library and re-wrote these components for jQuery and then submitted them as plug-ins to the jQuery plug-in repository. Accepted plug-ins get taken over by the jQuery team and that’s exactly what happened with the three plug-ins submitted by Microsoft with the templating plug-in even getting slated to be published as part of the jQuery core in the next major release (1.5). The following plug-ins are provided by Microsoft: jQuery Templates – a client side template rendering engine jQuery Data Link – a client side databinder that can synchronize changes without code jQuery Globalization – provides formatting and conversion features for dates and numbers The first two are ports of functionality that was slated for the Microsoft Ajax Library while functionality for the globalization library provides functionality that was already found in the original ASP.NET AJAX library. To me all three plug-ins address a pressing need in client side applications and provide functionality I’ve previously used in other incarnations, but with more complete implementations. Let’s take a close look at these plug-ins. jQuery Templates http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/ Client side templating is a key component for building rich JavaScript applications in the browser. Templating on the client lets you avoid from manually creating markup by creating DOM nodes and injecting them individually into the document via code. Rather you can create markup templates – similar to the way you create classic ASP server markup – and merge data into these templates to render HTML which you can then inject into the document or replace existing content with. Output from templates are rendered as a jQuery matched set and can then be easily inserted into the document as needed. Templating is key to minimize client side code and reduce repeated code for rendering logic. Instead a single template can be used in many places for updating and adding content to existing pages. Further if you build pure AJAX interfaces that rely entirely on client rendering of the initial page content, templates allow you to a use a single markup template to handle all rendering of each specific HTML section/element. I’ve used a number of different client rendering template engines with jQuery in the past including jTemplates (a PHP style templating engine) and a modified version of John Resig’s MicroTemplating engine which I built into my own set of libraries because it’s such a commonly used feature in my client side applications. jQuery templates adds a much richer templating model that allows for sub-templates and access to the data items. Like John Resig’s original Micro Template engine, the core basics of the templating engine create JavaScript code which means that templates can include JavaScript code. To give you a basic idea of how templates work imagine I have an application that downloads a set of stock quotes based on a symbol list then displays them in the document. To do this you can create an ‘item’ template that describes how each of the quotes is renderd as a template inside of the document: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div><div>${LastPrice}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div><div>${LastQuoteTimeString}</div> </div> </script> The ‘template’ is little more than HTML with some markup expressions inside of it that define the template language. Notice the embedded ${} expressions which reference data from the quote objects returned from an AJAX call on the server. You can embed any JavaScript or value expression in these template expressions. There are also a number of structural commands like {{if}} and {{each}} that provide for rudimentary logic inside of your templates as well as commands ({{tmpl}} and {{wrap}}) for nesting templates. You can find more about the full set of markup expressions available in the documentation. To load up this data you can use code like the following: <script type="text/javascript"> //var Proxy = new ServiceProxy("../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/"); $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnGetQuotes").click(GetQuotes); }); function GetQuotes() { var symbols = $("#txtSymbols").val().split(","); $.ajax({ url: "../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/GetStockQuotes", data: JSON.stringify({ symbols: symbols }), // parameter map type: "POST", // data has to be POSTed contentType: "application/json", timeout: 10000, dataType: "json", success: function (result) { var quotes = result.d; var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); $("#quoteDisplay").empty().append(jEl); }, error: function (xhr, status) { alert(status + "\r\n" + xhr.responseText); } }); }; </script> In this case an ASMX AJAX service is called to retrieve the stock quotes. The service returns an array of quote objects. The result is returned as an object with the .d property (in Microsoft service style) that returns the actual array of quotes. The template is applied with: var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); which selects the template script tag and uses the .tmpl() function to apply the data to it. The result is a jQuery matched set of elements that can then be appended to the quote display element in the page. The template is merged against an array in this example. When the result is an array the template is automatically applied to each each array item. If you pass a single data item – like say a stock quote – the template works exactly the same way but is applied only once. Templates also have access to a $data item which provides the current data item and information about the tempalte that is currently executing. This makes it possible to keep context within the context of the template itself and also to pass context from a parent template to a child template which is very powerful. Templates can be evaluated by using the template selector and calling the .tmpl() function on the jQuery matched set as shown above or you can use the static $.tmpl() function to provide a template as a string. This allows you to dynamically create templates in code or – more likely – to load templates from the server via AJAX calls. In short there are options The above shows off some of the basics, but there’s much for functionality available in the template engine. Check the documentation link for more information and links to additional examples. The plug-in download also comes with a number of examples that demonstrate functionality. jQuery templates will become a native component in jQuery Core 1.5, so it’s definitely worthwhile checking out the engine today and get familiar with this interface. As much as I’m stoked about templating becoming part of the jQuery core because it’s such an integral part of many applications, there are also a couple shortcomings in the current incarnation: Lack of Error Handling Currently if you embed an expression