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• Am I just not understanding TDD unit testing (Asp.Net MVC project)?

  - by KallDrexx

  I am trying to figure out how to correctly and efficiently unit test my Asp.net MVC project. When I started on this project I bought the Pro ASP.Net MVC, and with that book I learned about TDD and unit testing. After seeing the examples, and the fact that I work as a software engineer in QA in my current company, I was amazed at how awesome TDD seemed to be. So I started working on my project and went gun-ho writing unit tests for my database layer, business layer, and controllers. Everything got a unit test prior to implementation. At first I thought it was awesome, but then things started to go downhill. Here are the issues I started encountering: I ended up writing application code in order to make it possible for unit tests to be performed. I don't mean this in a good way as in my code was broken and I had to fix it so the unit test pass. I mean that abstracting out the database to a mock database is impossible due to the use of linq for data retrieval (using the generic repository pattern). The reason is that with linq-sql or linq-entities you can do joins just by doing: var objs = select p from _container.Projects select p.Objects; However, if you mock the database layer out, in order to have that linq pass the unit test you must change the linq to be var objs = select p from _container.Projects join o in _container.Objects on o.ProjectId equals p.Id select o; Not only does this mean you are changing your application logic just so you can unit test it, but you are making your code less efficient for the sole purpose of testability, and getting rid of a lot of advantages using an ORM has in the first place. Furthermore, since a lot of the IDs for my models are database generated, I proved to have to write additional code to handle the non-database tests since IDs were never generated and I had to still handle those cases for the unit tests to pass, yet they would never occur in real scenarios. Thus I ended up throwing out my database unit testing. Writing unit tests for controllers was easy as long as I was returning views. However, the major part of my application (and the one that would benefit most from unit testing) is a complicated ajax web application. For various reasons I decided to change the app from returning views to returning JSON with the data I needed. After this occurred my unit tests became extremely painful to write, as I have not found any good way to write unit tests for non-trivial json. After pounding my head and wasting a ton of time trying to find a good way to unit test the JSON, I gave up and deleted all of my controller unit tests (all controller actions are focused on this part of the app so far). So finally I was left with testing the Service layer (BLL). Right now I am using EF4, however I had this issue with linq-sql as well. I chose to do the EF4 model-first approach because to me, it makes sense to do it that way (define my business objects and let the framework figure out how to translate it into the sql backend). This was fine at the beginning but now it is becoming cumbersome due to relationships. For example say I have Project, User, and Object entities. One Object must be associated to a project, and a project must be associated to a user. This is not only a database specific rule, these are my business rules as well. However, say I want to do a unit test that I am able to save an object (for a simple example). I now have to do the following code just to make sure the save worked: User usr = new User { Name = "Me" }; _userService.SaveUser(usr); Project prj = new Project { Name = "Test Project", Owner = usr }; _projectService.SaveProject(prj); Object obj = new Object { Name = "Test Object" }; _objectService.SaveObject(obj); // Perform verifications There are many issues with having to do all this just to perform one unit test. There are several issues with this. For starters, if I add a new dependency, such as all projects must belong to a category, I must go into EVERY single unit test that references a project, add code to save the category then add code to add the category to the project. This can be a HUGE effort down the road for a very simple business logic change, and yet almost none of the unit tests I will be modifying for this requirement are actually meant to test that feature/requirement. If I then add verifications to my SaveProject method, so that projects cannot be saved unless they have a name with at least 5 characters, I then have to go through every Object and Project unit test to make sure that the new requirement doesn't make any unrelated unit tests fail. If there is an issue in the UserService.SaveUser() method it will cause all project, and object unit tests to fail and it the cause won't be immediately noticeable without having to dig through the exceptions. Thus I have removed all service layer unit tests from my project. I could go on and on, but so far I have not seen any way for unit testing to actually help me and not get in my way. I can see specific cases where I can, and probably will, implement unit tests, such as making sure my data verification methods work correctly, but those cases are few and far between. Some of my issues can probably be mitigated but not without adding extra layers to my application, and thus making more points of failure just so I can unit test. Thus I have no unit tests left in my code. Luckily I heavily use source control so I can get them back if I need but I just don't see the point. Everywhere on the internet I see people talking about how great TDD unit tests are, and I'm not just talking about the fanatical people. The few people who dismiss TDD/Unit tests give bad arguments claiming they are more efficient debugging by hand through the IDE, or that their coding skills are amazing that they don't need it. I recognize that both of those arguments are utter bullocks, especially for a project that needs to be maintainable by multiple developers, but any valid rebuttals to TDD seem to be few and far between. So the point of this post is to ask, am I just not understanding how to use TDD and automatic unit tests?

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• Https in java ends up with strange results

  - by Senne

  I'm trying to illustrate to students how https is used in java. But i have the feeling my example is not really the best out there... The code works well on my windows 7: I start the server, go to https://localhost:8080/somefile.txt and i get asked to trust the certificate, and all goes well. When I try over http (before or after accepting the certificate) I just get a blank page, which is ok for me. BUT when I try the exact same thing on my windows XP: Same thing, all goes well. But then (after accepting the certificate first), I'm also able to get all the the files through http! (if I first try http before https followed by accepting the certificate, I get no answer..) I tried refreshing, hard refreshing a million times but this should not be working, right? Is there something wrong in my code? I'm not sure if I use the right approach to implement https here... package Security; import java.io.*; import java.net.*; import java.util.*; import java.util.concurrent.Executors; import java.security.*; import javax.net.ssl.*; import com.sun.net.httpserver.*; public class HTTPSServer { public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException { InetSocketAddress addr = new InetSocketAddress(8080); HttpsServer server = HttpsServer.create(addr, 0); try { System.out.println("\nInitializing context ...\n"); KeyStore ks = KeyStore.getInstance("JKS"); char[] password = "vwpolo".toCharArray(); ks.load(new FileInputStream("myKeys"), password); KeyManagerFactory kmf = KeyManagerFactory.getInstance("SunX509"); kmf.init(ks, password); SSLContext sslContext = SSLContext.getInstance("TLS"); sslContext.init(kmf.getKeyManagers(), null, null); // a HTTPS server must have a configurator for the SSL connections. server.setHttpsConfigurator (new HttpsConfigurator(sslContext) { // override configure to change default configuration. public void configure (HttpsParameters params) { try { // get SSL context for this configurator SSLContext c = getSSLContext(); // get the default settings for this SSL context SSLParameters sslparams = c.getDefaultSSLParameters(); // set parameters for the HTTPS connection. params.setNeedClientAuth(true); params.setSSLParameters(sslparams); System.out.println("SSL context created ...\n"); } catch(Exception e2) { System.out.println("Invalid parameter ...\n"); e2.printStackTrace(); } } }); } catch(Exception e1) { e1.printStackTrace(); } server.createContext("/", new MyHandler1()); server.setExecutor(Executors.newCachedThreadPool()); server.start(); System.out.println("Server is listening on port 8080 ...\n"); } } class MyHandler implements HttpHandler { public void handle(HttpExchange exchange) throws IOException { String requestMethod = exchange.getRequestMethod(); if (requestMethod.equalsIgnoreCase("GET")) { Headers responseHeaders = exchange.getResponseHeaders(); responseHeaders.set("Content-Type", "text/plain"); exchange.sendResponseHeaders(200, 0); OutputStream responseBody = exchange.getResponseBody(); String response = "HTTP headers included in your request:\n\n"; responseBody.write(response.getBytes()); Headers requestHeaders = exchange.getRequestHeaders(); Set<String> keySet = requestHeaders.keySet(); Iterator<String> iter = keySet.iterator(); while (iter.hasNext()) { String key = iter.next(); List values = requestHeaders.get(key); response = key + " = " + values.toString() + "\n"; responseBody.write(response.getBytes()); System.out.print(response); } response = "\nHTTP request body: "; responseBody.write(response.getBytes()); InputStream requestBody = exchange.getRequestBody(); byte[] buffer = new byte[256]; if(requestBody.read(buffer) > 0) { responseBody.write(buffer); } else { responseBody.write("empty.".getBytes()); } URI requestURI = exchange.getRequestURI(); String file = requestURI.getPath().substring(1); response = "\n\nFile requested = " + file + "\n\n"; responseBody.write(response.getBytes()); responseBody.flush(); System.out.print(response); Scanner source = new Scanner(new File(file)); String text; while (source.hasNext()) { text = source.nextLine() + "\n"; responseBody.write(text.getBytes()); } source.close(); responseBody.close(); exchange.close(); } } }

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• Criticize my code, please

  - by Micky

  Hey, I was applying for a position, and they asked me to complete a coding problem for them. I did so and submitted it, but I later found out I was rejected from the position. Anyways, I have an eclectic programming background so I'm not sure if my code is grossly wrong or if I just didn't have the best solution out there. I would like to post my code and get some feedback about it. Before I do, here's a description of a problem: You are given a sorted array of integers, say, {1, 2, 4, 4, 5, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10, 11, 13 }. Now you are supposed to write a program (in C or C++, but I chose C) that prompts the user for an element to search for. The program will then search for the element. If it is found, then it should return the first index the entry was found at and the number of instances of that element. If the element is not found, then it should return "not found" or something similar. Here's a simple run of it (with the array I just put up): Enter a number to search for: 4 4 was found at index 2. There are 2 instances for 4 in the array. Enter a number to search for: -4. -4 is not in the array. They made a comment that my code should scale well with large arrays (so I wrote up a binary search). Anyways, my code basically runs as follows: Prompts user for input. Then it checks if it is within bounds (bigger than a[0] in the array and smaller than the largest element of the array). If so, then I perform a binary search. If the element is found, then I wrote two while loops. One while loop will count to the left of the element found, and the second while loop will count to the right of the element found. The loops terminate when the adjacent elements do not match with the desired value. EX: 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 The bold 4 is the value the binary search landed on. One loop will check to the left of it, and another loop will check to the right of it. Their sum will be the total number of instances of the the number four. Anyways, I don't know if there are any advanced techniques that I am missing or if I just don't have the CS background and made a big error. Any constructive critiques would be appreciated! #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <stddef.h> /* function prototype */ int get_num_of_ints( const int* arr, size_t r, int N, size_t* first, size_t* count ); int main() { int N; /* input variable */ int arr[]={1,1,2,3,3,4,4,4,4,5,5,7,7,7,7,8,8,8,9,11,12,12}; /* array of sorted integers */ size_t r = sizeof(arr)/sizeof(arr[0]); /* right bound */ size_t first; /* first match index */ size_t count; /* total number of matches */ /* prompts the user to enter input */ printf( "\nPlease input the integer you would like to find.\n" ); scanf( "%d", &N ); int a = get_num_of_ints( arr, r, N, &first, &count ); /* If the function returns -1 then the value is not found. Else it is returned */ if( a == -1) printf( "%d has not been found.\n", N ); else if(a >= 0){ printf( "The first matching index is %d.\n", first ); printf( "The total number of instances is %d.\n", count ); } return 0; } /* function definition */ int get_num_of_ints( const int* arr, size_t r, int N, size_t* first, size_t* count ) { int lo=0; /* lower bound for search */ int m=0; /* middle value obtained */ int hi=r-1; /* upper bound for search */ int w=r-1; /* used as a fixed upper bound to calculate the number of right instances of a particular value. */ /* binary search to find if a value exists */ /* first check if the element is out of bounds */ if( N < arr[0] || arr[hi] < N ){ m = -1; } else{ /* binary search to find a value, if it exists, within given parameters */ while(lo <= hi){ m = (hi + lo)/2; if(arr[m] < N) lo = m+1; else if(arr[m] > N) hi = m-1; else if(arr[m]==N){ m=m; break; } } if (lo > hi) /* if it doesn't we assign it -1 */ m = -1; } /* If the value is found, then we compute the left and right instances of it */ if( m >= 0 ){ int j = m-1; /* starting with the first term to the left */ int L = 0; /* total number of left instances */ /* while loop computes total number of left instances */ while( j >= 0 && arr[j] == arr[m] ){ L++; j--; } /* There are six possible outcomes of this. Depending on the outcome, we must assign the first index variable accordingly */ if( j > 0 && L > 0 ) *first=j+1; else if( j==0 && L==0) *first=m; else if( j > 0 && L==0 ) *first=m; else if(j < 0 && L==0 ) *first=m; else if( j < 0 && L > 0 ) *first=0; else if( j=0 && L > 0 ) *first=j+1; int h = m + 1; /* starting with the first term to the right */ int R = 0; /* total number of right instances */ /* while loop computes total number of right instances */ /* we fixed w earlier so that it's value does not change */ while( arr[h]==arr[m] && h <= w ){ R++; h++; } *count = (R + L + 1); /* total number of instances stored as value of count */ return *first; /* first instance index stored here */ } /* if value does not exist, then we return a negative value */ else if( m==-1) return -1; }

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• Policy based design and defaults.

  - by Noah Roberts

  Hard to come up with a good title for this question. What I really need is to be able to provide template parameters with different number of arguments in place of a single parameter. Doesn't make a lot of sense so I'll go over the reason: template < typename T, template <typename,typename> class Policy = default_policy > struct policy_based : Policy<T, policy_based<T,Policy> > { // inherits R Policy::fun(arg0, arg1, arg2,...,argn) }; // normal use: policy_base<type_a> instance; // abnormal use: template < typename PolicyBased > // No T since T is always the same when you use this struct custom_policy {}; policy_base<type_b,custom_policy> instance; The deal is that for many abnormal uses the Policy will be based on one single type T, and can't really be parameterized on T so it makes no sense to take T as a parameter. For other uses, including the default, a Policy can make sense with any T. I have a couple ideas but none of them are really favorites. I thought that I had a better answer--using composition instead of policies--but then I realized I have this case where fun() actually needs extra information that the class itself won't have. This is like the third time I've refactored this silly construct and I've got quite a few custom versions of it around that I'm trying to consolidate. I'd like to get something nailed down this time rather than just fish around and hope it works this time. So I'm just fishing for ideas right now hoping that someone has something I'll be so impressed by that I'll switch deities. Anyone have a good idea? Edit: You might be asking yourself why I don't just retrieve T from the definition of policy based in the template for default_policy. The reason is that default_policy is actually specialized for some types T. Since asking the question I have come up with something that may be what I need, which will follow, but I could still use some other ideas. template < typename T > struct default_policy; template < typename T, template < typename > class Policy = default_policy > struct test : Policy<test<T,Policy>> {}; template < typename T > struct default_policy< test<T, default_policy> > { void f() {} }; template < > struct default_policy< test<int, default_policy> > { void f(int) {} }; Edit: Still messing with it. I wasn't too fond of the above since it makes default_policy permanently coupled with "test" and so couldn't be reused in some other method, such as with multiple templates as suggested below. It also doesn't scale at all and requires a list of parameters at least as long as "test" has. Tried a few different approaches that failed until I found another that seems to work so far: template < typename T > struct default_policy; template < typename T, template < typename > class Policy = default_policy > struct test : Policy<test<T,Policy>> {}; template < typename PolicyBased > struct fetch_t; template < typename PolicyBased, typename T > struct default_policy_base; template < typename PolicyBased > struct default_policy : default_policy_base<PolicyBased, typename fetch_t<PolicyBased>::type> {}; template < typename T, template < typename > class Policy > struct fetch_t< test<T,Policy> > { typedef T type; }; template < typename PolicyBased, typename T > struct default_policy_base { void f() {} }; template < typename PolicyBased > struct default_policy_base<PolicyBased,int> { void f(int) {} };

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• Vector of Object Pointers, general help and confusion

  - by Staypuft

  Have a homework assignment in which I'm supposed to create a vector of pointers to objects Later on down the load, I'll be using inheritance/polymorphism to extend the class to include fees for two-day delivery, next day air, etc. However, that is not my concern right now. The final goal of the current program is to just print out every object's content in the vector (name & address) and find it's shipping cost (weight*cost). My Trouble is not with the logic, I'm just confused on few points related to objects/pointers/vectors in general. But first my code. I basically cut out everything that does not mater right now, int main, will have user input, but right now I hard-coded two examples. #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <vector> using namespace std; class Package { public: Package(); //default constructor Package(string d_name, string d_add, string d_zip, string d_city, string d_state, double c, double w); double calculateCost(double, double); void Print(); ~Package(); private: string dest_name; string dest_address; string dest_zip; string dest_city; string dest_state; double weight; double cost; }; Package::Package() { cout<<"Constucting Package Object with default values: "<<endl; string dest_name=""; string dest_address=""; string dest_zip=""; string dest_city=""; string dest_state=""; double weight=0; double cost=0; } Package::Package(string d_name, string d_add, string d_zip, string d_city, string d_state, string r_name, string r_add, string r_zip, string r_city, string r_state, double w, double c){ cout<<"Constucting Package Object with user defined values: "<<endl; string dest_name=d_name; string dest_address=d_add; string dest_zip=d_zip; string dest_city=d_city; string dest_state=d_state; double weight=w; double cost=c; } Package::~Package() { cout<<"Deconstructing Package Object!"<<endl; delete Package; } double Package::calculateCost(double x, double y){ return x+y; } int main(){ double cost=0; vector<Package*> shipment; cout<<"Enter Shipping Cost: "<<endl; cin>>cost; shipment.push_back(new Package("tom r","123 thunder road", "90210", "Red Bank", "NJ", cost, 10.5)); shipment.push_back(new Package ("Harry Potter","10 Madison Avenue", "55555", "New York", "NY", cost, 32.3)); return 0; } So my questions are: I'm told I have to use a vector of Object Pointers, not Objects. Why? My assignment calls for it specifically, but I'm also told it won't work otherwise. Where should I be creating this vector? Should it be part of my Package Class? How do I go about adding objects into it then? Do I need a copy constructor? Why? What's the proper way to deconstruct my vector of object pointers? Any help would be appreciated. I've searched for a lot of related articles on here and I realize that my program will have memory leaks. Using one of the specialized ptrs from boost:: will not be available for me to use. Right now, I'm more concerned with getting the foundation of my program built. That way I can actually get down to the functionality I need to create. Thanks.

