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SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #039

- by Pinal Dave

Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 FQL – Facebook Query Language Facebook list following advantages of FQL: Condensed XML reduces bandwidth and parsing costs. More complex requests can reduce the number of requests necessary. Provides a single consistent, unified interface for all of your data. It’s fun! UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function The day of the week can be retrieved in SQL Server by using the DatePart function. The value returned by the function is between 1 (Sunday) and 7 (Saturday). To convert this to a string representing the day of the week, use a CASE statement. UDF – Function to Get Previous And Next Work Day – Exclude Saturday and Sunday While reading ColdFusion blog of Ben Nadel Getting the Previous Day In ColdFusion, Excluding Saturday And Sunday, I realize that I use similar function on my SQL Server Database. This function excludes the Weekends (Saturday and Sunday), and it gets previous as well as next work day. Complete Series of SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Introduction Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 1 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 2 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 3 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers Complete List Download 2008 Introduction to Log Viewer In SQL Server all the windows event logs can be seen along with SQL Server logs. Interface for all the logs is same and can be launched from the same place. This log can be exported and filtered as well. DBCC SHRINKFILE Takes Long Time to Run If you are DBA who are involved with Database Maintenance and file group maintenance, you must have experience that many times DBCC SHRINKFILE operations takes a long time but any other operations with Database are relatively quicker. mssqlsystemresource – Resource Database The purpose of resource database is to facilitates upgrading to the new version of SQL Server without any hassle. In previous versions whenever version of SQL Server was upgraded all the previous version system objects needs to be dropped and new version system objects to be created. 2009 Puzzle – Write Script to Generate Primary Key and Foreign Key In SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), there is no option to script all the keys. If one is required to script keys they will have to manually script each key one at a time. If database has many tables, generating one key at a time can be a very intricate task. I want to throw a question to all of you if any of you have scripts for the same purpose. Maximizing View of SQL Server Management Studio – Full Screen – New Screen I had explained the following two different methods: 1) Open Results in Separate Tab - This is a very interesting method as result pan shows up in a different tab instead of the splitting screen horizontally. 2) Open SSMS in Full Screen - This works always and to its best. Not many people are aware of this method; hence, very few people use it to enhance performance. 2010 Find Queries using Parallelism from Cached Plan T-SQL script gets all the queries and their execution plan where parallelism operations are kicked up. Pay attention there is TOP 10 is used, if you have lots of transactional operations, I suggest that you change TOP 10 to TOP 50 This is the list of the all the articles in the series of computed columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage This article talks about how computed columns are created and why they take more storage space than before. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance This article talks about how PERSISTED columns give better performance than non-persisted columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance – Part 2 This article talks about how non-persisted columns give better performance than PERSISTED columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column and Performance – Part 3 This article talks about how Index improves the performance of Computed Columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage – Part 2 This article talks about how creating index on computed column does not grow the row length of table. SQL SERVER – Computed Columns – Index and Performance This article summarized all the articles related to computed columns. 2011 SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 21 of 31 What is Data Warehousing? What is Business Intelligence (BI)? What is a Dimension Table? What is Dimensional Modeling? What is a Fact Table? What are the Fundamental Stages of Data Warehousing? What are the Different Methods of Loading Dimension tables? Describes the Foreign Key Columns in Fact Table and Dimension Table? What is Data Mining? What is the Difference between a View and a Materialized View? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 22 of 31 What is OLTP? What is OLAP? What is the Difference between OLTP and OLAP? What is ODS? What is ER Diagram? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 23 of 31 What is ETL? What is VLDB? Is OLTP Database is Design Optimal for Data Warehouse? If denormalizing improves Data Warehouse Processes, then why is the Fact Table is in the Normal Form? What are Lookup Tables? What are Aggregate Tables? What is Real-Time Data-Warehousing? What are Conformed Dimensions? What is a Conformed Fact? How do you Load the Time Dimension? What is a Level of Granularity of a Fact Table? What are Non-Additive Facts? What is a Factless Facts Table? What are Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 24 of 31 What is Hybrid Slowly Changing Dimension? What is BUS Schema? What is a Star Schema? What Snow Flake Schema? Differences between the Star and Snowflake Schema? What is Difference between ER Modeling and Dimensional Modeling? What is Degenerate Dimension Table? Why is Data Modeling Important? What is a Surrogate Key? What is Junk Dimension? What is a Data Mart? What is the Difference between OLAP and Data Warehouse? What is a Cube and Linked Cube with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Snapshot with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Active Data Warehousing? What is the Difference between Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence? What is MDS? Explain the Paradigm of Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball. SQL SERVER – Azure Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Paras Doshi – Day 25 of 31 Paras Doshi has submitted 21 interesting question and answers for SQL Azure. 1.What is SQL Azure? 2.What is cloud computing? 3.How is SQL Azure different than SQL server? 4.How many replicas are maintained for each SQL Azure database? 5.How can we migrate from SQL server to SQL Azure? 6.Which tools are available to manage SQL Azure databases and servers? 7.Tell me something about security and SQL Azure. 8.What is SQL Azure Firewall? 9.What is the difference between web edition and business edition? 10.How do we synchronize On Premise SQL server with SQL Azure? 11.How do we Backup SQL Azure Data? 12.What is the current pricing model of SQL Azure? 13.What is the current limitation of the size of SQL Azure DB? 14.How do you handle datasets larger than 50 GB? 15.What happens when the SQL Azure database reaches Max Size? 16.How many databases can we create in a single server? 17.How many servers can we create in a single subscription? 18.How do you improve the performance of a SQL Azure Database? 19.What is code near application topology? 20.What were the latest updates to SQL Azure service? 21.When does a workload on SQL Azure get throttled? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Malathi Mahadevan – Day 26 of 31 Malachi had asked a simple question which has several answers. Each answer makes you think and ponder about the reality of the IT world. Look at the simple question – ‘What is the toughest challenge you have faced in your present job and how did you handle it’? and its various answers. Each answer has its own story. SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Rick Morelan – Day 27 of 31 Rick Morelan of Joes2Pros has written an excellent blog post on the subject how to find top N values. Most people are fully aware of how the TOP keyword works with a SELECT statement. After years preparing so many students to pass the SQL Certification I noticed they were pretty well prepared for job interviews too. Yes, they would do well in the interview but not great. There seemed to be a few questions that would come up repeatedly for almost everyone. Rick addresses similar questions in his lucid writing skills. 2012 Observation of Top with Index and Order of Resultset SQL Server has lots of things to learn and share. It is amazing to see how people evaluate and understand different techniques and styles differently when implementing. The real reason may be absolutely different but we may blame something totally different for the incorrect results. Read the blog post to learn more. How do I Record Video and Webcast How to Convert Hex to Decimal or INT Earlier I asked regarding a question about how to convert Hex to Decimal. I promised that I will post an answer with Due Credit to the author but never got around to post a blog post around it. Read the original post over here SQL SERVER – Question – How to Convert Hex to Decimal. Query to Get Unique Distinct Data Based on Condition – Eliminate Duplicate Data from Resultset The natural reaction will be to suggest DISTINCT or GROUP BY. However, not all the questions can be solved by DISTINCT or GROUP BY. Let us see the following example, where a user wanted only latest records to be displayed. Let us see the example to understand further. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Evil DRY

- by StefanSteinegger

DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a basic software design and coding principle. But there is just no silver bullet. While DRY should increase maintainability by avoiding common design mistakes, it could lead to huge maintenance problems when misunderstood. The root of the problem is most probably that many developers believe that DRY means that any piece of code that is written more then once should be made reusable. But the principle is stated as "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." So the important thing here is "knowledge". Nobody ever said "every piece of code". I try to give some examples of misusing the DRY principle. Code Repetitions by Coincidence There is code that is repeated by pure coincidence. It is not the same code because it is based on the same piece of knowledge, it is just the same by coincidence. It's hard to give an example of such a case. Just think about some lines of code the developer thinks "I already wrote something similar". Then he takes the original code, puts it into a public method, even worse into a base class where none had been there before, puts some weird arguments and some if or switch statements into it to support all special cases and calls this "increasing maintainability based on the DRY principle". The resulting "reusable method" is usually something the developer not even can give a meaningful name, because its contents isn't anything specific, it is just a bunch of code. For the same reason, nobody will really understand this piece of code. Typically this method only makes sense to call after some other method had been called. All the symptoms of really bad design is evident. Fact is, writing this kind of "reusable methods" is worse then copy pasting! Believe me. What will happen when you change this weird piece of code? You can't say what'll happen, because you can't understand what the code is actually doing. So better don't touch it anymore. Maintainability just died. Of course this problem is with any badly designed code. But because the developer tried to make this method as reusable as possible, large parts of the system get dependent on it. Completely independent parts get tightly coupled by this common piece of code. Changing on the single common place will have effects anywhere in the system, a typical symptom of too tight coupling. Without trying to dogmatically (and wrongly) apply the DRY principle, you just had a system with a weak design. Now you get a system which just can't be maintained anymore. So what can you do against it? When making code reusable, always identify the generally reusable parts of it. Find the reason why the code is repeated, find the common "piece of knowledge". If you have to search too far, it's probably not really there. Explain it to a colleague, if you can't explain or the explanation is to complicated, it's probably not worth to reuse. If you identify the piece of knowledge, don't forget to carefully find the place where it should be implemented. Reusing code is never worth giving up a clean design. Methods always need to do something specific. If you can't give it a simple and explanatory name, you did probably something weird. If you can't find the common piece of knowledge, try to make the code simpler. For instance, if you have some complicated string or collection operations within this code, write some general-purpose operations into a helper class. If your code gets simple enough, its not so bad if it can't be reused. If you are not able to find anything simple and reasonable, copy paste it. Put a comment into the code to reference the other copies. You may find a solution later. Requirements Repetitions by Coincidence Let's assume that you need to implement complex tax calculations for many countries. It's possible that some countries have very similar tax rules. These rules are still completely independent from each other, since every country can change it of its own. (Assumed that this similarity is actually by coincidence and not by political membership. There might be basic rules applying to all European countries. etc.) Let's assume that there are similarities between an Asian country and an African country. Moving the common part to a central place will cause problems. What happens if one of the countries changes its rules? Or - more likely - what happens if users of one country complain about an error in the calculation? If there is shared code, it is very risky to change it, even for a bugfix. It is hard to find requirements to be repeated by coincidence. Then there is not much you can do against the repetition of the code. What you really should consider is to make coding of the rules as simple as possible. So this independent knowledge "Tax Rules in Timbuktu" or wherever should be as pure as possible, without much overhead and stuff that does not belong to it. So you can write every independent requirement short and clean. DRYing try-catch and using Blocks This is a technical issue. Blocks like try-catch or using (e.g. in C#) are very hard to DRY. Imagine a complex exception handling, including several catch blocks. When the contents of the try block as well as the contents of the individual catch block are trivial, but the whole structure is repeated on many places in the code, there is almost no reasonable way to DRY it. try { // trivial code here using (Thingy thing = new thingy) { //trivial, but always different line of code } } catch(FooException foo) { // trivial foo handling } catch (BarException bar) { // trivial bar handling } catch { // trivial common handling } finally { // trivial finally block } The key here is that every block is trivial, so there is nothing to just move into a separate method. The only part that differs from case to case is the line of code in the body of the using block (or any other block). The situation is especially interesting if the many occurrences of this structure are completely independent: they appear in classes with no common base class, they don't aggregate each other and so on. Let's assume that this is a common pattern in service methods within the whole system. Examples of Evil DRYing in this situation: Put a if or switch statement into the method to choose the line of code to execute. There are several reasons why this is not a good idea: The close coupling of the formerly independent implementation is the strongest. Also the readability of the code and the use of a parameter to control the logic. Put everything into a method which takes a delegate as argument to call. The caller just passes his "specific line of code" to this method. The code will be very unreadable. The same maintainability problems apply as for any "Code Repetition by Coincidence" situations. Enforce a base class to all the classes where this pattern appears and use the template method pattern. It's the same readability and maintainability problem as above, but additionally complex and tightly coupled because of the base class. I would call this "Inheritance by Coincidence" which will not lead to great software design. What can you do against it: Ideally, the individual line of code is a call to a class or interface, which could be made individual by inheritance. If this would be the case, it wouldn't be a problem at all. I assume that it is no such a trivial case. Consider to refactor the error concept to make error handling easier. The last but not worst option is to keep the replications. Some pattern of code must be maintained in consistency, there is nothing we can do against it. And no reason to make it unreadable. Conclusion The DRY-principle is an important and basic principle every software developer should master. The key is to identify the "pieces of knowledge". There is code which can't be reused easily because of technical reasons. This requires quite a bit flexibility and creativity to make code simple and maintainable. It's not the problem of the principle, it is the problem of blindly applying a principle without understanding the problem it should solve. The result is mostly much worse then ignoring the principle.

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A WPF Image Button

- by psheriff

Instead of a normal button with words, sometimes you want a button that is just graphical. Yes, you can put an Image control in the Content of a normal Button control, but you still have the button outline, and trying to change the style can be rather difficult. Instead I like creating a user control that simulates a button, but just accepts an image. Figure 1 shows an example of three of these custom user controls to represent minimize, maximize and close buttons for a borderless window. Notice the highlighted image button has a gray rectangle around it. You will learn how to highlight using the VisualStateManager in this blog post.Figure 1: Creating a custom user control for things like image buttons gives you complete control over the look and feel.I would suggest you read my previous blog post on creating a custom Button user control as that is a good primer for what I am going to expand upon in this blog post. You can find this blog post at http://weblogs.asp.net/psheriff/archive/2012/08/10/create-your-own-wpf-button-user-controls.aspx.The User ControlThe XAML for this image button user control contains just a few controls, plus a Visual State Manager. The basic outline of the user control is shown below:<Border Grid.Row="0" Name="borMain" Style="{StaticResource pdsaButtonImageBorderStyle}" MouseEnter="borMain_MouseEnter" MouseLeave="borMain_MouseLeave" MouseLeftButtonDown="borMain_MouseLeftButtonDown"> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> ... MORE XAML HERE ... </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> <Image Style="{StaticResource pdsaButtonImageImageStyle}" Visibility="{Binding Path=Visibility}" Source="{Binding Path=ImageUri}" ToolTip="{Binding Path=ToolTip}" /></Border>There is a Border control named borMain and a single Image control in this user control. That is all that is needed to display the buttons shown in Figure 1. The definition for this user control is in a DLL named PDSA.WPF. The Style definitions for both the Border and the Image controls are contained in a resource dictionary names PDSAButtonStyles.xaml. Using a resource dictionary allows you to create a few different resource dictionaries, each with a different theme for the buttons.The Visual State ManagerTo display the highlight around the button as your mouse moves over the control, you will need to add a Visual State Manager group. Two different states are needed; MouseEnter and MouseLeave. In the MouseEnter you create a ColorAnimation to modify the BorderBrush color of the Border control. You specify the color to animate as “DarkGray”. You set the duration to less than a second. The TargetName of this storyboard is the name of the Border control “borMain” and since we are specifying a single color, you need to set the TargetProperty to “BorderBrush.Color”. You do not need any storyboard for the MouseLeave state. Leaving this VisualState empty tells the Visual State Manager to put everything back the way it was before the MouseEnter event.<VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> <VisualStateGroup Name="MouseStates"> <VisualState Name="MouseEnter"> <Storyboard> <ColorAnimation To="DarkGray" Duration="0:0:00.1" Storyboard.TargetName="borMain" Storyboard.TargetProperty="BorderBrush.Color" /> </Storyboard> </VisualState> <VisualState Name="MouseLeave" /> </VisualStateGroup></VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>Writing the Mouse EventsTo trigger the Visual State Manager to run its storyboard in response to the specified event, you need to respond to the MouseEnter event on the Border control. In the code behind for this event call the GoToElementState() method of the VisualStateManager class exposed by the user control. To this method you will pass in the target element (“borMain”) and the state (“MouseEnter”). The VisualStateManager will then run the storyboard contained within the defined state in the XAML.private void borMain_MouseEnter(object sender, MouseEventArgs e){ VisualStateManager.GoToElementState(borMain, "MouseEnter", true);}You also need to respond to the MouseLeave event. In this event you call the VisualStateManager as well, but specify “MouseLeave” as the state to go to.private void borMain_MouseLeave(object sender, MouseEventArgs e){ VisualStateManager.GoToElementState(borMain, "MouseLeave", true);}The Resource DictionaryBelow is the definition of the PDSAButtonStyles.xaml resource dictionary file contained in the PDSA.WPF DLL. This dictionary can be used as the default look and feel for any image button control you add to a window. <ResourceDictionary ... >     <Style TargetType="Border" x:Key="pdsaButtonImageBorderStyle"> <Setter Property="Margin" Value="4" /> <Setter Property="Padding" Value="2" /> <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="Transparent" /> <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="1" /> <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Top" /> <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Left" /> <Setter Property="Background" Value="Transparent" /> </Style>  <Style TargetType="Image" x:Key="pdsaButtonImageImageStyle"> <Setter Property="Width" Value="40" /> <Setter Property="Margin" Value="6" /> <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Top" /> <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Left" /> </Style></ResourceDictionary>Using the Button ControlOnce you make a reference to the PDSA.WPF DLL from your WPF application you will see the “PDSAucButtonImage” control appear in your Toolbox. Drag and drop the button onto a Window or User Control in your application. I have not referenced the PDSAButtonStyles.xaml file within the control itself so you do need to add a reference to this resource dictionary somewhere in your application such as in the App.xaml.<Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <ResourceDictionary Source="/PDSA.WPF;component/PDSAButtonStyles.xaml" /> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary></Application.Resources>This will give your buttons a default look and feel unless you override that dictionary on a specific Window or User Control or on an individual button. After you have given a global style to your application and you drag your image button onto a window, the following will appear in your XAML window.<my:PDSAucButtonImage ... />There will be some other attributes set on the above XAML, but you simply need to set the x:Name, the ToolTip and ImageUri properties. You will also want to respond to the Click event procedure in order to associate an action with clicking on this button. In the sample code you download for this blog post you will find the declaration of the Minimize button to be the following:<my:PDSAucButtonImage x:Name="btnMinimize" Click="btnMinimize_Click" ToolTip="Minimize Application" ImageUri="/PDSA.WPF;component/Images/Minus.png" />The ImageUri property is a dependency property in the PDSAucButtonImage user control. The x:Name and the ToolTip we get for free. You have to create the Click event procedure yourself. This is also created in the PDSAucButtonImage user control as follows:private void borMain_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e){ RaiseClick(e);}public delegate void ClickEventHandler(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e);public event ClickEventHandler Click;protected void RaiseClick(RoutedEventArgs e){ if (null != Click) Click(this, e);}Since a Border control does not have a Click event you will create one by using the MouseLeftButtonDown on the border to fire an event you create called “Click”.SummaryCreating your own image button control can be done in a variety of ways. In this blog post I showed you how to create a custom user control and simulate a button using a Border and Image control. With just a little bit of code to respond to the MouseLeftButtonDown event on the border you can raise your own Click event. Dependency properties, such as ImageUri, allow you to set attributes on your custom user control. Feel free to expand on this button by adding additional dependency properties, change the resource dictionary, and even the animation to make this button look and act like you want.NOTE: You can download the sample code for this article by visiting my website at http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips & Tricks”, then select “A WPF Image Button” from the drop down list.