that is invalid it’s simply not rendered. There’s no error rendered into the template nor do the various  template functions throw errors which leaves finding of bugs as a runtime exercise. I would like some mechanism – optional if possible – to be able to get error info of what is failing in a template when it’s rendered. No String Output Templates are always rendered into a jQuery matched set and there’s no way that I can see to directly render to a string. String output can be useful for debugging as well as opening up templating for creating non-HTML string output. Limited JavaScript Access Unlike John Resig’s original MicroTemplating Engine which was entirely based on JavaScript code generation these templates are limited to a few structured commands that can ‘execute’. There’s no code execution inside of script code which means you’re limited to calling expressions available in global objects or the data item passed in. This may or may not be a big deal depending on the complexity of your template logic. Error handling has been discussed quite a bit and it’s likely there will be some solution to that particualar issue by the time jQuery templates ship. The others are relatively minor issues but something to think about anyway. jQuery Data Link http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/data-link/ jQuery Data Link provides the ability to do two-way data binding between input controls and an underlying object’s properties. The typical scenario is linking a textbox to a property of an object and have the object updated when the text in the textbox is changed and have the textbox change when the value in the object or the entire object changes. The plug-in also supports converter functions that can be applied to provide the conversion logic from string to some other value typically necessary for mapping things like textbox string input to say a number property and potentially applying additional formatting and calculations. In theory this sounds great, however in reality this plug-in has some serious usability issues. Using the plug-in you can do things like the following to bind data: person = { firstName: "rick", lastName: "strahl"}; $(document).ready( function() { // provide for two-way linking of inputs $("form").link(person); // bind to non-input elements explicitly $("#objFirst").link(person, { firstName: { name: "objFirst", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); $("#objLast").link(person, { lastName: { name: "objLast", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); }); This code hooks up two-way linking between a couple of textboxes on the page and the person object. The first line in the .ready() handler provides mapping of object to form field with the same field names as properties on the object. Note that .link() does NOT bind items into the textboxes when you call .link() – changes are mapped only when values change and you move out of the field. Strike one. The two following commands allow manual binding of values to specific DOM elements which is effectively a one-way bind. You specify the object and a then an explicit mapping where name is an ID in the document. The converter is required to explicitly assign the value to the element. Strike two. You can also detect changes to the underlying object and cause updates to the input elements bound. Unfortunately the syntax to do this is not very natural as you have to rely on the jQuery data object. To update an object’s properties and get change notification looks like this: function updateFirstName() { $(person).data("firstName", person.firstName + " (code updated)"); } This works fine in causing any linked fields to be updated. In the bindings above both the firstName input field and objFirst DOM element gets updated. But the syntax requires you to use a jQuery .data() call for each property change to ensure that the changes are tracked properly. Really? Sure you’re binding through multiple layers of abstraction now but how is that better than just manually assigning values? The code savings (if any) are going to be minimal. As much as I would like to have a WPF/Silverlight/Observable-like binding mechanism in client script, this plug-in doesn’t help much towards that goal in its current incarnation. While you can bind values, the ‘binder’ is too limited to be really useful. If initial values can’t be assigned from the mappings you’re going to end up duplicating work loading the data using some other mechanism. There’s no easy way to re-bind data with a different object altogether since updates trigger only through the .data members. Finally, any non-input elements have to be bound via code that’s fairly verbose and frankly may be more voluminous than what you might write by hand for manual binding and unbinding. Two way binding can be very useful but it has to be easy and most importantly natural. If it’s more work to hook up a binding than writing a couple of lines to do binding/unbinding this sort of thing helps very little in most scenarios. In talking to some of the developers the feature set for Data Link is not complete and they are still soliciting input for features and functionality. If you have ideas on how you want this feature to be more useful get involved and post your recommendations. As it stands, it looks to me like this component needs a lot of love to become useful. For this component to really provide value, bindings need to be able to be refreshed easily and work at the object level, not just the property level. It seems to me we would be much better served by a model binder object that can perform these binding/unbinding tasks in bulk rather than a tool where each link has to be mapped first. I also find the choice of creating a jQuery plug-in questionable – it seems a standalone object – albeit one that relies on the jQuery library – would provide a more intuitive interface than the current forcing of options onto a plug-in style interface. Out of the three Microsoft created components this is by far the least useful and least polished implementation at this point. jQuery Globalization http://github.com/jquery/jquery-global Globalization in JavaScript applications often gets short shrift and part of the reason for this is that natively in JavaScript there’s little support for formatting and parsing of numbers and dates. There are a number of JavaScript libraries out there that provide some support for globalization, but most are limited to a particular portion of globalization. As .NET developers we’re fairly spoiled by the richness of APIs provided in the framework and when dealing with client development one really notices the lack of these features. While you may not necessarily need to localize your application the globalization plug-in also helps with some basic tasks for non-localized applications: Dealing with formatting and parsing of dates and time values. Dates in particular are