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• Image not loading onto JPanel?

  - by None None

  I have been trying to figure out how to add an image to a JPanel as a background, but still have complete control over the placing of JButtons, JLabels, and etc. This is one method I found, but it is crashing and not loading the image or buttons. Here is the code: import javax.swing.JFrame; import javax.swing.JPanel; import javax.swing.JButton; import java.awt.BorderLayout; import java.awt.FlowLayout; import java.awt.GridLayout; public class PanelDemo extends JFrame { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; private JButton btn1 = new JButton("EASY"); private JButton btn2 = new JButton("MEDIUM"); private JButton btn3 = new JButton("HARD"); private JButton btn4 = new JButton("High Score"); public PanelDemo() { super("Image Panel Demo"); JPanel panel = new ImagePanel( new FlowLayout(FlowLayout.CENTER, 50, 180)); JPanel panelbtn = new JPanel(new GridLayout(4, 1)); btn1.setBackground(new java.awt.Color(0, 0, 0)); btn1.setFont(new java.awt.Font("Showcard Gothic", 1, 24)); btn1.setForeground(new java.awt.Color(0, 255, 102)); btn2.setBackground(new java.awt.Color(0, 0, 0)); btn2.setFont(new java.awt.Font("Showcard Gothic", 1, 24)); btn2.setForeground(new java.awt.Color(0, 255, 102)); btn3.setBackground(new java.awt.Color(0, 0, 0)); btn3.setFont(new java.awt.Font("Showcard Gothic", 1, 24)); btn3.setForeground(new java.awt.Color(0, 255, 102)); btn4.setBackground(new java.awt.Color(0, 0, 0)); btn4.setFont(new java.awt.Font("Showcard Gothic", 1, 24)); btn4.setForeground(new java.awt.Color(0, 255, 102)); panel.add(panelbtn); panelbtn.add(btn1); panelbtn.add(btn2); panelbtn.add(btn3); panelbtn.add(btn4); add(panel, BorderLayout.CENTER); setSize(640, 480); setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); } public static void main(String... args) { new PanelDemo().setVisible(true); } } ImagePanel.java import java.awt.Graphics; import java.awt.Image; import java.awt.LayoutManager; import javax.swing.ImageIcon; import javax.swing.JPanel; public class ImagePanel extends JPanel { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; String imageFile = "/rsc/img/background.jpg"; public ImagePanel() { super(); } public ImagePanel(String image) { super(); this.imageFile = image; } public ImagePanel(LayoutManager layout) { super(layout); } public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { ImageIcon imageicon = new ImageIcon(getClass().getResource(imageFile)); Image image = imageicon.getImage(); super.paintComponent(g); if (image != null) g.drawImage(image, 0, 0, getWidth(), getHeight(), this); } } Error: Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NullPointerException at javax.swing.ImageIcon.<init>(Unknown Source) at ImagePanel.paintComponent(ImagePanel.java:27) at javax.swing.JComponent.paint(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.paintChildren(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.paint(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.paintChildren(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.paint(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JLayeredPane.paint(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.paintChildren(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.paintToOffscreen(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager$PaintManager.paintDoubleBuffered(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager$PaintManager.paint(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager.paint(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.JComponent.paint(Unknown Source) at java.awt.GraphicsCallback$PaintCallback.run(Unknown Source) at sun.awt.SunGraphicsCallback.runOneComponent(Unknown Source) at sun.awt.SunGraphicsCallback.runComponents(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Container.paint(Unknown Source) at java.awt.Window.paint(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager$3.run(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager$3.run(Unknown Source) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.security.ProtectionDomain$1.doIntersectionPrivilege(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager.paintDirtyRegions(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager.paintDirtyRegions(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager.prePaintDirtyRegions(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager.access$1000(Unknown Source) at javax.swing.RepaintManager$ProcessingRunnable.run(Unknown Source) at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventQueue.access$200(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventQueue$3.run(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventQueue$3.run(Unknown Source) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.security.ProtectionDomain$1.doIntersectionPrivilege(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source) at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(Unknown Source) Also, if anyone knows of a better way to put a background image on a JPanel, pease do tell. Thank you in advance.

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• C++ function not found during compilation

  - by forthewinwin

  For a homework assignment: I'm supposed to create randomized alphabetial keys, print them to a file, and then hash each of them into a hash table using the function "goodHash", found in my below code. When I try to run the below code, it says my "goodHash" "identifier isn't found". What's wrong with my code? #include <iostream> #include <vector> #include <cstdlib> #include "math.h" #include <fstream> #include <time.h> using namespace std; // "makeKey" function to create an alphabetical key // based on 8 randomized numbers 0 - 25. string makeKey() { int k; string key = ""; for (k = 0; k < 8; k++) { int keyNumber = (rand() % 25); if (keyNumber == 0) key.append("A"); if (keyNumber == 1) key.append("B"); if (keyNumber == 2) key.append("C"); if (keyNumber == 3) key.append("D"); if (keyNumber == 4) key.append("E"); if (keyNumber == 5) key.append("F"); if (keyNumber == 6) key.append("G"); if (keyNumber == 7) key.append("H"); if (keyNumber == 8) key.append("I"); if (keyNumber == 9) key.append("J"); if (keyNumber == 10) key.append("K"); if (keyNumber == 11) key.append("L"); if (keyNumber == 12) key.append("M"); if (keyNumber == 13) key.append("N"); if (keyNumber == 14) key.append("O"); if (keyNumber == 15) key.append("P"); if (keyNumber == 16) key.append("Q"); if (keyNumber == 17) key.append("R"); if (keyNumber == 18) key.append("S"); if (keyNumber == 19) key.append("T"); if (keyNumber == 20) key.append("U"); if (keyNumber == 21) key.append("V"); if (keyNumber == 22) key.append("W"); if (keyNumber == 23) key.append("X"); if (keyNumber == 24) key.append("Y"); if (keyNumber == 25) key.append("Z"); } return key; } // "makeFile" function to produce the desired text file. // Note this only works as intended if you include the ".txt" extension, // and that a file of the same name doesn't already exist. void makeFile(string fileName, int n) { ofstream ourFile; ourFile.open(fileName); int k; // For use in below loop to compare with n. int l; // For use in the loop inside the below loop. string keyToPassTogoodHash = ""; for (k = 1; k <= n; k++) { for (l = 0; l < 8; l++) { // For-loop to write to the file ONE key ourFile << makeKey()[l]; keyToPassTogoodHash += (makeKey()[l]); } ourFile << " " << k << "\n";// Writes two spaces and the data value goodHash(keyToPassTogoodHash); // I think this has to do with the problem makeKey(); // Call again to make a new key. } } // Primary function to create our desired file! void mainFunction(string fileName, int n) { makeKey(); makeFile(fileName, n); } // Hash Table for Part 2 struct Node { int key; string value; Node* next; }; const int hashTableSize = 10; Node* hashTable[hashTableSize]; // "goodHash" function for Part 2 void goodHash(string key) { int x = 0; int y; int keyConvertedToNumber = 0; // For-loop to produce a numeric value based on the alphabetic key, // which is then hashed into hashTable using the hash function // declared below the loop (hashFunction). for (y = 0; y < 8; y++) { if (key[y] == 'A' || 'B' || 'C') x = 0; if (key[y] == 'D' || 'E' || 'F') x = 1; if (key[y] == 'G' || 'H' || 'I') x = 2; if (key[y] == 'J' || 'K' || 'L') x = 3; if (key[y] == 'M' || 'N' || 'O') x = 4; if (key[y] == 'P' || 'Q' || 'R') x = 5; if (key[y] == 'S' || 'T') x = 6; if (key[y] == 'U' || 'V') x = 7; if (key[y] == 'W' || 'X') x = 8; if (key[y] == 'Y' || 'Z') x = 9; keyConvertedToNumber = x + keyConvertedToNumber; } int hashFunction = keyConvertedToNumber % hashTableSize; Node *temp; temp = new Node; temp->value = key; temp->next = hashTable[hashFunction]; hashTable[hashFunction] = temp; } // First two lines are for Part 1, to call the functions key to Part 1. int main() { srand ( time(NULL) ); // To make sure our randomization works. mainFunction("sandwich.txt", 5); // To test program cin.get(); return 0; } I realize my code is cumbersome in some sections, but I'm a noob at C++ and don't know much to do it better. I'm guessing another way I could do it is to AFTER writing the alphabetical keys to the file, read them from the file and hash each key as I do that, but I wouldn't know how to go about coding that.

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• c++ to vb.net , problem with callback function

  - by johan

  I'm having a hard time here trying to find a solution for my problem. I'm trying to convert a client API funktion from C++ to VB.NET, and i think have some problems with the callback function. parts of the C++ code: typedef struct{ BYTE m_bRemoteChannel; BYTE m_bSendMode; BYTE m_nImgFormat; // =0 cif ; = 1 qcif char *m_sIPAddress; char *m_sUserName; char *m_sUserPassword; BOOL m_bUserCheck; HWND m_hShowVideo; }CLIENT_VIDEOINFO, *PCLIENT_VIDEOINFO; CPLAYER_API LONG __stdcall MP4_ClientStart(PCLIENT_VIDEOINFO pClientinfo,void(CALLBACK *ReadDataCallBack)(DWORD nPort,UCHAR *pPacketBuffer,DWORD nPacketSize)); void CALLBACK ReadDataCallBack(DWORD nPort,UCHAR *pPacketBuffer,DWORD nPacketSize) { TRACE("%d\n",nPacketSize); } ..... aa5.m_sUserName = "123"; aa5.m_sUserPassword="w"; aa5.m_bUserCheck = TRUE; MP4_ClientSetTTL(64); nn1 = MP4_ClientStart(&aa5,ReadDataCallBack); if (nn1 == -1) { MessageBox("error"); return; } SDK description: MP4_ClientStart This function starts a connection. The format of the call is: LONG __stdcall MP4_ClientStart(PCLIENT_VIDEOINFO pClientinfo, void(*ReadDataCallBack)(DWORD nChannel,UCHAR *pPacketBuffer,DWORD nPacketSize)) Parameters pClientinfo holds the information. of this connection. nChannel holds the channel of card. pPacketBuffer holds the pointer to the receive buffer. nPacketSize holds the length of the receive buffer. Return Values If the function succeeds the return value is the context of this connection. If the function fails the return value is -1. Remarks typedef struct{ BYTE m_bRemoteChannel; BYTE m_bSendMode; BYTE m_bImgFormat; char *m_sIPAddress; char *m_sUserName; char *m_sUserPassword; BOOL m_bUserCheck; HWND m_hShowVideo; } CLIENT_VIDEOINFO, * PCLIENT_VIDEOINFO; m_bRemoteChannel holds the channel which the client wants to connect to. m_bSendMode holds the network mode of the connection. m_bImgFormat : Image format, 0 is main channel video, 1 is sub channel video m_sIPAddress holds the IP address of the server. m_sUserName holds the user’s name. m_sUserPassword holds the user’s password. m_bUserCheck holds the value whether sends the user’s name and password or not. m_hShowVideo holds Handle for this video window. If m_hShowVideo holds NULL, the client can be record only without decoder. If m_bUserCheck is FALSE, we will send m_sUserName and m_sUserPassword as NULL, else we will send each 50 bytes. The length of m_sIPAddress and m_sUserName must be more than 50 bytes. ReadDataCallBack: When the library receives a packet from a server, this callback is called. My VB.Net code: Imports System.Runtime.InteropServices Public Class Form1 Const WM_USER = &H400 Public Structure CLIENT_VIDEOINFO Public m_bRemoteChannel As Byte Public m_bSendMode As Byte Public m_bImgFormat As Byte Public m_sIPAddress As String Public m_sUserName As String Public m_sUserPassword As String Public m_bUserCheck As Boolean Public m_hShowVideo As Long 'hWnd End Structure Public Declare Function MP4_ClientSetNetPort Lib "hikclient.dll" (ByVal dServerPort As Integer, ByVal dClientPort As Integer) As Boolean Public Declare Function MP4_ClientStartup Lib "hikclient.dll" (ByVal nMessage As UInteger, ByVal hWnd As System.IntPtr) As Boolean <DllImport("hikclient.dll")> Public Shared Function MP4_ClientStart(ByVal Clientinfo As CLIENT_VIDEOINFO, ByRef ReadDataCallBack As CALLBACKdel) As Long End Function Public Delegate Sub CALLBACKdel(ByVal nPort As Long, <MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPArray)> ByRef pPacketBuffer As Byte(), ByVal nPacketSize As Long) Public Sub CALLBACK(ByVal nPort As Long, <MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPArray)> ByRef pPacketBuffer As Byte(), ByVal nPacketSize As Long) End Sub Public mydel As New CALLBACKdel(AddressOf CALLBACK) Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load Dim Clientinfo As New CLIENT_VIDEOINFO() Clientinfo.m_bRemoteChannel = 0 Clientinfo.m_bSendMode = 0 Clientinfo.m_bImgFormat = 0 Clientinfo.m_sIPAddress = "193.168.1.100" Clientinfo.m_sUserName = "1" Clientinfo.m_sUserPassword = "a" Clientinfo.m_bUserCheck = False Clientinfo.m_hShowVideo = Me.Handle 'Nothing MP4_ClientSetNetPort(850, 850) MP4_ClientStartup(WM_USER + 1, Me.Handle) MP4_ClientStart(Clientinfo, mydel) End Sub End Class here is some other examples of the code in: C# http://blog.csdn.net/nenith1981/archive/2007/09/17/1787692.aspx VB ://read.pudn.com/downloads70/sourcecode/graph/250633/MD%E5%AE%A2%E6%88%B7%E7%AB%AF%28VB%29/hikclient.bas__.htm ://read.pudn.com/downloads70/sourcecode/graph/250633/MD%E5%AE%A2%E6%88%B7%E7%AB%AF%28VB%29/Form1.frm__.htm Delphi ://read.pudn.com/downloads91/sourcecode/multimedia/streaming/349759/Delphi_client/Unit1.pas__.htm

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• Find the set of largest contiguous rectangles to cover multiple areas

  - by joelpt

  I'm working on a tool called Quickfort for the game Dwarf Fortress. Quickfort turns spreadsheets in csv/xls format into a series of commands for Dwarf Fortress to carry out in order to plot a "blueprint" within the game. I am currently trying to optimally solve an area-plotting problem for the 2.0 release of this tool. Consider the following "blueprint" which defines plotting commands for a 2-dimensional grid. Each cell in the grid should either be dug out ("d"), channeled ("c"), or left unplotted ("."). Any number of distinct plotting commands might be present in actual usage. . d . d c c d d d d c c . d d d . c d d d d d c . d . d d c To minimize the number of instructions that need to be sent to Dwarf Fortress, I would like to find the set of largest contiguous rectangles that can be formed to completely cover, or "plot", all of the plottable cells. To be valid, all of a given rectangle's cells must contain the same command. This is a faster approach than Quickfort 1.0 took: plotting every cell individually as a 1x1 rectangle. This video shows the performance difference between the two versions. For the above blueprint, the solution looks like this: . 9 . 0 3 2 8 1 1 1 3 2 . 1 1 1 . 2 7 1 1 1 4 2 . 6 . 5 4 2 Each same-numbered rectangle above denotes a contiguous rectangle. The largest rectangles take precedence over smaller rectangles that could also be formed in their areas. The order of the numbering/rectangles is unimportant. My current approach is iterative. In each iteration, I build a list of the largest rectangles that could be formed from each of the grid's plottable cells by extending in all 4 directions from the cell. After sorting the list largest first, I begin with the largest rectangle found, mark its underlying cells as "plotted", and record the rectangle in a list. Before plotting each rectangle, its underlying cells are checked to ensure they are not yet plotted (overlapping a previous plot). We then start again, finding the largest remaining rectangles that can be formed and plotting them until all cells have been plotted as part of some rectangle. I consider this approach slightly more optimized than a dumb brute-force search, but I am wasting a lot of cycles (re)calculating cells' largest rectangles and checking underlying cells' states. Currently, this rectangle-discovery routine takes the lion's share of the total runtime of the tool, especially for large blueprints. I have sacrificed some accuracy for the sake of speed by only considering rectangles from cells which appear to form a rectangle's corner (determined using some neighboring-cell heuristics which aren't always correct). As a result of this 'optimization', my current code doesn't actually generate the above solution correctly, but it's close enough. More broadly, I consider the goal of largest-rectangles-first to be a "good enough" approach for this application. However I observe that if the goal is instead to find the minimum set (fewest number) of rectangles to completely cover multiple areas, the solution would look like this instead: . 3 . 5 6 8 1 3 4 5 6 8 . 3 4 5 . 8 2 3 4 5 7 8 . 3 . 5 7 8 This second goal actually represents a more optimal solution to the problem, as fewer rectangles usually means fewer commands sent to Dwarf Fortress. However, this approach strikes me as closer to NP-Hard, based on my limited math knowledge. Watch the video if you'd like to better understand the overall strategy; I have not addressed other aspects of Quickfort's process, such as finding the shortest cursor-path that plots all rectangles. Possibly there is a solution to this problem that coherently combines these multiple strategies. Help of any form would be appreciated.