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Web API, JavaScript, Chrome & Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

- by Brian Lanham

The team spent much of the week working through this issues related to Chrome running on Windows 8 consuming cross-origin resources using Web API. We thought it was resolved on day 2 but it resurfaced the next day. We definitely resolved it today though. I believe I do not fully understand the situation but I am going to explain what I know in an effort to help you avoid and/or resolve a similar issue. References We referenced many sources during our trial-and-error troubleshooting. These are the links we reference in order of applicability to the solution: Zoiner Tejada JavaScript and other material from -> http://www.devproconnections.com/content1/topic/microsoft-azure-cors-141869/catpath/windows-azure-platform2/page/3 WebDAV Where I learned about “Accept” –> http://www-jo.se/f.pfleger/cors-and-iis? IT Hit Tells about NOT using ‘*’ –> http://www.webdavsystem.com/ajax/programming/cross_origin_requests Carlos Figueira Sample back-end code (newer) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d (older version) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/CORS-support-in-ASPNET-Web-01e9980a Background As a measure of protection, Web designers (W3C) and implementers (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla) made it so that a request, especially a JSON request (but really any URL), sent from one domain to another will only work if the requestee “knows” about the requester and allows requests from it. So, for example, if you write a ASP.NET MVC Web API service and try to consume it from multiple apps, the browsers used may (will?) indicate that you are not allowed by showing an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” error indicating the requester is not allowed to make requests. Internet Explorer (big surprise) is the odd-hair-colored step-child in this mix. It seems that running locally at least IE allows this for development purposes. Chrome and Firefox do not. In fact, Chrome is quite restrictive. Notice the images below. IE shows data (a tabular view with one row for each day of a week) while Chrome does not (trust me, neither does Firefox). Further, the Chrome developer console shows an XmlHttpRequest (XHR) error. Screen captures from IE (left) and Chrome (right). Note that Chrome does not display data and the console shows an XHR error. Why does this happen? The Web browser submits these requests and processes the responses and each browser is different. Okay, so, IE is probably the only one that’s truly different. However, Chrome has a specific process of performing a “pre-flight” check to make sure the service can respond to an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) request. So basically, the sequence is, if I understand correctly: 1)Page Loads –> 2)JavaScript Request Processed by Browser –> 3)Browsers Prepares to Submit Request –> 4)[Chrome] Browser Submits Pre-Flight Request –> 5)Server Responds with HTTP 200 –> 6)Browser Submits Request –> 7)Server Responds with Data –> 8)Page Shows Data This situation occurs for both GET and POST methods. Typically, GET methods are called with query string parameters so there is no data posted. Instead, the requesting domain needs to be permitted to request data but generally nothing more is required. POSTs on the other hand send form data. Therefore, more configuration is required (you’ll see the configuration below). AJAX requests are not friendly with this (POSTs) either because they don’t post in a form. How to fix it. The team went through many iterations of self-hair removal and we think we finally have a working solution. The trial-and-error approach eventually worked and we referenced many sources for the information. I indicate those references above. There are basically three (3) tasks needed to make this work. Assumptions: You are using Visual Studio, Web API, JavaScript, and have Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, and several browsers. 1. Configure the client Joel Cochran centralized our “cors-oriented” JavaScript (from here). There are two calls including one for GET and one for POST function(url, data, callback) { console.log(data); $.support.cors = true; var jqxhr = $.post(url, data, callback, "json") .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) { if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) { var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); xdr.open("post", url); xdr.onload = function () { if (callback) { callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success'); } }; xdr.send(data); } else { console.log(">" + jqXhHR.status); alert("corsAjax.post error: " + status + ", " + errorThrown); } }); }; The GET CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) function(url, callback) { $.support.cors = true; var jqxhr = $.get(url, null, callback, "json") .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) { if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) { var xdr = new XDomainRequest(); xdr.open("get", url); xdr.onload = function () { if (callback) { callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success'); } }; xdr.send(); } else { alert("CORS is not supported in this browser or from this origin."); } }); }; The POST CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) Now you need to call these functions to get and post your data (instead of, say, using $.Ajax). Here is a GET example: corsAjax.get(url, function(data) { if (data !== null && data.length !== undefined) { // do something with data } }); And here is a POST example: corsAjax.post(url, item); Simple…except…you’re not done yet. 2. Change Web API Controllers to Allow CORS There are actually two steps here. Do you remember above when we mentioned the “pre-flight” check? Chrome actually asks the server if it is allowed to ask it for cross-origin resource sharing access. So you need to let the server know it’s okay. This is a two-part activity. a) Add the appropriate response header Access-Control-Allow-Origin, and b) permit the API functions to respond to various methods including GET, POST, and OPTIONS. OPTIONS is the method that Chrome and other browsers use to ask the server if it can ask about permissions. Here is an example of a Web API controller thus decorated: NOTE: You’ll see a lot of references to using “*” in the header value. For security reasons, Chrome does NOT recognize this is valid. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "http://localhost:51234")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Credentials", "true")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, COPY, MOVE, DELETE, MKCOL, LOCK, UNLOCK, PUT, GETLIB, VERSION-CONTROL, CHECKIN, CHECKOUT, UNCHECKOUT, REPORT, UPDATE, CANCELUPLOAD, HEAD, OPTIONS, GET, POST")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destination, Content-Type, Depth, User-Agent, X-File-Size, X-Requested-With, If-Modified-Since, X-File-Name, Cache-Control")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Max-Age", "3600")] public abstract class BaseApiController : ApiController { [HttpGet] [HttpOptions] public IEnumerable<foo> GetFooItems(int id) { return foo.AsEnumerable(); } [HttpPost] [HttpOptions] public void UpdateFooItem(FooItem fooItem) { // NOTE: The fooItem object may or may not // (probably NOT) be set with actual data. // If not, you need to extract the data from // the posted form manually. if (fooItem.Id == 0) // However you check for default... { // We use NewtonSoft.Json. string jsonString = context.Request.Form.GetValues(0)[0].ToString(); Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer js = new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer(); fooItem = js.Deserialize<FooItem>(new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonTextReader(new System.IO.StringReader(jsonString))); } // Update the set fooItem object. } } Please note a few specific additions here: * The header attributes at the class level are required. Note all of those methods and headers need to be specified but we find it works this way so we aren’t touching it. * Web API will actually deserialize the posted data into the object parameter of the called method on occasion but so far we don’t know why it does and doesn’t. * [HttpOptions] is, again, required for the pre-flight check. * The “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” response header should NOT NOT NOT contain an ‘*’. 3. Headers and Methods and Such We had most of this code in place but found that Chrome and Firefox still did not render the data. Interestingly enough, Fiddler showed that the GET calls succeeded and the JSON data is returned properly. We learned that among the headers set at the class level, we needed to add “ACCEPT”. Note that I accidentally added it to methods and to headers. Adding it to methods worked but I don’t know why. We added it to headers also for good measure. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPA... [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destin... Next Steps That should do it. If it doesn’t let us know. What to do next? * Don’t hardcode the allowed domains. Note that port numbers and other domain name specifics will cause problems and must be specified. If this changes do you really want to deploy updated software? Consider Miguel Figueira’s approach in the following link to writing a custom HttpHeaderAttribute class that allows you to specify the domain names and then you can do it dynamically. There are, of course, other ways to do it dynamically but this is a clean approach. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d

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Oracle Solaris 11 ZFS Lab for Openworld 2012

- by user12626122

Preface This is the content from the Oracle Openworld 2012 ZFS lab. It was well attended - the feedback was that it was a little short - thats probably because in writing it I bacame very time-concious after the ASM/ACFS on Solaris extravaganza I ran last year which was almost too long for mortal man to finish in the 1 hour session. Enjoy. Table of Contents Exercise Z.1: ZFS Pools Exercise Z.2: ZFS File Systems Exercise Z.3: ZFS Compression Exercise Z.4: ZFS Deduplication Exercise Z.5: ZFS Encryption Exercise Z.6: Solaris 11 Shadow Migration Introduction This set of exercises is designed to briefly demonstrate new features in Solaris 11 ZFS file system: Deduplication, Encryption and Shadow Migration. Also included is the creation of zpools and zfs file systems - the basic building blocks of the technology, and also Compression which is the compliment of Deduplication. The exercises are just introductions - you are referred to the ZFS Adminstration Manual for further information. From Solaris 11 onward the online manual pages consist of zpool(1M) and zfs(1M) with further feature-specific information in zfs_allow(1M), zfs_encrypt(1M) and zfs_share(1M). The lab is easily carried out in a VirtualBox running Solaris 11 with 6 virtual 3 Gb disks to play with. Exercise Z.1: ZFS Pools Task: You have several disks to use for your new file system. Create a new zpool and a file system within it. Lab: You will check the status of existing zpools, create your own pool and expand it. Your Solaris 11 installation already has a root ZFS pool. It contains the root file system. Check this: root@solaris:~# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 15.9G 6.62G 9.25G 41% 1.00x ONLINE - root@solaris:~# zpool status pool: rpool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors Note the disk device the root pool is on - c3t0d0s0 Now you will create your own ZFS pool. First you will check what disks are available: root@solaris:~# echo | format Searching for disks...done AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: 0. c3t0d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 2085 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@0,0 1. c3t2d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@2,0 2. c3t3d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@3,0 3. c3t4d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@4,0 4. c3t5d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@5,0 5. c3t6d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@6,0 6. c3t7d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@7,0 Specify disk (enter its number): Specify disk (enter its number): The root disk is numbered 0. The others are free for use. Try creating a simple pool and observe the error message: root@solaris:~# zpool create mypool c3t2d0 c3t3d0 'mypool' successfully created, but with no redundancy; failure of one device will cause loss of the pool So destroy that pool and create a mirrored pool instead: root@solaris:~# zpool destroy mypool root@solaris:~# zpool create mypool mirror c3t2d0 c3t3d0 root@solaris:~# zpool status mypool pool: mypool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM mypool ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors Back to topExercise Z.2: ZFS File Systems Task: You have to create file systems for later exercises. You can see that when a pool is created, a file system of the same name is created: root@solaris:~# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 86.5K 2.94G 31K /mypool Create your filesystems and mountpoints as follows: root@solaris:~# zfs create -o mountpoint=/data1 mypool/mydata1 The -o option sets the mount point and automatically creates the necessary directory. root@solaris:~# zfs list mypool/mydata1 NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool/mydata1 31K 2.94G 31K /data1 Back to top Exercise Z.3: ZFS Compression Task:Try out different forms of compression available in ZFS Lab:Create 2nd filesystem with compression, fill both file systems with the same data, observe results You can see from the zfs(1) manual page that there are several types of compression available to you, set with the property=value syntax: compression=on | off | lzjb | gzip | gzip-N | zle Controls the compression algorithm used for this dataset. The lzjb compression algorithm is optimized for performance while providing decent data compression. Setting compression to on uses the lzjb compression algorithm. The gzip compression algorithm uses the same compression as the gzip(1) command. You can specify the gzip level by using the value gzip-N where N is an integer from 1 (fastest) to 9 (best compression ratio). Currently, gzip is equivalent to gzip-6 (which is also the default for gzip(1)). Create a second filesystem with compression turned on. Note how you set and get your values separately: root@solaris:~# zfs create -o mountpoint=/data2 mypool/mydata2 root@solaris:~# zfs set compression=gzip-9 mypool/mydata2 root@solaris:~# zfs get compression mypool/mydata1 NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool/mydata1 compression off default root@solaris:~# zfs get compression mypool/mydata2 NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool/mydata2 compression gzip-9 local Now you can copy the contents of /usr/lib into both your normal and compressing filesystem and observe the results. Don't forget the dot or period (".") in the find(1) command below: root@solaris:~# cd /usr/lib root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pdv /data1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pdv /data2 The copy into the compressing file system takes longer - as it has to perform the compression but the results show the effect: root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.35G 1.59G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 1.01G 1.59G 1.01G /data1 mypool/mydata2 341M 1.59G 341M /data2 Note that the available space in the pool is shared amongst the file systems. This behavior can be modified using quotas and reservations which are not covered in this lab but are covered extensively in the ZFS Administrators Guide. Back to top Exercise Z.4: ZFS Deduplication The deduplication property is used to remove redundant data from a ZFS file system. With the property enabled duplicate data blocks are removed synchronously. The result is that only unique data is stored and common componenents are shared. Task:See how to implement deduplication and its effects Lab: You will create a ZFS file system with deduplication turned on and see if it reduces the amount of physical storage needed when we again fill it with a copy of /usr/lib. root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs destroy mypool/mydata2 root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs set dedup=on mypool/mydata1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# rm -rf /data1/* root@solaris:/usr/lib# mkdir /data1/2nd-copy root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.02M 2.94G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 43K 2.94G 43K /data1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pd /data1 2142768 blocks root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.02G 1.99G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 1.01G 1.99G 1.01G /data1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pd /data1/2nd-copy 2142768 blocks root@solaris:/usr/lib#zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.99G 1.96G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 1.98G 1.96G 1.98G /data1 You could go on creating copies for quite a while...but you get the idea. Note that deduplication and compression can be combined: the compression acts on metadata. Deduplication works across file systems in a pool and there is a zpool-wide property dedupratio: root@solaris:/usr/lib# zpool get dedupratio mypool NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool dedupratio 4.30x - Deduplication can also be checked using "zpool list": root@solaris:/usr/lib# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT mypool 2.98G 1001M 2.01G 32% 4.30x ONLINE - rpool 15.9G 6.66G 9.21G 41% 1.00x ONLINE - Before moving on to the next topic, destroy that dataset and free up some space: root@solaris:~# zfs destroy mypool/mydata1 Back to top Exercise Z.5: ZFS Encryption Task: Encrypt sensitive data. Lab: Explore basic ZFS encryption. This lab only covers the basics of ZFS Encryption. In particular it does not cover various aspects of key management. Please see the ZFS Adminastrion Manual and the zfs_encrypt(1M) manual page for more detail on this functionality. Back to top root@solaris:~# zfs create -o encryption=on mypool/data2 Enter passphrase for 'mypool/data2': ******** Enter again: ******** root@solaris:~# Creation of a descendent dataset shows that encryption is inherited from the parent: root@solaris:~# zfs create mypool/data2/data3 root@solaris:~# zfs get -r encryption,keysource,keystatus,checksum mypool/data2 NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool/data2 encryption on local mypool/data2 keysource passphrase,prompt local mypool/data2 keystatus available - mypool/data2 checksum sha256-mac local mypool/data2/data3 encryption on inherited from mypool/data2 mypool/data2/data3 keysource passphrase,prompt inherited from mypool/data2 mypool/data2/data3 keystatus available - mypool/data2/data3 checksum sha256-mac inherited from mypool/data2 You will find the online manual page zfs_encrypt(1M) contains examples. In particular, if time permits during this lab session you may wish to explore the changing of a key using "zfs key -c mypool/data2". Exercise Z.6: Shadow Migration Shadow Migration allows you to migrate data from an old file system to a new file system while simultaneously allowing access and modification to the new file system during the process. You can use Shadow Migration to migrate a local or remote UFS or ZFS file system to a local file system. Task: You wish to migrate data from one file system (UFS, ZFS, VxFS) to ZFS while mainaining access to it. Lab: Create the infrastructure for shadow migration and transfer one file system into another. First create the file system you want to migrate root@solaris:~# zpool create oldstuff c3t4d0 root@solaris:~# zfs create oldstuff/forgotten Then populate it with some files: root@solaris:~# cd /var/adm root@solaris:/var/adm# find . -print | cpio -pdv /oldstuff/forgotten You need the shadow-migration package installed: root@solaris:~# pkg install shadow-migration Packages to install: 1 Create boot environment: No Create backup boot environment: No Services to change: 1 DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 1/1 14/14 0.2/0.2 PHASE ACTIONS Install Phase 39/39 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 1/1 Image State Update Phase 2/2 You then enable the shadowd service: root@solaris:~# svcadm enable shadowd root@solaris:~# svcs shadowd STATE STIME FMRI online 7:16:09 svc:/system/filesystem/shadowd:default Set the filesystem to be migrated to read-only root@solaris:~# zfs set readonly=on oldstuff/forgotten Create a new zfs file system with the shadow property set to the file system to be migrated: root@solaris:~# zfs create -o shadow=file:///oldstuff/forgotten mypool/remembered Use the shadowstat(1M) command to see the progress of the migration: root@solaris:~# shadowstat EST BYTES BYTES ELAPSED DATASET XFRD LEFT ERRORS TIME mypool/remembered 92.5M - - 00:00:59 mypool/remembered 99.1M 302M - 00:01:09 mypool/remembered 109M 260M - 00:01:19 mypool/remembered 133M 304M - 00:01:29 mypool/remembered 149M 339M - 00:01:39 mypool/remembered 156M 86.4M - 00:01:49 mypool/remembered 156M 8E 29 (completed) Note that if you had created /mypool/remembered as encrypted, this would be the preferred method of encrypting existing data. Similarly for compressing or deduplicating existing data. The procedure for migrating a file system over NFS is similar - see the ZFS Administration manual. That concludes this lab session.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 03, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 03, 2012Popular ReleasesMini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query: Just a bug fix release for when the connections try to refresh after an edit. Make sure you read the http://pksoftware.net/Content/MiniSqlQuery/Help/MiniSqlQueryQuickStart.docx for an introduction.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.58: Fix for Issue #18296: provide "ALL" value to the -ignore switch to ignore all error and warning messages. Fix for issue #18293: if encountering EOF before a function declaration or expression is properly closed, throw an appropriate error and don't crash. Adjust the variable-renaming algorithm so it's very specific when renaming variables with the same number of references so a single source file ends up with the same minified names on different platforms. add the ability to specify kno...LogExpert: 1.4 build 4566: This release for the 1.4 version line contains various fixes which have been made some times ago. Until now these fixes were only available in the 1.5 alpha versions. It also contains a fix for: 710. Column finder (press F8 to show) Terminal server issues: Multiple sessions with same user should work now Settings Export/Import available via Settings Dialog still incomple (e.g. tab colors are not saved) maybe I change the file format one day no command line support yet (for importin...DynamicToSql: DynamicToSql 1.0.0 (beta): 1.0.0 beta versionCommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8.5 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. FluentscriptCommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 contains a scripting language called FluentScript. Releases notes for FluentScript located at http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/wikipage?action=Edit&title=Release%20Notes&referringTitle=Documentation Fluentscript - 0.9.8.5 - Final ReleaseApplication: FluentScript Versio...SharePoint 2010 Metro UI: SharePoint 2010 Metro UI8: Please review the documentation link for how to install. Installation takes some basic knowledge of how to upload and edit SharePoint Artifact files. Please view the discussions tab for ongoing FAQsBack-Propagation Neural Networks Simulation: Back-Propagation Neural Networks Simulation: This is the first release application for Back-Propagation Neural Networks Simulation. It is required .NET Framework 4.0. Check this to use http://backpronn.codeplex.comnopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.60: Highlight features & improvements: • Significant performance optimization. • Use AJAX for adding products to the cart. • New flyout mini-shopping cart. • Auto complete suggestions for product searching. • Full-Text support. • EU cookie law support. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.51: http://download.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=nvlmaker&DownloadId=371510 ????：http://115.com/file/beoef05k#THE-NVL-Maker-ver3.51-sim.7z ????：http://www.mediafire.com/file/6tqdwj9jr6eb9qj/THENVLMakerver3.51tra.7z ======================================== ???? ======================================== 3.51 beta ???： ·?????????????????????? ·?????????，?????????0，?????????????????????? ·??????????????????????????? ·?????????????TJS????（EXP??） ·??4:3???，???????????????，??????????? ·?????????...????: ????2.0.3: 1、???????????。 2、????????。 3、????????????。 4、bug??，????。Generic enumeration: Enumeration.zip: Generic enumeration dll with a test console application.Apworks: Apworks (v2.5.4563.21309, 30JUN2012): Installation Prerequisites: 1. Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 SP1 2. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1 3. Other required libraries & assemblies are now included in the installation package so no more prerequisites needed Functional Updates: 1. Refactor the identity field of the IEntity interface from 'Id' to 'ID' 2. Changed the MySql Storage to use the MySql NetConnector version 6.4.4. 3. Implemented the paging support for the repositories. 4. Added the Eager Loading Property specification t...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5 Intrepid: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, download the Linux package. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) You should delete /home/config/saved.cfg to reset binds/other stuff If you us...WallSwitch: WallSwitch 1.0.4: Version 1.0.4 Changes: Changes in previous version broke hotkey support; fixed this. When minimizing the window to tray, if there are unsaved changes, then prompt to save first. When changing the path on a folder location, reset the file list. Fixed app not shutting down properly when closed externally. Improved installer to shut down app instead of requiring reboot. Clear History action now clears all history, rather than just the current theme.List Form Manipulation Framework (LFMF) for SharePoint 2010: LFMF v1.1: Added new SPFieldIO field type to reference filenamesSystem.Net.FtpClient: API Reference 2012.06.29: Updated with new file listing example as well as any API changes since the last release.Magelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.0: User Right Licensing ContentType version 2.0.267.1Designing Windows 8 Applications with C# and XAML: Chapters 1 - 7 Release Preview: Source code for all examples from Chapters 1 - 7 for the Release PreviewSQL Server FineBuild: Version 3.1.0: Top SQL Server FineBuild Version 3.1.0This is the stable version of FineBuild for SQL Server 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005 Documentation FineBuild Wiki containing details of the FineBuild process Known Issues Limitations with this release FineBuild V3.1.0 Release Contents List of changes included in this release Please DonateFineBuild is free, but please donate what you think FineBuild is worth as everything goes to charity. Tearfund is one of the UK's leading relief and de...EasySL: RapidSL V2: Rewrite RapidSL UI Framework, Using Silverlight 5.0 EF4.1 Code First Ria Service SP2 + Lastest Silverlight Toolkit.New Projects2DoTasks: This is a simple Dnn Module for Project/Tasks/time management. I hope you all found it useful.AOPify: AOPify lightweight fluent AOP framework that provides basic AOP features both before,after,onerror etc with fluent syntax..Capacitacion: This is my first Project - mvillasecoCLFiling: Client filing with search functionsContoso University MVC NTier: This is first version reference application for ASP.NET MVC NTier.DynamicToSql: DynamicToSql is a lightweight API that maps dynamically typed entities to a database and vice versa. It works against any database that has ADO.NET drivers.Enlightener: Deobfuscator target at Confuser. Child project of http://netdeob0.codeplex.com/Excel Adjacency List to Dot: Excel add-in to generate graphs in GraphViz dot file format from an adjacency list in Excel.FFXIV Job Bar: This is a little utility to help with Job changes in FFXIV. Gallery: A simple javascript/jquery based image gallery. Just include the Gallery.js and jquery in your html page.Grocery Droid: Transfer your P.C. designed shopping list to androidLOCOL: Locol is a internet medium to provide local information and services to district local residents.Meter: Log communal meters dataNthDownload: NthDownload is yet another attempt at a download manager.Paginacion de un objeto en un gridview: Como paginar un objeto con multiples resultados en un gridviewRunman game: "Runman" is port of "Pac-Man" game writing on C# and XNASB01: Project will be a startup for a warehouse management and easy to extend by any developer. Plug n play kind of setup.SC2Ranks API: A .NET 4.0 SC2Ranks APISharePoint 2010 Cookie Approval Control: If you need to comply with EU cookie law this control displays a message to each user that cookies are in use on the site and allows them to accept the messageSharePoint Advanced Visibility Options: Advanced Visibility Options - is an extension to SharePoint providing configurable List Field Iterator with PowerShell scripts.smtools2: Add-on tools for Service MonsterSparqube Picture Column Lite for SharePoint 2010: Sparqube Picture Column Lite is simple component for uploading and displaying images in SharePoint 2010 lists.SpudloFizzBuzz: This project is part of a job application process.SwiftMVVM: An extremely fast, easily refactorable implementation of INotifyPropertyChanged/ing, using dynamic proxy generation, as well as a robust change tracking engine.ZPL Converter: ZPL Converter converts Zune Playlists (.ZPL) easily and fast into other playlist formats, e.g. '.M3U' or '.PLS'.