problematic in JavaScript as there are no formatters whatsoever except the .toString() method which outputs a verbose and next to useless long string. With the globalization plug-in you get a good chunk of the formatting and parsing functionality that the .NET framework provides on the server. You can write code like the following for example to format numbers and dates: var date = new Date(); var output = $.format(date, "MMM. dd, yy") + "\r\n" + $.format(date, "d") + "\r\n" + // 10/25/2010 $.format(1222.32213, "N2") + "\r\n" + $.format(1222.33, "c") + "\r\n"; alert(output); This becomes even more useful if you combine it with templates which can also include any JavaScript expressions. Assuming the globalization plug-in is loaded you can create template expressions that use the $.format function. Here’s the template I used earlier for the stock quote again with a couple of formats applied: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div> <div>${$.format(LastPrice,"N2")}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div> <div>${$.format(LastQuoteTime,"MMM dd, yyyy")}</div> </div> </script> There are also parsing methods that can parse dates and numbers from strings into numbers easily: alert($.parseDate("25.10.2010")); alert($.parseInt("12.222")); // de-DE uses . for thousands separators As you can see culture specific options are taken into account when parsing. The globalization plugin provides rich support for a variety of locales: Get a list of all available cultures Query cultures for culture items (like currency symbol, separators etc.) Localized string names for all calendar related items (days of week, months) Generated off of .NET’s supported locales In short you get much of the same functionality that you already might be using in .NET on the server side. The plugin includes a huge number of locales and an Globalization.all.min.js file that contains the text defaults for each of these locales as well as small locale specific script files that define each of the locale specific settings. It’s highly recommended that you NOT use the huge globalization file that includes all locales, but rather add script references to only those languages you explicitly care about. Overall this plug-in is a welcome helper. Even if you use it with a single locale (like en-US) and do no other localization, you’ll gain solid support for number and date formatting which is a vital feature of many applications. Changes for Microsoft It’s good to see Microsoft coming out of its shell and away from the ‘not-built-here’ mentality that has been so pervasive in the past. It’s especially good to see it applied to jQuery – a technology that has stood in drastic contrast to Microsoft’s own internal efforts in terms of design, usage model and… popularity. It’s great to see that Microsoft is paying attention to what customers prefer to use and supporting the customer sentiment – even if it meant drastically changing course of policy and moving into a more open and sharing environment in the process. The additional jQuery support that has been introduced in the last two years certainly has made lives easier for many developers on the ASP.NET platform. It’s also nice to see Microsoft submitting proposals through the standard jQuery process of plug-ins and getting accepted for various very useful projects. Certainly the jQuery Templates plug-in is going to be very useful to many especially since it will be baked into the jQuery core in jQuery 1.5. I hope we see more of this type of involvement from Microsoft in the future. Kudos!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  ASP.NET  

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• Tips on Migrating from AquaLogic .NET Accelerator to WebCenter WSRP Producer for .NET

  - by user647124

  This year I embarked on a journey to migrate a group of ASP.NET web applications developed to integrate with WebLogic Portal 9.2 via the AquaLogic® Interaction .NET Application Accelerator 1.0 to instead use the Oracle WebCenter WSRP Producer for .NET and integrated with WebLogic Portal 10.3.4. It has been a very winding path and this blog entry is intended to share both the lessons learned and relevant approaches that led to those learnings. Like most journeys of discovery, it was not a direct path, and there are notes to let you know when it is practical to skip a section if you are in a hurry to get from here to there. For the Curious From the perspective of necessity, this section would be better at the end. If it were there, though, it would probably be read by far fewer people, including those that are actually interested in these types of sections. Those in a hurry may skip past and be none the worst for it in dealing with the hands-on bits of performing a migration from .NET Accelerator to WSRP Producer. For others who want to talk about why they did what they did after they did it, or just want to know for themselves, enjoy. A Brief (and edited) History of the WSRP for .NET Technologies (as Relevant to the this Post) Note: This section is for those who are curious about why the migration path is not as simple as many other Oracle technologies. You can skip this section in its entirety and still be just as competent in performing a migration as if you had read it. The currently deployed architecture that was to be migrated and upgraded achieved initial integration between .NET and J2EE over the WSRP protocol through the use of The AquaLogic Interaction .NET Application Accelerator. The .NET Accelerator allowed the applications that were written in ASP.NET and deployed on a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) to interact with a WebLogic Portal application deployed on a WebLogic (J2EE application) Server (both version 9.2, the state of the art at the time of its creation). At the time this architectural decision for the application was made, both the AquaLogic and WebLogic brands were owned by BEA Systems. The AquaLogic brand included products acquired by BEA through the acquisition of Plumtree, whose flagship product was a portal platform available in both J2EE and .NET versions. As part of this dual technology support an adaptor was created to facilitate the use of WSRP as a communication protocol where customers wished to integrate components from both versions of the Plumtree portal. The adapter evolved over several product generations to include a broad array of both standard and proprietary WSRP integration capabilities. Later, BEA Systems was acquired by Oracle. Over the course of several years Oracle has acquired a large number of portal applications and has taken the strategic direction to migrate users of these myriad (and formerly competitive) products to the Oracle WebCenter technology stack. As part of Oracle’s strategic technology roadmap, older portal products are being schedule for end of life, including the portal products that were part of the BEA