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• Updated data is not loaded in the same browser(using Ajax )

  - by Mouli

  Initilly load some datas into dropdown list. It contain company code and company related fields in Textbox. Using Ajax to load the company related Fields in onchange Function I edit the company related fields and update it. Its updated Successfully then i Click the back button and refresh the browser. I select the updated company form the dropdown list. It always list the old value insted of updated data. I want to show the updated fields into corresponding textbox. This part of coding is to load the companyname into dropdown list <% DBAccess dbAccess = Util.initDatabaseAccess(); ResultSet rs = null; ResultSet rsEdit = null; int updateSuccess = 0; String button = request.getParameter("saveAction"); rs = dbAccess.executeQuery("select companyname,Companycode,companyid from yosemitecompany where cmpstatus=1 order by companyname"); %> My Ajax function <script> function showCompanyDetails(str) { if (str=="") { document.getElementById("CompanyName").innerHTML=""; return; } if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest(); } else { xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() { if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200) { var resValue=new Array(); resValue = xmlhttp.responseText.split("$"); document.getElementById("CompanyName").value=resValue[0]; document.getElementById("StreetName1").value=(resValue[1]!=null && !resValue[1].equalsIgnoreCase("null") && resValue[1].length>0?resValue[1]:""); document.getElementById("StreetName2").value=(resValue[2]!=null && !resValue[2].equalsIgnoreCase("null") && resValue[2].length>0?resValue[2]:""); document.getElementById("City").value=(resValue[3]!=null && !resValue[3].equalsIgnoreCase("null") && resValue[3].length>0?resValue[3]:""); document.getElementById("Zipcode").value=trim((resValue[5]!=null && !resValue[5].equalsIgnoreCase("null") && resValue[5].length>0?resValue[5]:"")); document.getElementById("officePhone").value=(resValue[6]!=null && !resValue[6].equalsIgnoreCase("null") && resValue[6].length>0?resValue[6]:""); document.getElementById("Fax1").value=(resValue[7]!=null && !resValue[7].equalsIgnoreCase("null") && resValue[7].length>0?resValue[7]:""); document.getElementById("email").value=(resValue[8]!=null && !resValue[8].equalsIgnoreCase("null") && resValue[8].length>0?resValue[8]:""); document.getElementById("WebSite").value=(resValue[9]!=null && !resValue[9].equalsIgnoreCase("null") && resValue[9].length>0?resValue[9]:""); document.getElementById("description").value=(resValue[10]!=null && !resValue[10].equalsIgnoreCase("null") && resValue[10].length>0?resValue[10]:""); document.getElementById("companycode").value=resValue[11]; document.getElementById("tempCompanyId").value=resValue[12]; document.getElementById("tempStateId").value=resValue[13]; stateID = resValue[13]; countryID = resValue[14]; processAjaxRequestPost('ajaxRequestPost','SingleListHandler','getCountryListDetails', document.getElementById("tempCompanyId").value); showTimezone(resValue[15]); document.getElementById("userName").value=resValue[16]; document.getElementById("passWord").value=resValue[17]; } } xmlhttp.open("GET","customerDetail.jsp?val="+str,true); xmlhttp.send(); } </script> My Update function <%if(updateSuccess <= 0){ if(button != null && button.equalsIgnoreCase("update")) { String companyCode = request.getParameter("companycode").trim(); String companyName = request.getParameter("CompanyName").trim(); String StreetName1 = request.getParameter("StreetName1").trim(); String StreetName2 = request.getParameter("StreetName2").trim(); String City = request.getParameter("City").trim(); String Zipcode = request.getParameter("Zipcode").trim(); String officePhone = request.getParameter("officePhone").trim(); String Fax1 = request.getParameter("Fax1").trim(); String email = request.getParameter("email").trim(); String WebSite = request.getParameter("WebSite").trim(); String description = request.getParameter("description").trim(); String companyid = request.getParameter("tempCompanyId").trim(); String stateId = request.getParameter("tempStateId").trim(); String timeZone = request.getParameter("timezone").trim(); String uploadCustomerLogo = request.getParameter("uploadCustomerLogo").trim(); String userName = request.getParameter("userName").trim(); String passWord = request.getParameter("passWord").trim(); String smtpInsertFlag = "NO"; String getCompanyId = null; updateSuccess = dbAccess.executeUpdate("update yosemitecompany set companyname='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(companyName)+"', streetname1='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(StreetName1)+"', streetname2='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(StreetName2)+"', cityname='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(City)+"', zipcode='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(Zipcode)+"', phonenumber1='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(officePhone)+"', fax1='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(Fax1)+"', email1='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(email)+"', website='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(WebSite)+"', description='"+com.zoniac.util.Util.deQuoteForSingleQuote(description)+"',timezoneid="+timeZone+", stateid="+stateId+" where companyid='"+companyid+"'"); if(rs != null) { rs = null; dbAccess.close(); } } %> My customerDetail.jsp File <% String val = request.getParameter("val"); DBAccess dbAccess = Util.initDatabaseAccess(); ResultSet rs = null; String outputResult = null; String ff = "NO"; rs = dbAccess.executeQuery("select companyname,streetname1,streetname2,cityname,(select statename from state where stateid = (select stateid from yosemitecompany where companyid ="+val+"))as state,zipcode,phonenumber1,fax1,email1,website,description,companycode,companyid,(select stateid from state where stateid = (select stateid from yosemitecompany where companyid ="+val+"))as statecode,(select countryid from country where countryid =(select countryid from state where stateid = (select stateid from yosemitecompany where companyid ="+val+")))as countryid,timezoneid from yosemitecompany where companyid = "+val+""); if(rs.next()){ outputResult = rs.getString(1)+"$"+rs.getString(2)+"$"+rs.getString(3)+"$"+rs.getString(4)+"$"+rs.getString(5)+"$"+rs.getString(6)+"$"+rs.getString(7)+"$"+rs.getString(8)+"$"+rs.getString(9)+"$"+rs.getString(10)+"$"+rs.getString(11)+"$"+rs.getString(12)+"$"+rs.getString(13)+"$"+rs.getString(14)+"$"+rs.getString(15)+"$"+rs.getString(16); } rs = null; rs = dbAccess.executeQuery("select username,password from EMAILAUTHENTICATIONDETAILS where companyid="+val); if(rs.next()){ ff="YES"; outputResult += "$"+rs.getString(1)+"$"+rs.getString(2); } if(ff.equals("NO")){ outputResult += "$$"; } out.println(outputResult); outputResult = null; ff = "NO"; if(rs!=null) { rs = null; dbAccess.close(); } %>

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• Databinding, using formulas for unusual binding possible?

  - by Rattenmann

  Edit: added Info for WPF being used I am trying to bind a list of custom objects to a DataGrid. Straight binding seems easy enough, but i need to specify some complex formulas for some extra fields that do not directly show up in my class. Also i want to be able to EDIT the data in the Grid and get updates on related fields. Let me show you an example, because it is really hard to explain. I will simplify it to rooms with items. Each item can be red and blue. My Class looks like this: public class room { public string strRoomName { set; get; } public string strItemname { set; get; } public int intRedItem { set; get; } public int intBlueItem { set; get; } } Now if i use dataTable.ItemSource = myList; i get something like this: nr. | room | name | red | blue 1. living room, ball, 2, 1 2. sleeping room, bunny, 4, 1 3. living room, chair, 3, 2 4. kitchen, ball, 4, 7 5. garage, chair, 1, 4 Now for the complex part i need help with. I want every item to be the same number, red and blue. And because this does not hold true i want to see the "inbalance" per room AND globally like this: nr. | room | name | red | blue | missing | global red | global blue | global missing 1. living room, ball, 2, 1, 1 blue, 6, 7, 1 red 2. sleeping room, bunny, 4, 1, 3 blue, 4, 1, 3 blue 3. living room, chair, 3, 2, 1 blue, 4, 6, 2 red 4. kitchen, ball, 4, 7, 3 red, 6, 7, 1 red 5. garage, chair, 1, 4, 3 red, 4, 6, 2 red As you can see this smeels like excel formulas, i am unsure how to handle this in c# code however. You can also see i need to use data in the same row, but also get data from other rows that match one propertiy (the items name). Also if i change the blue value=1 in line 1 to value=2, i want line 1 to read like this: 1. living room, ball, 2, 2, even, 6, 8, 2 red and of corse line 4 needs to change to: 4. kitchen, ball, 4, 7, 3 red, 6, 8, 2 red As i said, this smells like excel, that's why i am really upset about myself not finding an easy solution. Surely enough c# offers some way to handle this stuff, right? Disclaimer: It is totally possible that i need a complete differend approach, pointing that out ot me is perfectly fine. Be it other ways to handle this, or a better way to structure my class. I am ok with every way to handle this as it is for learning purposes. I am simply doing programms for fun next to my college and just so happen to hit these kinda things that bug me out because i don't find a clean solution. And then i neglect my studies because i want to solve my (unreleated to studys,...) issue. Just can't stand having unsolved coding stuff around, don't judge me! ;-) And big thanks in advance if you have gotten this far in my post. It sure must be confusing with all those reds and blues. Edit: After reading trough your answers and testing my skills to implement your hints, i now have the following code as my class: public class RoomList : ObservableCollection<room> { public RoomList() : base() { Add(new room() { strRoomName = "living room", strItemname = "ball", intRedItem = 2, intBlueItem = 1 }); Add(new room() { strRoomName = "sleeping room", strItemname = "bunny", intRedItem = 4, intBlueItem = 1 }); Add(new room() { strRoomName = "living room", strItemname = "chair", intRedItem = 3, intBlueItem = 2 }); Add(new room() { strRoomName = "kitchen", strItemname = "ball", intRedItem = 4, intBlueItem = 7 }); Add(new room() { strRoomName = "garage", strItemname = "chair", intRedItem = 1, intBlueItem = 4 }); } } //rooms public class room : INotifyPropertyChanged { public string strRoomName { set; get; } public string strItemname { set; get; } public int intRedItem { get { return intRedItem; } set { intRedItem = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("intRedItem", "strMissing"); } } public int intBlueItem { get { return intBlueItem; } set { intBlueItem = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("intBlueItem", "strMissing"); } } public string strMissing { get { int missingCount = intRedItem - intBlueItem; return missingCount == 0 ? "Even" : missingCount.ToString(); } } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; public void NotifyPropertyChanged(params string[] propertyNames) { if (PropertyChanged != null) { foreach (string propertyName in propertyNames) { PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } } } I got the "missing" field working right away, thanks alot for that tip. It really was as easy as i imagined and will be of great use for future projects. Still two (three maybe....) things i am missing tho. The above code terminates with a "System.StackOverflowException" in the setter of intRedItem and intBlueItem. I fail to see the error, that could be due to being 4:30am here, or my lack of understanding. Second issue: I followed the link to ObservableCollections as you can see from my code above. Yet i am unsure how to actually use that collection. Putting it as DataContent like suggested on that page shows a missing ressource. Adding it as a ressource like listed there crashes my VSExpress designer and leads to the programm not starting. So for now i am still using my old approach of a list like this: listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "living room", strItemname = "ball", intRedItem = 2, intBlueItem = 1 }); listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "sleeping room", strItemname = "bunny", intRedItem = 4, intBlueItem = 1 }); listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "living room", strItemname = "chair", intRedItem = 3, intBlueItem = 2 }); listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "kitchen", strItemname = "ball", intRedItem = 4, intBlueItem = 7 }); listRooms.Add(new room() { strRoomName = "garage", strItemname = "chair", intRedItem = 1, intBlueItem = 4 }); datagridRooms.ItemsSource = listRooms; And lastly: When testing before adding the notifyevents i tried to implement a proterty that looped trough the other objects, without any luck. The "missingItem" property worked so easy, yet it only tries to access "it's own" properties kind of. I need to access other objects, like "all objects that have the same room value". The idea behind this is that i am trying to calculate a value from other objects without even having those objects yet, at least in my logic. Where is the flaw in my thinking? Those 5 objects are added and created (?) one after another. So if the first tries to set it's "all red balls in my room AND all other rooms" value,.. how could it know about the balls in the kitchen, that get added as 4th object? So far so good tho, got on the right track i think. Just need some sleep first.

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• How to autostart this slide

  - by lchales

  Hello there: first of all i have no idea on coding or anything related, simple question: is there any simple way to tell this code to autostart the slide? at the current moment the images change on click. currently the index page only have one image, what i want is to add a few but without the need to click to see the next one here is the code from my index: <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ /* the images preload plugin */ (function($) { $.fn.preload = function(options) { var opts = $.extend({}, $.fn.preload.defaults, options), o = $.meta ? $.extend({}, opts, this.data()) : opts; var c = this.length, l = 0; return this.each(function() { var $i = $(this); $('<img/>').load(function(i){ ++l; if(l == c) o.onComplete(); }).attr('src',$i.attr('src')); }); }; $.fn.preload.defaults = { onComplete : function(){return false;} }; })(jQuery); //]]> </script><script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ $(function() { var $tf_bg = $('#tf_bg'), $tf_bg_images = $tf_bg.find('img'), $tf_bg_img = $tf_bg_images.eq(0), $tf_thumbs = $('#tf_thumbs'), total = $tf_bg_images.length, current = 0, $tf_content_wrapper = $('#tf_content_wrapper'), $tf_next = $('#tf_next'), $tf_prev = $('#tf_prev'), $tf_loading = $('#tf_loading'); //preload the images $tf_bg_images.preload({ onComplete : function(){ $tf_loading.hide(); init(); } }); //shows the first image and initializes events function init(){ //get dimentions for the image, based on the windows size var dim = getImageDim($tf_bg_img); //set the returned values and show the image $tf_bg_img.css({ width : dim.width, height : dim.height, left : dim.left, top : dim.top }).fadeIn(); //resizing the window resizes the $tf_bg_img $(window).bind('resize',function(){ var dim = getImageDim($tf_bg_img); $tf_bg_img.css({ width : dim.width, height : dim.height, left : dim.left, top : dim.top }); }); //expand and fit the image to the screen $('#tf_zoom').live('click', function(){ if($tf_bg_img.is(':animated')) return false; var $this = $(this); if($this.hasClass('tf_zoom')){ resize($tf_bg_img); $this.addClass('tf_fullscreen') .removeClass('tf_zoom'); } else{ var dim = getImageDim($tf_bg_img); $tf_bg_img.animate({ width : dim.width, height : dim.height, top : dim.top, left : dim.left },350); $this.addClass('tf_zoom') .removeClass('tf_fullscreen'); } } ); //click the arrow down, scrolls down $tf_next.bind('click',function(){ if($tf_bg_img.is(':animated')) return false; scroll('tb'); }); //click the arrow up, scrolls up $tf_prev.bind('click',function(){ if($tf_bg_img.is(':animated')) return false; scroll('bt'); }); //mousewheel events - down / up button trigger the scroll down / up $(document).mousewheel(function(e, delta) { if($tf_bg_img.is(':animated')) return false; if(delta > 0) scroll('bt'); else scroll('tb'); return false; }); //key events - down / up button trigger the scroll down / up $(document).keydown(function(e){ if($tf_bg_img.is(':animated')) return false; switch(e.which){ case 38: scroll('bt'); break; case 40: scroll('tb'); break; } }); } //show next / prev image function scroll(dir){ //if dir is "tb" (top -> bottom) increment current, //else if "bt" decrement it current = (dir == 'tb')?current + 1:current - 1; //we want a circular slideshow, //so we need to check the limits of current if(current == total) current = 0; else if(current < 0) current = total - 1; //flip the thumb $tf_thumbs.flip({ direction : dir, speed : 400, onBefore : function(){ //the new thumb is set here var content = '<span id="tf_zoom" class="tf_zoom"><\/span>'; content +='<img src="' + $tf_bg_images.eq(current).attr('longdesc') + '" alt="Thumb' + (current+1) + '"/>'; $tf_thumbs.html(content); } }); //we get the next image var $tf_bg_img_next = $tf_bg_images.eq(current), //its dimentions dim = getImageDim($tf_bg_img_next), //the top should be one that makes the image out of the viewport //the image should be positioned up or down depending on the direction top = (dir == 'tb')?$(window).height() + 'px':-parseFloat(dim.height,10) + 'px'; //set the returned values and show the next image $tf_bg_img_next.css({ width : dim.width, height : dim.height, left : dim.left, top : top }).show(); //now slide it to the viewport $tf_bg_img_next.stop().animate({ top : dim.top },700); //we want the old image to slide in the same direction, out of the viewport var slideTo = (dir == 'tb')?-$tf_bg_img.height() + 'px':$(window).height() + 'px'; $tf_bg_img.stop().animate({ top : slideTo },700,function(){ //hide it $(this).hide(); //the $tf_bg_img is now the shown image $tf_bg_img = $tf_bg_img_next; //show the description for the new image $tf_content_wrapper.children() .eq(current) .show(); }); //hide the current description $tf_content_wrapper.children(':visible') .hide() } //animate the image to fit in the viewport function resize($img){ var w_w = $(window).width(), w_h = $(window).height(), i_w = $img.width(), i_h = $img.height(), r_i = i_h / i_w, new_w,new_h; if(i_w > i_h){ new_w = w_w; new_h = w_w * r_i; if(new_h > w_h){ new_h = w_h; new_w = w_h / r_i; } } else{ new_h = w_w * r_i; new_w = w_w; } $img.animate({ width : new_w + 'px', height : new_h + 'px', top : '0px', left : '0px' },350); } //get dimentions of the image, //in order to make it full size and centered function getImageDim($img){ var w_w = $(window).width(), w_h = $(window).height(), r_w = w_h / w_w, i_w = $img.width(), i_h = $img.height(), r_i = i_h / i_w, new_w,new_h, new_left,new_top; if(r_w > r_i){ new_h = w_h; new_w = w_h / r_i; } else{ new_h = w_w * r_i; new_w = w_w; } return { width : new_w + 'px', height : new_h + 'px', left : (w_w - new_w) / 2 + 'px', top : (w_h - new_h) / 2 + 'px' }; } }); //]]> </script>