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Unable to cast transparent proxy to type <type>

- by Rick Strahl

This is not the first time I've run into this wonderful error while creating new AppDomains in .NET and then trying to load types and access them across App Domains. In almost all cases the problem I've run into with this error the problem comes from the two AppDomains involved loading different copies of the same type. Unless the types match exactly and come exactly from the same assembly the typecast will fail. The most common scenario is that the types are loaded from different assemblies - as unlikely as that sounds. An Example of Failure To give some context, I'm working on some old code in Html Help Builder that creates a new AppDomain in order to parse assembly information for documentation purposes. I create a new AppDomain in order to load up an assembly process it and then immediately unload it along with the AppDomain. The AppDomain allows for unloading that otherwise wouldn't be possible as well as isolating my code from the assembly that's being loaded. The process to accomplish this is fairly established and I use it for lots of applications that use add-in like functionality - basically anywhere where code needs to be isolated and have the ability to be unloaded. My pattern for this is: Create a new AppDomain Load a Factory Class into the AppDomain Use the Factory Class to load additional types from the remote domain Here's the relevant code from my TypeParserFactory that creates a domain and then loads a specific type - TypeParser - that is accessed cross-AppDomain in the parent domain:public class TypeParserFactory : System.MarshalByRefObject,IDisposable { …/// <summary> /// TypeParser Factory method that loads the TypeParser /// object into a new AppDomain so it can be unloaded. /// Creates AppDomain and creates type. /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public TypeParser CreateTypeParser() { if (!CreateAppDomain(null)) return null; /// Create the instance inside of the new AppDomain /// Note: remote domain uses local EXE's AppBasePath!!! TypeParser parser = null; try { Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); string assemblyPath = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location; parser = (TypeParser) this.LocalAppDomain.CreateInstanceFrom(assemblyPath, typeof(TypeParser).FullName).Unwrap(); } catch (Exception ex) { this.ErrorMessage = ex.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } return parser; } private bool CreateAppDomain(string lcAppDomain) { if (lcAppDomain == null) lcAppDomain = "wwReflection" + Guid.NewGuid().ToString().GetHashCode().ToString("x"); AppDomainSetup setup = new AppDomainSetup(); // *** Point at current directory setup.ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory; //setup.PrivateBinPath = Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "bin"); this.LocalAppDomain = AppDomain.CreateDomain(lcAppDomain,null,setup); // Need a custom resolver so we can load assembly from non current path AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve += new ResolveEventHandler(CurrentDomain_AssemblyResolve); return true; } …} Note that the classes must be either [Serializable] (by value) or inherit from MarshalByRefObject in order to be accessible remotely. Here I need to call methods on the remote object so all classes are MarshalByRefObject. The specific problem code is the loading up a new type which points at an assembly that visible both in the current domain and the remote domain and then instantiates a type from it. This is the code in question:Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); string assemblyPath = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location; parser = (TypeParser) this.LocalAppDomain.CreateInstanceFrom(assemblyPath, typeof(TypeParser).FullName).Unwrap(); The last line of code is what blows up with the Unable to cast transparent proxy to type <type> error. Without the cast the code actually returns a TransparentProxy instance, but the cast is what blows up. In other words I AM in fact getting a TypeParser instance back but it can't be cast to the TypeParser type that is loaded in the current AppDomain. Finding the Problem To see what's going on I tried using the .NET 4.0 dynamic type on the result and lo and behold it worked with dynamic - the value returned is actually a TypeParser instance: Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); string assemblyPath = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location; object objparser = this.LocalAppDomain.CreateInstanceFrom(assemblyPath, typeof(TypeParser).FullName).Unwrap(); // dynamic works dynamic dynParser = objparser; string info = dynParser.GetVersionInfo(); // method call works // casting fails parser = (TypeParser)objparser; So clearly a TypeParser type is coming back, but nevertheless it's not the right one. Hmmm… mysterious.Another couple of tries reveal the problem however:// works dynamic dynParser = objparser; string info = dynParser.GetVersionInfo(); // method call works // c:\wwapps\wwhelp\wwReflection20.dll (Current Execution Folder) string info3 = typeof(TypeParser).Assembly.CodeBase; // c:\program files\vfp9\wwReflection20.dll (my COM client EXE's folder) string info4 = dynParser.GetType().Assembly.CodeBase; // fails parser = (TypeParser)objparser; As you can see the second value is coming from a totally different assembly. Note that this is even though I EXPLICITLY SPECIFIED an assembly path to load the assembly from! Instead .NET decided to load the assembly from the original ApplicationBase folder. Ouch! How I actually tracked this down was a little more tedious: I added a method like this to both the factory and the instance types and then compared notes:public string GetVersionInfo() { return ".NET Version: " + Environment.Version.ToString() + "\r\n" + "wwReflection Assembly: " + typeof(TypeParserFactory).Assembly.CodeBase.Replace("file:///", "").Replace("/", "\\") + "\r\n" + "Assembly Cur Dir: " + Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + "\r\n" + "ApplicationBase: " + AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase + "\r\n" + "App Domain: " + AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FriendlyName + "\r\n"; } For the factory I got: .NET Version: 4.0.30319.239wwReflection Assembly: c:\wwapps\wwhelp\bin\wwreflection20.dllAssembly Cur Dir: c:\wwapps\wwhelpApplicationBase: C:\Programs\vfp9\App Domain: wwReflection534cfa1f For the instance type I got: .NET Version: 4.0.30319.239wwReflection Assembly: C:\\Programs\\vfp9\wwreflection20.dllAssembly Cur Dir: c:\\wwapps\\wwhelpApplicationBase: C:\\Programs\\vfp9\App Domain: wwDotNetBridge_56006605 which clearly shows the problem. You can see that both are loading from different appDomains but the each is loading the assembly from a different location. Probably a better solution yet (for ANY kind of assembly loading problem) is to use the .NET Fusion Log Viewer to trace assembly loads.The Fusion viewer will show a load trace for each assembly loaded and where it's looking to find it. Here's what the viewer looks like: The last trace above that I found for the second wwReflection20 load (the one that is wonky) looks like this:*** Assembly Binder Log Entry (1/13/2012 @ 3:06:49 AM) *** The operation was successful. Bind result: hr = 0x0. The operation completed successfully. Assembly manager loaded from: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\V4.0.30319\clr.dll Running under executable c:\programs\vfp9\vfp9.exe --- A detailed error log follows. === Pre-bind state information === LOG: User = Ras\ricks LOG: DisplayName = wwReflection20, Version=4.61.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null (Fully-specified) LOG: Appbase = file:///C:/Programs/vfp9/ LOG: Initial PrivatePath = NULL LOG: Dynamic Base = NULL LOG: Cache Base = NULL LOG: AppName = vfp9.exe Calling assembly : (Unknown). === LOG: This bind starts in default load context. LOG: Using application configuration file: C:\Programs\vfp9\vfp9.exe.Config LOG: Using host configuration file: LOG: Using machine configuration file from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\V4.0.30319\config\machine.config. LOG: Policy not being applied to reference at this time (private, custom, partial, or location-based assembly bind). LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Programs/vfp9/wwReflection20.DLL. LOG: Assembly download was successful. Attempting setup of file: C:\Programs\vfp9\wwReflection20.dll LOG: Entering run-from-source setup phase. LOG: Assembly Name is: wwReflection20, Version=4.61.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null LOG: Binding succeeds. Returns assembly from C:\Programs\vfp9\wwReflection20.dll. LOG: Assembly is loaded in default load context. WRN: The same assembly was loaded into multiple contexts of an application domain: WRN: Context: Default | Domain ID: 2 | Assembly Name: wwReflection20, Version=4.61.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null WRN: Context: LoadFrom | Domain ID: 2 | Assembly Name: wwReflection20, Version=4.61.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null WRN: This might lead to runtime failures. WRN: It is recommended to inspect your application on whether this is intentional or not. WRN: See whitepaper http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109270 for more information and common solutions to this issue. Notice that the fusion log clearly shows that the .NET loader makes no attempt to even load the assembly from the path I explicitly specified. Remember your Assembly Locations As mentioned earlier all failures I've seen like this ultimately resulted from different versions of the same type being available in the two AppDomains. At first sight that seems ridiculous - how could the types be different and why would you have multiple assemblies - but there are actually a number of scenarios where it's quite possible to have multiple copies of the same assembly floating around in multiple places. If you're hosting different environments (like hosting the Razor Engine, or ASP.NET Runtime for example) it's common to create a private BIN folder and it's important to make sure that there's no overlap of assemblies. In my case of Html Help Builder the problem started because I'm using COM interop to access the .NET assembly and the above code. COM Interop has very specific requirements on where assemblies can be found and because I was mucking around with the loader code today, I ended up moving assemblies around to a new location for explicit loading. The explicit load works in the main AppDomain, but failed in the remote domain as I showed. The solution here was simple enough: Delete the extraneous assembly which was left around by accident. Not a common problem, but one that when it bites is pretty nasty to figure out because it seems so unlikely that types wouldn't match. I know I've run into this a few times and writing this down hopefully will make me remember in the future rather than poking around again for an hour trying to debug the issue as I did today. Hopefully it'll save some of you some time as well in the future.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET COM 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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Top 5 Developer Enabling Nuggets in MySQL 5.6

- by Rob Young

MySQL 5.6 is truly a better MySQL and reflects Oracle's commitment to the evolution of the most popular and widelyused open source database on the planet. The feature-complete 5.6 release candidate was announced at MySQL Connect in late September and the production-ready, generally available ("GA") product should be available in early 2013. While the message around 5.6 has been focused mainly on mass appeal, advanced topics like performance/scale, high availability, and self-healing replication clusters, MySQL 5.6 also provides many developer-friendly nuggets that are designed to enable those who are building the next generation of web-based and embedded applications and services. Boiling down the 5.6 feature set into a smaller set, of simple, easy to use goodies designed with developer agility in mind, these things deserve a quick look:Subquery Optimizations Using semi-JOINs and late materialization, the MySQL 5.6 Optimizer delivers greatly improved subquery performance. Specifically, the optimizer is now more efficient in handling subqueries in the FROM clause; materialization of subqueries in the FROM clause is now postponed until their contents are needed during execution. Additionally, the optimizer may add an index to derived tables during execution to speed up row retrieval. Internal tests run using the DBT-3 benchmark Query #13, shown below, demonstrate an order of magnitude improvement in execution times (from days to seconds) over previous versions. select c_name, c_custkey, o_orderkey, o_orderdate, o_totalprice, sum(l_quantity)from customer, orders, lineitemwhere o_orderkey in ( select l_orderkey from lineitem group by l_orderkey having sum(l_quantity) > 313 ) and c_custkey = o_custkey and o_orderkey = l_orderkeygroup by c_name, c_custkey, o_orderkey, o_orderdate, o_totalpriceorder by o_totalprice desc, o_orderdateLIMIT 100;What does this mean for developers? For starters, simplified subqueries can now be coded instead of complex joins for cross table lookups: SELECT title FROM film WHERE film_id IN (SELECT film_id FROM film_actor GROUP BY film_id HAVING count(*) > 12); And even more importantly subqueries embedded in packaged applications no longer need to be re-written into joins. This is good news for both ISVs and their customers who have access to the underlying queries and who have spent development cycles writing, testing and maintaining their own versions of re-written queries across updated versions of a packaged app.The details are in the MySQL 5.6 docs. Online DDL OperationsToday's web-based applications are designed to rapidly evolve and adapt to meet business and revenue-generationrequirements. As a result, development SLAs are now most often measured in minutes vs days or weeks. For example, when an application must quickly support new product lines or new products within existing product lines, the backend database schema must adapt in kind, and most commonly while the application remains available for normal business operations. MySQL 5.6 supports this level of online schema flexibility and agility by providing the following new ALTER TABLE online DDL syntax additions: CREATE INDEX DROP INDEX Change AUTO_INCREMENT value for a column ADD/DROP FOREIGN KEY Rename COLUMN Change ROW FORMAT, KEY_BLOCK_SIZE for a table Change COLUMN NULL, NOT_NULL Add, drop, reorder COLUMN Again, the details are in the MySQL 5.6 docs. Key-value access to InnoDB via Memcached APIMany of the next generation of web, cloud, social and mobile applications require fast operations against simple Key/Value pairs. At the same time, they must retain the ability to run complex queries against the same data, as well as ensure the data is protected with ACID guarantees. With the new NoSQL API for InnoDB, developers have allthe benefits of a transactional RDBMS, coupled with the performance capabilities of Key/Value store.MySQL 5.6 provides simple, key-value interaction with InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API. Implemented via a new Memcached daemon plug-in to mysqld, the new Memcached protocol is mapped directly to the native InnoDB API and enables developers to use existing Memcached clients to bypass the expense of query parsing and go directly to InnoDB data for lookups and transactional compliant updates. The API makes it possible to re-use standard Memcached libraries and clients, while extending Memcached functionality by integrating a persistent, crash-safe, transactional database back-end. The implementation is shown here:So does this option provide a performance benefit over SQL? Internal performance benchmarks using a customized Java application and test harness show some very promising results with a 9X improvement in overall throughput for SET/INSERT operations:You can follow the InnoDB team blog for the methodology, implementation and internal test cases that generated these results here. How to get started with Memcached API to InnoDB is here. New Instrumentation in Performance SchemaThe MySQL Performance Schema was introduced in MySQL 5.5 and is designed to provide point in time metrics for key performance indicators. MySQL 5.6 improves the Performance Schema in answer to the most common DBA and Developer problems. New instrumentations include: Statements/Stages What are my most resource intensive queries? Where do they spend time? Table/Index I/O, Table Locks Which application tables/indexes cause the most load or contention? Users/Hosts/Accounts Which application users, hosts, accounts are consuming the most resources? Network I/O What is the network load like? How long do sessions idle? Summaries Aggregated statistics grouped by statement, thread, user, host, account or object. The MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema is now enabled by default in the my.cnf file with optimized and auto-tune settings that minimize overhead (< 5%, but mileage will vary), so using the Performance Schema ona production server to monitor the most common application use cases is less of an issue. In addition, new atomic levels of instrumentation enable the capture of granular levels of resource consumption by users, hosts, accounts, applications, etc. for billing and chargeback purposes in cloud computing environments.The MySQL docs are an excellent resource for all that is available and that can be done with the 5.6 Performance Schema. Better Condition Handling - GET DIAGNOSTICSMySQL 5.6 enables developers to easily check for error conditions and code for exceptions by introducing the new MySQL Diagnostics Area and corresponding GET DIAGNOSTICS interface command. The Diagnostic Area can be populated via multiple options and provides 2 kinds of information:Statement - which provides affected row count and number of conditions that occurredCondition - which provides error codes and messages for all conditions that were returned by a previous operation The addressable items for each are: The new GET DIAGNOSTICS command provides a standard interface into the Diagnostics Area and can be used via the CLI or from within application code to easily retrieve and handle the results of the most recent statement execution. An example of how it is used might be:mysql> DROP TABLE test.no_such_table; ERROR 1051 (42S02): Unknown table 'test.no_such_table' mysql> GET DIAGNOSTICS CONDITION 1 -> @p1 = RETURNED_SQLSTATE, @p2 = MESSAGE_TEXT; mysql> SELECT @p1, @p2; +-------+------------------------------------+| @p1 | @p2 | +-------+------------------------------------+| 42S02 | Unknown table 'test.no_such_table' | +-------+------------------------------------+ Options for leveraging the MySQL Diagnotics Area and GET DIAGNOSTICS are detailed in the MySQL Docs.While the above is a summary of some of the key developer enabling 5.6 features, it is by no means exhaustive. You can dig deeper into what MySQL 5.6 has to offer by reading this developer zone article or checking out "What's New in MySQL 5.6" in the MySQL docs.BONUS ALERT! If you are developing on Windows or are considering MySQL as an alternative to SQL Server for your next project, application or shipping product, you should check out the MySQL Installer for Windows. The installer includes the MySQL 5.6 RC database, all drivers, Visual Studio and Excel plugins, tray monitor and development tools all a single download and GUI installer. So what are your next steps? Register for Dec. 13 "MySQL 5.6: Building the Next Generation of Web-Based Applications and Services" live web event. Hurry! Seats are limited. Download the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate (look under the Development Releases tab) Provide Feedback <link to http://bugs.mysql.com/> Join the Developer discussion on the MySQL Forums Explore all MySQL Products and Developer Tools As always, thanks for your continued support of MySQL!