acquisition. The .NET Accelerator has been modified over a very long period of time with features driven by users of that product and developed under three different vendors (each a direct competitor in the same solution space prior to merger). The Oracle WebCenter WSRP Producer for .NET was introduced much more recently with the key objective to specifically address the needs of the WebCenter customers developing solutions accessible through both J2EE and .NET platforms utilizing the WSRP specifications. The Oracle Product Development Team also provides these insights on the drivers for developing the WSRP Producer: ***************************************** Support for ASP.NET AJAX. Controls using the ASP.NET AJAX script manager do not function properly in the Application Accelerator for .NET. Support 2 way SSL in WLP. This was not possible with the proxy/bridge set up in the existing Application Accelerator for .NET. Allow developers to code portlets (Web Parts) using the .NET framework rather than a proprietary framework. Developers had to use the Application Accelerator for .NET plug-ins to Visual Studio to manage preferences and profile data. This is now replaced with the .NET Framework Personalization (for preferences) and Profile providers. The WSRP Producer for .NET was created as a new way of developing .NET portlets. It was never designed to be an upgrade path for the Application Accelerator for .NET. .NET developers would create new .NET portlets with the WSRP Producer for .NET and leave any existing .NET portlets running in the Application Accelerator for .NET. ***************************************** The advantage to creating a new solution for WSRP is a product that is far easier for Oracle to maintain and support which in turn improves quality, reliability and maintainability for their customers. No changes to J2EE applications consuming the WSRP portlets previously rendered by the.NET Accelerator is required to migrate from the Aqualogic WSRP solution. For some customers using the .NET Accelerator the challenge is adapting their current .NET applications to work with the WSRP Producer (or any other WSRP adapter as they are proprietary by nature). Part of this adaptation is the need to deploy the .NET applications as a child to the WSRP producer web application as root. Differences between .NET Accelerator and WSRP Producer Note: This section is for those who are curious about why the migration is not as pluggable as something such as changing security providers in WebLogic Server. You can skip this section in its entirety and still be just as competent in performing a migration as if you had read it. The basic terminology used to describe the participating applications in a WSRP environment are the same when applied to either the .NET Accelerator or the WSRP Producer: Producer and Consumer. In both cases the .NET application serves as what is referred to as a WSRP environment as the Producer. The difference lies in how the two adapters create the WSRP translation of the .NET application. The .NET Accelerator, as the name implies, is meant to serve as a quick way of adding WSRP capability to a .NET application. As such, at a high level, the .NET Accelerator behaves as a proxy for requests between the .NET application and the WSRP Consumer. A WSRP request is sent from the consumer to the .NET Accelerator, the.NET Accelerator transforms this request into an ASP.NET request, receives the response, then transforms the response into a WSRP response. The .NET Accelerator is deployed as a stand-alone application on IIS. The WSRP Producer is deployed as a parent application on IIS and all ASP.NET modules that will be made available over WSRP are deployed as children of the WSRP Producer application. In this manner, the WSRP Producer acts more as a Request Filter than a proxy in the WSRP transactions between Producer and Consumer. Highly Recommended Enabling Logging Note: You can skip this section now, but you will most likely want to come back to it later, so why not just read it now? Logging is very helpful in tracking down the causes of any anomalies during testing of migrated portlets. To enable the WSRP Producer logging, update the Application_Start method in the Global.asax.cs for your .NET application by adding log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure(); IIS logs will usually (in a standard configuration) be in a sub folder under C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\W3SVC. WSRP Producer logs will be found at C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdefault\Logs\WSRPProducer.log InputTrace.webinfo and OutputTrace.webinfo are located under C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdefault and can be useful in debugging issues related to markup transformations. Things You Must Do Merge Web.Config Note: If you have been skipping all the sections that you can, now is the time to stop and pay attention J Because the existing .NET application will become a sub-application to the WSRP Producer, you will want to merge required settings from the existing Web.Config to the one in the WSRP Producer. Use the WSRP Producer Master Page The Master Page installed for the WSRP Producer provides common, hiddenform fields and JavaScripts to facilitate portlet instance management and display configuration when the child page is being rendered over WSRP. You add the Master Page by including it in the <@ Page declaration with MasterPageFile="~/portlets/Resources/MasterPages/WSRP.Master" . You then replace: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" > <HTML> <HEAD> With <asp:Content ID="ContentHead1" ContentPlaceHolderID="wsrphead" Runat="Server"> And </HEAD> <body> <form id="theForm" method="post" runat="server"> With </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="ContentBody1" ContentPlaceHolderID="Main" Runat="Server"> And finally </form> </body> </HTML> With </asp:Content> In the event you already use Master Pages, adapt your existing Master Pages to be sub masters. See Nested ASP.NET Master Pages for a detailed reference of how to do this. It Happened to Me, It Might Happen to You…Or Not Watch for Use of Session or Request in OnInit In the event the .NET application being modified has pages developed to assume the user has been authenticated in an earlier page request there may be direct or indirect references in the OnInit method to request or session objects that may not have been created yet. This will vary from application to application, so the recommended approach is to test first. If there is an issue with a page running as a WSRP portlet then check for potential references in the OnInit method (including references by methods called within OnInit) to session or request objects. If there are, the simplest solution is to create a new method and then call that method once the necessary object(s) is fully available. I find doing this at the