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• NetBeans Development 7 - Windows 7 64-bit … JNI native calls ... a how to guide

  - by CirrusFlyer

  I provide this for you to hopefully save you some time and pain. As part of my expereince in getting to know NB Development v7 on my Windows 64-bit workstation I found another frustrating adventure in trying to get the JNI (Java Native Interface) abilities up and working in my project. As such, I am including a brief summary of steps required (as all the documentation I found was completely incorrect for these versions of Windows and NetBeans on how to do JNI). It took a couple of days of experimentation and reviewing every webpage I could find that included these technologies as keyword searches. Yuk!! Not fun. To begin, as NetBeans Development is "all about modules" if you are reading this you probably have a need for one, or more, of your modules to perform JNI calls. Most of what is available on this site or the Internet in general (not to mention the help file in NB7) is either completely wrong for these versions, or so sparse as to be essentially unuseful to anyone other than a JNI expert. Here is what you are looking for ... the "cut to the chase" - "how to guide" to get a JNI call up and working on your NB7 / Windows 64-bit box. 1) From within your NetBeans Module (not the host appliation) declair your native method(s) and make sure you can compile the Java source without errors. Example: package org.mycompanyname.nativelogic; public class NativeInterfaceTest { static { try { if (System.getProperty( "os.arch" ).toLowerCase().equals( "amd64" ) ) System.loadLibrary( <64-bit_folder_name_on_file_system>/<file_name.dll> ); else System.loadLibrary( <32-bit_folder_name_on_file_system>/<file_name.dll> ); } catch (SecurityException se) {} catch (UnsatisfieldLinkError ule) {} catch (NullPointerException npe) {} } public NativeInterfaceTest() {} native String echoString(String s); } Take notice to the fact that we only load the Assembly once (as it's in a static block), because othersise you will throw exceptions if attempting to load it again. Also take note of our single (in this example) native method titled "echoString". This is the method that our C / C++ application is going to implement, then via the majic of JNI we'll call from our Java code. 2) If using a 64-bit version of Windows (which we are here) we need to open a 64-bit Visual Studio Command Prompt (versus the standard 32-bit version), and execute the "vcvarsall" BAT file, along with an "amd64" command line argument, to set the environment up for 64-bit tools. Example: <path_to_Microsoft_Visual_Studio_10.0>/VC/vcvarsall.bat amd64 Take note that you can use any version of the C / C++ compiler from Microsoft you wish. I happen to have Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010 installed on my box so I chose to use "v10.0" but any that support 64-bit development will work fine. The other important aspect here is the "amd64" param. 3) In the Command Prompt change drives \ directories on your computer so that you are at the root of the fully qualified Class location on the file system that contains your native method declairation. Example: The fully qualified class name for my natively declair method is "org.mycompanyname.nativelogic.NativeInterfaceTest". As we successfully compiled our Java in Step 1 above, we should find it contained in our NetBeans Module something similar to the following: "/build/classes/org/mycompanyname/nativelogic/NativeInterfaceTest.class" We need to make sure our Command Prompt sets, as the current directly, "/build/classes" because of our next step. 4) In this step we'll create our C / C++ Header file that contains the JNI required statments. Type the following in the Command Prompt: javah -jni org.mycompanyname.nativelogic.NativeInterfaceTest and hit enter. If you receive any kind of error that states this is an unrecognized command that simply means your Windows computer does not know the PATH to that command (it's in your /bin folder). Either run the command from there, or include the fully qualified path name when invoking this application, or set your computer's PATH environmental variable to include that path in its search. This should produce a file called "org_mycompanyname_nativelogic_NativeInterfaceTest.h" ... a C Header file. I'd make a copy of this in case you need a backup later. 5) Edit the NativeInterfaceTest.h header file and include an implementation for the echoString() method. Example: JNIEXPORT jstring JNICALL Java_org_mycompanyname_nativelogic_NativeInterfaceTest_echoString (JNIEnv *env, jobject jobj, jstring js) { return((*env)->NewStringUTF(env, "My JNI is up and working after lots of research")); } Notice how you can't simply return a normal Java String (because you're in C at the moment). You have to tell the passed in JVM variable to create a Java String for you that will be returned back. Check out the following Oracle web page for other data types and how to create them for JNI purposes. 6) Close and Save your changes to the Header file. Now that you've added an implementation to the Header change the file extention from ".h" to ".c" as it's now a C source code file that properly implements the JNI required interface. Example: NativeInterfaceTest.c 7) We need to compile the newly created source code file and Link it too. From within the Command Prompt type the following: cl /I"path_to_my_jdks_include_folder" /I"path_to_my_jdks_include_win32_folder" /D:AMD64=1 /LD NativeInterfaceTest.c /FeNativeInterfaceTest.dll /link /machine:x64 Example: cl /I"D:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_21/include" /I"D:/Program Files/java/jdk1.6.0_21/include/win32" /D:AMD64=1 /LD NativeInterfaceTest.c /FeNativeInterfaceTest.dll /link /machine:x64 Notice the quotes around the paths to the 'include" and 'include/win32' folders is required because I have spaces in my folder names ... 'Program Files'. You can include them if you have no spaces without problems, but they are mandatory if you have spaces when using a command prompt. This will generate serveral files, but it's the DLL we're interested in. This is what the System.loadLirbary() java method is looking for. 8) Congratuations! You're at the last step. Simply take the DLL Assembly and paste it at the following location: <path_of_NetBeansProjects_folder>/<project_name>/<module_name>/build/cluster/modules/lib/x64 Note that you'll probably have to create the "lib" and "x64" folders. Example: C:\Users\<user_name>\Documents\NetBeansProjects\<application_name>\<module_name>\build\cluster\modules\lib\x64\NativeInterfaceTest.dll Java code ... notice how we don't inlude the ".dll" file extension in the loadLibrary() call? System.loadLibrary( "/x64/NativeInterfaceTest" ); Now, in your Java code you can create a NativeInterfaceTest object and call the echoString() method and it will return the String value you typed in the NativeInterfaceTest.c source code file. Hopefully this will save you the brain damage I endured trying to figure all this out on my own. Good luck and happy coding!

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• Trying to get around this Webservice call from Android using AsycTask

  - by Kevin Rave

  I am a fairly beginner in Android Development. I am developing an application that extensively relays on Webservice calls. First screen takes username and password and validates the user by calling the Webservice. If U/P is valid, then I need to fire up the 2nd activity. In that 2nd activity, I need to do 3 calls. But I haven't gotten to the 2nd part yet. In fact, I haven't completed the full coding yet. But I wanted to test if the app is working as far as I've come through. When calling webserivce, I am showing alert dialog. But the app is crashing somewhere. The LoginActivity shows up. When I enter U/P and press Login Button, it crashes. My classes: TaskHandler.java public class TaskHandler { private String URL; private User userObj; private String results; private JSONDownloaderTask task; ; public TaskHandler( String url, User user) { this.URL = url; this.userObj = user; } public String handleTask() { Log.d("Two", "In the function"); task = new JSONDownloaderTask(); Log.d("Three", "In the function"); task.execute(URL); return results; } private class JSONDownloaderTask extends AsyncTask<String, Void, String> { private String username;// = userObj.getUsername(); private String password; //= userObj.getPassword(); public HttpStatus status_code; public JSONDownloaderTask() { Log.d("con", "Success"); this.username = userObj.getUsername(); this.password = userObj.getPassword(); Log.d("User" + this.username , " Pass" + this.password); } private AsyncProgressActivity progressbar = new AsyncProgressActivity(); @Override protected void onPreExecute() { progressbar.showLoadingProgressDialog(); } @Override protected String doInBackground(String... params) { final String url = params[0]; //getString(R.string.api_staging_uri) + "Authenticate/"; // Populate the HTTP Basic Authentitcation header with the username and password HttpAuthentication authHeader = new HttpBasicAuthentication(username, password); HttpHeaders requestHeaders = new HttpHeaders(); requestHeaders.setAuthorization(authHeader); requestHeaders.setAccept(Collections.singletonList(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)); // Create a new RestTemplate instance RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate(); restTemplate.getMessageConverters().add(new MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter()); try { // Make the network request Log.d(this.getClass().getName(), url); ResponseEntity<Message> response = restTemplate.exchange(url, HttpMethod.GET, new HttpEntity<Object>(requestHeaders), Message.class); status_code = response.getStatusCode(); return response.getBody().toString(); } catch (HttpClientErrorException e) { status_code = e.getStatusCode(); return new Message(0, e.getStatusText(), e.getLocalizedMessage(), "error").toString(); } catch ( Exception e ) { Log.d(this.getClass().getName() ,e.getLocalizedMessage()); return "Unknown Exception"; } } @Override protected void onPostExecute(String result) { progressbar.dismissProgressDialog(); switch ( status_code ) { case UNAUTHORIZED: result = "Invalid username or passowrd"; break; case ACCEPTED: result = "Invalid username or passowrd" + status_code; break; case OK: result = "Successful!"; break; } } } } AsycProgressActivity.java public class AsyncProgressActivity extends Activity { protected static final String TAG = AsyncProgressActivity.class.getSimpleName(); private ProgressDialog progressDialog; private boolean destroyed = false; @Override protected void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); destroyed = true; } public void showLoadingProgressDialog() { Log.d("Here", "Progress"); this.showProgressDialog("Authenticating..."); Log.d("Here", "afer p"); } public void showProgressDialog(CharSequence message) { Log.d("Here", "Message"); if (progressDialog == null) { progressDialog = new ProgressDialog(this); progressDialog.setIndeterminate(true); } Log.d("Here", "Message 2"); progressDialog.setMessage(message); progressDialog.show(); } public void dismissProgressDialog() { if (progressDialog != null && !destroyed) { progressDialog.dismiss(); } } } LoginActivity.java public class LoginActivity extends AsyncProgressActivity implements OnClickListener { Button login_button; HttpStatus status_code; /** Called when the activity is first created. */ @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); //this.requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE); setContentView(R.layout.main); login_button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btnLogin); login_button.setOnClickListener(this); ViewServer.get(this).addWindow(this); } public void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); ViewServer.get(this).removeWindow(this); } public void onResume() { super.onResume(); ViewServer.get(this).setFocusedWindow(this); } public void onClick(View v) { if ( v.getId() == R.id.btnLogin ) { User userobj = new User(); String result; userobj.setUsername( ((EditText) findViewById(R.id.username)).getText().toString()); userobj.setPassword(((EditText) findViewById(R.id.password)).getText().toString() ); TaskHandler handler = new TaskHandler(getString(R.string.api_staging_uri) + "Authenticate/", userobj); Log.d(this.getClass().getName(), "One"); result = handler.handleTask(); Log.d(this.getClass().getName(), "After two"); Utilities.showAlert(result, LoginActivity.this); } } Utilities.java public class Utilities { public static void showAlert(String message, Context context) { AlertDialog.Builder alertDialogBuilder = new AlertDialog.Builder(context); alertDialogBuilder.setTitle("Login"); alertDialogBuilder.setMessage(message) .setCancelable(false) .setPositiveButton("OK",new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog,int id) { dialog.dismiss(); //dialog.cancel(); } }); alertDialogBuilder.setIcon(drawable.ic_dialog_alert); // create alert dialog AlertDialog alertDialog = alertDialogBuilder.create(); // show it alertDialog.show(); } }

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• How to model a relationship that NHibernate (or Hibernate) doesn’t easily support

  - by MylesRip

  I have a situation in which the ideal relationship, I believe, would involve Value Object Inheritance. This is unfortunately not supported in NHibernate so any solution I come up with will be less than perfect. Let’s say that: “Item” entities have a “Location” that can be in one of multiple different formats. These formats are completely different with no overlapping fields. We will deal with each Location in the format that is provided in the data with no attempt to convert from one format to another. Each Item has exactly one Location. “SpecialItem” is a subtype of Item, however, that is unique in that it has exactly two Locations. “Group” entities aggregate Items. “LocationGroup” is as subtype of Group. LocationGroup also has a single Location that can be in any of the formats as described above. Although I’m interested in Items by Group, I’m also interested in being able to find all items with the same Location, regardless of which group they are in. I apologize for the number of stipulations listed above, but I’m afraid that simplifying it any further wouldn’t really reflect the difficulties of the situation. Here is how the above could be diagrammed: Mapping Dilemma Diagram: (http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/592ad48b1a.jpg) (I tried placing the diagram inline, but Stack Overflow won't allow that until I have accumulated more points. I understand the reasoning behind it, but it is a bit inconvenient for now.) Hmmm... Apparently I can't have multiple links either. :-( Analyzing the above, I make the following observations: I treat Locations polymorphically, referring to the supertype rather than the subtype. Logically, Locations should be “Value Objects” rather than entities since it is meaningless to differentiate between two Location objects that have all the same values. Thus equality between Locations should be based on field comparisons, not identifiers. Also, value objects should be immutable and shared references should not be allowed. Using NHibernate (or Hibernate) one would typically map value objects using the “component” keyword which would cause the fields of the class to be mapped directly into the database table that represents the containing class. Put another way, there would not be a separate “Locations” table in the database (and Locations would therefore have no identifiers). NHibernate (or Hibernate) do not currently support inheritance for value objects. My choices as I see them are: Ignore the fact that Locations should be value objects and map them as entities. This would take care of the inheritance mapping issues since NHibernate supports entity inheritance. The downside is that I then have to deal with aliasing issues. (Meaning that if multiple objects share a reference to the same Location, then changing values for one object’s Location would cause the location to change for other objects that share the reference the same Location record.) I want to avoid this if possible. Another downside is that entities are typically compared by their IDs. This would mean that two Location objects would be considered not equal even if the values of all their fields are the same. This would be invalid and unacceptable from the business perspective. Flatten Locations into a single class so that there are no longer inheritance relationships for Locations. This would allow Locations to be treated as value objects which could easily be handled by using “component” mapping in NHibernate. The downside in this case would be that the domain model becomes weaker, more fragile and less maintainable. Do some “creative” mapping in the hbm files in order to force Location fields to be mapped into the containing entities’ tables without using the “component” keyword. This approach is described by Colin Jack here. My situation is more complicated than the one he describes due to the fact that SpecialItem has a second Location and the fact that a different entity, LocatedGroup, also has Locations. I could probably get it to work, but the mappings would be non-intuitive and therefore hard to understand and maintain by other developers in the future. Also, I suspect that these tricky mappings would likely not be possible using Fluent NHibernate so I would use the advantages of using that tool, at least in that situation. Surely others out there have run into similar situations. I’m hoping someone who has “been there, done that” can share some wisdom. :-) So here’s the question… Which approach should be preferred in this situation? Why?

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• Create a class that inherets DrawableGameComponent in XNA as a CLASS with custom functions

  - by user3675013

  using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; namespace TileEngine { class Renderer : DrawableGameComponent { public Renderer(Game game) : base(game) { } SpriteBatch spriteBatch ; protected override void LoadContent() { base.LoadContent(); } public override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { base.Draw(gameTime); } public override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { base.Update(gameTime); } public override void Initialize() { base.Initialize(); } public RenderTarget2D new_texture(int width, int height) { Texture2D TEX = new Texture2D(GraphicsDevice, width, height); //create the texture to render to RenderTarget2D Mine = new RenderTarget2D(GraphicsDevice, width, height); GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(Mine); //set the render device to the reference provided //maybe base.draw can be used with spritebatch. Idk. We'll see if the order of operation //works out. Wish I could call base.draw here. return Mine; //I'm hoping that this returns the same instance and not a copy. } public void draw_texture(int width, int height, RenderTarget2D Mine) { GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); //Set the renderer to render to the backbuffer again Rectangle drawrect = new Rectangle(0, 0, width, height); //Set the rendering size to what we want spriteBatch.Begin(); //This uses spritebatch to draw the texture directly to the screen spriteBatch.Draw(Mine, drawrect, Color.White); //This uses the color white spriteBatch.End(); //ends the spritebatch //Call base.draw after this since it doesn't seem to recognize inside the function //maybe base.draw can be used with spritebatch. Idk. We'll see if the order of operation //works out. Wish I could call base.draw here. } } } I solved a previous issue where I wasn't allowed to access GraphicsDevice outside the main Default 'main' class Ie "Game" or "Game1" etc. Now I have a new issue. FYi no one told me that it would be possible to use GraphicsDevice References to cause it to not be null by using the drawable class. (hopefully after this last bug is solved it doesn't still return null) Anyways at present the problem is that I can't seem to get it to initialize as an instance in my main program. Ie Renderer tileClipping; and I'm unable to use it such as it is to be noted i haven't even gotten to testing these two steps below but before it compiled but when those functions of this class were called it complained that it can't render to a null device. Which meant that the device wasn't being initialized. I had no idea why. It took me hours to google this. I finally figured out the words I needed.. which were "do my rendering in XNA in a seperate class" now I haven't used the addcomponent function because I don't want it to only run these functions automatically and I want to be able to call the custom ones. In a nutshell what I want is: *access to rendering targets and graphics device OUTSIDE default class *passing of Rendertarget2D (which contain textures and textures should automatically be passed with a rendering target? ) *the device should be passed to this function as well OR the device should be passed to this function as a byproduct of passing the rendertarget (which is automatically associated with the render device it was given originally) *I'm assuming I'm dealing with abstracted pointers here so when I pass a class object or instance, I should be recieving the SAME object , I referenced, and not a copy that has only the lifespan of the function running. *the purpose for all these options: I want to initialize new 2d textures on the fly to customize tileclipping and even the X , y Offsets of where a WHOLE texture will be rendered, and the X and Y offsets of where tiles will be rendered ON that surface. This is why. And I'll be doing region based lighting effects per tile or even per 8X8 pixel spaces.. we'll see I'll also be doing sprite rotations on the whole texture then copying it again to a circular masked texture, and then doing a second copy for only solid tiles for masked rotated collisions on sprites. I'll be checking the masked pixels for my collision, and using raycasting possibly to check for collisions on those areas. The sprite will stay in the center, when this rotation happens. Here is a detailed diagram: http://i.stack.imgur.com/INf9K.gif I'll be using texture2D for steps 4-6 I suppose for steps 1 as well. Now ontop of that, the clipping size (IE the sqaure rendered) will be able to be shrunk or increased, on a per frame basis Therefore I can't use the same static size for my main texture2d and I can't use just the backbuffer Or we get the annoying flicker. Also I will have multiple instances of the renderer class so that I can freely pass textures around as if they are playing cards (in a sense) layering them ontop of eachother, cropping them how i want and such. and then using spritebatch to simply draw them at the locations I want. Hopefully this makes sense, and yes I will be planning on using alpha blending but only after all tiles have been drawn.. The masked collision is important and Yes I am avoiding using math on the tile rendering and instead resorting to image manipulation in video memory which is WHY I need this to work the way I'm intending it to work and not in the default way that XNA seems to handle graphics. Thanks to anyone willing to help. I hate the code form offered, because then I have to rely on static presence of an update function. What if I want to kill that update function or that object, but have it in memory, but just have it temporarily inactive? I'm making the assumption here the update function of one of these gamecomponents is automatic ? Anyways this is as detailed as I can make this post hopefully someone can help me solve the issue. Instead of tell me "derrr don't do it this wayyy" which is what a few people told me (but they don't understand the actual goal I have in mind) I'm trying to create basically a library where I can copy images freely no matter the size, i just have to specify the size in the function then as long as a reference to that object exists it should be kept alive? right? :/ anyways.. Anything else? I Don't know. I understand object oriented coding but I don't understand this XNA It's beggining to feel impossible to do anything custom in it without putting ALL my rendering code into the draw function of the main class tileClipping.new_texture(GraphicsDevice, width, height) tileClipping.Draw_texture(...)