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HTML5-MVC application using VS2010 SP1

- by nmarun

This is my first attempt at creating HTML5 pages. VS 2010 allows working with HTML5 now (you just need to make a small change after installing SP1). So my Razor view is now a HTML5 page. I call this application - 5Commerce – (an over-simplified) HTML5 ECommerce site. So here’s the flow of the application: home page renders user enters first and last name, chooses a product and the quantity can enter additional instructions for the order place the order user is then taken to another page showing the order details Off to the details. This is what my page looks in Google Chrome 10 beta (or later) soon after it renders. Here are some of the things to observe on this. Look a little closer and you’ll see a border around the first name textbox – this is ‘autofocus’ in action. I’ve set the autofocus attribute on this textbox. So as soon as the page loads, this control gets focus. 1: <input type="text" autofocus id="firstName" class="inputWidth" data_minlength="" 2: data_maxlength="" placeholder="first name" /> See a partially grayed out ‘last name’ text in the second textbox. This is set using a placeholder attribute (see above). It gets wiped out on-focus and improves the UI visuals in general. The quantity textbox is actually a numerical-only textbox. 1: <input type="number" id="quantity" data_mincount="" class="inputWidth" /> The last line is for additional instructions. This looks like a label but it’s content is editable. Just adding the ‘contenteditable’ attribute to the span allow the user to edit the text inside. 1: <span contenteditable id="additionalInstructions" data_texttype="" class="editableContent">select text and edit </span> All of the above is just plain HTML (no lurking javascript acting in here). Makes it real clean and simple. Going more into the HTML, I see that the _Layout.cshtml already is using some HTML5 content. I created my project before installing SP1, so that was the reason for my surprise. 1: <!DOCTYPE html> This is the doctype declaration in HTML5 and this is supported even by IE6 (just take my word on IE6 now, don’t go install it to test it, especially when MS is doing an IE6 countdown). That’s just amazing and extremely easy to read remember and talk about a few less bytes on every call! I modified the rest of my _Layout.cshtml to the below: 1: <!DOCTYPE html> 2: <html> 3: <head> 4: <title>5Commerce - HTML 5 Ecommerce site</title> 5: <link href="@Url.Content("~/Content/Site.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> 6: <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> 7: <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/CustomScripts.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> 8: <script type="text/javascript"> 9: $(document).ready(function () { 10: WireupEvents(); 11: }); 12:</script> 13: 14: </head> 15: 16: <body role="document" class="bodybackground"> 17: <header role="heading"> 18: <h2>5Commerce - HTML 5 Ecommerce site!</h2> 19: </header> 20: <section id="mainForm"> 21: @RenderBody() 22: </section> 23: <footer id="page_footer" role="siteBaseInfo"> 24: <p>© 2011 5Commerce Inc!</p> 25: </footer> 26: </body> 27: </html> I’m sure you’re seeing some of the new tags here. To give a brief intro about them: <header>, <footer>: Marks the header/footer region of a page or section. <section>: A logical grouping of content role attribute: Identifies the responsibility of an element. This attribute can be used by screen readers and can also be filtered through jQuery. SP1 also allows for some intellisense in HTML5. You see the other types of input fields – email, date, datetime, month, url and there are others as well. So once my page loads, i.e., ‘on document ready’, I’m wiring up the events following the principles of unobtrusive javascript. In the snippet below, I’m controlling the behavior of the input controls for specific events. 1: $("#productList").bind('change blur', function () { 2: IsSelectedProductValid(); 3: }); 4: 5: $("#quantity").bind('blur', function () { 6: IsQuantityValid(); 7: }); 8: 9: $("#placeOrderButton").click( 10: function () { 11: if (IsPageValid()) { 12: LoadProducts(); 13: } 14: }); This enables some client-side validation to occur before the data is sent to the server. These validation constraints are obtained through a JSON call to the WCF service and are set to the ‘data_’ attributes of the input controls. Have a look at the ‘GetValidators()’ function below: 1: function GetValidators() { 2: // the post to your webservice or page 3: $.ajax({ 4: type: "GET", //GET or POST or PUT or DELETE verb 5: url: "http://localhost:14805/OrderService.svc/GetValidators", // Location of the service 6: data: "{}", //Data sent to server 7: contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", // content type sent to server 8: dataType: "json", //Expected data format from server 9: processdata: true, //True or False 10: success: function (result) {//On Successfull service call 11: if (result.length > 0) { 12: for (i = 0; i < result.length; i++) { 13: if (result[i].PropertyName == "FirstName") { 14: if (result[i].MinLength > 0) { 15: $("#firstName").attr("data_minLength", result[i].MinLength); 16: } 17: if (result[i].MaxLength > 0) { 18: $("#firstName").attr("data_maxLength", result[i].MaxLength); 19: } 20: } 21: else if (result[i].PropertyName == "LastName") { 22: if (result[i].MinLength > 0) { 23: $("#lastName").attr("data_minLength", result[i].MinLength); 24: } 25: if (result[i].MaxLength > 0) { 26: $("#lastName").attr("data_maxLength", result[i].MaxLength); 27: } 28: } 29: else if (result[i].PropertyName == "Quantity") { 30: if (result[i].MinCount > 0) { 31: $("#quantity").attr("data_minCount", result[i].MinCount); 32: } 33: } 34: else if (result[i].PropertyName == "AdditionalInstructions") { 35: if (result[i].TextType.length > 0) { 36: $("#additionalInstructions").attr("data_textType", result[i].TextType); 37: } 38: } 39: } 40: } 41: }, 42: error: function (result) {// When Service call fails 43: alert('Service call failed: ' + result.status + ' ' + result.statusText); 44: } 45: }); 46: 47: //.... 48: } Just before the GetValidators() function runs and sets the validation constraints, this is what the html looks like (seen through the Dev tools of Chrome): After the function executes, you see the values in the ‘data_’ attributes. As and when we enter valid data into these fields, the error messages disappear, since the validation is bound to the blur event of the control. There you see… no error messages (well, the catch here is that once you enter THAT name, all errors disappear automatically). Clicking on ‘Place Order!’ runs the SaveOrder function. You can see the JSON for the order object that is getting constructed and passed to the WCF Service. 1: function SaveOrder() { 2: var addlInstructionsDefaultText = "select text and edit"; 3: var addlInstructions = $("span:first").text(); 4: if(addlInstructions == addlInstructionsDefaultText) 5: { 6: addlInstructions = ''; 7: } 8: var orderJson = { 9: AdditionalInstructions: addlInstructions, 10: Customer: { 11: FirstName: $("#firstName").val(), 12: LastName: $("#lastName").val() 13: }, 14: OrderedProduct: { 15: Id: $("#productList").val(), 16: Quantity: $("#quantity").val() 17: } 18: }; 19: 20: // the post to your webservice or page 21: $.ajax({ 22: type: "POST", //GET or POST or PUT or DELETE verb 23: url: "http://localhost:14805/OrderService.svc/SaveOrder", // Location of the service 24: data: JSON.stringify(orderJson), //Data sent to server 25: contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", // content type sent to server 26: dataType: "json", //Expected data format from server 27: processdata: false, //True or False 28: success: function (result) {//On Successfull service call 29: window.location.href = "http://localhost:14805/home/ShowOrderDetail/" + result; 30: }, 31: error: function (request, error) {// When Service call fails 32: alert('Service call failed: ' + request.status + ' ' + request.statusText); 33: } 34: }); 35: } The service saves this order into an XML file and returns the order id (a guid). On success, I redirect to the ShowOrderDetail action method passing the guid. This page will show all the details of the order. Although the back-end weightlifting is done by WCF, I did not show any of that plumbing-work as I wanted to concentrate more on the HTML5 and its associates. However, you can see it all in the source here. I do have one issue with HTML5 and this is an existing issue with HTML4 as well. If you see the snippet above where I’ve declared a textbox for first name, you’ll see the autofocus attribute just dangling by itself. It doesn’t follow the xml syntax of ‘key="value"’ allowing users to continue writing badly-formatted html even in the new version. You’ll see the same issue with the ‘contenteditable’ attribute as well. The work-around is that you can do ‘autofocus=”true”’ and it’ll work fine plus make it well-formatted. But unless the standards enforce this, there will be people (me included) who’ll get by, by just typing the bare minimum! Hoping this will get fixed in the coming version-updates. Source code here. Verdict: I think it’s time for us to embrace the new HTML5. Thank you HTML4 and Welcome HTML5.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, July 04, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, July 04, 2012Popular ReleasesMVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 2.2.0: Added Modified all Mv4 related features to conform with the Mvc4 RC Now all items controls accept any IEnumerable<T>(before just List<T> were accepted by most of controls) retrievalManager class that retrieves automatically data from a data source whenever it catchs events triggered by filtering, sorting, and paging controls move method to the updatesManager to move one child objects from a father to another. The move operation can be undone like the insert, update and delete operatio...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.6: 2012.07.03 Ver5.6.6 (1) ???????????ftp://?????????、????LIST?????Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (v1.0.68.441): Just a bug fix release for when the connections try to refresh after an edit. Make sure you read the Quickstart for an introduction.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.58: Fix for Issue #18296: provide "ALL" value to the -ignore switch to ignore all error and warning messages. Fix for issue #18293: if encountering EOF before a function declaration or expression is properly closed, throw an appropriate error and don't crash. Adjust the variable-renaming algorithm so it's very specific when renaming variables with the same number of references so a single source file ends up with the same minified names on different platforms. add the ability to specify kno...LogExpert: 1.4 build 4566: This release for the 1.4 version line contains various fixes which have been made some times ago. Until now these fixes were only available in the 1.5 alpha versions. It also contains a fix for: 710. Column finder (press F8 to show) Terminal server issues: Multiple sessions with same user should work now Settings Export/Import available via Settings Dialog still incomple (e.g. tab colors are not saved) maybe I change the file format one day no command line support yet (for importin...DynamicToSql: DynamicToSql 1.0.0 (beta): 1.0.0 beta versionCommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8.5 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. FluentscriptCommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 contains a scripting language called FluentScript. Releases notes for FluentScript located at http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/wikipage?action=Edit&title=Release%20Notes&referringTitle=Documentation Fluentscript - 0.9.8.5 - Final ReleaseApplication: FluentScript Versio...SharePoint 2010 Metro UI: SharePoint 2010 Metro UI8: Please review the documentation link for how to install. Installation takes some basic knowledge of how to upload and edit SharePoint Artifact files. Please view the discussions tab for ongoing FAQsnopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.60: Highlight features & improvements: • Significant performance optimization. • Use AJAX for adding products to the cart. • New flyout mini-shopping cart. • Auto complete suggestions for product searching. • Full-Text support. • EU cookie law support. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.51: http://download.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=nvlmaker&DownloadId=371510 ????：http://115.com/file/beoef05k#THE-NVL-Maker-ver3.51-sim.7z ????：http://www.mediafire.com/file/6tqdwj9jr6eb9qj/THENVLMakerver3.51tra.7z ======================================== ???? ======================================== 3.51 beta ???： ·?????????????????????? ·?????????，?????????0，?????????????????????? ·??????????????????????????? ·?????????????TJS????（EXP??） ·??4:3???，???????????????，??????????? ·?????????...????: ????2.0.3: 1、???????????。 2、????????。 3、????????????。 4、bug??，????。AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5 Intrepid: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, download the Linux package. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) You should delete /home/config/saved.cfg to reset binds/other stuff If you us...Magelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.0: User Right Licensing ContentType version 2.0.267.1Bongiozzo Photosite: Alpha: Just first stable releaseMDS MODELING WORKBOOK: MDS MODELING WORKBOOK: This is the initial release. Works with SQL 2008 R2 Master Data Services. Also works with SQL 2012 Master Data Services but has not been completely tested.Logon Screen Launcher: Logon Screen Launcher 1.3.0: FIXED - Minor handle leak issueBF3Rcon.NET: BF3Rcon.NET 25.0: This update brings the library up to server release R25, which includes the few additions from R21. There are also some minor bug fixes and a couple of other minor changes. In addition, many methods now take advantage of the RconResult class, which will give error information on failed requests; this replaces the bool returned by many methods. There is also an implicit conversion from RconResult to bool (both of which were true on success), so old code shouldn't break. ChangesAdded Player.S...TelerikMvcGridCustomBindingHelper: Version 1.0.15.183-RC: TelerikMvcGridCustomBindingHelper 1.0.15.183 RC This is a RC (release candidate) version, please test and report any error or problem you encounter. Warning: There are many changes in this release and some of them break backward compatibility. Release notes (since 0.5.0-Alpha version): Custom aggregates via an inherited class or inline fluent function Ignore group on aggregates for better performance Projections (restriction of the database columns queried) for an even better performa...PunkBuster™ Screenshot Viewer: PunkBuster™ Screenshot Viewer 1.0: First release of PunkBuster™ Screenshot ViewerDesigning Windows 8 Applications with C# and XAML: Chapters 1 - 7 Release Preview: Source code for all examples from Chapters 1 - 7 for the Release PreviewNew ProjectsAzureMVC4: hiBoonCraft Launcher: BoonCraft Launcher V2.0 See http://352n.dyndns.org for more info on BoonCraftC# to Javascript: Have you ever wanted to automagically have access to the enums you use in your .NET code in the javascript code you're writing for client-side?CMCIC payment gateway provider for NB_Store: CMCIC payment gateway provider for NB_StoreCOFE2 : Cloud Over IFileSystemInfo Entries Extensions: COFE2 enable user to access the user-defined file system on local or foreign computer, using a System.IO-like interface or a RESTful Web API.Directory access via LDAP: .NET library for managing a directory via LDAP.E-mail processing: .NET library for processing e-mail.FAST Search for SharePoint Query Statistics: F4SP Query Statistics scans the FAST for SharePoint Query Logs and presents statistics based on the logs. Total Queries, Top Queries, Queries per user etc...File Backup: This project is an open source windows azure cloud backup win forms application.HanxiaoFu's personal: This will help synchronizing my work done in home and at workLifekostyuk: This is my first project on TFSNet WebSocket Server: NetWebSocket Server is c# based hight performance and scalable Websocket server. Posroid for Windows 8: ?? ??????? ????? ?? ?? ????? ??? ?? ??? ??? ???? ? ? ???, ???8??? ???? ?? ??? ? ? ??? ??? ????? ?????.PowerRules: PowerRules is a group of scripts that help you audit your farm for Configuration Drift (Configuration changes over time)Projet Niloc TETRAS: Student Project to know how to manage and coordinating a team.proyectobanco: PROFE AQUI ESTA EL PROYECTO DISCULPE NOMAS ATT SANCANsheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: Sheetengine is an HTML5 canvas based isometric display engine for JavaScript. It features textures, z-ordering, shadows, intersecting sheets, object movements.Shiny2: GTS Spoofing program for Generation IV and V of Pokemon.SMS Backup & Restore XML to MySQL: The purpose is to take the XML files created by SMS Backup and Restore (Android) and importing them via a Dropbox/Google Drive synch into a MySQL dbStundenplan TSST: App für Windows Phone um die einzelnen Vertretungspläne der technischen Schule Steinfurt anzusehenswalmacenamiento: Proyecto para el almacenamiento de registrosTFS Work Item Association Check-in Policy: This policy requires TFS source control check-ins to be associated with a single, in-progress task that is assigned to you.TurboTemplate: TurboTemplate is a fast source code generation helper which quick transforms between your SQL database and some templated text of your choice.visblog: this is short summary of my projectVisualHG_fliedonion: This is fork of VisualHG. This will used by improve VisualHG for me. support only Visual Studio 2008 (not SP1). Wave Tag Library: A very simple and modest .wav file tag library. With this library you can load .wav files, edit the tags (equivalent to mp3's ID3 tags) and save back to file.Wordpress: WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.ZEAL-C02 Bluetooth module Driver for Netduino: A class library for the .NET Micro Framework to support the Zeal-C02 Bluetooth module for Netduino.

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Table Variables: an empirical approach.

- by Phil Factor

It isn’t entirely a pleasant experience to publish an article only to have it described on Twitter as ‘Horrible’, and to have it criticized on the MVP forum. When this happened to me in the aftermath of publishing my article on Temporary tables recently, I was taken aback, because these critics were experts whose views I respect. What was my crime? It was, I think, to suggest that, despite the obvious quirks, it was best to use Table Variables as a first choice, and to use local Temporary Tables if you hit problems due to these quirks, or if you were doing complex joins using a large number of rows. What are these quirks? Well, table variables have advantages if they are used sensibly, but this requires some awareness by the developer about the potential hazards and how to avoid them. You can be hit by a badly-performing join involving a table variable. Table Variables are a compromise, and this compromise doesn’t always work out well. Explicit indexes aren’t allowed on Table Variables, so one cannot use covering indexes or non-unique indexes. The query optimizer has to make assumptions about the data rather than using column distribution statistics when a table variable is involved in a join, because there aren’t any column-based distribution statistics on a table variable. It assumes a reasonably even distribution of data, and is likely to have little idea of the number of rows in the table variables that are involved in queries. However complex the heuristics that are used might be in determining the best way of executing a SQL query, and they most certainly are, the Query Optimizer is likely to fail occasionally with table variables, under certain circumstances, and produce a Query Execution Plan that is frightful. The experienced developer or DBA will be on the lookout for this sort of problem. In this blog, I’ll be expanding on some of the tests I used when writing my article to illustrate the quirks, and include a subsequent example supplied by Kevin Boles. A simplified example. We’ll start out by illustrating a simple example that shows some of these characteristics. We’ll create two tables filled with random numbers and then see how many matches we get between the two tables. We’ll forget indexes altogether for this example, and use heaps. We’ll try the same Join with two table variables, two table variables with OPTION (RECOMPILE) in the JOIN clause, and with two temporary tables. It is all a bit jerky because of the granularity of the timing that isn’t actually happening at the millisecond level (I used DATETIME). However, you’ll see that the table variable is outperforming the local temporary table up to 10,000 rows. Actually, even without a use of the OPTION (RECOMPILE) hint, it is doing well. What happens when your table size increases? The table variable is, from around 30,000 rows, locked into a very bad execution plan unless you use OPTION (RECOMPILE) to provide the Query Analyser with a decent estimation of the size of the table. However, if it has the OPTION (RECOMPILE), then it is smokin’. Well, up to 120,000 rows, at least. It is performing better than a Temporary table, and in a good linear fashion. What about mixed table joins, where you are joining a temporary table to a table variable? You’d probably expect that the query analyzer would throw up its hands and produce a bad execution plan as if it were a table variable. After all, it knows nothing about the statistics in one of the tables so how could it do any better? Well, it behaves as if it were doing a recompile. And an explicit recompile adds no value at all. (we just go up to 45000 rows since we know the bigger picture now) Now, if you were new to this, you might be tempted to start drawing conclusions. Beware! We’re dealing with a very complex beast: the Query Optimizer. It can come up with surprises What if we change the query very slightly to insert the results into a Table Variable? We change nothing else and just measure the execution time of the statement as before. Suddenly, the table variable isn’t looking so much better, even taking into account the time involved in doing the table insert. OK, if you haven’t used OPTION (RECOMPILE) then you’re toast. Otherwise, there isn’t much in it between the Table variable and the temporary table. The table variable is faster up to 8000 rows and then not much in it up to 100,000 rows. Past the 8000 row mark, we’ve lost the advantage of the table variable’s speed. Any general rule you may be formulating has just gone for a walk. What we can conclude from this experiment is that if you join two table variables, and can’t use constraints, you’re going to need that Option (RECOMPILE) hint. Count Dracula and the Horror Join. These tables of integers provide a rather unreal example, so let’s try a rather different example, and get stuck into some implicit indexing, by using constraints. What unusual words are contained in the book ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker? Here we get a table of all the common words in the English language (60,387 of them) and put them in a table. We put them in a Table Variable with the word as a primary key, a Table Variable Heap and a Table Variable with a primary key. We then take all the distinct words used in the book ‘Dracula’ (7,558 of them). We then create a table variable and insert into it all those uncommon words that are in ‘Dracula’. i.e. all the words in Dracula that aren’t matched in the list of common words. To do this we use a left outer join, where the right-hand value is null. The results show a huge variation, between the sublime and the gorblimey. If both tables contain a Primary Key on the columns we join on, and both are Table Variables, it took 33 Ms. If one table contains a Primary Key, and the other is a heap, and both are Table Variables, it took 46 Ms. If both Table Variables use a unique constraint, then the query takes 36 Ms. If neither table contains a Primary Key and both are Table Variables, it took 116383 Ms. Yes, nearly two minutes!! If both tables contain a Primary Key, one is a Table Variables and the other is a temporary table, it took 113 Ms. If one table contains a Primary Key, and both are Temporary Tables, it took 56 Ms.If both tables are temporary tables and both have primary keys, it took 46 Ms. Here we see table variables which are joined on their primary key again enjoying a slight performance advantage over temporary tables. Where both tables are table variables and both are heaps, the query suddenly takes nearly two minutes! So what if you have two heaps and you use option Recompile? If you take the rogue query and add the hint, then suddenly, the query drops its time down to 76 Ms. If you add unique indexes, then you've done even better, down to half that time. Here are the text execution plans.So where have we got to? Without drilling down into the minutiae of the execution plans we can begin to create a hypothesis. If you are using table variables, and your tables are relatively small, they are faster than temporary tables, but as the number of rows increases you need to do one of two things: either you need to have a primary key on the column you are using to join on, or else you need to use option (RECOMPILE) If you try to execute a query that is a join, and both tables are table variable heaps, you are asking for trouble, well- slow queries, unless you give the table hint once the number of rows has risen past a point (30,000 in our first example, but this varies considerably according to context). Kevin’s Skew In describing the table-size, I used the term ‘relatively small’. Kevin Boles produced an interesting case where a single-row table variable produces a very poor execution plan when joined to a very, very skewed table. In the original, pasted into my article as a comment, a column consisted of 100000 rows in which the key column was one number (1) . To this was added eight rows with sequential numbers up to 9. When this was joined to a single-tow Table Variable with a key of 2 it produced a bad plan. This problem is unlikely to occur in real usage, and the Query Optimiser team probably never set up a test for it. Actually, the skew can be slightly less extreme than Kevin made it. The following test showed that once the table had 54 sequential rows in the table, then it adopted exactly the same execution plan as for the temporary table and then all was well. Undeniably, real data does occasionally cause problems to the performance of joins in Table Variables due to the extreme skew of the distribution. We've all experienced Perfectly Poisonous Table Variables in real live data. As in Kevin’s example, indexes merely make matters worse, and the OPTION (RECOMPILE) trick does nothing to help. In this case, there is no option but to use a temporary table. However, one has to note that once the slight de-skew had taken place, then the plans were identical across a huge range. Conclusions Where you need to hold intermediate results as part of a process, Table Variables offer a good alternative to temporary tables when used wisely. They can perform faster than a temporary table when the number of rows is not great. For some processing with huge tables, they can perform well when only a clustered index is required, and when the nature of the processing makes an index seek very effective. Table Variables are scoped to the batch or procedure and are unlikely to hang about in the TempDB when they are no longer required. They require no explicit cleanup. Where the number of rows in the table is moderate, you can even use them in joins as ‘Heaps’, unindexed. Beware, however, since, as the number of rows increase, joins on Table Variable heaps can easily become saddled by very poor execution plans, and this must be cured either by adding constraints (UNIQUE or PRIMARY KEY) or by adding the OPTION (RECOMPILE) hint if this is impossible. Occasionally, the way that the data is distributed prevents the efficient use of Table Variables, and this will require using a temporary table instead. Tables Variables require some awareness by the developer about the potential hazards and how to avoid them. If you are not prepared to do any performance monitoring of your code or fine-tuning, and just want to pummel out stuff that ‘just runs’ without considering namby-pamby stuff such as indexes, then stick to Temporary tables. If you are likely to slosh about large numbers of rows in temporary tables without considering the niceties of processing just what is required and no more, then temporary tables provide a safer and less fragile means-to-an-end for you.