start of the Page_Load method to be the simplest solution. Case Sensitivity .NET languages are not case sensitive, but Java is. This means it is possible to have many variations of SRC= and src= or .JPG and .jpg. The preferred solution is to make these mark up instances all lower case in your .NET application. This will allow the default Rewriter rules in wsrp-producer.xml to work as is. If this is not practical, then make duplicates of any rules where an issue is occurring due to upper or mixed case usage in the .NET application markup and match the case in use with the duplicate rule. For example: <RewriterRule> <LookFor>(href=\"([^\"]+)</LookFor> <ChangeToAbsolute>true</ChangeToAbsolute> <ApplyTo>.axd,.css</ApplyTo> <MakeResource>true</MakeResource> </RewriterRule> May need to be duplicated as: <RewriterRule> <LookFor>(HREF=\"([^\"]+)</LookFor> <ChangeToAbsolute>true</ChangeToAbsolute> <ApplyTo>.axd,.css</ApplyTo> <MakeResource>true</MakeResource> </RewriterRule> While it is possible to write a regular expression that will handle mixed case usage, it would be long and strenous to test and maintain, so the recommendation is to use duplicate rules. Is it Still Relative? Some .NET applications base relative paths with a fixed root location. With the introduction of the WSRP Producer, the root has moved up one level. References to ~/ will need to be updated to ~/portlets and many ../ paths will need another ../ in front. I Can See You But I Can’t Find You This issue was first discovered while debugging modules with code that referenced the form on a page from the code-behind by name and/or id. The initial error presented itself as run-time error that was difficult to interpret over WSRP but seemed clear when run as straight ASP.NET as it indicated that the object with the form name did not exist. Since the form name was no longer valid after implementing the WSRP Master Page, the likely fix seemed to simply update the references in the code. However, as the WSRP Master Page is external to the code, a compile time error resulted: Error      155         The name 'form1' does not exist in the current context                C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdefault\portlets\legacywebsite\module\Screens \Reporting.aspx.cs                51           52           legacywebsite.module Much hair-pulling research later it was discovered that it was the use of the FindControl method causing the issue. FindControl doesn’t work quite as expected once a Master Page has been introduced as the controls become embedded in controls, require a recursion to find them that is not part of the FindControl method. In code where the page form is referenced by name, there are two steps to the solution. First, the form needs to be referenced in code generically with Page.Form. For example, this: ToggleControl ctrl = new ToggleControl(frmManualEntry, FunctionLibrary.ParseArrayLst(userObj.Roles)); Becomes this: ToggleControl ctrl = new ToggleControl(Page.Form, FunctionLibrary.ParseArrayLst(userObj.Roles)); Generally the form id is referenced in most ASP.NET applications as a path to a control on the form. To reach the control once a MasterPage has been added requires an additional method to recurse through the controls collections within the form and find the control ID. The following method (found at Rick Strahl's Web Log) corrects this very nicely: public static Control FindControlRecursive(Control Root, string Id) { if (Root.ID == Id) return Root; foreach (Control Ctl in Root.Controls) { Control FoundCtl = FindControlRecursive(Ctl, Id); if (FoundCtl != null) return FoundCtl; } return null; } Where the form name is not referenced, simply using the FindControlRecursive method in place of FindControl will be all that is necessary. Following the second part of the example referenced earlier, the method called with Page.Form changes its value extraction code block from this: Label lblErrMsg = (Label)frmRef.FindControl("lblBRMsg" To this: Label lblErrMsg = (Label) FunctionLibrary.FindControlRecursive(frmRef, "lblBRMsg" The Master That Won’t Step Aside In most migrations it is preferable to make as few changes as possible. In one case I ran across an existing Master Page that would not function as a sub-Master Page. While it would probably have been educational to trace down why, the expedient process of updating it to take the place of the WSRP Master Page is the route I took. The changes are highlighted below: … <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="wsrphead" runat="server"></asp:ContentPlaceHolder> </head> <body leftMargin="0" topMargin="0"> <form id="TheForm" runat="server"> <input type="hidden" name="key" id="key" value="" /> <input type="hidden" name="formactionurl" id="formactionurl" value="" /> <input type="hidden" name="handle" id="handle" value="" /> <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server" EnablePartialRendering="true" > </asp:ScriptManager> This approach did not work for all existing Master Pages, but fortunately all of the other existing Master Pages I have run across worked fine as a sub-Master to the WSRP Master Page. Moving On In Enterprise Portals, even after you get everything working, the work is not finished. Next you need to get it where everyone will work with it. Migration Planning Providing that the server where IIS is running is adequately sized, it is possible to run both the .NET Accelerator and the WSRP Producer on the same server during the upgrade process. The upgrade can be performed incrementally, i.e., one portlet at a time, if server administration processes support it. Those processes would include the ability to manage a second producer in the consuming portal and to change over individual portlet instances from one provider to the other. If processes or requirements demand that all portlets be cut over at the same time, it needs to be determined if this cut over should include a new producer, updating all of the portlets in the consumer, or if the WSRP Producer portlet configuration must maintain the naming conventions used by the .NET Accelerator and simply change the WSRP end point configured in the consumer. In some enterprises it may even be necessary to maintain the same WSDL end point, at which point the IIS configuration will be where the updates occur. The downside to such a requirement is that it makes rolling back very difficult, should the need arise. Location, Location, Location Not everyone wants the web application to have the descriptively obvious wsrpdefault location, or needs to create a second WSRP site on the same server. The instructions below are from the product team and, while targeted towards making a second site, will work for creating a site with a different name and then remove the old site. You can also change just the name in IIS. Manually Creating a WSRP Producer Site Instructions (NOTE: all executables used are the same ones used by