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• Accessing local variable doesn't improve performance

  - by NicMagnier

  The short version Why is this code: var index = (Math.floor(y / scale) * img.width + Math.floor(x / scale)) * 4; More performant than this one? var index = Math.floor(ref_index) * 4; The long version This week, the author of Impact js published an article about some rendering issue: http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2012/09/drawing-pixels-is-hard In the article there was the source of a function to scale an image by accessing pixels in the canvas. I wanted to suggest some traditional ways to optimize this kind of code so that the scaling would be shorter at loading time. But after testing it my result was most of the time worst that the original function. Guessing this was the JavaScript engine that was doing some smart optimization I tried to understand a bit more what was going on so I did a bunch of test. But my results are quite confusing and I would need some help to understand what's going on. I have a test page here: http://www.mx981.com/stuff/resize_bench/test.html jsPerf: http://jsperf.com/local-variable-due-to-the-scope-lookup To start the test, click the picture and the results will appear in the console. There are three different versions: The original code: for( var y = 0; y < heightScaled; y++ ) { for( var x = 0; x < widthScaled; x++ ) { var index = (Math.floor(y / scale) * img.width + Math.floor(x / scale)) * 4; var indexScaled = (y * widthScaled + x) * 4; scaledPixels.data[ indexScaled ] = origPixels.data[ index ]; scaledPixels.data[ indexScaled+1 ] = origPixels.data[ index+1 ]; scaledPixels.data[ indexScaled+2 ] = origPixels.data[ index+2 ]; scaledPixels.data[ indexScaled+3 ] = origPixels.data[ index+3 ]; } } jsPerf: http://jsperf.com/so-accessing-local-variable-doesn-t-improve-performance One of my attempt to optimize it: var ref_index = 0; var ref_indexScaled = 0 var ref_step = 1 / scale; for( var y = 0; y < heightScaled; y++ ) { for( var x = 0; x < widthScaled; x++ ) { var index = Math.floor(ref_index) * 4; scaledPixels.data[ ref_indexScaled++ ] = origPixels.data[ index ]; scaledPixels.data[ ref_indexScaled++ ] = origPixels.data[ index+1 ]; scaledPixels.data[ ref_indexScaled++ ] = origPixels.data[ index+2 ]; scaledPixels.data[ ref_indexScaled++ ] = origPixels.data[ index+3 ]; ref_index+= ref_step; } } jsPerf: http://jsperf.com/so-accessing-local-variable-doesn-t-improve-performance The same optimized code but with recalculating the index variable each time (Hybrid) var ref_index = 0; var ref_indexScaled = 0 var ref_step = 1 / scale; for( var y = 0; y < heightScaled; y++ ) { for( var x = 0; x < widthScaled; x++ ) { var index = (Math.floor(y / scale) * img.width + Math.floor(x / scale)) * 4; scaledPixels.data[ ref_indexScaled++ ] = origPixels.data[ index ]; scaledPixels.data[ ref_indexScaled++ ] = origPixels.data[ index+1 ]; scaledPixels.data[ ref_indexScaled++ ] = origPixels.data[ index+2 ]; scaledPixels.data[ ref_indexScaled++ ] = origPixels.data[ index+3 ]; ref_index+= ref_step; } } jsPerf: http://jsperf.com/so-accessing-local-variable-doesn-t-improve-performance The only difference in the two last one is the calculation of the 'index' variable. And to my surprise the optimized version is slower in most browsers (except opera). Results of personal testing (not the jsPerf tests): Opera Original: 8668ms Optimized: 932ms Hybrid: 8696ms Chrome Original: 139ms Optimized: 145ms Hybrid: 136ms Safari Original: 433ms Optimized: 853ms Hybrid: 451ms Firefox Original: 343ms Optimized: 422ms Hybrid: 350ms After digging around, it seems an usual good practice is to access mainly local variable due to the scope lookup. Because The optimized version only call one local variable it should be faster that the Hybrid code which call multiple variable and object in addition to the various operation involved. So why the "optimized" version is slower? I thought that it might be because some JavaScript engine don't optimize the Optimized version because it is not hot enough but after using --trace-opt in chrome, it seems all version are properly compiled by V8. At this point I am a bit clueless and wonder if somebody would know what is going on? I did also some more test cases in this page: http://www.mx981.com/stuff/resize_bench/index.html

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• Integrating JavaScript Unit Tests with Visual Studio

  - by Stephen Walther

  Modern ASP.NET web applications take full advantage of client-side JavaScript to provide better interactivity and responsiveness. If you are building an ASP.NET application in the right way, you quickly end up with lots and lots of JavaScript code. When writing server code, you should be writing unit tests. One big advantage of unit tests is that they provide you with a safety net that enable you to safely modify your existing code – for example, fix bugs, add new features, and make performance enhancements -- without breaking your existing code. Every time you modify your code, you can execute your unit tests to verify that you have not broken anything. For the same reason that you should write unit tests for your server code, you should write unit tests for your client code. JavaScript is just as susceptible to bugs as C#. There is no shortage of unit testing frameworks for JavaScript. Each of the major JavaScript libraries has its own unit testing framework. For example, jQuery has QUnit, Prototype has UnitTestJS, YUI has YUI Test, and Dojo has Dojo Objective Harness (DOH). The challenge is integrating a JavaScript unit testing framework with Visual Studio. Visual Studio and Visual Studio ALM provide fantastic support for server-side unit tests. You can easily view the results of running your unit tests in the Visual Studio Test Results window. You can set up a check-in policy which requires that all unit tests pass before your source code can be committed to the source code repository. In addition, you can set up Team Build to execute your unit tests automatically. Unfortunately, Visual Studio does not provide “out-of-the-box” support for JavaScript unit tests. MS Test, the unit testing framework included in Visual Studio, does not support JavaScript unit tests. As soon as you leave the server world, you are left on your own. The goal of this blog entry is to describe one approach to integrating JavaScript unit tests with MS Test so that you can execute your JavaScript unit tests side-by-side with your C# unit tests. The goal is to enable you to execute JavaScript unit tests in exactly the same way as server-side unit tests. You can download the source code described by this project by scrolling to the end of this blog entry. Rejected Approach: Browser Launchers One popular approach to executing JavaScript unit tests is to use a browser as a test-driver. When you use a browser as a test-driver, you open up a browser window to execute and view the results of executing your JavaScript unit tests. For example, QUnit – the unit testing framework for jQuery – takes this approach. The following HTML page illustrates how you can use QUnit to create a unit test for a function named addNumbers(). <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Using QUnit</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://github.com/jquery/qunit/raw/master/qunit/qunit.css" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <h1 id="qunit-header">QUnit example</h1> <h2 id="qunit-banner"></h2> <div id="qunit-testrunner-toolbar"></div> <h2 id="qunit-userAgent"></h2> <ol id="qunit-tests"></ol> <div id="qunit-fixture">test markup, will be hidden</div> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://github.com/jquery/qunit/raw/master/qunit/qunit.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // The function to test function addNumbers(a, b) { return a+b; } // The unit test test("Test of addNumbers", function () { equals(4, addNumbers(1,3), "1+3 should be 4"); }); </script> </body> </html> This test verifies that calling addNumbers(1,3) returns the expected value 4. When you open this page in a browser, you can see that this test does, in fact, pass. The idea is that you can quickly refresh this QUnit HTML JavaScript test driver page in your browser whenever you modify your JavaScript code. In other words, you can keep a browser window open and keep refreshing it over and over while you are developing your application. That way, you can know very quickly whenever you have broken your JavaScript code. While easy to setup, there are several big disadvantages to this approach to executing JavaScript unit tests: You must view your JavaScript unit test results in a different location than your server unit test results. The JavaScript unit test results appear in the browser and the server unit test results appear in the Visual Studio Test Results window. Because all of your unit test results don’t appear in a single location, you are more likely to introduce bugs into your code without noticing it. Because your unit tests are not integrated with Visual Studio – in particular, MS Test -- you cannot easily include your JavaScript unit tests when setting up check-in policies or when performing automated builds with Team Build. A more sophisticated approach to using a browser as a test-driver is to automate the web browser. Instead of launching the browser and loading the test code yourself, you use a framework to automate this process. There are several different testing frameworks that support this approach: · Selenium – Selenium is a very powerful framework for automating browser tests. You can create your tests by recording a Firefox session or by writing the test driver code in server code such as C#. You can learn more about Selenium at http://seleniumhq.org/. LTAF – The ASP.NET team uses the Lightweight Test Automation Framework to test JavaScript code in the ASP.NET framework. You can learn more about LTAF by visiting the project home at CodePlex: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/35501 jsTestDriver – This framework uses Java to automate the browser. jsTestDriver creates a server which can be used to automate multiple browsers simultaneously. This project is located at http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/ TestSwam – This framework, created by John Resig, uses PHP to automate the browser. Like jsTestDriver, the framework creates a test server. You can open multiple browsers that are automated by the test server. Learn more about TestSwarm by visiting the following address: https://github.com/jeresig/testswarm/wiki Yeti – This is the framework introduced by Yahoo for automating browser tests. Yeti uses server-side JavaScript and depends on Node.js. Learn more about Yeti at http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/08/25/introducing-yeti-the-yui-easy-testing-interface/ All of these frameworks are great for integration tests – however, they are not the best frameworks to use for unit tests. In one way or another, all of these frameworks depend on executing tests within the context of a “living and breathing” browser. If you create an ASP.NET Unit Test then Visual Studio will launch a web server before executing the unit test. Why is launching a web server so bad? It is not the worst thing in the world. However, it does introduce dependencies that prevent your code from being tested in isolation. One of the defining features of a unit test -- versus an integration test – is that a unit test tests code in isolation. Another problem with launching a web server when performing unit tests is that launching a web server can be slow. If you cannot execute your unit tests quickly, you are less likely to execute your unit tests each and every time you make a code change. You are much more likely to fall into the pit of failure. Launching a browser when performing a JavaScript unit test has all of the same disadvantages as launching a web server when performing an ASP.NET unit test. Instead of testing a unit of JavaScript code in isolation, you are testing JavaScript code within the context of a particular browser. Using the frameworks listed above for integration tests makes perfect sense. However, I want to consider a different approach for creating unit tests for JavaScript code. Using Server-Side JavaScript for JavaScript Unit Tests A completely different approach to executing JavaScript unit tests is to perform the tests outside of any browser. If you really want to test JavaScript then you should test JavaScript and leave the browser out of the testing process. There are several ways that you can execute JavaScript on the server outside the context of any browser: Rhino – Rhino is an implementation of JavaScript written in Java. The Rhino project is maintained by the Mozilla project. Learn more about Rhino at http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/ V8 – V8 is the open-source Google JavaScript engine written in C++. This is the JavaScript engine used by the Chrome web browser. You can download V8 and embed it in your project by visiting http://code.google.com/p/v8/ JScript – JScript is the JavaScript Script Engine used by Internet Explorer (up to but not including Internet Explorer 9), Windows Script Host, and Active Server Pages. Internet Explorer is still the most popular web browser. Therefore, I decided to focus on using the JScript Script Engine to execute JavaScript unit tests. Using the Microsoft Script Control There are two basic ways that you can pass JavaScript to the JScript Script Engine and execute the code: use the Microsoft Windows Script Interfaces or use the Microsoft Script Control. The difficult and proper way to execute JavaScript using the JScript Script Engine is to use the Microsoft Windows Script Interfaces. You can learn more about the Script Interfaces by visiting http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t9d4xf28(VS.85).aspx The main disadvantage of using the Script Interfaces is that they are difficult to use from .NET. There is a great series of articles on using the Script Interfaces from C# located at http://www.drdobbs.com/184406028. I picked the easier alternative and used the Microsoft Script Control. The Microsoft Script Control is an ActiveX control that provides a higher level abstraction over the Window Script Interfaces. You can download the Microsoft Script Control from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d7e31492-2595-49e6-8c02-1426fec693ac After you download the Microsoft Script Control, you need to add a reference to it to your project. Select the Visual Studio menu option Project, Add Reference to open the Add Reference dialog. Select the COM tab and add the Microsoft Script Control 1.0. Using the Script Control is easy. You call the Script Control AddCode() method to add JavaScript code to the Script Engine. Next, you call the Script Control Run() method to run a particular JavaScript function. The reference documentation for the Microsoft Script Control is located at the MSDN website: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa227633%28v=vs.60%29.aspx Creating the JavaScript Code to Test To keep things simple, let’s imagine that you want to test the following JavaScript function named addNumbers() which simply adds two numbers together: MvcApplication1\Scripts\Math.js function addNumbers(a, b) { return 5; } Notice that the addNumbers() method always returns the value 5. Right-now, it will not pass a good unit test. Create this file and save it in your project with the name Math.js in your MVC project’s Scripts folder (Save the file in your actual MVC application and not your MVC test application). Creating the JavaScript Test Helper Class To make it easier to use the Microsoft Script Control in unit tests, we can create a helper class. This class contains two methods: LoadFile() – Loads a JavaScript file. Use this method to load the JavaScript file being tested or the JavaScript file containing the unit tests. ExecuteTest() – Executes the JavaScript code. Use this method to execute a JavaScript unit test. Here’s the code for the JavaScriptTestHelper class: JavaScriptTestHelper.cs   using System; using System.IO; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting; using MSScriptControl; namespace MvcApplication1.Tests { public class JavaScriptTestHelper : IDisposable { private ScriptControl _sc; private TestContext _context; /// <summary> /// You need to use this helper with Unit Tests and not /// Basic Unit Tests because you need a Test Context /// </summary> /// <param name="testContext">Unit Test Test Context</param> public JavaScriptTestHelper(TestContext testContext) { if (testContext == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("TestContext"); } _context = testContext; _sc = new ScriptControl(); _sc.Language = "JScript"; _sc.AllowUI = false; } /// <summary> /// Load the contents of a JavaScript file into the /// Script Engine. /// </summary> /// <param name="path">Path to JavaScript file</param> public void LoadFile(string path) { var fileContents = File.ReadAllText(path); _sc.AddCode(fileContents); } /// <summary> /// Pass the path of the test that you want to execute. /// </summary> /// <param name="testMethodName">JavaScript function name</param> public void ExecuteTest(string testMethodName) { dynamic result = null; try { result = _sc.Run(testMethodName, new object[] { }); } catch { var error = ((IScriptControl)_sc).Error; if (error != null) { var description = error.Description; var line = error.Line; var column = error.Column; var text = error.Text; var source = error.Source; if (_context != null) { var details = String.Format("{0} \r\nLine: {1} Column: {2}", source, line, column); _context.WriteLine(details); } } throw new AssertFailedException(error.Description); } } public void Dispose() { _sc = null; } } }     Notice that the JavaScriptTestHelper class requires a Test Context to be instantiated. For this reason, you can use the JavaScriptTestHelper only with a Visual Studio Unit Test and not a Basic Unit Test (These are two different types of Visual Studio project items). Add the JavaScriptTestHelper file to your MVC test application (for example, MvcApplication1.Tests). Creating the JavaScript Unit Test Next, we need to create the JavaScript unit test function that we will use to test the addNumbers() function. Create a folder in your MVC test project named JavaScriptTests and add the following JavaScript file to this folder: MvcApplication1.Tests\JavaScriptTests\MathTest.js /// <reference path="JavaScriptUnitTestFramework.js"/> function testAddNumbers() { // Act var result = addNumbers(1, 3); // Assert assert.areEqual(4, result, "addNumbers did not return right value!"); }   The testAddNumbers() function takes advantage of another JavaScript library named JavaScriptUnitTestFramework.js. This library contains all of the code necessary to make assertions. Add the following JavaScriptnitTestFramework.js to the same folder as the MathTest.js file: MvcApplication1.Tests\JavaScriptTests\JavaScriptUnitTestFramework.js var assert = { areEqual: function (expected, actual, message) { if (expected !== actual) { throw new Error("Expected value " + expected + " is not equal to " + actual + ". " + message); } } }; There is only one type of assertion supported by this file: the areEqual() assertion. Most likely, you would want to add additional types of assertions to this file to make it easier to write your JavaScript unit tests. Deploying the JavaScript Test Files This step is non-intuitive. When you use Visual Studio to run unit tests, Visual Studio creates a new folder and executes a copy of the files in your project. After you run your unit tests, your Visual Studio Solution will contain a new folder named TestResults that includes a subfolder for each test run. You need to configure Visual Studio to deploy your JavaScript files to the test run folder or Visual Studio won’t be able to find your JavaScript files when you execute your unit tests. You will get an error that looks something like this when you attempt to execute your unit tests: You can configure Visual Studio to deploy your JavaScript files by adding a Test Settings file to your Visual Studio Solution. It is important to understand that you need to add this file to your Visual Studio Solution and not a particular Visual Studio project. Right-click your Solution in the Solution Explorer window and select the menu option Add, New Item. Select the Test Settings item and click the Add button. After you create a Test Settings file for your solution, you can indicate that you want a particular folder to be deployed whenever you perform a test run. Select the menu option Test, Edit Test Settings to edit your test configuration file. Select the Deployment tab and select your MVC test project’s JavaScriptTest folder to deploy. Click the Apply button and the Close button to save the changes and close the dialog. Creating the Visual Studio Unit Test The very last step is to create the Visual Studio unit test (the MS Test unit test). Add a new unit test to your MVC test project by selecting the menu option Add New Item and selecting the Unit Test project item (Do not select the Basic Unit Test project item): The difference between a Basic Unit Test and a Unit Test is that a Unit Test includes a Test Context. We need this Test Context to use the JavaScriptTestHelper class that we created earlier. Enter the following test method for the new unit test: [TestMethod] public void TestAddNumbers() { var jsHelper = new JavaScriptTestHelper(this.TestContext); // Load JavaScript files jsHelper.LoadFile("JavaScriptUnitTestFramework.js"); jsHelper.LoadFile(@"..\..\..\MvcApplication1\Scripts\Math.js"); jsHelper.LoadFile("MathTest.js"); // Execute JavaScript Test jsHelper.ExecuteTest("testAddNumbers"); } This code uses the JavaScriptTestHelper to load three files: JavaScripUnitTestFramework.js – Contains the assert functions. Math.js – Contains the addNumbers() function from your MVC application which is being tested. MathTest.js – Contains the JavaScript unit test function. Next, the test method calls the JavaScriptTestHelper ExecuteTest() method to execute the testAddNumbers() JavaScript function. Running the Visual Studio JavaScript Unit Test After you complete all of the steps described above, you can execute the JavaScript unit test just like any other unit test. You can use the keyboard combination CTRL-R, CTRL-A to run all of the tests in the current Visual Studio Solution. Alternatively, you can use the buttons in the Visual Studio toolbar to run the tests: (Unfortunately, the Run All Impacted Tests button won’t work correctly because Visual Studio won’t detect that your JavaScript code has changed. Therefore, you should use either the Run Tests in Current Context or Run All Tests in Solution options instead.) The results of running the JavaScript tests appear side-by-side with the results of running the server tests in the Test Results window. For example, if you Run All Tests in Solution then you will get the following results: Notice that the TestAddNumbers() JavaScript test has failed. That is good because our addNumbers() function is hard-coded to always return the value 5. If you double-click the failing JavaScript test, you can view additional details such as the JavaScript error message and the line number of the JavaScript code that failed: Summary The goal of this blog entry was to explain an approach to creating JavaScript unit tests that can be easily integrated with Visual Studio and Visual Studio ALM. I described how you can use the Microsoft Script Control to execute JavaScript on the server. By taking advantage of the Microsoft Script Control, we were able to execute our JavaScript unit tests side-by-side with all of our other unit tests and view the results in the standard Visual Studio Test Results window. You can download the code discussed in this blog entry from here: http://StephenWalther.com/downloads/Blog/JavaScriptUnitTesting/JavaScriptUnitTests.zip Before running this code, you need to first install the Microsoft Script Control which you can download from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d7e31492-2595-49e6-8c02-1426fec693ac