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ASP.NET: Using conditionals in data binding expressions

- by DigiMortal

ASP.NET 2.0 has no support for using conditionals in data binding expressions but it will change in ASP.NET 4.0. In this posting I will show you how to implement Iif() function for ASP.NET 2.0 and how ASP.NET 4.0 solves this problem smoothly without any code. Problem Let’s say we have simple repeater. <asp:Repeater runat="server" ID="itemsList"> <HeaderTemplate> <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5"> </HeaderTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <tr> <td align="right"><%# Container.ItemIndex + 1 %>.</td> <td><%# Eval("Title") %></td> </tr> </ItemTemplate> <FooterTemplate> </table> </FooterTemplate> </asp:Repeater> Repeater is bound to data when form loads. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { var items = new[] { new { Id = 1, Title = "Headline 1" }, new { Id = 2, Title = "Headline 2" }, new { Id = 2, Title = "Headline 3" }, new { Id = 2, Title = "Headline 4" }, new { Id = 2, Title = "Headline 5" } }; itemsList.DataSource = items; itemsList.DataBind(); } We need to format even and odd rows differently. Let’s say we want even rows to be with whitesmoke background and odd rows with white background. Just like shown on screenshot on right. Our first thought is to use some simple expression to avoid writing custom methods. We cannot use construct like this <%# Container.ItemIndex % 2==0 ? "white" : "whitesmoke" %> because all we get are template compilation errors. ASP.NET 2.0: Iif() method For ASP.NET 2.0 pages and controls we can create Iif() method and call it from our templates. This is out Iif() method. protected object Iif(bool condition, object trueResult, object falseResult) { return condition ? trueResult : falseResult; } And here you can see how to use it. <asp:Repeater runat="server" ID="itemsList"> <HeaderTemplate> <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5"> </HeaderTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <tr style='background-color:' <%# Iif(Container.ItemIndex % 2==0 ? "white" : "whitesmoke") %>'> <td align="right"> <%# Container.ItemIndex + 1 %>.</td> <td> <%# Eval("Title") %></td> </tr> </ItemTemplate> <FooterTemplate> </table> </FooterTemplate> </asp:Repeater> This method does not care about types because it works with all objects (and value-types). I had to define this method in code-behind file of my user control because using this method as extension method made it undetectable for ASP.NET template engine. ASP.NET 4.0: Conditionals are supported In ASP.NET 4.0 we will write … hmm … we will write nothing special. Here is solution. <asp:Repeater runat="server" ID="itemsList"> <HeaderTemplate> <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5"> </HeaderTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <tr style='background-color:' <%# Container.ItemIndex % 2==0 ? "white" : "whitesmoke" %>'> <td align="right"> <%# Container.ItemIndex + 1 %>.</td> <td> <%# Eval("Title") %></td> </tr> </ItemTemplate> <FooterTemplate> </table> </FooterTemplate> </asp:Repeater> Yes, it works well. :)

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Introduction to LinqPad Driver for StreamInsight 2.1

- by Roman Schindlauer

We are announcing the availability of the LinqPad driver for StreamInsight 2.1. The purpose of this blog post is to offer a quick introduction into the new features that we added to the StreamInsight LinqPad driver. We’ll show you how to connect to a remote server, how to inspect the entities present of that server, how to compose on top of them and how to manage their lifetime. Installing the driver Info on how to install the driver can be found in an earlier blog post here. Establishing connections As you click on the “Add Connection” link in the left pane you will notice that now it’s possible to build the data context automatically. The new driver appears as an option in the upper list, and if you pick it you will open a connection dialog that lets you connect to a remote StreamInsight server. The connection dialog lets you specify the address of the remote server. You will notice that it’s possible to pick up the binding information from the configuration file of the LinqPad application (which is normally in the same folder as LinqPad.exe and is called LinqPad.exe.config). In order for the context to be generated you need to pick an application from the server. The control is editable hence you can create a new application if you don’t want to make changes to an existing application. If you choose a new application name you will be prompted for confirmation before this gets created. Once you click OK the connection is created and you can start issuing queries against the remote server. If there’s any connectivity error the connection is marked with a red X and you can see the error message informing you what went wrong (i.e., the remote server could not be reached etc.). The context for remote servers Let’s take a look at what happens after we are connected successfully. Every LinqPad query runs inside a context – think of it as a class that wraps all the code that you’re writing. If you’re connecting to a live server the context will contain the following: The application object itself. All entities present in this application (sources, sinks, subjects and processes). The picture below shows a snapshot of the left pane of LinqPad after a successful connection. Every entity on the server has a different icon which will allow users to figure out its purpose. You will also notice that some entities have a string in parentheses following the name. It should be interpreted as such: the first name is the name of the property of the context class and the second name is the name of the entity as it exists on the server. Not all valid entity names are valid identifier names so in cases where we had to make a transformation you see both. Note also that as you hover over the entities you get IntelliSense with their types – more on that later. Remoting is not supported As you play with the entities exposed by the context you will notice that you can’t read and write directly to/from them. If for instance you’re trying to dump the content of an entity you will get an error message telling you that in the current version remoting is not supported. This is because the entity lives on the remote server and dumping its content means reading the events produced by this entity into the local process. ObservableSource.Dump(); Will yield the following error: Reading from a remote 'System.Reactive.Linq.IQbservable`1[System.Int32]' is not supported. Use the 'Microsoft.ComplexEventProcessing.Linq.RemoteProvider.Bind' method to read from the source using a remote observer. This basically tells you that you can call the Bind() method to direct the output of this source to a sink that has to be defined on the remote machine as well. You can’t bring the results to the LinqPad window unless you write code specifically for that. Compose queries You may ask – what's the purpose of all that? After all the same information is present in the EventFlowDebugger, why bother with showing it in LinqPad? First of all, What gets exposed in LinqPad is not what you see in the debugger. In LinqPad we have a property on the context class for every entity that lives on the server. Because LinqPad offers IntelliSense we in fact have much more information about the entity, and more importantly we can compose with that entity very easily. For example, let’s say that this code creates an entity: using (var server = Server.Connect(...)) { var a = server.CreateApplication("WhiteFish"); var src = a .DefineObservable<int>(() => Observable.Range(0, 3)) .Deploy("ObservableSource"); If later we want to compose with the source we have to fetch it and then we can bind something to a.GetObservable<int>("ObservableSource)").Bind(... This means that we had to know a bunch of things about this: that it’s a source, that it’s an observable, it produces a result with payload Int32 and it’s named “ObservableSource”. Only the second and last bits of information are present in the debugger, by the way. As you type in the query window you see that all the entities are present, you get IntelliSense support for them and it’s much easier to make sense of what’s available. Let’s look at a scenario where composition is plausible. With the new programming model it’s possible to create “cold” sources that are parameterized. There was a way to accomplish that even in the previous version by passing parameters to the adapters, but this time it’s much more elegant because the expression declares what parameters are required. Say that we hover the mouse over the ThrottledSource source – we will see that its type is Func<int, int, IQbservable<int>> - this in effect means that we need to pass two int parameters before we can get a source that produces events, and the type for those events is int – in the particular case of my example I had the source produce a range of integers and the two parameters were the start and end of the range. So we see how a developer can create a source that is not running yet. Then someone else (e.g. an administrator) can pass whatever parameters appropriate and run the process. Proxy Types Here’s an interesting scenario – what if someone created a source on a server but they forgot to tell you what type they used. Worse yet, they might have used an anonymous type and even though they can refer to it by name you can’t figure out how to use that type. Let’s walk through an example that shows how you can compose against types you don’t need to have the definition of. This is how we can create a source that returns an anonymous type: Application.DefineObservable(() => Observable.Range(1, 10).Select(i => new { I = i })).Deploy("O1"); Now if we refresh the connection we can see the new source named O1 appear in the list. But what’s more important is that we now have a type to work with. So we can compose a query that refers to the anonymous type. var threshold = new StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0<int>(5); var filter = from i in O1 where i > threshold select i; filter.Deploy("O2"); You will notice that the anonymous type defined with this statement: new { I = i } can now be manipulated by a client that does not have access to it because the LinqPad driver has generated another type in its stead, named StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0. This type has all the properties and fields of the type defined on the server, except in this case we can instantiate values and use it to compose more queries. It is worth noting that the same thing works for types that are not anonymous – the test is if the LinqPad driver can resolve the type or not. If it’s not possible then a new type will be generated that approximates the type that exists on the server. Control metadata In addition to composing processes on top of the existing entities we can do other useful things. We can delete them – nothing new here as we simply access the entities through the Entities collection of the application class. Here is where having their real name in parentheses comes handy. There’s another way to find out what’s behind a property – dump its expression. The first line in the output tells us what’s the name of the entity used to build this property in the context. Runtime information So let’s create a process to see what happens. We can bind a source to a sink and run the resulting process. If you right click on the connection you can refresh it and see the process present in the list of entities. Then you can drag the process to the query window and see that you can have access to process object in the Processes collection of the application. You can then manipulate the process (delete it, read its diagnostic view etc.). Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

- by Janice J. Heiss

Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant. It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle { private final int dataSize = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6); public void f() { { byte[] data = new byte[dataSize]; } byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize]; } public static void main(String[] args) { JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle(); jmp.f(); }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite { private final int dataSize = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6); public void f() { { byte[] data = new byte[dataSize]; } for(int i=0; i<10; i++) { System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory"); } byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize]; } public static void main(String[] args) { JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite(); jmp.f(); System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError"); }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers. Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.

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The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

- by Janice J. Heiss

Dr. Heinz Kabutz is well known for his Java Specialists’ Newsletter, initiated in November 2000, where he displays his acute grasp of the intricacies of the Java platform for an estimated 70,000 readers; for his work as a consultant; and for his workshops and trainings at his home on the Island of Crete where he has lived since 2006 -- where he is known to curl up on the beach with his laptop to hack away, in between dips in the Mediterranean. Kabutz was born of German parents and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where he developed a love of programming in junior high school through his explorations on a ZX Spectrum computer. He received a B.S. from the University of Cape Town, and at 25, a Ph.D., both in computer science. He will be leading a two-hour hands-on lab session, HOL6500 – “Finding and Solving Java Deadlocks,” at this year’s JavaOne that will explore what causes deadlocks and how to solve them. Q: Tell us about your JavaOne plans.A: I am arriving on Sunday evening and have just one hands-on-lab to do on Monday morning. This is the first time that a non-Oracle team is doing a HOL at JavaOne under Oracle's stewardship and we are all a bit nervous about how it will turn out. Oracle has been immensely helpful in getting us set up. I have a great team helping me: Kirk Pepperdine, Dario Laverde, Benjamin Evans and Martijn Verburg from jClarity, Nathan Reynolds from Oracle, Henri Tremblay of OCTO Technology and Jeff Genender of Savoir Technologies. Monday will be hard work, but after that, I will hopefully get to network with fellow Java experts, attend interesting sessions and just enjoy San Francisco. Oh, and my kids have already given me a shopping list of things to get, like a GoPro Hero 2 dive housing for shooting those nice videos of Crete. (That's me at the beginning diving down.) Q: What sessions are you attending that we should know about?A: Sometimes the most unusual sessions are the best. I avoid the "big names". They often are spread too thin with all their sessions, which makes it difficult for them to deliver what I would consider deep content. I also avoid entertainers who might be good at presenting but who do not say that much.In 2010, I attended a session by Vladimir Yaroslavskiy where he talked about sorting. Although he struggled to speak English, what he had to say was spectacular. There was hardly anybody in the room, having not heard of Vladimir before. To me that was the highlight of 2010. Funnily enough, he was supposed to speak with Joshua Bloch, but if you remember, Google cancelled. If Bloch has been there, the room would have been packed to capacity.Q: Give us an update on the Java Specialists’ Newsletter.A: The Java Specialists' Newsletter continues being read by an elite audience around the world. The apostrophe in the name is significant. It is a newsletter for Java specialists. When I started it twelve years ago, I was trying to find non-obvious things in Java to write about. Things that would be interesting to an advanced audience.As an April Fool's joke, I told my readers in Issue 44 that subscribing would remain free, but that they would have to pay US$5 to US$7 depending on their geographical location. I received quite a few angry emails from that one. I would have not earned that much from unsubscriptions. Most readers stay for a very long time.After Oracle bought Sun, the Java community held its breath for about two years whilst Oracle was figuring out what to do with Java. For a while, we were quite concerned that there was not much progress shown by Oracle. My newsletter still continued, but it was quite difficult finding new things to write about. We have probably about 70,000 readers, which is quite a small number for a Java publication. However, our readers are the top in the Java industry. So I don't mind having "only" 70000 readers, as long as they are the top 0.7%.Java concurrency is a very important topic that programmers think they should know about, but often neglect to fully understand. I continued writing about that and made some interesting discoveries. For example, in Issue 165, I showed how we can get thread starvation with the ReadWriteLock. This was a bug in Java 5, which was corrected in Java 6, but perhaps a bit too much. Whereas we could get starvation of writers in Java 5, in Java 6 we could now get starvation of readers. All of these interesting findings make their way into my courseware to help companies avoid these pitfalls.Another interesting discovery was how polymorphism works in the Server HotSpot compiler in Issue 157 and Issue 158. HotSpot can inline methods from interfaces that have only one implementation class in the JVM. When a new subclass is instantiated and called for the first time, the JVM will undo the previous optimization and re-optimize differently.Here is a little memory puzzle for your readers: public class JavaMemoryPuzzle { private final int dataSize = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6); public void f() { { byte[] data = new byte[dataSize]; } byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize]; } public static void main(String[] args) { JavaMemoryPuzzle jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzle(); jmp.f(); }}When you run this you will always get an OutOfMemoryError, even though the local variable data is no longer visible outside of the code block.So here comes the puzzle, that I'd like you to ponder a bit. If you very politely ask the VM to release memory, then you don't get an OutOfMemoryError: public class JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite { private final int dataSize = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory() * 0.6); public void f() { { byte[] data = new byte[dataSize]; } for(int i=0; i<10; i++) { System.out.println("Please be so kind and release memory"); } byte[] data2 = new byte[dataSize]; } public static void main(String[] args) { JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite jmp = new JavaMemoryPuzzlePolite(); jmp.f(); System.out.println("No OutOfMemoryError"); }}Why does this work? When I published this in my newsletter, I received over 400 emails from excited readers around the world, most of whom sent me the wrong explanation. After the 300th wrong answer, my replies became unfortunately a bit curt. Have a look at Issue 174 for a detailed explanation, but before you do, put on your thinking caps and try to figure it out yourself. Q: What do you think Java developers should know that they currently do not know?A: They should definitely get to know more about concurrency. It is a tough subject that most programmers try to avoid. Unfortunately we do come in contact with it. And when we do, we need to know how to protect ourselves and how to solve tricky system errors.Knowing your IDE is also useful. Most IDEs have a ton of shortcuts, which can make you a lot more productive in moving code around. Another thing that is useful is being able to read GC logs. Kirk Pepperdine has a great talk at JavaOne that I can recommend if you want to learn more. It's this: CON5405 – “Are Your Garbage Collection Logs Speaking to You?” Q: What are you looking forward to in Java 8?A: I'm quite excited about lambdas, though I must confess that I have not studied them in detail yet. Maurice Naftalin's Lambda FAQ is quite a good start to document what you can do with them. I'm looking forward to finding all the interesting bugs that we will now get due to lambdas obscuring what is really going on underneath, just like we had with generics.I am quite impressed with what the team at Oracle did with OpenJDK's performance. A lot of the benchmarks now run faster.Hopefully Java 8 will come with JSR 310, the Date and Time API. It still boggles my mind that such an important API has been left out in the cold for so long.What I am not looking forward to is losing perm space. Even though some systems run out of perm space, at least the problem is contained and they usually manage to work around it. In most cases, this is due to a memory leak in that region of memory. Once they bundle perm space with the old generation, I predict that memory leaks in perm space will be harder to find. More contracts for us, but also more pain for our customers.

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ASP.NET MVC: Moving code from controller action to service layer