the installer and “wsrpdev” will be the name of the new instance): 1. Copy C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdefault to C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdev. 2. Bring up a command window as an administrator 3. Run C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\uninstall_resources\IISAppAccelSiteCreator.exe install WSRPProducers wsrpdev "C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdev" 8678 2.0.50727 4. Run C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\uninstall_resources\PermManage.exe add FileSystem C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdev "NETWORK SERVICE" 3 1 5. Run C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\uninstall_resources\PermManage.exe add FileSystem C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsrpdev EVERYONE 1 1 6. Open up C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsdl\1.0\WSRPService.wsdl and replace wsrpdefault with wsrpdev 7. Open up C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\wsdl\2.0\WSRPService.wsdl and replace wsrpdefault with wsrpdev Tests: 1. Bring up a browser on the host itself and go to http://localhost:8678/wsrpdev/wsdl/1.0/WSRPService.wsdl and make sure that the URLs in the XML returned include the wsrpdev changes you made in step 6. 2. Bring up a browser on the host itself and see if the default sample comes up: http://localhost:8678/wsrpdev/portlets/ASPNET_AJAX_sample/default.aspx 3. Register the producer in WLP and test the portlet. Changing the Port used by WSRP Producer The pre-configured port for the WSRP Producer is 8678. You can change this port by updating both the IIS configuration and C:\Oracle\Middleware\WSRPProducerForDotNet\[WSRP_APP_NAME]\wsdl\1.0\WSRPService.wsdl. Do You Need to Migrate? Oracle Premier Support ended in November of 2010 for AquaLogic Interaction .NET Application Accelerator 1.x and Extended Support ends in November 2012 (see http://www.oracle.com/us/support/lifetime-support/lifetime-support-software-342730.html for other related dates). This means that integration with products released after November of 2010 is not supported. If having such support is the policy within your enterprise, you do indeed need to migrate. If changes in your enterprise cause your current solution with the .NET Accelerator to no longer function properly, you may need to migrate. Migration is a choice, and if the goals of your enterprise are to take full advantage of newer technologies then migration is certainly one activity you should be planning for.

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• ASP.NET Frameworks and Raw Throughput Performance

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few days ago I had a curious thought: With all these different technologies that the ASP.NET stack has to offer, what's the most efficient technology overall to return data for a server request? When I started this it was mere curiosity rather than a real practical need or result. Different tools are used for different problems and so performance differences are to be expected. But still I was curious to see how the various technologies performed relative to each just for raw throughput of the request getting to the endpoint and back out to the client with as little processing in the actual endpoint logic as possible (aka Hello World!). I want to clarify that this is merely an informal test for my own curiosity and I'm sharing the results and process here because I thought it was interesting. It's been a long while since I've done any sort of perf testing on ASP.NET, mainly because I've not had extremely heavy load requirements and because overall ASP.NET performs very well even for fairly high loads so that often it's not that critical to test load performance. This post is not meant to make a point  or even come to a conclusion which tech is better, but just to act as a reference to help understand some of the differences in perf and give a starting point to play around with this yourself. I've included the code for this simple project, so you can play with it and maybe add a few additional tests for different things if you like. Source Code on GitHub I looked at this data for these technologies: ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET MVC WebForms ASP.NET WebPages ASMX AJAX Services  (couldn't get AJAX/JSON to run on IIS8 ) WCF Rest Raw ASP.NET HttpHandlers It's quite a mixed bag, of course and the technologies target different types of development. What started out as mere curiosity turned into a bit of a head scratcher as the results were sometimes surprising. What I describe here is more to satisfy my curiosity more than anything and I thought it interesting enough to discuss on the blog :-) First test: Raw Throughput The first thing I did is test raw throughput for the various technologies. This is the least practical test of course since you're unlikely to ever create the equivalent of a 'Hello World' request in a real life application. The idea here is to measure how much time a 'NOP' request takes to return data to the client. So for this request I create the simplest Hello World request that I could come up for each tech. Http Handler The first is the lowest level approach which is an HTTP handler. public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } WebForms Next I added a couple of ASPX pages - one using CodeBehind and one using only a markup page. The CodeBehind page simple does this in CodeBehind without any markup in the ASPX page: public partial class HelloWorld_CodeBehind : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() ); Response.End(); } } while the Markup page only contains some static output via an expression:<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="HelloWorld_Markup.aspx.cs" Inherits="AspNetFrameworksPerformance.HelloWorld_Markup" %> Hello World. Time is <%= DateTime.Now %> ASP.NET WebPages WebPages is the freestanding Razor implementation of ASP.NET. Here's the simple HelloWorld.cshtml page:Hello World @DateTime.Now WCF REST WCF REST was the token REST implementation for ASP.NET before WebAPI and the inbetween step from ASP.NET AJAX. I'd like to forget that this technology was ever considered for production use, but I'll include it here. Here's an OperationContract class: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } } WCF REST can return arbitrary results by returning a Stream object and a content type. The code above turns the string result into a stream and returns that back to the client. ASP.NET AJAX (ASMX Services) I also wanted to test ASP.NET AJAX services because prior to WebAPI this is probably still the most widely used AJAX technology for the ASP.NET stack today. Unfortunately I was completely unable to get this running on my Windows 8 machine. Visual Studio 2012  removed adding of ASP.NET AJAX services, and when I tried to manually add the service and configure the