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• What's New in ASP.NET 4

  - by Navaneeth

  The .NET Framework version 4 includes enhancements for ASP.NET 4 in targeted areas. Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express also include enhancements and new features for improved Web development. This document provides an overview of many of the new features that are included in the upcoming release. This topic contains the following sections: ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET Web Forms ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Data ASP.NET Chart Control Visual Web Developer Enhancements Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET Core Services ASP.NET 4 introduces many features that improve core ASP.NET services such as output caching and session state storage. Extensible Output Caching Since the time that ASP.NET 1.0 was released, output caching has enabled developers to store the generated output of pages, controls, and HTTP responses in memory. On subsequent Web requests, ASP.NET can serve content more quickly by retrieving the generated output from memory instead of regenerating the output from scratch. However, this approach has a limitation — generated content always has to be stored in memory. On servers that experience heavy traffic, the memory requirements for output caching can compete with memory requirements for other parts of a Web application. ASP.NET 4 adds extensibility to output caching that enables you to configure one or more custom output-cache providers. Output-cache providers can use any storage mechanism to persist HTML content. These storage options can include local or remote disks, cloud storage, and distributed cache engines. Output-cache provider extensibility in ASP.NET 4 lets you design more aggressive and more intelligent output-caching strategies for Web sites. For example, you can create an output-cache provider that caches the "Top 10" pages of a site in memory, while caching pages that get lower traffic on disk. Alternatively, you can cache every vary-by combination for a rendered page, but use a distributed cache so that the memory consumption is offloaded from front-end Web servers. You create a custom output-cache provider as a class that derives from the OutputCacheProvider type. You can then configure the provider in the Web.config file by using the new providers subsection of the outputCache element For more information and for examples that show how to configure the output cache, see outputCache Element for caching (ASP.NET Settings Schema). For more information about the classes that support caching, see the documentation for the OutputCache and OutputCacheProvider classes. By default, in ASP.NET 4, all HTTP responses, rendered pages, and controls use the in-memory output cache. The defaultProvider attribute for ASP.NET is AspNetInternalProvider. You can change the default output-cache provider used for a Web application by specifying a different provider name for defaultProvider attribute. In addition, you can select different output-cache providers for individual control and for individual requests and programmatically specify which provider to use. For more information, see the HttpApplication.GetOutputCacheProviderName(HttpContext) method. The easiest way to choose a different output-cache provider for different Web user controls is to do so declaratively by using the new providerName attribute in a page or control directive, as shown in the following example: <%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="None" providerName="DiskCache" %> Preloading Web Applications Some Web applications must load large amounts of data or must perform expensive initialization processing before serving the first request. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, for these situations you had to devise custom approaches to "wake up" an ASP.NET application and then run initialization code during the Application_Load method in the Global.asax file. To address this scenario, a new application preload manager (autostart feature) is available when ASP.NET 4 runs on IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2. The preload feature provides a controlled approach for starting up an application pool, initializing an ASP.NET application, and then accepting HTTP requests. It lets you perform expensive application initialization prior to processing the first HTTP request. For example, you can use the application preload manager to initialize an application and then signal a load-balancer that the application was initialized and ready to accept HTTP traffic. To use the application preload manager, an IIS administrator sets an application pool in IIS 7.5 to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <applicationPools> <add name="MyApplicationPool" startMode="AlwaysRunning" /> </applicationPools> Because a single application pool can contain multiple applications, you specify individual applications to be automatically started by using the following configuration in the applicationHost.config file: <sites> <site name="MySite" id="1"> <application path="/" serviceAutoStartEnabled="true" serviceAutoStartProvider="PrewarmMyCache" > <!-- Additional content --> </application> </site> </sites> <!-- Additional content --> <serviceAutoStartProviders> <add name="PrewarmMyCache" type="MyNamespace.CustomInitialization, MyLibrary" /> </serviceAutoStartProviders> When an IIS 7.5 server is cold-started or when an individual application pool is recycled, IIS 7.5 uses the information in the applicationHost.config file to determine which Web applications have to be automatically started. For each application that is marked for preload, IIS7.5 sends a request to ASP.NET 4 to start the application in a state during which the application temporarily does not accept HTTP requests. When it is in this state, ASP.NET instantiates the type defined by the serviceAutoStartProvider attribute (as shown in the previous example) and calls into its public entry point. You create a managed preload type that has the required entry point by implementing the IProcessHostPreloadClient interface, as shown in the following example: public class CustomInitialization : System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient { public void Preload(string[] parameters) { // Perform initialization. } } After your initialization code runs in the Preload method and after the method returns, the ASP.NET application is ready to process requests. Permanently Redirecting a Page Content in Web applications is often moved over the lifetime of the application. This can lead to links to be out of date, such as the links that are returned by search engines. In ASP.NET, developers have traditionally handled requests to old URLs by using the Redirect method to forward a request to the new URL. However, the Redirect method issues an HTTP 302 (Found) response (which is used for a temporary redirect). This results in an extra HTTP round trip. ASP.NET 4 adds a RedirectPermanent helper method that makes it easy to issue HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently) responses, as in the following example: RedirectPermanent("/newpath/foroldcontent.aspx"); Search engines and other user agents that recognize permanent redirects will store the new URL that is associated with the content, which eliminates the unnecessary round trip made by the browser for temporary redirects. Session State Compression By default, ASP.NET provides two options for storing session state across a Web farm. The first option is a session state provider that invokes an out-of-process session state server. The second option is a session state provider that stores data in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Because both options store state information outside a Web application's worker process, session state has to be serialized before it is sent to remote storage. If a large amount of data is saved in session state, the size of the serialized data can become very large. ASP.NET 4 introduces a new compression option for both kinds of out-of-process session state providers. By using this option, applications that have spare CPU cycles on Web servers can achieve substantial reductions in the size of serialized session state data. You can set this option using the new compressionEnabled attribute of the sessionState element in the configuration file. When the compressionEnabled configuration option is set to true, ASP.NET compresses (and decompresses) serialized session state by using the .NET Framework GZipStreamclass. The following example shows how to set this attribute. <sessionState mode="SqlServer" sqlConnectionString="data source=dbserver;Initial Catalog=aspnetstate" allowCustomSqlDatabase="true" compressionEnabled="true" /> ASP.NET Web Forms Web Forms has been a core feature in ASP.NET since the release of ASP.NET 1.0. Many enhancements have been in this area for ASP.NET 4, such as the following: The ability to set meta tags. More control over view state. Support for recently introduced browsers and devices. Easier ways to work with browser capabilities. Support for using ASP.NET routing with Web Forms. More control over generated IDs. The ability to persist selected rows in data controls. More control over rendered HTML in the FormView and ListView controls. Filtering support for data source controls. Enhanced support for Web standards and accessibility Setting Meta Tags with the Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription Properties Two properties have been added to the Page class: MetaKeywords and MetaDescription. These two properties represent corresponding meta tags in the HTML rendered for a page, as shown in the following example: <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>Untitled Page</title> <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2' /> <meta name="description" content="Description of my page" /> </head> These two properties work like the Title property does, and they can be set in the @ Page directive. For more information, see Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription. Enabling View State for Individual Controls A new property has been added to the Control class: ViewStateMode. You can use this property to disable view state for all controls on a page except those for which you explicitly enable view state. View state data is included in a page's HTML and increases the amount of time it takes to send a page to the client and post it back. Storing more view state than is necessary can cause significant decrease in performance. In earlier versions of ASP.NET, you could reduce the impact of view state on a page's performance by disabling view state for specific controls. But sometimes it is easier to enable view state for a few controls that need it instead of disabling it for many that do not need it. For more information, see Control.ViewStateMode. Support for Recently Introduced Browsers and Devices ASP.NET includes a feature that is named browser capabilities that lets you determine the capabilities of the browser that a user is using. Browser capabilities are represented by the HttpBrowserCapabilities object which is stored in the HttpRequest.Browser property. Information about a particular browser's capabilities is defined by a browser definition file. In ASP.NET 4, these browser definition files have been updated to contain information about recently introduced browsers and devices such as Google Chrome, Research in Motion BlackBerry smart phones, and Apple iPhone. Existing browser definition files have also been updated. For more information, see How to: Upgrade an ASP.NET Web Application to ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET Web Server Controls and Browser Capabilities. The browser definition files that are included with ASP.NET 4 are shown in the following list: •blackberry.browser •chrome.browser •Default.browser •firefox.browser •gateway.browser •generic.browser •ie.browser •iemobile.browser •iphone.browser •opera.browser •safari.browser A New Way to Define Browser Capabilities ASP.NET 4 includes a new feature referred to as browser capabilities providers. As the name suggests, this lets you build a provider that in turn lets you write custom code to determine browser capabilities. In ASP.NET version 3.5 Service Pack 1, you define browser capabilities in an XML file. This file resides in a machine-level folder or an application-level folder. Most developers do not need to customize these files, but for those who do, the provider approach can be easier than dealing with complex XML syntax. The provider approach makes it possible to simplify the process by implementing a common browser definition syntax, or a database that contains up-to-date browser definitions, or even a Web service for such a database. For more information about the new browser capabilities provider, see the What's New for ASP.NET 4 White Paper. Routing in ASP.NET 4 ASP.NET 4 adds built-in support for routing with Web Forms. Routing is a feature that was introduced with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and lets you configure an application to use URLs that are meaningful to users and to search engines because they do not have to specify physical file names. This can make your site more user-friendly and your site content more discoverable by search engines. For example, the URL for a page that displays product categories in your application might look like the following example: http://website/products.aspx?categoryid=12 By using routing, you can use the following URL to render the same information: http://website/products/software The second URL lets the user know what to expect and can result in significantly improved rankings in search engine results. the new features include the following: The PageRouteHandler class is a simple HTTP handler that you use when you define routes. You no longer have to write a custom route handler. The HttpRequest.RequestContext and Page.RouteData properties make it easier to access information that is passed in URL parameters. The RouteUrl expression provides a simple way to create a routed URL in markup. The RouteValue expression provides a simple way to extract URL parameter values in markup. The RouteParameter class makes it easier to pass URL parameter values to a query for a data source control (similar to FormParameter). You no longer have to change the Web.config file to enable routing. For more information about routing, see the following topics: ASP.NET Routing Walkthrough: Using ASP.NET Routing in a Web Forms Application How to: Define Routes for Web Forms Applications How to: Construct URLs from Routes How to: Access URL Parameters in a Routed Page Setting Client IDs The new ClientIDMode property makes it easier to write client script that references HTML elements rendered for server controls. Increasing use of Microsoft Ajax makes the need to do this more common. For example, you may have a data control that renders a long list of products with prices and you want to use client script to make a Web service call and update individual prices in the list as they change without refreshing the entire page. Typically you get a reference to an HTML element in client script by using the document.GetElementById method. You pass to this method the value of the id attribute of the HTML element you want to reference. In the case of elements that are rendered for ASP.NET server controls earlier versions of ASP.NET could make this difficult or impossible. You were not always able to predict what id values ASP.NET would generate, or ASP.NET could generate very long id values. The problem was especially difficult for data controls that would generate multiple rows for a single instance of the control in your markup. ASP.NET 4 adds two new algorithms for generating id attributes. These algorithms can generate id attributes that are easier to work with in client script because they are more predictable and that are easier to work with because they are simpler. For more information about how to use the new algorithms, see the following topics: ASP.NET Web Server Control Identification Walkthrough: Making Data-Bound Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript Walkthrough: Making Controls Located in Web User Controls Easier to Access from JavaScript How to: Access Controls from JavaScript by ID Persisting Row Selection in Data Controls The GridView and ListView controls enable users to select a row. In previous versions of ASP.NET, row selection was based on the row index on the page. For example, if you select the third item on page 1 and then move to page 2, the third item on page 2 is selected. In most cases, is more desirable not to select any rows on page 2. ASP.NET 4 supports Persisted Selection, a new feature that was initially supported only in Dynamic Data projects in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. When this feature is enabled, the selected item is based on the row data key. This means that if you select the third row on page 1 and move to page 2, nothing is selected on page 2. When you move back to page 1, the third row is still selected. This is a much more natural behavior than the behavior in earlier versions of ASP.NET. Persisted selection is now supported for the GridView and ListView controls in all projects. You can enable this feature in the GridView control, for example, by setting the EnablePersistedSelection property, as shown in the following example: <asp:GridView id="GridView2" runat="server" PersistedSelection="true"> </asp:GridView> FormView Control Enhancements The FormView control is enhanced to make it easier to style the content of the control with CSS. In previous versions of ASP.NET, the FormView control rendered it contents using an item template. This made styling more difficult in the markup because unexpected table row and table cell tags were rendered by the control. The FormView control supports RenderOuterTable, a property in ASP.NET 4. When this property is set to false, as show in the following example, the table tags are not rendered. This makes it easier to apply CSS style to the contents of the control. <asp:FormView ID="FormView1" runat="server" RenderTable="false"> For more information, see FormView Web Server Control Overview. ListView Control Enhancements The ListView control, which was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5, has all the functionality of the GridView control while giving you complete control over the output. This control has been made easier to use in ASP.NET 4. The earlier version of the control required that you specify a layout template that contained a server control with a known ID. The following markup shows a typical example of how to use the ListView control in ASP.NET 3.5. <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <LayoutTemplate> <asp:PlaceHolder ID="ItemPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder> </LayoutTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> In ASP.NET 4, the ListView control does not require a layout template. The markup shown in the previous example can be replaced with the following markup: <asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server"> <ItemTemplate> <% Eval("LastName")%> </ItemTemplate> </asp:ListView> For more information, see ListView Web Server Control Overview. Filtering Data with the QueryExtender Control A very common task for developers who create data-driven Web pages is to filter data. This traditionally has been performed by building Where clauses in data source controls. This approach can be complicated, and in some cases the Where syntax does not let you take advantage of the full functionality of the underlying database. To make filtering easier, a new QueryExtender control has been added in ASP.NET 4. This control can be added to EntityDataSource or LinqDataSource controls in order to filter the data returned by these controls. Because the QueryExtender control relies on LINQ, but you do not to need to know how to write LINQ queries to use the query extender. The QueryExtender control supports a variety of filter options. The following lists QueryExtender filter options. Term Definition SearchExpression Searches a field or fields for string values and compares them to a specified string value. RangeExpression Searches a field or fields for values in a range specified by a pair of values. PropertyExpression Compares a specified value to a property value in a field. If the expression evaluates to true, the data that is being examined is