- by DigiMortal

I fixed one controller action in my application that doesn’t seemed good enough for me. It wasn’t big move I did but worth to show to beginners how nice code you can write when using correct layering in your application. As an example I use code from my posting ASP.NET MVC: How to implement invitation codes support. Problematic controller action Although my controller action works well I don’t like how it looks. It is too much for controller action in my opinion. [HttpPost] public ActionResult GetAccess(string accessCode) { if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(accessCode.Trim())) { ModelState.AddModelError("accessCode", "Insert invitation code!"); return View(); } Guid accessGuid; try { accessGuid = Guid.Parse(accessCode); } catch { ModelState.AddModelError("accessCode", "Incorrect format of invitation code!"); return View(); } using(var ctx = new EventsEntities()) { var user = ctx.GetNewUserByAccessCode(accessGuid); if(user == null) { ModelState.AddModelError("accessCode", "Cannot find account with given invitation code!"); return View(); } user.UserToken = User.Identity.GetUserToken(); ctx.SaveChanges(); } Session["UserId"] = accessGuid; return Redirect("~/admin"); } Looking at this code my first idea is that all this access code stuff must be located somewhere else. We have working functionality in wrong place and we should do something about it. Service layer I add layers to my application very carefully because I don’t like to use hand grenade to kill a fly. When I see real need for some layer and it doesn’t add too much complexity I will add new layer. Right now it is good time to add service layer to my small application. After that it is time to move code to service layer and inject service class to controller. public interface IUserService { bool ClaimAccessCode(string accessCode, string userToken, out string errorMessage); // Other methods of user service } I need this interface when writing unit tests because I need fake service that doesn’t communicate with database and other external sources. public class UserService : IUserService { private readonly IDataContext _context; public UserService(IDataContext context) { _context = context; } public bool ClaimAccessCode(string accessCode, string userToken, out string errorMessage) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(accessCode.Trim())) { errorMessage = "Insert invitation code!"; return false; } Guid accessGuid; if (!Guid.TryParse(accessCode, out accessGuid)) { errorMessage = "Incorrect format of invitation code!"; return false; } var user = _context.GetNewUserByAccessCode(accessGuid); if (user == null) { errorMessage = "Cannot find account with given invitation code!"; return false; } user.UserToken = userToken; _context.SaveChanges(); errorMessage = string.Empty; return true; } } Right now I used simple solution for errors and made access code claiming method to follow usual TrySomething() methods pattern. This way I can keep error messages and their retrieval away from controller and in controller I just mediate error message from service to view. Controller Now all the code is moved to service layer and we need also some modifications to controller code so it makes use of users service. I don’t show here DI/IoC details about how to give service instance to controller. GetAccess() action of controller looks like this right now. [HttpPost] public ActionResult GetAccess(string accessCode) { var userToken = User.Identity.GetUserToken(); string errorMessage; if (!_userService.ClaimAccessCode(accessCode, userToken, out errorMessage)) { ModelState.AddModelError("accessCode", errorMessage); return View(); } Session["UserId"] = Guid.Parse(accessCode); return Redirect("~/admin"); } It’s short and nice now and it deals with web site part of access code claiming. In the case of error user is shown access code claiming view with error message that ClaimAccessCode() method returns as output parameter. If everything goes fine then access code is reserved for current user and user is authenticated. Conclusion When controller action grows big you have to move code to layers it actually belongs. In this posting I showed you how I moved access code claiming functionality from controller action to user service class that belongs to service layer of my application. As the result I have controller action that coordinates the user interaction when going through access code claiming process. Controller communicates with service layer and gets information about how access code claiming succeeded.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 26, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 26, 2012Popular ReleasesQuick Performance Monitor: Version 1.8.1: Added option to set main window to be 'Always On Top'. Use context (right-click) menu on graph to toggle..Net Rest API for Kayako Fusion 4: kayako_rest_api_2012.03.26: Added ability to search for users via organisation/email. This is much quicker than getting all users then filtering.GeoMedia PostGIS data server: PostGIS GDO 1.0.1.1: This is a new version of GeoMeda PostGIS data server which supports user rights. It means that only those feature classes, which the current user has rights to select, are visible in GeoMedia. Issues fixed in this release Fixed a problem when gdo.gfeaturesbase table has been visible in GeoMedia. To hide this table, run the previous version of Database Utilities and uncheck this table in the feature classes list. Then load the new release. Fixed a problem when coordinate system list has not...Silverlight 4 & 5 Persian DatePicker: Silverlight 4 and 5 Persian DatePicker: Added Silverlight 5 support.Y.Music: Y.Music v.1.0: ?????? ?????? ?????????. ????????: ????? ???? ????, ??????? ?????? ? ??? - Beta.Asp.NET Url Router: v1.0: build for .net 2.0 and .net 4.0menu4web: menu4web 0.0.3: menu4web 0.0.3ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.0 Final: This release installs both the ArcGIS Editor for OSM Server Component and/or ArcGIS Editor for OSM Desktop components. The Desktop tools allow you to download data from the OpenStreetMap servers and store it locally in a geodatabase. You can then use the familiar editing environment of ArcGIS Desktop to create, modify, or delete data. Once you are done editing, you can post back the edit changes to OSM to make them available to all OSM users. The Server Component allows you to quickly create...Craig's Utility Library: Craig's Utility Library 3.1: This update adds about 60 new extension methods, a couple of new classes, and a number of fixes including: Additions Added DateSpan class Added GenericDelimited class Random additions Added static thread friendly version of Random.Next called ThreadSafeNext. AOP Manager additions Added Destroy function to AOPManager (clears out all data so system can be recreated. Really only useful for testing...) ORM additions Added PagedCommand and PageCount functions to ObjectBaseClass (same as M...XNA Electric Effect: Jason Electric Effect v1.1: The library now includes 3 effect types: Line, Bezier, CatmullRom, providing different look and feel.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.1: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components are available as NuGet pa...Change default Share-site group SharePoint Online (Office 365): Change default Share-site group SharePoint Online: As default when we share a site collection or site with external users, SharePoint Online show default SharePoint groups which are Visitors and Members. By using this feature, you will get a link which you can use to customize the default groups to your custom groups and other default groups.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: C++, .NET Coding Guideline: Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Coding Guideline This document describes the coding style guideline for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team.Working with Social Data: Tag Cloud Customization: http://swatipoint.blogspot.com/2011/10/sharepoint-2010-social-featurestagging.htmlWebDAV for WHS: Version 1.0.67: - Added: Check whether the Remote Web Access is turned on or not; - Added: Check for Add-In updates;Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (March 2012) for .NET 4.0: March release of Phalanger 3.0 significantly enhances performance, adds new features and fixes many issues. See following for the list of main improvements: New features: Phalanger Tools installable for Visual Studio 2011 Beta "filter" extension with several most used filters implemented DomDocument HTML parser, loadHTML() method mail() PHP compatible function PHP 5.4 T_CALLABLE token PHP 5.4 "callable" type hint PCRE: UTF32 characters in range support configuration supports <c...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.0: Version 8.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Internationalization Custom authentication provider Access control list for forums and threads Webdeploy package checksum: abc62990189cf0d488ef915d4a55e4b14169bc01 Visit Roadmap for more details.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6: This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build ...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 1: New feature - Windows 8 Metro build New feature - JsonTextReader automatically reads ISO strings as dates New feature - Added DateFormatHandling to control whether dates are written in the MS format or ISO format, with ISO as the default New feature - Added DateTimeZoneHandling to control reading and writing DateTime time zone details New feature - Added async serialize/deserialize methods to JsonConvert New feature - Added Path to JsonReader/JsonWriter/ErrorContext and exceptions w...New ProjectsASIVeste: No description availableAuthor-it Sync Headings Plug-in: Author-it plug-in that allows the user to synchronize the Print, Help, and Web headings with the Description for each selected topic.BlogEngine.Web: BlogEngine.Web is a BlogEngine.Net converted to use Web Application Project model (WAP).Code Writer Helper: A quick solution to help code generator writers.CodeUITest: Practise CodeUI automation.DAX Studio: Excel Add-In for PowerPivot and Analysis Services Tabular projects that will include an Object Browser, query editing and execution, formula and measure editing ,syntax highlighting, integrated tracing and query execution breakdowns.Fated: Fated is an isometric-viewed, tile-based tactical RPG developed in C# using XNA to be deployed to XBox. This includes a character generation core, graphics engine, and storyline parser.iSufe???: “iSufe???”??????????????????????????????。???????????、????、?????????，??????????????。??，????iOS/Android/WAP???????，???????????????。????GPLv2??，?????????????。Kinect test project: Basic project for my kinect test applicationLoLTimers: LoLTimers by Christian Schubert 2012. Version 1.0.0.0 This is a small app that lets you keep track of the most important creep camp cooldowns. Developed in Visual Studio C#.London Priority Security Services Ltd: LPSS - London Priority Security Services LtdNMCNPM: code nhóm nmcnpmOffice 365 Anonymous Access Manager Sandbox Solution: The sandbox solution enables you to manage anonymous access of lists on Office 365. It allows setting read, modifying and adding rights. Additionally the configuration page adds the necessary events to be able to use moderations, when anonymous users are creating a list item. The second feature in the solution enables anonymous access on blogs sites, it allows to enable anonymous users to comment on a blog.Office 365 Google Analytics: This sandbox solution enables google analytics everywhere in your site collection. This allows you to use the google analytics reporting on all your Office 365 sites.Office 365 Mobile Access Enables for Public Sites & Blogs: This sandbox solution enables mobile access on Office 365 sites.OwnMFCSolution: MFC test solution.People Data Generator: Need to load a bunch of test data to represent people (e.g. name, address, phone, etc.)? Wish it looked realistic? People Data Generator is what you need. Features: *Realistic names *Realistic addresses, using real towns and postal codes *Realistic phone numbers and emails *Very ExtensibleProventi: Met dit programma kan je je voorraad van je onderneming beheren. Dit programma zal in eerste instantie gebruikt worden binnen de minionderneming Proventi. Het programma is geschreven in VB.Net en maakt gebruik van SQL Server CE voor de gegevensopslag.qCommerce: ??????????? ???????, ???????????? ??? ????? qSoftwareQuanLyOTo: Ð? án môn h?c C# qu?n lý garage ô tôRoyaSoft.ir Resources: i am use this project for my personal web site :)SGPF: The team does not have nothing to declare here!SharePoint 2010 Autocomplete Lookup Field: Autocomplete Lookup field allows type ahead functionality while entering lookup values in list items.Sharing Photos using SignalR: An MVC application using SignalR that can be used to share photos between friends and get realtime updates. An user connected to the website can upload a photo which will be automatically broadcasted to all clients connected at that point.Sistema Hoteleiro: Sistema Hoteleiro é o meu trabalho final da disciplina Arquitetura de Aplicativos Ambiente .NET da 4a turma do curso de pós-graduação de especialização em Arquitetura de Sistemas Distribuídos oferecido pelo Instituto de Educação Continuada da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de MSoftware Revolution: This project is core information site of Software Revolution named company which provides software solutions.tgryi: tgyrivbWSUS: Really decide which and when to install updates from a centralized server, globally or per host : - installation schedule - updates to install - email results - configure extra Windows Update parameters Works with WSUS server or Windows Update from Microsoft. See README.txt for more informations ! :) Current official website is http://sourceforge.net/projects/vbwsus/XamlCombine: Combines multiple XAML resource dictionaries in one. Replaces DynamicResources to StaticResources. And sort them in order of usage.XNA Shader-free Linear Burn effect: Sample demonstrating a Linear Burn effect in XNA without using custom shaderszhCms: zhCmszhtest: my test project

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 25, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 25, 2012Popular ReleasesAsp.NET Url Router: v1.0: build for .net 2.0 and .net 4.0menu4web: menu4web 0.0.3: menu4web 0.0.3Craig's Utility Library: Craig's Utility Library 3.1: This update adds about 60 new extension methods, a couple of new classes, and a number of fixes including: Additions Added DateSpan class Added GenericDelimited class Random additions Added static thread friendly version of Random.Next called ThreadSafeNext. AOP Manager additions Added Destroy function to AOPManager (clears out all data so system can be recreated. Really only useful for testing...) ORM additions Added PagedCommand and PageCount functions to ObjectBaseClass (same as M...MemoryLifter: MemoryLifter 2.4.1: KNOWN ISSUE: Sometime the automatic installation of SQL Compact Edition dependency does not work, when you are behind a proxy server. To solve that problem install SQL CE 3.5 SP2 manually from the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5783SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQLMon 4.2 alpha 14: 1. improved accuracy of logic fault checking in analysisDotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.1: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components are available as NuGet pa...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: C++, .NET Coding Guideline: Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Coding Guideline This document describes the coding style guideline for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team.WebDAV for WHS: Version 1.0.67: - Added: Check whether the Remote Web Access is turned on or not; - Added: Check for Add-In updates;Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (March 2012) for .NET 4.0: March release of Phalanger 3.0 significantly enhances performance, adds new features and fixes many issues. See following for the list of main improvements: New features: Phalanger Tools installable for Visual Studio 2011 Beta "filter" extension with several most used filters implemented DomDocument HTML parser, loadHTML() method mail() PHP compatible function PHP 5.4 T_CALLABLE token PHP 5.4 "callable" type hint PCRE: UTF32 characters in range support configuration supports <c...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.0: Version 8.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Internationalization Custom authentication provider Access control list for forums and threads Webdeploy package checksum: abc62990189cf0d488ef915d4a55e4b14169bc01 Visit Roadmap for more details.BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6: This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build ...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 1: New feature - Windows 8 Metro build New feature - JsonTextReader automatically reads ISO strings as dates New feature - Added DateFormatHandling to control whether dates are written in the MS format or ISO format, with ISO as the default New feature - Added DateTimeZoneHandling to control reading and writing DateTime time zone details New feature - Added async serialize/deserialize methods to JsonConvert New feature - Added Path to JsonReader/JsonWriter/ErrorContext and exceptions w...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Fixed a bug when ping and cmd.exe kept running in endless loop after action progress was finished. Fixed update checking from Codeplex RSS feed. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA...WebSocket4Net: WebSocket4Net 0.5: Changes in this release fixed the wss's default port bug improved JsonWebSocket supported set client access policy protocol for silverlight fixed a handshake issue in Silverlight fixed a bug that "Host" field in handshake hadn't contained port if the port is not default supported passing in Origin parameter for handshaking supported reacting pings from server side fixed a bug in data sending fixed the bug sending a closing handshake with no message which would cause an excepti...SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.5: Changes included in this release: supported closing handshake queue checking improved JSON subprotocol supported sending ping from server to client fixed a bug about sending a closing handshake with no message refactored the code to improve protocol compatibility fixed a bug about sub protocol configuration loading in Mono improved BasicSubProtocol added JsonWebSocketSessionUltra Presenter Desktop: UltraPresenter Desktop Version 2012.03.18: New release with new interface design.LoU: LoU.Dungeons V0: LoU.Dungeons V0SSIS GoogleAnalyticsSource: Version 1.0.3 x64: Now it's possible to select 225 metrics and 93 dimensions and I have modified almost all of the data types.HTML to docx Converter: htmltodocx_0.5.1_alpha: Improved UTF-8 support. Please note, for proper UTF-8 support, there appears to be an issue with PHPWord that needs to be addressed. See: http://phpword.codeplex.com/discussions/261365 for a discussion.Daun Management Studio: Daun Management Studio 0.1 (Alpha Version): These are these the alpha application packages for Daun Management Studio to manage MongoDB Server. Please visit our official website http://www.daun-project.comNew ProjectsBundle Transformer: Bundle Transformer - a modular extension for System.Web.Optimization. Classes CssTransformer and JsTransformer, included in the core of Bundle Transformer, implement interface IBundleTransform. They are intended to replace the standard classes CssMinify and JsMinify.Catel fody plugin: Catel plugin for Fody. For more information about Fody, see http://code.google.com/p/fody/.CharsetConverter: CharsetConverter makes it easier to convert a bunch of files from one charset to another. Files are backuped and recoded. You will no longer need to convert one file after another. It's developed in VB.NET.FNSYS: ??GM Spriter: GM Spriter creates copy rectangle and scaling data for sprites that can drawn in pieces. Supporting a more advanced, optimized, and less resource intensive method.htty: htty is the HTTP TTY, a console application for interacting with web servers.menu4web: menu4web is lightweight javascript code for creating dynamic menus on web sites.mvcpractice2: mvcpractice2National Transportation Information Control Protocol Suite: A Standards Compliant Extensible NTCIP Software Solution. It is utilized in all federally funded projects in the world over. It contains utilities for encoding, decoding in various layer formats such as HDLC, PMPP, SNMP (BER, PER Etc.) There are also some proprietary features. This software was developed in my Free Time because the software in use by my organization was severely lacking and always required some type of major change for the smallest thing. After implementation and...OpenEMR: OpenEMR is an open source medical practice management application (EHR EMR PMS) featuring fully integrated electronic health records, scheduling, electronic billing, internationalization, free support, a vibrant community, and a whole lot more. Mirror of Sourceforge OpenEMR project.Opera Extension Creator: The program helps create extensions for Opera. You can write code in another editor (program can automatically checks for changes on the disk) and only one click to create .oex file and install it in Opera. It's developed in (V)C# 2005 and .NET 2.0. PADNUG Site Redesign: Bringing the PADNUG web site up to current technologies and giving it a facelift.Practico1: ejercicios de practico 1Roslyn and C#-Derived Languages: Roslyn and C#-Derived Languages(for example: Axum)Series Organiser: An app that organises tv series episodes based on the file name into a series folder structure.Silverlight socket component: Beetle.SL?????Silverlight socket?????,???????????,??????????tcp??;?????????????.Skylark: Skylark is an n-tier application to test drive different .NET technologies across various domain problems. It's developed in .NET C#

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 12, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 12, 2011Popular ReleasesSizeOnDisk: 1.0.8.4: Fix: Contextual menu failures. Switch to ShellExecuteEx of Win32Api.Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.1 (June 2011) for .NET 4.0: Release of Phalanger 2.1 - the opensource PHP compiler for .NET framework 4.0. Installation package also includes basic version of Phalanger Tools for Visual Studio 2010. This allows you to easily create, build and debug Phalanger web or application inside this ultimate integrated development environment. You can even install the tools into the free Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated). To improve the performance of your application using MySQL, please use Managed MySQL Extension for Phala...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.7: Version: 2.0.0.7 (Milestone 7): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...SimplePlanner: v2.0b: For 2011-2012 Sem 1 ???2011-2012 ????Visual Studio 2010 Help Downloader: 1.0.0.3: Domain name support for proxy Cleanup old packages bug Writing to EventLog with UAC enabled bug Small fixes & RefactoringMedia Companion: MC 3.406b weekly: With this version change a movie rebuild is required when first run -else MC will lock up on exit. Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. Refer to the documentation on this site for the Installation & Setup Guide Important! If you find MC not displaying movie data properly, please try a 'movie rebuild' to reload the data from the nfo's into MC's cache. Fixes Movies Readded movie preference to rename invalid or scene nfo's to info ext...Windows Azure VM Assistant: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5 (Debug) - Test Release VersionNetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9: Changes: - fix examples (include issue 16026) - add new examples - 32Bit/64Bit Walkthrough is now available in technical Documentation. Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...Reusable Library: V1.1.3: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.54.0: New on this release: 1) Mayor performance improvements. 2) AdjustToContents now take into account the text rotation. 3) Fixed issues 6782, 6784, 6788HTML-IDEx: HTML-IDEx .15 ALPHA: This release fixes line counting a little bit and adds the masshighlight() sub, which highlights pasted and inserted code.AutoLoL: AutoLoL v2.0.3: - Improved summoner spells are now displayed - Fixed some of the startup errors people got - Double clicking an item selects it - Some usability changes that make using AutoLoL just a little easier - Bug fixes AutoLoL v2 is not an update, but an entirely new version! Please install to a different directory than AutoLoL v1Host Profiles: Host Profiles 1.0: Host Profiles 1.0 Release Quickly modify host file Automatically flush dnsVidCoder: 0.9.2: Updated to HandBrake 4024svn. This fixes problems with mpeg2 sources: corrupted previews, incorrect progress indicators and encodes that incorrectly report as failed. Fixed a problem that prevented target sizes above 2048 MB.SharePoint Search XSL Samples: SharePoint 2010 Samples: I have updated some of the samples from the 2007 release. These all work in SharePoint 2010. I removed the Pivot on File Extension because SharePoint 2010 search has refiners that perform the same function.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta5: ??AcDown?????????????，??????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta5 ?????????? ???? ?? ???????? ???"????????"?? ????????????? ????????/???? ?? ???"????"??? ?? ??????????? ?? ?? ??????????? ?? ?????????????????? ??????????????????? ???????????????? ????????????Discussions???????? ????AcDown??????????????VFPX: GoFish 4 Beta 1: Current beta is Build 144 (released 2011-06-07 ) See the GoFish4 info page for details and video link: http://vfpx.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=GoFishShowUI: Write-UI -in PowerShell: ShowUI: ShowUI is a PowerShell module to help you write rich user interfaces in script.SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.0.3: Fixed User Management screen when "RequiresQuestionAndAnswer" set to true Reply to Email Address can now be customized User Management page now only displays users that reside in the membership database Web parts have been changed to inherit from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart, so that they will display on anonymous application pages For installation and configuration steps see here.Babylon Toolkit: Babylon.Toolkit v1.0.4: Note about samples: In order to run samples, you need to configure visual studio to run them as an "Out-of-browser application". in order to do that, go to the property page of a sample project, go to the Debug tab, and check the "Out-of-browser application" radio. New features : New Effects BasicEffect3Lights (3 dir lights instead of 1 position light) CartoonEffect (work in progress) SkinnedEffect (with normal and specular map support) SplattingEffect (for multi-texturing with smooth ...New ProjectsAnything Over Anything (Network Tunneling): Tunneling software created using the Reactive Extensions framework! Rx is not just for events!!!BDDocs - Behavior Driven Documentation: An alternative tool to enable project collaboration between stakeholders in a BDD environment. Focuses more on the domain and its implementation then the technical details of the testing framework.Checkin Policies for TFS 2010: More check-in policies for TFS 2010cheese: Projet d'études sur les jeux d'échecs http://davcha.wordpress.comCodeCrusade: Code Crusade is a programming game based around Lua and C#.Dimensional Values: Dimensional Values is a class library that defines units like inch, foot, meter, second, minute, hour, Newton, Pascal, Hertz, etc. that qualify values stored in classes of different dimensions such as the length dimension, the time dimension, the force dimension, etc. The library takes care of unit conversion automatically and produces higher dimension class objects from the mathematical operators (for example, dividing a length dimensional value by a time dimensional value automatically y...Enlight Adventures: Enlight Adventures is a Windows Phone 7 game that is based on the activities of the Enlight Fountain Control Group at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.Expression Tree Serializer: .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 class library that serializes and deserializes Expression instances. Also: a WCF IQueryable LINQ Provider and Web Http (REST) client for Silverlight that provides a simplified REST client API (i.e. WCF's WebChannelFactory) that's easier to use than WebClient.F# and C# ASP.NET MVC 3 (Razor) VSIX Project Template Example: This project provides an example of how to create a F# and C# VSIX Project Template made up of a C# ASP.NET MVC 3 web application, a F# Library that contains controllers, models, etc., and a F# Library that can be used to contain unit tests. FreeForm - SilverLight Dynamic Form Builder: FreeForm is a SilverLight4 Dynamic Forms Designer. It is enterprise forms for gathering information and making tools, include a lot of Silverlight4 interface control. Now Give Up InfoPath! TO Use FreeForm! First version online DEMO: http://crmwin.com/TestPage.html?Type=tempInternational Geek Developer Alliance: Take it easy!Kouak - HTTP File Share Server: Kouak is a basic portable file share server over http. He let you share easily files in eterogenous environements and in just few click. He don't need installation and run on every machine from windows xp s2 to windows 7.MARK: MARK is an interpreted programming language, written in PHP, for beginners to learn the fundamentals of programming paradigms. To make learning easier this language cuts the syntactic learning curve out that can hinder learning - hence allowing any beginner to learn the fundamentals of programming easily, whilst having fun with an easy-to-write, powerful programming language.Movie Manager: A tool for personal Movie CollectionNairc: This is a telescope control system project of Nairc.NPD: NPD Trading SystemObjects Library: OLib is a list of objects for programming, Programmers don't have to make alot of own classes anymoreProgressbar Field: The progress bar is typically used when an application performs tasks such as project progress or sales activity. Users of an application might consider an application non-informative if there is no visual cue.PTask: PTask is an API built on the .NET Task API that simplifies the execution in parrallel of dependent units of work. It provides a fluent API for building node dependency structures and executes those structures with the maximum level of parralelization using the thread pool.Quant: quantSharpAuctioneer: A set of classes to parse and read the World of Warcraft Auctioneer Add-On scan data.SimplePlanner: NTU Simple PlannerSiteUnity Framework: SiteUnity Framework makes it easier to build website. The target of framework, write less and simple code to build complex website. For that purpose there are some modules for viewing and managing page. It's develop in Asp.NET using C#, Mssql and Jquery.SMTP Proxy for GMail and Windows Live Mail/Hotmail: GMail and Microsoft Live Mail require encrypted connections (SSL/TLS), but not all software supports SSL/TLS. SmtpProxy accepts unencrypted connections and forwards them to GMail/Live. It runs as a Windows Service and supports ALL email clients. It's developed in C#/.NET4.WipeTouch, a jQuery plugin for touch devices: jQuery plugin for touch wipe events. Detects when user wipes on all 9 directions (top, bottom, left, right and diagonals) and triggers the desired event.