script handler references it simply did not work - I always got a SOAP response for GET and POST operations. No matter what I tried I always ended up getting XML results even when explicitly adding the ScriptHandler. So, I didn't test this (but the code is there - you might be able to test this on a Windows 7 box). ASP.NET MVC Next up is probably the most popular ASP.NET technology at the moment: MVC. Here's the small controller: public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } } ASP.NET WebAPI Next up is WebAPI which looks kind of similar to MVC. Except here I have to use a StringContent result to return the response: public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } } Testing Take a minute to think about each of the technologies… and take a guess which you think is most efficient in raw throughput. The fastest should be pretty obvious, but the others - maybe not so much. The testing I did is pretty informal since it was mainly to satisfy my curiosity - here's how I did this: I used Apache Bench (ab.exe) from a full Apache HTTP installation to run and log the test results of hitting the server. ab.exe is a small executable that lets you hit a URL repeatedly and provides counter information about the number of requests, requests per second etc. ab.exe and the batch file are located in the \LoadTests folder of the project. An ab.exe command line  looks like this: ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld which hits the specified URL 100,000 times with a load factor of 20 concurrent requests. This results in output like this:   It's a great way to get a quick and dirty performance summary. Run it a few times to make sure there's not a large amount of varience. You might also want to do an IISRESET to clear the Web Server. Just make sure you do a short test run to warm up the server first - otherwise your first run is likely to be skewed downwards. ab.exe also allows you to specify headers and provide POST data and many other things if you want to get a little more fancy. Here all tests are GET requests to keep it simple. I ran each test: 100,000 iterations Load factor of 20 concurrent connections IISReset before starting A short warm up run for API and MVC to make sure startup cost is mitigated Here is the batch file I used for the test: IISRESET REM make sure you add REM C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin REM to your path so ab.exe can be found REM Warm up ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJsonab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/handler.ashx > handler.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_CodeBehind.aspx > AspxCodeBehind.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_Markup.aspx > AspxMarkup.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld > Wcf.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldCode > Mvc.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld > WebApi.txt I ran each of these tests 3 times and took the average score for Requests/second, with the machine otherwise idle. I did see a bit of variance when running many tests but the values used here are the medians. Part of this has to do with the fact I ran the tests on my local machine - result would probably more consistent running the load test on a separate machine hitting across the network. I ran these tests locally on my laptop which is a Dell XPS with quad core Sandibridge I7-2720QM @ 2.20ghz and a fast SSD drive on Windows 8. CPU load during tests ran to about 70% max across all 4 cores (IOW, it wasn't overloading the machine). Ideally you can try running these tests on a separate machine hitting the local machine. If I remember correctly IIS 7 and 8 on client OSs don't throttle so the performance here should be Results Ok, let's cut straight to the chase. Below are the results from the tests… It's not surprising that the handler was fastest. But it was a bit surprising to me that the next fastest was WebForms and especially Web Forms with markup over a CodeBehind page. WebPages also fared fairly well. MVC and WebAPI are a little slower and the slowest by far is WCF REST (which again I find surprising). As mentioned at the start the raw throughput tests are not overly practical as they don't test scripting performance for the HTML generation engines or serialization performances of the data engines. All it really does is give you an idea of the raw throughput for the technology from time of request to reaching the endpoint and returning minimal text data back to the client which indicates full round trip performance. But it's still interesting to see that Web Forms performs better in throughput than either MVC, WebAPI or WebPages. It'd be interesting to try this with a few pages that actually have some parsing logic on it, but that's beyond the scope of this throughput test. But what's also amazing about this test is the sheer amount of traffic that a laptop computer is handling. Even the slowest tech managed 5700 requests a second, which is one hell of a lot of requests if you extrapolate that out over a 24 hour period. Remember these are not static pages, but dynamic requests that are being served. Another test - JSON Data Service Results The second test I used a JSON result from several of the technologies. I didn't bother running WebForms and WebPages through this test since that doesn't make a ton of sense to return data from the them (OTOH, returning text from the APIs didn't make a ton of sense either :-) In these tests I have a small Person class that gets serialized and then returned to the client. The Person class looks like this: public class Person { public Person() { Id = 10; Name = "Rick"; Entered = DateTime.Now; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public DateTime Entered { get; set; } } Here are the updated handler classes that use Person: Handler public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { var action = context.Request.QueryString["action"]; if (action == "json") JsonRequest(context); else TextRequest(context); } public void TextRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public void JsonRequest(HttpContext context) { var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new Person(), Formatting.None); context.Response.ContentType = "application/json"; context.Response.Write(json); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } This code adds a little logic to check for a action query string and route the request to an optional JSON result method. To generate JSON, I'm using the same JSON.NET serializer (JsonConvert.SerializeObject) used in Web API to create the JSON response. WCF REST   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } [OperationContract] [WebGet(ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json,BodyStyle=WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest)] public Person HelloWorldJson() { // Add your operation implementation here return new Person(); } } For WCF REST all I have to do is add a method with the Person result type.   