returned. OrderByExpression Sorts data by a specified column and sort direction. CustomExpression Calls a function that defines custom filter in the page. For more information, see QueryExtenderQueryExtender Web Server Control Overview. Enhanced Support for Web Standards and Accessibility Earlier versions of ASP.NET controls sometimes render markup that does not conform to HTML, XHTML, or accessibility standards. ASP.NET 4 eliminates most of these exceptions. For details about how the HTML that is rendered by each control meets accessibility standards, see ASP.NET Controls and Accessibility. CSS for Controls that Can be Disabled In ASP.NET 3.5, when a control is disabled (see WebControl.Enabled), a disabled attribute is added to the rendered HTML element. For example, the following markup creates a Label control that is disabled: <asp:Label id="Label1" runat="server"   Text="Test" Enabled="false" /> In ASP.NET 3.5, the previous control settings generate the following HTML: <span id="Label1" disabled="disabled">Test</span> In HTML 4.01, the disabled attribute is not considered valid on span elements. It is valid only on input elements because it specifies that they cannot be accessed. On display-only elements such as span elements, browsers typically support rendering for a disabled appearance, but a Web page that relies on this non-standard behavior is not robust according to accessibility standards. For display-only elements, you should use CSS to indicate a disabled visual appearance. Therefore, by default ASP.NET 4 generates the following HTML for the control settings shown previously: <span id="Label1" class="aspNetDisabled">Test</span> You can change the value of the class attribute that is rendered by default when a control is disabled by setting the DisabledCssClass property. CSS for Validation Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, validation controls render a default color of red as an inline style. For example, the following markup creates a RequiredFieldValidator control: <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator1" runat="server"   ErrorMessage="Required Field" ControlToValidate="RadioButtonList1" /> ASP.NET 3.5 renders the following HTML for the validator control: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1"   style="color:Red;visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> By default, ASP.NET 4 does not render an inline style to set the color to red. An inline style is used only to hide or show the validator, as shown in the following example: <span id="RequiredFieldValidator1"   style"visibility:hidden;">RequiredFieldValidator</span> Therefore, ASP.NET 4 does not automatically show error messages in red. For information about how to use CSS to specify a visual style for a validation control, see Validating User Input in ASP.NET Web Pages. CSS for the Hidden Fields Div Element ASP.NET uses hidden fields to store state information such as view state and control state. These hidden fields are contained by a div element. In ASP.NET 3.5, this div element does not have a class attribute or an id attribute. Therefore, CSS rules that affect all div elements could unintentionally cause this div to be visible. To avoid this problem, ASP.NET 4 renders the div element for hidden fields with a CSS class that you can use to differentiate the hidden fields div from others. The new classvalue is shown in the following example: <div class="aspNetHidden"> CSS for the Table, Image, and ImageButton Controls By default, in ASP.NET 3.5, some controls set the border attribute of rendered HTML to zero (0). The following example shows HTML that is generated by the Table control in ASP.NET 3.5: <table id="Table2" border="0"> The Image control and the ImageButton control also do this. Because this is not necessary and provides visual formatting information that should be provided by using CSS, the attribute is not generated in ASP.NET 4. CSS for the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the UpdatePanel and UpdateProgress controls do not support expando attributes. This makes it impossible to set a CSS class on the HTMLelements that they render. In ASP.NET 4 these controls have been changed to accept expando attributes, as shown in the following example: <asp:UpdatePanel runat="server" class="myStyle"> </asp:UpdatePanel> The following HTML is rendered for this markup: <div id="ctl00_MainContent_UpdatePanel1" class="expandoclass"> </div> Eliminating Unnecessary Outer Tables In ASP.NET 3.5, the HTML that is rendered for the following controls is wrapped in a table element whose purpose is to apply inline styles to the entire control: FormView Login PasswordRecovery ChangePassword If you use templates to customize the appearance of these controls, you can specify CSS styles in the markup that you provide in the templates. In that case, no extra outer table is required. In ASP.NET 4, you can prevent the table from being rendered by setting the new RenderOuterTable property to false. Layout Templates for Wizard Controls In ASP.NET 3.5, the Wizard and CreateUserWizard controls generate an HTML table element that is used for visual formatting. In ASP.NET 4 you can use a LayoutTemplate element to specify the layout. If you do this, the HTML table element is not generated. In the template, you create placeholder controls to indicate where items should be dynamically inserted into the control. (This is similar to how the template model for the ListView control works.) For more information, see the Wizard.LayoutTemplate property. New HTML Formatting Options for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Controls ASP.NET 3.5 uses HTML table elements to format the output for the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList controls. To provide an alternative that does not use tables for visual formatting, ASP.NET 4 adds two new options to the RepeatLayout enumeration: UnorderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ul and li elements instead of a table. OrderedList. This option causes the HTML output to be formatted by using ol and li elements instead of a table. For examples of HTML that is rendered for the new options, see the RepeatLayout enumeration. Header and Footer Elements for the Table Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Table control can be configured to render thead and tfoot elements by setting the TableSection property of the TableHeaderRow class and the TableFooterRow class. In ASP.NET 4 these properties are set to the appropriate values by default. CSS and ARIA Support for the Menu Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the Menu control uses HTML table elements for visual formatting, and in some configurations it is not keyboard-accessible. ASP.NET 4 addresses these problems and improves accessibility in the following ways: The generated HTML is structured as an unordered list (ul and li elements). CSS is used for visual formatting. The menu behaves in accordance with ARIA standards for keyboard access. You can use arrow keys to navigate menu items. (For information about ARIA, see Accessibility in Visual Studio and ASP.NET.) ARIA role and property attributes are added to the generated HTML. (Attributes are added by using JavaScript instead of included in the HTML, to avoid generating HTML that would cause markup validation errors.) Styles for the Menu control are rendered in a style block at the top of the page, instead of inline with the rendered HTML elements. If you want to use a separate CSS file so that you can modify the menu styles, you can set the Menu control's new IncludeStyleBlock property to false, in which case the style block is not generated. Valid XHTML for the HtmlForm Control In ASP.NET 3.5, the HtmlForm control (which is created implicitly by the <form runat="server"> tag) renders an HTML form element that has both name and id attributes. The name attribute is deprecated in XHTML 1.1. Therefore, this control does not render the name attribute in ASP.NET 4. Maintaining Backward Compatibility in Control Rendering An existing ASP.NET Web site might have code in it that assumes that controls are rendering HTML the way they do in ASP.NET 3.5. To avoid causing backward compatibility problems when you upgrade the site to ASP.NET 4, you can have ASP.NET continue to generate HTML the way it does in ASP.NET 3.5 after you upgrade the site. To do so, you can set the controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion attribute of the pages element to "3.5" in the Web.config file of an ASP.NET 4 Web site, as shown in the following example: <system.web>   <pages controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="3.5"/> </system.web> If this setting is omitted, the default value is the same as the version of ASP.NET that the Web site targets. (For information about multi-targeting in ASP.NET, see .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects.) ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC helps Web developers build compelling standards-based Web sites that are easy to maintain because it decreases the dependency among application layers by using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. MVC provides complete control over the page markup. It also improves testability by inherently supporting Test Driven Development (TDD). Web sites created using ASP.NET MVC have a modular architecture. This allows members of a team to work independently on the various modules and can be used to improve collaboration. For example, developers can work on the model and controller layers (data and logic), while the designer work on the view (presentation). For tutorials, walkthroughs, conceptual content, code samples, and a complete API reference, see ASP.NET MVC 2. Dynamic Data Dynamic Data was introduced in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 release in mid-2008. This feature provides many enhancements for creating data-driven applications, such as the following: A RAD experience for quickly building a data-driven Web site. Automatic validation that is based on constraints defined in the data model. The ability to easily change the markup that is generated for fields in the GridView and DetailsView controls by using field templates that are part of your Dynamic Data project. For ASP.NET 4, Dynamic Data has been enhanced to give developers even more power for quickly building data-driven Web sites. For more information, see ASP.NET Dynamic Data Content Map. Enabling Dynamic Data for Individual Data-Bound Controls in Existing Web Applications You can use Dynamic Data features in existing ASP.NET Web applications that do not use scaffolding by enabling Dynamic Data for individual data-bound controls. Dynamic Data provides the presentation and data layer support for rendering these controls. When you enable Dynamic Data for data-bound controls, you get the following benefits: Setting default values for data fields. Dynamic Data enables you to provide default values at run time for fields in a data control. Interacting with the database without creating and registering a data model. Automatically validating the data that is entered by the user without writing any code. For more information, see Walkthrough: Enabling Dynamic Data in ASP.NET Data-Bound Controls. New Field Templates for URLs and E-mail Addresses ASP.NET 4 introduces two new built-in field templates, EmailAddress.ascx and Url.ascx. These templates are used for fields that are marked as EmailAddress or Url using the DataTypeAttribute attribute. For EmailAddress objects, the field is displayed as a hyperlink that is created by using the mailto: protocol. When users click the link, it opens the user's e-mail client and creates a skeleton message. Objects typed as Url are displayed as ordinary hyperlinks. The following example shows how to mark fields. [DataType(DataType.EmailAddress)] public object HomeEmail { get; set; } [DataType(DataType.Url)] public object Website { get; set; } Creating Links with the DynamicHyperLink Control Dynamic Data uses the new routing feature that was added in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to control the URLs that users see when they access the Web site. The new DynamicHyperLink control makes it easy to build links to pages in a Dynamic Data site. For information, see How to: Create Table Action Links in Dynamic Data Support for Inheritance in the Data Model Both the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL support inheritance in their data models. An example of this might be a database that has an InsurancePolicy table. It might also contain CarPolicy and HousePolicy tables that have the same fields as InsurancePolicy and then add more fields. Dynamic Data has been modified to understand inherited objects in the data model and to support scaffolding for the inherited tables. For more information, see Walkthrough: Mapping Table-per-Hierarchy Inheritance in Dynamic Data. Support for Many-to-Many Relationships (Entity Framework Only) The Entity Framework has rich support for many-to-many relationships between tables, which is implemented by exposing the relationship as a collection on an Entity object. New field templates (ManyToMany.ascx and ManyToMany_Edit.ascx) have been added to provide support for displaying and editing data that is involved in many-to-many relationships. For more information, see Working with Many-to-Many Data Relationships in Dynamic Data. New Attributes to Control Display and Support Enumerations The DisplayAttribute has been added to give you additional control over how fields are displayed. The DisplayNameAttribute attribute in earlier versions of Dynamic Data enabled you to change the name that is used as a caption for a field. The new DisplayAttribute class lets you specify more options for displaying a field, such as the order in which a field is displayed and whether a field will be used as a filter. The attribute also provides independent control of the name that is used for the labels in a GridView control, the name that is used in a DetailsView control, the help text for the field, and the watermark used for the field (if the field accepts text input). The EnumDataTypeAttribute class has been added to let you map fields to enumerations. When you apply this attribute to a field, you specify an enumeration type. Dynamic Data uses the new Enumeration.ascx field template to create UI for displaying and editing enumeration values. The template maps the values from the database to the names in the enumeration. Enhanced Support for Filters Dynamic Data 1.0 had built-in filters for Boolean columns and foreign-key columns. The filters did not let you specify the order in which they were displayed. The new DisplayAttribute attribute addresses this by giving you control over whether a column appears as a filter and in what order it will be displayed. An additional enhancement is that filtering support has been rewritten to use the new QueryExtender feature of Web Forms. This lets you create filters without requiring knowledge of the data source control that the filters will be used with. Along with these extensions, filters have also been turned into template controls, which lets you add new ones. Finally, the DisplayAttribute class mentioned earlier allows the default filter to be overridden, in the same way that UIHint allows the default field template for a column to be overridden. For more information, see Walkthrough: Filtering Rows in Tables That Have a Parent-Child Relationship and QueryableFilterRepeater. ASP.NET Chart Control The ASP.NET chart server control enables you to create ASP.NET pages applications that have simple, intuitive charts for complex statistical or financial analysis. The chart control supports the following features: Data series, chart areas, axes, legends, labels, titles, and more. Data binding. Data manipulation, such as copying, splitting, merging, alignment, grouping, sorting, searching, and filtering. Statistical formulas and financial formulas. Advanced chart appearance, such as 3-D, anti-aliasing, lighting, and perspective. Events and customizations. Interactivity and Microsoft Ajax. Support for the Ajax Content Delivery Network (CDN), which provides an optimized way for you to add Microsoft Ajax Library and jQuery scripts to your Web applications. For more information, see Chart Web Server Control Overview. Visual Web Developer Enhancements The following sections provide information about enhancements and new features in Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express. The Web page designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been enhanced for better CSS compatibility, includes additional support for HTML and ASP.NET markup snippets, and features a redesigned version of IntelliSense for JScript. Improved CSS Compatibility The Visual Web Developer designer in Visual Studio 2010 has been updated to improve CSS 2.1 standards compliance. The designer better preserves HTML source code and is more robust than in previous versions of Visual Studio. HTML and JScript Snippets In the HTML editor, IntelliSense auto-completes tag names. The IntelliSense Snippets feature auto-completes whole tags and more. In Visual Studio 2010, IntelliSense snippets are supported for JScript, alongside C# and Visual Basic, which were supported in earlier versions of Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 includes over 200 snippets that help you auto-complete common ASP.NET and HTML tags, including required attributes (such as runat="server") and common attributes specific to a tag (such as ID, DataSourceID, ControlToValidate, and Text). You can download additional snippets, or you can write your own snippets that encapsulate the blocks of markup that you or your team use for common tasks. For more information on HTML snippets, see Walkthrough: Using HTML Snippets. JScript IntelliSense Enhancements In Visual 2010, JScript IntelliSense has been redesigned to provide an even richer editing experience. IntelliSense now recognizes objects that have been dynamically generated by methods such as registerNamespace and by similar techniques used by other JavaScript frameworks. Performance has been improved to analyze large libraries of script and to display IntelliSense with little or no processing delay. Compatibility has been significantly increased to support almost all third-party libraries and to support diverse coding styles. Documentation comments are now parsed as you type and are immediately leveraged by IntelliSense. Web Application Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 For Web application projects, Visual Studio now provides tools that work with the IIS Web Deployment Tool (Web Deploy) to automate many processes that had to be done manually in earlier versions of ASP.NET. For example, the following tasks can now be automated: Creating an IIS application on the destination computer and configuring IIS settings. Copying files to the destination computer. Changing Web.config settings that must be different in the destination environment. Propagating changes to data or data structures in SQL Server databases that are used by the Web application. For more information about Web application deployment, see ASP.NET Deployment Content Map. Enhancements to ASP.NET Multi-Targeting ASP.NET 4 adds new features to the multi-targeting feature to make it easier to work with projects that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. Multi-targeting was introduced in ASP.NET 3.5 to enable you to use the latest version of Visual Studio without having to upgrade existing Web sites or Web services to the latest version of the .NET Framework. In Visual Studio 2008, when you work with a project targeted for an earlier version of the .NET Framework, most features of the development environment adapt to the targeted version. However, IntelliSense displays language features that are available in the current version, and property windows display properties available in the current version. In Visual Studio 2010, only language features and properties available in the targeted version of the .NET Framework are shown. For more information about multi-targeting, see the following topics: .NET Framework Multi-Targeting for ASP.NET Web Projects ASP.NET Side-by-Side Execution Overview How to: Host Web Applications That Use Different Versions of the .NET Framework on the Same Server How to: Deploy Web Site Projects Targeted for Earlier Versions of the .NET Framework

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• Using an alternate JSON Serializer in ASP.NET Web API