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Different Flavors of Leases Back On

- by Theresa Hickman

Given the continued interest regarding the proposed changes to Lease Accounting, I decided to write another entry on this controversial topic with colorful commentary from our resident accounting expert, Seamus Moran. Background (A History Lesson) Back in 1976, the FASB issued FAS 13, “Accounting for Leases” that permitted leases to be either an operating lease or capital (finance) lease. In substance, operating leases are a form of off-balance sheet financing. According to Seamus, operating leases date back to the launch of the Boeing 707 in the 1950s. Because the aircraft was so much more expensive than previous aircrafts, the industry came up with the operating lease concept to accommodate these jet liners that dominated air transport. How it worked was the bank would buy the plane and lease it to the airline. Because the bank never controlled or flew the plane, they never placed the asset on their balance sheet, and because the airline never owned the plane, they didn’t place it on their balance sheet either. They simply treated the monthly lease payments as rental expenses on the P&L. August 2010 Original Lease Accounting Changes In August 2010, FASB and IASB decided to overhaul lease accounting as part of their joint commitment “to insure that investors and other users of financial statements are provided useful, transparent, and complete information about leasing transactions in the financial statements.” Some say that the current lease accounting standards are broken because it keeps assets off the balance sheet, hidden from investors’ view. The original proposal abolished operating leases and only permitted capital leases where all leases would be recorded on the balance sheet as assets and liabilities. The asset side would reflect the right to use the asset for the leased term, and the liability side would reflect the obligation to make lease payments. Why Companies Were Freaking Out According to the SEC, the financial impact of the aforementioned lease changes was estimated to add more than $1.3 trillion of operating lease obligations to corporate balance sheets. Many companies in various industries, especially retail, are concerned because the changes are significant and will impact existing leases with no grandfather clause for existing operating leases. Of course, the banks and airlines I mentioned earlier really hate this because neither wants to report the airplane (now costing around $60 M) as an asset. Regular companies were concerned that they would have to report routine short term leases of real estate or equipment as fixed assets, even though they were really just longer term rentals. One company we spoke to leased roadside billboards, and really did not consider them to be fixed assets in any way. Obviously, these changes would have had a profound and lasting effect on a company’s financial and real estate strategies and significantly impact its financial statements. Financial statements would show higher depreciation and interest expense with significantly higher total assets and debt. In terms of financial metrics, they’re negatively impacted. It would raise a company’s debt-to-capital ratio to reflect the higher debt compared to equity, it would negatively impact their return-on-assets because now companies will appear more asset intensive, and it will decrease EPS, lowering shareholder ROI. Feb. 2011 Recent Update The comment period on leases closed in December 2010. The FASB and the IASB have met several times since then and published their initial responses to the input they received from the various interested parties. They are “redeliberating” the principles involved in Lease Accounting. Some of the issues they are looking at include: The core definition of a lease. This will articulate principles on what is a lease and what is “not-a-lease.” One theory or supposition is that they might define a lease as the transfer of certain but not all major ownership attributes for a certain period of time. So a year’s lease of an aircraft might be a “lease,” but a year’s lease of half a floor in an office building would be “not-a-lease.” The ownership attributes transferred from the core owner to the user are different; the airline must maintain, paint, and do whatever it needs to do on the aircraft. However, the office renter will have strictly limited rights in respect to the rented space. The differences between a lease contract and service contract. Even if they call them “leases” for the purpose of commercial law, a service contract might not be accounted for as a lease. The accounting to be done by the lessee. They would define when the bank or landlord would retain the asset on their balance sheet, and perhaps by implication, when the lessor would not need to include the asset on theirs. So if the finance house keeps the airplane or office on their balance sheet, the tenant doesn’t need to. I’m not sure that I can draw the opposite conclusion where the finance house doesn’t report but the tenant must. The difference, if any, between a financing lease and other leases, and the implications to the accounting. The present value calculation when renewable terms exist. They have reduced the circumstances in which one must look at the renewable terms of a lease in calculating the present value. In most circumstances, you will use the lease term rather than the potential renewable term. Their latest discussion this past week with the contents of the discussion was not available at the time of me writing this entry. For more details, the results of the discussions are posted on both the FASB and the IASB websites. Implied Software Changes Whatever the final rules turn out to be, all ERP systems, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards, and Oracle Hyperion will need to change their software to accommodate the new rules. The following lists some changes that might have to be made to accounting software depending on what the final standards will be in June 2011: Lease tracking may require modifications with tracking of additional lease details that might require a centralized repository to maintain Accounting may need to be modified as there are many changes to how capital leases and the new “other than finance” leases are accounted for both on the lessee and lessor side. For example, valuation, amortization, and disclosure will be considerably different requiring different types of data to be captured. Companies may need to modify their chart of accounts depending on how they want to track leases, which could then impact financial reporting and consolidation Business processes may require changes which could then impact internal controls Software applications may need to perform more advanced computations on leases Reports and KPIs may need to reflect new operating metrics Hold Onto Your Seats Before you redo all your lease agreements and call your software vendors asking when the changes to the software will be made, remember that the rules are not finalized yet, and from appearances, will not reflect the proposals in the exposure draft. Not only are there objections to putting the operating lease assets on anyone’s balance sheet, there are lots of objections to subjectivity and the data required for the valuation. According to Seamus, there is huge opposition from New York bankers, the airlines, the EU, the Communist Party of China (since it impacts their exporting business), and Republicans (hearing complaints from small and large businesses). Even if everyone can agree on the proposed changes, 2013 might be the earliest that companies would need to change how they report leases. The Boards will finish their deliberations in April, May or June 2011. As we’ve seen with other Exposure Drafts, if the changes are minor and the principles met the General Acceptance consensus criteria, the Standard could be finalized at that time. However, if substantial changes are made, a fresh exposure draft, comment period, and review period might be involved, too. Seamus added an interesting perspective. Even if the proposed changes do pass, don’t you think our customers, such as Boeing, GE Capital, United Airlines, etc. will be clever enough to come up with a new kind of financing arrangement that complies with the new accounting? How about the large retail customers, such as Best Buy and Macerich? Don’t you think they might simply cut deals around retail locations with new contracts that prevent their leases from being capital leases? Instead of blindly adapting the software to meet the principles outlined in the final standard, our software needs to accommodate how businesses will respond to the new rules. We cannot know our customers’ responses until the rules are finalized. Oracle is aware of the potential changes and is staying abreast of the developments through our domain expertise staff, our relationship with customers, our market awareness, and, of course, our relationships with the Big 4. This is part of our normal process with respect to worldwide regulatory compliance. Oracle products have been IFRS and GAAP compliant for years and we will continue to maintain those standards going forward.

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Introduction to LinqPad Driver for StreamInsight 2.1

- by Roman Schindlauer

We are announcing the availability of the LinqPad driver for StreamInsight 2.1. The purpose of this blog post is to offer a quick introduction into the new features that we added to the StreamInsight LinqPad driver. We’ll show you how to connect to a remote server, how to inspect the entities present of that server, how to compose on top of them and how to manage their lifetime. Installing the driver Info on how to install the driver can be found in an earlier blog post here. Establishing connections As you click on the “Add Connection” link in the left pane you will notice that now it’s possible to build the data context automatically. The new driver appears as an option in the upper list, and if you pick it you will open a connection dialog that lets you connect to a remote StreamInsight server. The connection dialog lets you specify the address of the remote server. You will notice that it’s possible to pick up the binding information from the configuration file of the LinqPad application (which is normally in the same folder as LinqPad.exe and is called LinqPad.exe.config). In order for the context to be generated you need to pick an application from the server. The control is editable hence you can create a new application if you don’t want to make changes to an existing application. If you choose a new application name you will be prompted for confirmation before this gets created. Once you click OK the connection is created and you can start issuing queries against the remote server. If there’s any connectivity error the connection is marked with a red X and you can see the error message informing you what went wrong (i.e., the remote server could not be reached etc.). The context for remote servers Let’s take a look at what happens after we are connected successfully. Every LinqPad query runs inside a context – think of it as a class that wraps all the code that you’re writing. If you’re connecting to a live server the context will contain the following: The application object itself. All entities present in this application (sources, sinks, subjects and processes). The picture below shows a snapshot of the left pane of LinqPad after a successful connection. Every entity on the server has a different icon which will allow users to figure out its purpose. You will also notice that some entities have a string in parentheses following the name. It should be interpreted as such: the first name is the name of the property of the context class and the second name is the name of the entity as it exists on the server. Not all valid entity names are valid identifier names so in cases where we had to make a transformation you see both. Note also that as you hover over the entities you get IntelliSense with their types – more on that later. Remoting is not supported As you play with the entities exposed by the context you will notice that you can’t read and write directly to/from them. If for instance you’re trying to dump the content of an entity you will get an error message telling you that in the current version remoting is not supported. This is because the entity lives on the remote server and dumping its content means reading the events produced by this entity into the local process. ObservableSource.Dump(); Will yield the following error: Reading from a remote 'System.Reactive.Linq.IQbservable`1[System.Int32]' is not supported. Use the 'Microsoft.ComplexEventProcessing.Linq.RemoteProvider.Bind' method to read from the source using a remote observer. This basically tells you that you can call the Bind() method to direct the output of this source to a sink that has to be defined on the remote machine as well. You can’t bring the results to the LinqPad window unless you write code specifically for that. Compose queries You may ask – what's the purpose of all that? After all the same information is present in the EventFlowDebugger, why bother with showing it in LinqPad? First of all, What gets exposed in LinqPad is not what you see in the debugger. In LinqPad we have a property on the context class for every entity that lives on the server. Because LinqPad offers IntelliSense we in fact have much more information about the entity, and more importantly we can compose with that entity very easily. For example, let’s say that this code creates an entity: using (var server = Server.Connect(...)) { var a = server.CreateApplication("WhiteFish"); var src = a .DefineObservable<int>(() => Observable.Range(0, 3)) .Deploy("ObservableSource"); If later we want to compose with the source we have to fetch it and then we can bind something to a.GetObservable<int>("ObservableSource)").Bind(... This means that we had to know a bunch of things about this: that it’s a source, that it’s an observable, it produces a result with payload Int32 and it’s named “ObservableSource”. Only the second and last bits of information are present in the debugger, by the way. As you type in the query window you see that all the entities are present, you get IntelliSense support for them and it’s much easier to make sense of what’s available. Let’s look at a scenario where composition is plausible. With the new programming model it’s possible to create “cold” sources that are parameterized. There was a way to accomplish that even in the previous version by passing parameters to the adapters, but this time it’s much more elegant because the expression declares what parameters are required. Say that we hover the mouse over the ThrottledSource source – we will see that its type is Func<int, int, IQbservable<int>> - this in effect means that we need to pass two int parameters before we can get a source that produces events, and the type for those events is int – in the particular case of my example I had the source produce a range of integers and the two parameters were the start and end of the range. So we see how a developer can create a source that is not running yet. Then someone else (e.g. an administrator) can pass whatever parameters appropriate and run the process. Proxy Types Here’s an interesting scenario – what if someone created a source on a server but they forgot to tell you what type they used. Worse yet, they might have used an anonymous type and even though they can refer to it by name you can’t figure out how to use that type. Let’s walk through an example that shows how you can compose against types you don’t need to have the definition of. This is how we can create a source that returns an anonymous type: Application.DefineObservable(() => Observable.Range(1, 10).Select(i => new { I = i })).Deploy("O1"); Now if we refresh the connection we can see the new source named O1 appear in the list. But what’s more important is that we now have a type to work with. So we can compose a query that refers to the anonymous type. var threshold = new StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0<int>(5); var filter = from i in O1 where i > threshold select i; filter.Deploy("O2"); You will notice that the anonymous type defined with this statement: new { I = i } can now be manipulated by a client that does not have access to it because the LinqPad driver has generated another type in its stead, named StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0. This type has all the properties and fields of the type defined on the server, except in this case we can instantiate values and use it to compose more queries. It is worth noting that the same thing works for types that are not anonymous – the test is if the LinqPad driver can resolve the type or not. If it’s not possible then a new type will be generated that approximates the type that exists on the server. Control metadata In addition to composing processes on top of the existing entities we can do other useful things. We can delete them – nothing new here as we simply access the entities through the Entities collection of the application class. Here is where having their real name in parentheses comes handy. There’s another way to find out what’s behind a property – dump its expression. The first line in the output tells us what’s the name of the entity used to build this property in the context. Runtime information So let’s create a process to see what happens. We can bind a source to a sink and run the resulting process. If you right click on the connection you can refresh it and see the process present in the list of entities. Then you can drag the process to the query window and see that you can have access to process object in the Processes collection of the application. You can then manipulate the process (delete it, read its diagnostic view etc.). Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 2 – Learn through disagreement

- by Chris George

I think I was in the right place! During Day 1 I kept on reading tweets about Lean Coffee that has happened earlier that morning. It intrigued me and I figured in for a penny in for a pound, and set my alarm for 6:45am. Following the award night the night before, it was _really_ hard getting up when it went off, but I did and after a very early breakfast, set off for the 10 min walk to the Dorint. With Lean Coffee due to start at 07:30, I arrived at the hotel and made my way to one of the hotel bars. I soon realised I was in the right place as although the bar was empty, there was a table with post-it’s and pens! This MUST be the place! The premise of Lean Coffee is to have several small timeboxed discussions. Everyone writes down what they would like to discuss on post-its that are then briefly explained and submitted to the pile. Once everyone is done, the group dot-votes on the topics. The topics are then sorted by the dot vote counts and the discussions begin. Each discussion had 8 mins to start with, which meant it prevented the discussions getting off topic too much. After the time elapsed, the group had a vote whether to extend the discussion by a further 4 mins or move on. Several discussion were had around training, soft skills etc. The conversations were really interesting and there were quite a few good ideas. Overall it was a very enjoyable experience, certainly worth the early start! Make Melly Happy Following Lean Coffee was real coffee, and much needed that was! The first keynote of the day was “Let’s help Melly (Changing Work into Life)”by Jurgen Appelo. Draw lines to track happiness This was a very interesting presentation, and set the day nicely. The theme to the keynote was projects are about the people, more-so than the actual tasks. So he started by showing a photo of an employee ‘Melly’ who looked happy enough. He then stated that she looked happy but actually hated her job. In fact 50% of Americans hate their jobs. He went on to say that the world over 50% of people hate Americans their jobs. Jurgen talked about many ways to reduce the feedback cycle, not only of the project, but of the people management. Ideas such as Happiness doors, happiness tracking (drawing lines on a wall indicating your happiness for that day), kudo boxes (to compliment a colleague for good work). All of these (and more) ideas stimulate conversation amongst the team, lead to early detection of issues and investigation of solutions. I’ve massively simplified Jurgen’s keynote and have certainly not done it justice, so I will post a link to the video once it’s available. Following more coffee, the next talk was “How releasing faster changes testing” by Alexander Schwartz. This is a topic very close to our hearts at the moment, so I was eager to find out any juicy morsels that could help us achieve more frequent releases, and Alex did not disappoint. He started off by confirming something that I have been a firm believer in for a number of years now; adding more people can do more harm than good when trying to release. This is for a number of reasons, but just adding new people to a team at such a critical time can be more of a drain on resources than they add. The alternative is to have the whole team have shared responsibility for faster delivery. So the whole team is responsible for quality and testing. Obviously you will have the test engineers on the project who have the specialist skills, but there is no reason that the entire team cannot do exploratory testing on the product. This links nicely with the Developer Exploratory testing presented by Sigge on Day 1, and certainly something that my team are really striving towards. Focus on cycle time, so what can be done to reduce the time between dev cycles, release cycles. What’s stops a release, what delays a release? all good solid questions that can be answered. Alex suggested that perhaps the product doesn’t need to be fully tested. Doing less testing will reduce the cycle time therefore get the release out faster. He suggested a risk-based approach to planning what testing needs to happen. Reducing testing could have an impact on revenue if it causes harm to customers, so test the ‘right stuff’! Determine a set of tests that are ‘face saving’ or ‘smoke’ tests. These tests cover the core functionality of the product and aim to prevent major embarrassment if these areas were to fail! Amongst many other very good points, Alex suggested that a good approach would be to release after every new feature is added. So do a bit of work -> release, do some more work -> release. By releasing small increments of work, the impact on the customer of bugs being introduced is reduced. Red Pill, Blue Pill The second keynote of the day was “Adaptation and improvisation – but your weakness is not your technique” by Markus Gartner and proved to be another very good presentation. It started off quoting lines from the Matrix which relate to adapting, improvising, realisation and mastery. It has alot of nerds in the room smiling! Markus went on to explain how through deliberate practice ( and a lot of it!) you can achieve mastery, but then you never stop learning. Through methods such as code retreats, testing dojos, workshops you can continually improve and learn. The code retreat idea was one that interested me. It involved pairing to write an automated test for, say, 45 mins, they deleting all the code, finding a different partner and writing the same test again! This is another keynote where the video will speak louder than anything I can write here! Markus did elaborate on something that Lisa and Janet had touched on yesterday whilst busting the myth that “Testers Must Code”. Whilst it is true that to be a tester, you don’t need to code, it is becoming more common that there is this crossover happening where more testers are coding and more programmers are testing. Markus made a special distinction between programmers and developers as testers develop tests code so this helped to make that clear. “Extending Continuous Integration and TDD with Continuous Testing” by Jason Ayers was my next talk after lunch. We already do CI and a bit of TDD on my project team so I was interested to see what this continuous testing thing was all about and whether it would actually work for us. At the start of the presentation I was of the opinion that it just would not work for us because our tests are too slow, and that would be the case for many people. Jason started off by setting the scene and saying that those doing TDD spend between 10-15% of their time waiting for tests to run. This can be reduced by testing less often, reducing the test time but this then increases the risk of introduced bugs not being spotted quickly. Therefore, in comes Continuous Testing (CT). CT systems run your unit tests whenever you save some code and runs them in the background so you can continue working. This is a really nice idea, but to do this, your tests must be fast, independent and reliable. The latter two should be the case anyway, and the first is ideal, but hard! Jason makes several suggestions to make tests fast. Firstly keep the scope of the test small, secondly spin off any expensive tests into a suite which is run, perhaps, overnight or outside of the CT system at any rate. So this started to change my mind, perhaps we could re-engineer our tests, and continuously run the quick ones to give an element of coverage. This talk was very interesting and I’ve already tried a couple of the tools mentioned on our product (Mighty Moose and NCrunch). Sadly due to the way our solution is built, it currently doesn’t work, but we will look at whether we can make this work because this has the potential to be a mini-game-changer for us. Using the wrong data Gojko’s Hierarchy of Quality The final keynote of the day was “Reinventing software quality” by Gojko Adzic. He opened the talk with the statement “We’ve got quality wrong because we are using the wrong data”! Gojko then went on to explain that we should judge a bug by whether the customer cares about it, not by whether we think it’s important. Why spend time fixing issues that the customer just wouldn’t care about and releasing months later because of this? Surely it’s better to release now and get customer feedback? This was another reference to the idea of how it’s better to build the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Get feedback early to make sure you’re making the right thing. Gojko then showed something which was very analogous to Maslow’s heirachy of needs. Successful – does it contribute to the business? Useful – does it do what the user wants Usable – does it do what it’s supposed to without breaking Performant/Secure – is it secure/is the performance acceptable Deployable Functionally ok – can it be deployed without breaking? He then explained that User Stories should focus on change. In other words they should focus on the users needs, not the users process. Describe what the change will be, how that change will happen then measure it! Networking and Beer Following the day’s closing keynote, there were drinks and nibble for the ‘Networking’ evening. This was a great opportunity to talk to people. I find approaching strangers very uncomfortable but once again, when in Rome! Pete Walen and I had a long conversation about only fixing issues that the customer cares about versus fixing issues that make you proud of your software! Without saying much, and asking the right questions, Pete made me re-evaluate my thoughts on the matter. Clever, very clever! Oh and he ‘bought’ me a beer! My Takeaway Triple from Day 2: release small and release often to minimize issues creeping in and get faster feedback from ‘the real world’ Focus on issues that the customers care about, not what we think is important It’s okay to disagree with someone, even if they are well respected agile testing gurus, that’s how discussion and learning happens!