ASP.NET MVC public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { // // GET: /MvcPerformance/ public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } public JsonResult HelloWorldJson() { return Json(new Person(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } } For MVC all I have to do for a JSON response is return a JSON result. ASP.NET internally uses JavaScriptSerializer. ASP.NET WebAPI public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } [HttpGet] public Person HelloWorldJson() { return new Person(); } [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldJson2() { var response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); response.Content = new ObjectContent<Person>(new Person(), GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter); return response; } } Testing and Results To run these data requests I used the following ab.exe commands:REM JSON RESPONSES ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/Handler.ashx?action=json > HandlerJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJson > MvcJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson > WebApiJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorldJson > WcfJson.txt The results from this test run are a bit interesting in that the WebAPI test improved performance significantly over returning plain string content. Here are the results:   The performance for each technology drops a little bit except for WebAPI which is up quite a bit! From this test it appears that WebAPI is actually significantly better performing returning a JSON response, rather than a plain string response. Snag with Apache Benchmark and 'Length Failures' I ran into a little snag with Apache Benchmark, which was reporting failures for my Web API requests when serializing. As the graph shows performance improved significantly from with JSON results from 5580 to 6530 or so which is a 15% improvement (while all others slowed down by 3-8%). However, I was skeptical at first because the WebAPI test reports showed a bunch of errors on about 10% of the requests. Check out this report: Notice the Failed Request count. What the hey? Is WebAPI failing on roughly 10% of requests when sending JSON? Turns out: No it's not! But it took some sleuthing to figure out why it reports these failures. At first I thought that Web API was failing, and so to make sure I re-ran the test with Fiddler attached and runiisning the ab.exe test by using the -X switch: ab.exe -n100 -c10 -X localhost:8888 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson which showed that indeed all requests where returning proper HTTP 200 results with full content. However ab.exe was reporting the errors. After some closer inspection it turned out that the dates varying in size altered the response length in dynamic output. For example: these two results: {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.841926-10:00"} {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.8519262-10:00"} are different in length for the number which results in 68 and 69 bytes respectively. The same URL produces different result lengths which is what ab.exe reports. I didn't notice at first bit the same is happening when running the ASHX handler with JSON.NET result since it uses the same serializer that varies the milliseconds. Moral: You can typically ignore Length failures in Apache Benchmark and when in doubt check the actual output with Fiddler. Note that the other failure values are accurate though. Another interesting Side Note: Perf drops over Time As I was running these tests repeatedly I was finding that performance steadily dropped from a startup peak to a 10-15% lower stable level. IOW, with Web API I'd start out with around 6500 req/sec and in subsequent runs it keeps dropping until it would stabalize somewhere around 5900 req/sec occasionally jumping lower. For these tests this is why I did the IIS RESET and warm up for individual tests. This is a little puzzling. Looking at Process Monitor while the test are running memory very quickly levels out as do handles and threads, on the first test run. Subsequent runs everything stays stable, but the performance starts going downwards. This applies to all the technologies - Handlers, Web Forms, MVC, Web API - curious to see if others test this and see similar results. Doing an IISRESET then resets everything and performance starts off at peak again… Summary As I stated at the outset, these were informal to satiate my curiosity not to prove that any technology is better or even faster than another. While there clearly are differences in performance the differences (other than WCF REST which was by far the slowest and the raw handler which was by far the highest) are relatively minor, so there is no need to feel that any one technology is a runaway standout in raw performance. Choosing a technology is about more than pure performance but also about the adequateness for the job and the easy of implementation. The strengths of each technology will make for any minor performance difference we see in these tests. However, to me it's important to get an occasional reality check and compare where new technologies are heading. Often times old stuff that's been optimized and designed for a time of less horse power can utterly blow the doors off newer tech and simple checks like this let you compare. Luckily we're seeing that much of the new stuff performs well even in V1.0 which is great. To me it was very interesting to see Web API perform relatively badly with plain string content, which originally led me to think that Web API might not be properly optimized just yet. For those that caught my Tweets late last week regarding WebAPI's slow responses was with String content which is in fact considerably slower. Luckily where it counts with serialized JSON and XML WebAPI actually performs better. But I do wonder what would make generic string content slower than serialized code? This stresses another point: Don't take a single test as the final gospel and don't extrapolate out from a single set of tests. Certainly Twitter can make you feel like a fool when you post something immediate that hasn't been fleshed out a little more <blush>. Egg on my face. As a result I ended up screwing around with this for a few hours today to compare different scenarios. Well worth the time… I hope you found this useful, if not for the results, maybe for the process of quickly testing a few requests for performance and charting out a comparison. Now onwards with more serious stuff… Resources Source Code on GitHub Apache HTTP Server Project (ab.exe is part of the binary distribution)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  Web Api   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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