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array and array_view from amp.h

- by Daniel Moth

This is a very long post, but it also covers what are probably the classes (well, array_view at least) that you will use the most with C++ AMP, so I hope you enjoy it! Overview The concurrency::array and concurrency::array_view template classes represent multi-dimensional data of type T, of N dimensions, specified at compile time (and you can later access the number of dimensions via the rank property). If N is not specified, it is assumed that it is 1 (i.e. single-dimensional case). They are rectangular (not jagged). The difference between them is that array is a container of data, whereas array_view is a wrapper of a container of data. So in that respect, array behaves like an STL container, whereas the closest thing an array_view behaves like is an STL iterator (albeit with random access and allowing you to view more than one element at a time!). The data in the array (whether provided at creation time or added later) resides on an accelerator (which is specified at creation time either explicitly by the developer, or set to the default accelerator at creation time by the runtime) and is laid out contiguously in memory. The data provided to the array_view is not stored by/in the array_view, because the array_view is simply a view over the real source (which can reside on the CPU or other accelerator). The underlying data is copied on demand to wherever the array_view is accessed. Elements which differ by one in the least significant dimension of the array_view are adjacent in memory. array objects must be captured by reference into the lambda you pass to the parallel_for_each call, whereas array_view objects must be captured by value (into the lambda you pass to the parallel_for_each call). Creating array and array_view objects and relevant properties You can create array_view objects from other array_view objects of the same rank and element type (shallow copy, also possible via assignment operator) so they point to the same underlying data, and you can also create array_view objects over array objects of the same rank and element type e.g. array_view<int,3> a(b); // b can be another array or array_view of ints with rank=3 Note: Unlike the constructors above which can be called anywhere, the ones in the rest of this section can only be called from CPU code. You can create array objects from other array objects of the same rank and element type (copy and move constructors) and from other array_view objects, e.g. array<float,2> a(b); // b can be another array or array_view of floats with rank=2 To create an array from scratch, you need to at least specify an extent object, e.g. array<int,3> a(myExtent);. Note that instead of an explicit extent object, there are convenience overloads when N<=3 so you can specify 1-, 2-, 3- integers (dependent on the array's rank) and thus have the extent created for you under the covers. At any point, you can access the array's extent thought the extent property. The exact same thing applies to array_view (extent as constructor parameters, incl. convenience overloads, and property). While passing only an extent object to create an array is enough (it means that the array will be written to later), it is not enough for the array_view case which must always wrap over some other container (on which it relies for storage space and actual content). So in addition to the extent object (that describes the shape you'd like to be viewing/accessing that data through), to create an array_view from another container (e.g. std::vector) you must pass in the container itself (which must expose .data() and a .size() methods, e.g. like std::array does), e.g. array_view<int,2> aaa(myExtent, myContainerOfInts); Similarly, you can create an array_view from a raw pointer of data plus an extent object. Back to the array case, to optionally initialize the array with data, you can pass an iterator pointing to the start (and optionally one pointing to the end of the source container) e.g. array<double,1> a(5, myVector.begin(), myVector.end()); We saw that arrays are bound to an accelerator at creation time, so in case you don’t want the C++ AMP runtime to assign the array to the default accelerator, all array constructors have overloads that let you pass an accelerator_view object, which you can later access via the accelerator_view property. Note that at the point of initializing an array with data, a synchronous copy of the data takes place to the accelerator, and then to copy any data back we'll see that an explicit copy call is required. This does not happen with the array_view where copying is on demand... refresh and synchronize on array_view Note that in the previous section on constructors, unlike the array case, there was no overload that accepted an accelerator_view for array_view. That is because the array_view is simply a wrapper, so the allocation of the data has already taken place before you created the array_view. When you capture an array_view variable in your call to parallel_for_each, the copy of data between the non-CPU accelerator and the CPU takes place on demand (i.e. it is implicit, versus the explicit copy that has to happen with the array). There are some subtleties to the on-demand-copying that we cover next. The assumption when using an array_view is that you will continue to access the data through the array_view, and not through the original underlying source, e.g. the pointer to the data that you passed to the array_view's constructor. So if you modify the data through the array_view on the GPU, the original pointer on the CPU will not "know" that, unless one of two things happen: you access the data through the array_view on the CPU side, i.e. using indexing that we cover below you explicitly call the array_view's synchronize method on the CPU (this also gets called in the array_view's destructor for you) Conversely, if you make a change to the underlying data through the original source (e.g. the pointer), the array_view will not "know" about those changes, unless you call its refresh method. Finally, note that if you create an array_view of const T, then the data is copied to the accelerator on demand, but it does not get copied back, e.g. array_view<const double, 5> myArrView(…); // myArrView will not get copied back from GPU There is also a similar mechanism to achieve the reverse, i.e. not to copy the data of an array_view to the GPU. copy_to, data, and global copy/copy_async functions Both array and array_view expose two copy_to overloads that allow copying them to another array, or to another array_view, and these operations can also be achieved with assignment (via the = operator overloads). Also both array and array_view expose a data method, to get a raw pointer to the underlying data of the array or array_view, e.g. float* f = myArr.data();. Note that for array_view, this only works when the rank is equal to 1, due to the data only being contiguous in one dimension as covered in the overview section. Finally, there are a bunch of global concurrency::copy functions returning void (and corresponding concurrency::copy_async functions returning a future) that allow copying between arrays and array_views and iterators etc. Just browse intellisense or amp.h directly for the full set. Note that for array, all copying described throughout this post is deep copying, as per other STL container expectations. You can never have two arrays point to the same data. indexing into array and array_view plus projection Reading or writing data elements of an array is only legal when the code executes on the same accelerator as where the array was bound to. In the array_view case, you can read/write on any accelerator, not just the one where the original data resides, and the data gets copied for you on demand. In both cases, the way you read and write individual elements is via indexing as described next. To access (or set the value of) an element, you can index into it by passing it an index object via the subscript operator. Furthermore, if the rank is 3 or less, you can use the function ( ) operator to pass integer values instead of having to use an index object. e.g. array<float,2> arr(someExtent, someIterator); //or array_view<float,2> arr(someExtent, someContainer); index<2> idx(5,4); float f1 = arr[idx]; float f2 = arr(5,4); //f2 ==f1 //and the reverse for assigning, e.g. arr(idx[0], 7) = 6.9; Note that for both array and array_view, regardless of rank, you can also pass a single integer to the subscript operator which results in a projection of the data, and (for both array and array_view) you get back an array_view of rank N-1 (or if the rank was 1, you get back just the element at that location). Not Covered In this already very long post, I am not going to cover three very cool methods (and related overloads) that both array and array_view expose: view_as, section, reinterpret_as. We'll revisit those at some point in the future, probably on the team blog. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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What’s new in MVVM Light V3

- by Laurent Bugnion

V3 of the MVVM Light Toolkit was released during MIX10, after quite a long alpha stage. This post lists the new features in MVVM Light V3. Compatibility MVVM Light Toolkit V3 can be installed for the following tools and framework versions: Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Expression Blend 3 Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5 SP1 Silverlight 3 Visual Studio 2010 RC, Expression Blend 4 beta Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5 SP1 Windows Presentation Foundation 4 RC Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 RC For more information about installing the MVVM Light Toolkit V3, please visit this page. For cleaning up existing installation, see this page. New in V3 RTM The following features have been added after V3 alpha3: Project template for the Windows Phone 7 series (Silverlight) This new template allows you to create a new MVVM Light application in Visual Studio 2010 RC and to run it in the Windows Phone 7 series emulator. This template uses the Silverlight 3 version of the MVVM Light Toolkit V3. At this time, only the essentials features of the GalaSoft.MvvmLight.dll assembly are supported on the phone. New in V3 alpha3 The following features have been added after V3 alpha2: New logo An awesome logo has been designed for MVVM Light by Philippe Schutz. DispatcherHelper class (in GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Extras.dll) This class is useful when you work on multi-threaded WPF or Silverlight applications. Initializing: The DispatcherHelper class must be initialized in the UI thread. For example, you can initialize the class in a Silverlight application’s Application_Startup event handler, or in the WPF application’s static App constructor (in App.xaml). // Initializing in Silverlight (in App.xaml) private void Application_Startup( object sender, StartupEventArgs e) { RootVisual = new MainPage(); DispatcherHelper.Initialize(); } // Initializing in WPF (in App.xaml) static App() { DispatcherHelper.Initialize(); } Verifying if a property exists The ViewModelBase.RaisePropertyChanged method now checks if a given property name exists on the ViewModel class, and throws an exception if that property cannot be found. This is useful to detect typos in a property name, for example during a refactoring. Note that the check is only done in DEBUG mode. Replacing IDisposable with ICleanup The IDisposable implementation in the ViewModelBase class has been marked obsolete. Instead, the ICleanup interface (and its Cleanup method) has been added. Implementing IDisposable in a ViewModel is still possible, but must be done explicitly. IDisposable in ViewModelBase was a bad practice, because it supposes that the ViewModel is garbage collected after Dispose is called. instead, the Cleanup method does not have such expectation. The ViewModelLocator class (created when an MVVM Light project template is used in Visual Studio or Expression Blend) exposes a static Cleanup method, which should in turn call each ViewModel’s Cleanup method. The ViewModel is free to override the Cleanup method if local cleanup must be performed. Passing EventArgs to command with EventToCommand The EventToCommand class is used to bind any event to an ICommand (typically on the ViewModel). In this case, it can be useful to pass the event’s EventArgs parameter to the command in the ViewModel. For example, for the MouseEnter event, you can pass the MouseEventArgs to a RelayCommand<MouseEventArgs> as shown in the next listings. Note: Bringing UI specific classes (such as EventArgs) into the ViewModel reduces the testability of the ViewModel, and thus should be used with care. Setting EventToCommand and PassEventArgsToCommand: <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <i:Interaction.Triggers> <i:EventTrigger EventName="MouseEnter"> <cmd:EventToCommand Command="{Binding MyCommand}" PassEventArgsToCommand="True" /> </i:EventTrigger> </i:Interaction.Triggers> </Grid> Getting the EventArgs in the command public RelayCommand<MouseEventArgs> MyCommand { get; private set; } public MainViewModel() { MyCommand = new RelayCommand<MouseEventArgs>(e => { // e is of type MouseEventArgs }); } Changes to templates Various changes have been made to project templates and item templates to make them more compatible with Silverlight 4 and to improve their visibility in Visual Studio and Expression Blend. Bug corrections When a message is sent through the Messenger class using the method Messenger.Default.Send<T>(T message, object token), and the token is a simple value (for example int), the message was not sent correctly. This bug is now corrected. New in V3 The following features have been added after V2. Sending messages with callback Certain classes have been added to the GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Messaging namespace, allowing sending a message and getting a callback from the recipient. These classes are: NotificationMessageWithCallback: Base class for messages with callback. NotificationMessageAction: A class with string notification, and a parameterless callback. NotificationMessageAction<T>: A class with string notification, and a callback with a parameter of type T. To send a message with callback, use the following code: var message = new NotificationMessageAction<bool>( "Hello world", callbackMessage => { // This is the callback code if (callbackMessage) { // ... } }); Messenger.Default.Send(message); To register and receive a message with callback, use the following code: Messenger.Default.Register<NotificationMessageAction<bool>>( this, message => { // Do something // Execute the callback message.Execute(true); }); Messenger.Default can be overriden The Messenger.Default property can also be replaced, for example for unit testing purposes, by using the Messenger.OverrideDefault method. All the public methods of the Messenger class have been made virtual, and can be overridden in the test messenger class. Sending messages to interfaces In V2, it was possible to deliver messages targeted to instances of a given class. in V3 it is still possible, but in addition you can deliver a message to instances that implement a certain interface. The message will not be delivered to other recipients. Use the overload Messenger.Default.Send<TMessage, TTarget>(TMessage message) where TTarget is, in fact, an interface (for example IDisposable). Of course the recipient must register to receive the type of message TMessage. Sending messages with a token Messages can now be sent through the Messenger with a token. To send a message with token, use the method overload Send<TMessage>(TMessage message, object token). To receive a message with token, use the methods Register<TMessage>(object recipient, object token, Action<TMessage> action) or Register<TMessage>(object recipient, object token, bool receiveDerivedMessagesToo, Action<TMessage> action) The token can be a simple value (int, string, etc…) or an instance of a class. The message is not delivered to recipients who registered with a different token, or with no token at all. Renaming CommandMessage to NotificationMessage To avoid confusion with ICommand and RelayCommand, the CommandMessage class has been renamed to NotificationMessage. This message class can be used to deliver a notification (of type string) to a recipient. ViewModelBase constructor with IMessenger The ViewModelBase class now accepts an IMessenger parameter. If this constructor is used instead of the default empty constructor, the IMessenger passed as parameter will be used to broadcast a PropertyChangedMessage when the method RaisePropertyChanged<T>(string propertyName, T oldValue, T newValue, bool broadcast) is used. In the default ViewModelBase constructor is used, the Messenger.Default instance will be used instead. EventToCommand behavior The EventToCommand behavior has been added in V3. It can be used to bind any event of any FrameworkElement to any ICommand (for example a RelayCommand located in the ViewModel). More information about the EventToCommand behavior can be found here and here. Updated the project templates to remove the sample application The project template has been updated to remove the sample application that was created every time that a new MVVM Light application was created in Visual Studio or Blend. This makes the creation of a new application easier, because you don’t need to remove code before you can start writing code. Bug corrections Some bugs that were in Version 2 have been corrected: In some occasions, an exception could be thrown when a recipient was registered for a message at the same time as a message was received. New names for DLLs If you upgrade an existing installation, you will need to change the reference to the DLLs in C:\Program Files\Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)\Mvvm Light Toolkit\Binaries. The assemblies have been moved, and the versions for Silverlight 4 and for WPF4 have been renamed, to avoid some confusion. It is now easier to make sure that you are using the correct DLL. WPF3.5SP1, Silverlight 3 When using the DLLs, make sure that you use the correct versions. WPF4, Silverlight 4 When using the DLLs, make sure that you use the correct versions. Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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C#/.NET Little Wonders: Constraining Generics with Where Clause

- by James Michael Hare

Back when I was primarily a C++ developer, I loved C++ templates. The power of writing very reusable generic classes brought the art of programming to a brand new level. Unfortunately, when .NET 1.0 came about, they didn’t have a template equivalent. With .NET 2.0 however, we finally got generics, which once again let us spread our wings and program more generically in the world of .NET However, C# generics behave in some ways very differently from their C++ template cousins. There is a handy clause, however, that helps you navigate these waters to make your generics more powerful. The Problem – C# Assumes Lowest Common Denominator In C++, you can create a template and do nearly anything syntactically possible on the template parameter, and C++ will not check if the method/fields/operations invoked are valid until you declare a realization of the type. Let me illustrate with a C++ example: 1: // compiles fine, C++ makes no assumptions as to T 2: template <typename T> 3: class ReverseComparer 4: { 5: public: 6: int Compare(const T& lhs, const T& rhs) 7: { 8: return rhs.CompareTo(lhs); 9: } 10: }; Notice that we are invoking a method CompareTo() off of template type T. Because we don’t know at this point what type T is, C++ makes no assumptions and there are no errors. C++ tends to take the path of not checking the template type usage until the method is actually invoked with a specific type, which differs from the behavior of C#: 1: // this will NOT compile! C# assumes lowest common denominator. 2: public class ReverseComparer<T> 3: { 4: public int Compare(T lhs, T rhs) 5: { 6: return lhs.CompareTo(rhs); 7: } 8: } So why does C# give us a compiler error even when we don’t yet know what type T is? This is because C# took a different path in how they made generics. Unless you specify otherwise, for the purposes of the code inside the generic method, T is basically treated like an object (notice I didn’t say T is an object). That means that any operations, fields, methods, properties, etc that you attempt to use of type T must be available at the lowest common denominator type: object. Now, while object has the broadest applicability, it also has the fewest specific. So how do we allow our generic type placeholder to do things more than just what object can do? Solution: Constraint the Type With Where Clause So how do we get around this in C#? The answer is to constrain the generic type placeholder with the where clause. Basically, the where clause allows you to specify additional constraints on what the actual type used to fill the generic type placeholder must support. You might think that narrowing the scope of a generic means a weaker generic. In reality, though it limits the number of types that can be used with the generic, it also gives the generic more power to deal with those types. In effect these constraints says that if the type meets the given constraint, you can perform the activities that pertain to that constraint with the generic placeholders. Constraining Generic Type to Interface or Superclass One of the handiest where clause constraints is the ability to specify the type generic type must implement a certain interface or be inherited from a certain base class. For example, you can’t call CompareTo() in our first C# generic without constraints, but if we constrain T to IComparable<T>, we can: 1: public class ReverseComparer<T> 2: where T : IComparable<T> 3: { 4: public int Compare(T lhs, T rhs) 5: { 6: return lhs.CompareTo(rhs); 7: } 8: } Now that we’ve constrained T to an implementation of IComparable<T>, this means that our variables of generic type T may now call any members specified in IComparable<T> as well. This means that the call to CompareTo() is now legal. If you constrain your type, also, you will get compiler warnings if you attempt to use a type that doesn’t meet the constraint. This is much better than the syntax error you would get within C++ template code itself when you used a type not supported by a C++ template. Constraining Generic Type to Only Reference Types Sometimes, you want to assign an instance of a generic type to null, but you can’t do this without constraints, because you have no guarantee that the type used to realize the generic is not a value type, where null is meaningless. Well, we can fix this by specifying the class constraint in the where clause. By declaring that a generic type must be a class, we are saying that it is a reference type, and this allows us to assign null to instances of that type: 1: public static class ObjectExtensions 2: { 3: public static TOut Maybe<TIn, TOut>(this TIn value, Func<TIn, TOut> accessor) 4: where TOut : class 5: where TIn : class 6: { 7: return (value != null) ? accessor(value) : null; 8: } 9: } In the example above, we want to be able to access a property off of a reference, and if that reference is null, pass the null on down the line. To do this, both the input type and the output type must be reference types (yes, nullable value types could also be considered applicable at a logical level, but there’s not a direct constraint for those). Constraining Generic Type to only Value Types Similarly to constraining a generic type to be a reference type, you can also constrain a generic type to be a value type. To do this you use the struct constraint which specifies that the generic type must be a value type (primitive, struct, enum, etc). Consider the following method, that will convert anything that is IConvertible (int, double, string, etc) to the value type you specify, or null if the instance is null. 1: public static T? ConvertToNullable<T>(IConvertible value) 2: where T : struct 3: { 4: T? result = null; 5: 6: if (value != null) 7: { 8: result = (T)Convert.ChangeType(value, typeof(T)); 9: } 10: 11: return result; 12: } Because T was constrained to be a value type, we can use T? (System.Nullable<T>) where we could not do this if T was a reference type. Constraining Generic Type to Require Default Constructor You can also constrain a type to require existence of a default constructor. Because by default C# doesn’t know what constructors a generic type placeholder does or does not have available, it can’t typically allow you to call one. That said, if you give it the new() constraint, it will mean that the type used to realize the generic type must have a default (no argument) constructor. Let’s assume you have a generic adapter class that, given some mappings, will adapt an item from type TFrom to type TTo. Because it must create a new instance of type TTo in the process, we need to specify that TTo has a default constructor: 1: // Given a set of Action<TFrom,TTo> mappings will map TFrom to TTo 2: public class Adapter<TFrom, TTo> : IEnumerable<Action<TFrom, TTo>> 3: where TTo : class, new() 4: { 5: // The list of translations from TFrom to TTo 6: public List<Action<TFrom, TTo>> Translations { get; private set; } 7: 8: // Construct with empty translation and reverse translation sets. 9: public Adapter() 10: { 11: // did this instead of auto-properties to allow simple use of initializers 12: Translations = new List<Action<TFrom, TTo>>(); 13: } 14: 15: // Add a translator to the collection, useful for initializer list 16: public void Add(Action<TFrom, TTo> translation) 17: { 18: Translations.Add(translation); 19: } 20: 21: // Add a translator that first checks a predicate to determine if the translation 22: // should be performed, then translates if the predicate returns true 23: public void Add(Predicate<TFrom> conditional, Action<TFrom, TTo> translation) 24: { 25: Translations.Add((from, to) => 26: { 27: if (conditional(from)) 28: { 29: translation(from, to); 30: } 31: }); 32: } 33: 34: // Translates an object forward from TFrom object to TTo object. 35: public TTo Adapt(TFrom sourceObject) 36: { 37: var resultObject = new TTo(); 38: 39: // Process each translation 40: Translations.ForEach(t => t(sourceObject, resultObject)); 41: 42: return resultObject; 43: } 44: 45: // Returns an enumerator that iterates through the collection. 46: public IEnumerator<Action<TFrom, TTo>> GetEnumerator() 47: { 48: return Translations.GetEnumerator(); 49: } 50: 51: // Returns an enumerator that iterates through a collection. 52: IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() 53: { 54: return GetEnumerator(); 55: } 56: } Notice, however, you can’t specify any other constructor, you can only specify that the type has a default (no argument) constructor. Summary The where clause is an excellent tool that gives your .NET generics even more power to perform tasks higher than just the base "object level" behavior. There are a few things you cannot specify with constraints (currently) though: Cannot specify the generic type must be an enum. Cannot specify the generic type must have a certain property or method without specifying a base class or interface – that is, you can’t say that the generic must have a Start() method. Cannot specify that the generic type allows arithmetic operations. Cannot specify that the generic type requires a specific non-default constructor. In addition, you cannot overload a template definition with different, opposing constraints. For example you can’t define a Adapter<T> where T : struct and Adapter<T> where T : class. Hopefully, in the future we will get some of these things to make the where clause even more useful, but until then what we have is extremely valuable in making our generics more user friendly and more powerful! Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Little Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,where,generics

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