  - by Rick Strahl

  The new ASP.NET Web API that Microsoft released alongside MVC 4.0 Beta last week is a great framework for building REST and AJAX APIs. I've been working with it for quite a while now and I really like the way it works and the complete set of features it provides 'in the box'. It's about time that Microsoft gets a decent API for building generic HTTP endpoints into the framework. DataContractJsonSerializer sucks As nice as Web API's overall design is one thing still sucks: The built-in JSON Serialization uses the DataContractJsonSerializer which is just too limiting for many scenarios. The biggest issues I have with it are: No support for untyped values (object, dynamic, Anonymous Types) MS AJAX style Date Formatting Ugly serialization formats for types like Dictionaries To me the most serious issue is dealing with serialization of untyped objects. I have number of applications with AJAX front ends that dynamically reformat data from business objects to fit a specific message format that certain UI components require. The most common scenario I have there are IEnumerable query results from a database with fields from the result set rearranged to fit the sometimes unconventional formats required for the UI components (like jqGrid for example). Creating custom types to fit these messages seems like overkill and projections using Linq makes this much easier to code up. Alas DataContractJsonSerializer doesn't support it. Neither does DataContractSerializer for XML output for that matter. What this means is that you can't do stuff like this in Web API out of the box:public object GetAnonymousType() { return new { name = "Rick", company = "West Wind", entered= DateTime.Now }; } Basically anything that doesn't have an explicit type DataContractJsonSerializer will not let you return. FWIW, the same is true for XmlSerializer which also doesn't work with non-typed values for serialization. The example above is obviously contrived with a hardcoded object graph, but it's not uncommon to get dynamic values returned from queries that have anonymous types for their result projections. Apparently there's a good possibility that Microsoft will ship Json.NET as part of Web API RTM release.  Scott Hanselman confirmed this as a footnote in his JSON Dates post a few days ago. I've heard several other people from Microsoft confirm that Json.NET will be included and be the default JSON serializer, but no details yet in what capacity it will show up. Let's hope it ends up as the default in the box. Meanwhile this post will show you how you can use it today with the beta and get JSON that matches what you should see in the RTM version. What about JsonValue? To be fair Web API DOES include a new JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray type that allow you to address some of these scenarios. JsonValue is a new type in the System.Json assembly that can be used to build up an object graph based on a dictionary. It's actually a really cool implementation of a dynamic type that allows you to create an object graph and spit it out to JSON without having to create .NET type first. JsonValue can also receive a JSON string and parse it without having to actually load it into a .NET type (which is something that's been missing in the core framework). This is really useful if you get a JSON result from an arbitrary service and you don't want to explicitly create a mapping type for the data returned. For serialization you can create an object structure on the fly and pass it back as part of an Web API action method like this:public JsonValue GetJsonValue() { dynamic json = new JsonObject(); json.name = "Rick"; json.company = "West Wind"; json.entered = DateTime.Now; dynamic address = new JsonObject(); address.street = "32 Kaiea"; address.zip = "96779"; json.address = address; dynamic phones = new JsonArray(); json.phoneNumbers = phones; dynamic phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); //var jsonString = json.ToString(); return json; } which produces the following output (formatted here for easier reading):{ name: "rick", company: "West Wind", entered: "2012-03-08T15:33:19.673-10:00", address: { street: "32 Kaiea", zip: "96779" }, phoneNumbers: [ { type: "Home", number: "808 123-1233" }, { type: "Mobile", number: "808 123-1234" }] } If you need to build a simple JSON type on the fly these types work great. But if you have an existing type - or worse a query result/list that's already formatted JsonValue et al. become a pain to work with. As far as I can see there's no way to just throw an object instance at JsonValue and have it convert into JsonValue dictionary. It's a manual process. Using alternate Serializers in Web API So, currently the default serializer in WebAPI is DataContractJsonSeriaizer and I don't like it. You may not either, but luckily you can swap the serializer fairly easily. If you'd rather use the JavaScriptSerializer built into System.Web.Extensions or Json.NET today, it's not too difficult to create a custom MediaTypeFormatter that uses these serializers and can replace or partially replace the native serializer. Here's a MediaTypeFormatter implementation using the ASP.NET JavaScriptSerializer:using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using System.IO; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JavaScriptSerializerFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JavaScriptSerializerFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type== typeof(JsonArray) ) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); string json; using (var sr = new StreamReader(stream)) { json = sr.ReadToEnd(); sr.Close(); } object val = ser.Deserialize(json,type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); var json = ser.Serialize(value); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } Formatter implementation is pretty simple: You override 4 methods to tell which types you can handle and then handle the input or output streams to create/parse the JSON data. Note that when creating output you want to take care to still allow JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray types to be handled by the default serializer so those objects serialize properly - if you let either JavaScriptSerializer or JSON.NET handle them they'd try to render the dictionaries which is very undesirable. If you'd rather use Json.NET here's the JSON.NET version of the formatter:// this code requires a reference to JSON.NET in your project #if true using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using Newtonsoft.Json; using System.IO; using Newtonsoft.Json.Converters; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JsonNetFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JsonNetFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type == typeof(JsonArray)) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; var sr = new StreamReader(stream); var jreader = new JsonTextReader(sr); var ser = new JsonSerializer(); ser.Converters.Add(new IsoDateTimeConverter()); object val = ser.Deserialize(jreader, type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(value, Formatting.Indented, new JsonConverter[1] { new IsoDateTimeConverter() } ); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } #endif   One advantage of the Json.NET serializer is that you can specify a few options on how things are formatted and handled. You get null value handling and you can plug in the IsoDateTimeConverter which is nice to product proper ISO dates that I would expect any Json serializer to output these days. Hooking up the Formatters Once you've created the custom formatters you need to enable them for your Web API application. To do this use the GlobalConfiguration.Configuration object and add the formatter to the Formatters collection. Here's what this looks like hooked up from Application_Start in a Web project:protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Action based routing (used for RPC calls) RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "StockApi", routeTemplate: "stocks/{action}/{symbol}", defaults: new { symbol = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "StockApi" } ); // WebApi Configuration to hook up formatters and message handlers // optional RegisterApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration); } public static void RegisterApis(HttpConfiguration config) { // Add JavaScriptSerializer formatter instead - add at top to make default //config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JavaScriptSerializerFormatter()); // Add Json.net formatter - add at the top so it fires first! // This leaves the old one in place so JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray still are handled config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonNetFormatter()); } One thing to remember here is the GlobalConfiguration object which is Web API's static configuration instance. I think this thing is seriously misnamed given that GlobalConfiguration could stand for anything and so is hard to discover if you don't know what you're looking for. How about WebApiConfiguration or something more descriptive? Anyway, once you know what it is you can use the Formatters collection to insert your custom formatter. Note that I insert my formatter at the top of the list so it takes precedence over the default formatter. I also am not removing the old formatter because I still want JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray to be handled by the default serialization mechanism. Since they process in sequence and I exclude processing for these types JsonValue et al. still get properly serialized/deserialized. Summary Currently DataContractJsonSerializer in Web API is a pain, but at least we have the ability with relatively limited effort to replace the MediaTypeFormatter and plug in our own JSON serializer. This is useful for many scenarios - if you have existing client applications that used MVC JsonResult or ASP.NET AJAX results from ASMX AJAX services you can plug in the JavaScript serializer and get exactly the same serializer you used in the past so your results will be the same and don't potentially break clients. JSON serializers do vary a bit in how they serialize some of the more complex types (like Dictionaries and dates for example) and so if you're migrating it might be helpful to ensure your client code doesn't break when you switch to ASP.NET Web API. Going forward it looks like Microsoft is planning on plugging in Json.Net into Web API and make that the default. I think that's an awesome choice since Json.net has been around forever, is fast and easy to use and provides a ton of functionality as part of this great library. I just wish Microsoft would have figured this out sooner instead of now at the last minute integrating with it especially given that Json.Net has a similar set of lower level JSON objects JsonValue/JsonObject etc. which now will end up being duplicated by the native System.Json stuff. It's not like we don't already have enough confusion regarding which JSON serializer to use (JavaScriptSerializer, DataContractJsonSerializer, JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray and now Json.net). For years I've been using my own JSON serializer because the built in choices are both limited. However, with an official encorsement of Json.Net I'm happily moving on to use that in my applications. Let's see and hope Microsoft gets this right before ASP.NET Web API goes gold.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api  AJAX  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER JULY 2012

  - by mseika

  SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER JULY 2012 Dear SOA partner community member To provide our community members the best of our knowledge, we want your feedback on our SOA Partner community. Thus we are organizing SOA Partner Community Survey 2012. We request you to participate in the survey and give your valuable feedback on various areas of marketing, sales and education. To continue our successful BPM Suite, Oracle is launching together with you Process Accelerators initiative. It’s your opportunity to co-develop and market predefined processes. Oracle Fusion Applications Design Patterns are a great tool to develop your SOA or BPM solution or process accelerators. To promote your SOA & BPM Specialization we continue to offer several benefits. This month we would like to highlight our Specialization Plaques - make sure you request one for your office! Our Fusion Middleware Summer Camps are booked out, if could not get a seat you can attend the SOA & BPM track @ Virtual Developer Day: Oracle Fusion Development Oracle demo systems offer´s two new demos: Business Driven Development based on BPM Suite & SOA Lifecycle Management. Jürgen KressOracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA NEW CONTENT Community SurveyProcess Accelerators KitPlaques SOA & BPM SpecializedSOA & BPM at Virtual Developer Day News from our Partners & CommunityOverview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6 Business driven development(BDD) demo now available! SOA Lifecycle Management Oracle Fusion applications design patterns Updated material by Oracle Connect and Network SOA Blogs SOA on Facebook SOA on LinkedIn SOA on Twitter Mix SOA Forum COMMUNITY SURVEY Like every year we would like to get your feedback in our SOA Partner Community Survey 2012. Make sure that You attend to further develop our community and support our planning! It is key for us to get your feedback to prepare for the next fiscal year. Back to top PROCESS ACCELERATORS KIT Oracle is very interested to co-develop and market with you, our partners, pre-defined processes for BPM Suite.I am very happy to announce a new program called “Oracle BPM Partner Solution Catalog”. This program will provide a one-stop shop for our customers looking for Oracle BPM partner solutions available in the market today.The Oracle BPM Solution Catalog will be hosted on our very popular Oracle Technology Network (OTN). To give you an idea of the scale of customer visibility, OTN today receives over 1Million hits per day from our business and developer community. We would like to invite you to list your Oracle BPM 11g solutions available today.In order to participate in this program, you need to do the following: Fill in the attached slide templates - #3 and #4 for each Oracle BPM 11g solution you would like to list on OTN.Please add links to whitepapers , videos, references to the specific solution in the template slide. We recommend that you create a landing page on your website for these linked artifacts and just point to the same from within the PowerPoint template. This will give you the flexibility to update the information as frequently as needed. If you have the particular solution in production or a reference available, please list them as well. Send the PowerPoint template slides (1 set of slides for each Oracle BPM solution) to [email protected]. In addition to having the opportunity to list your solutions on OTN for Oracle customers, you will have the chance to advertise your new wins/implementations/solutions in an Oracle Sponsored PM Webinar held every quarter. This program is targeted to go live by the end of summer 2012. At this point, we are targeting a soft launch in July end 2012 so send on your BPM solutions information as soon as possible. We would love to have your solution(s) listed in the “Oracle BPM Partner Solution Catalog” at the time of the launch. This will be a live repository so you can keep adding more solutions as they become available. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us [email protected], Product Strategy Director, Oracle BPM , Phone +1 650.506.5486.Thank you and look forward to hearing from you. Oracle BPM team Process Accelerators Overview.pdf ProcessAcceleratorsDataSheet.pdf Demos draUPK.zip & trmUPK.zip BPM Solution repository slides.ppt Additional BPM material BPM Process Development Lifecycle Document that describes recommended approach to collaborative process modeling across business and IT tools ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) by Andrejus Baranovskis BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 by Mark Nelson BPM – Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View by Mark Nelson For the complete kit please visit the BPM folder at our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). For the complete presentation please visit our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). Information is Oracle and Partner confidential! Back to top PLAQUES SOA & BPM SPECIALIZED We continue to offer you a nice SOA & BPM Specialization plaque with your logo to proof your success. If you are a SOA or BPM Specialized partner and would like to request the plaque please send Brigitte an e-mail with the following information: Partner Name Partner logo (preferred eps file) Partner Status gold or platinum Your shipping address Your Specialization: SOA or BPM We recommend to mount the plaque at your office reception in addition you can use the SOA Specialization logos at your website download Logo: Gold & Platinum or the BPM logos Gold & Platinum Back to top SOA & BPM AT VIRTUAL DEVELOPER DAY Register now for this FREE hands-on online workshop Get up to date and learn everything you wanted to know about Oracle ADF & Fusion Development plus live Q&A chats with Oracle technical staffOracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is the standards based, strategic framework for Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle ADF’s integration with the Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BI creates a complete productive development platform for your custom applications.Join us at this FREE virtual event and learn the latest in Fusion Development including: Is Oracle ADF development faster and simpler than Forms, Apex or .Net? Mobile Application Development with ADF Mobile Oracle ADF development with Eclipse Oracle WebCenter Portal and ADF Development Application Lifecycle Management with ADF Building Process Centric Applications with ADF and BPM Oracle Business Intelligence and ADF Integration Live Q&A chats with Oracle technical staff Developer lead, manager or architect - this event has something for everyone. Don’t miss this opportunity.Tuesday, July 10, 2012. 9:00 a.m. PT -1:00 p.m. PT 11:00 a.m. CT - 3:00 p.m. CT 12:00 p.m. ET - 4:00 p.m. ET 1:00 p.m. BRT - 5:00 p.m. BRT Register online now! for this FREE event. Agenda: 09:00 am Opening 09:30 am Keynote: Oracle Fusion Development Track1Introduction to Fusion Development Track2What's New in Fusion Development Track3Fusion Development in the Enterprise 10:00 am Is Oracle ADF Development Faster and Simpler than Oracle Forms, APEX or .Net? Mobile Application Development with ADF Mobile Oracle WebCenter Portal and ADF Development 11:00 am Rich Web UI made simple - an ADF Faces Overview Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse - ADF Development Building Process Centric Applications with ADF and BPM 12:00 noon Next Generation Controller for JSF Application Lifecycle Management for ADF Oracle Business Intelligence and ADF Integration *Hands On Lab – WebCenter and ADF Lab w/ JDeveloper - Lab materials will be provided ahead of the event to give you ample time to work through the lab and increase the productivity of the live chat sessions the day of the event. Sessions abstractsRegister online now! for this FREE event Read more on Community Events and post your comment here. Back to top NEWS FROM OUR PARTNERS AND COMMUNITY Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity JDeveloper & ADF?Troubleshooting BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6http://dlvr.it/1p0FfS SOA Community?SOA & BPM @ Virtual Developer Day: Oracle Fusion Development - July 10th 2012https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/soa-bpm-virtual-developer-day- oracle-fusion-developmentjuly-10th-2012/#soacommunity #soa #bom #education orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: BAM design pointers - In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discove.http://ow.ly/1kYqES SOA CommunitySOA Community Newsletter June 2012http://wp.me/p10C8u-qw SOA CommunityBPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 by Mark Nelsonhttp://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/ bpmn-process-editor-problems-in-11-1-1-6 #soacommunity #bpm OTNArchBeat ?SOA Learning Library: free short, topic-focused training on Oracle SOA & BPM products | @SOACommunity http://pub.vitrue.com/NE1G Andrejus Baranovskis ?ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization)http://fb.me/1coX4r1X1 SOA CommunitySOA Learning Library provides a comprehensive curriculum for the SOA and BPM product suites https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/soa-learning-library #soacommunity #soa #bpm OTNArchBeat ?A Universal JMX Client for Weblogic - Part 1: Monitoring BPEL Thread Pools in SOA 11g | Stefan Koserhttp://pub.vitrue.com/mQVZ OTNArchBeat ?BPM - Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View | Mark Nelson http://pub.vitrue.com/3PR0Oracle SOA ?Learn how Choice Hotels Implements Innovative Google Maps Solution with #OracleSOA http://bit.ly/MTwIJ3 SOA Communitytop Tweets SOA Partner Community - June 2012 Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/top-tweets-soa-partner-community-june-2012 Torsten Winterberg#OPITZ is pushing Oracle commitment to the next level: New Specializations done: ADF, BPM, WLS, Exadatahttp://bit.ly/KX1WVS ServiceTechSymposium ?Only 8 more days left until Super Early Bird Registration Discount expires! http://www.servicetechsymposium.com OracleBlogsSOA Management in 3 minutes - Video explainerhttp://ow.ly/1kN5pn SOA Community ?SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium 2012 London - Enter Promo Code: Djmxz370https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/soa-cloud-service-technology-symposium-2012-london #soasymposium #soacommunity #soa Heidi BuelowGreat course! w David Read RT @soacommunity: product management ADF for BPM training 5 seats left https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/fusion-middleware-summer-campsadvanced-partner-trainings/ #bpm #soacommunity SOA Community ?product management ADF for BPM training 5 seats lefthttps://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/fusion-middleware-summer-campsadvanced-partner-trainings/ #bpm #soacommunity OTNArchBeat ?Oacle Fusion Applications Design Patterns Now Available For Developers | Ultan O'Broinhttp://pub.vitrue.com/UEiF OTNArchBeat ?SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium 2012London - Special Oracle Discounthttp://pub.vitrue.com/8E0J SOA CommunityBecome a facebook fan of soacommunity http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity SOA Community ?SOA Suite HealthCare Integration Architecture https://blogs.oracle.com/SOAForHealthcare/entry/soa_suite_healthcare_integration_architecture #soacommunity #soa Andrejus Baranovskis ?Running Pre-built Virtual Machine for SOA Suite and BPM Suite 11g PS5 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6http://fb.me/vB8nO0Vg OracleBlogsPrinciples of Service-Oriented Architecture by Douwe P. van den Bos http://ow.ly/1kIcOP OTNArchBeatOracle Public Cloud Architecture | @TylerJewell http://ow.ly/bHAcL The SOA Network ?Business Process Management, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Web 2.0: Business Transformation or.http://bit.ly/LBgREL #ITNews #SOA OracleBlogs ?Oracle SOA Foundation Practitioner Certificationhttp://ow.ly/1kGYYg Frank Nimphius ?Learn Advanced ADF. ORACLE Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in Lisbon - July 9th - 13thhttp://bit.ly/KGCl3i SOA CommunityTransform Your Application Integration with Best Practices from Oracle Customershttps://blogs.oracle.com/SOA/entry/transform_your_application_integration_with #soacommunity #soa #bpm Simone GeibWhat you always wanted to know about #oraclesoa diagnostics: Shawn Bailey, Overview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6,http://ow.ly/bxK0M Oracle SOA ?Save the date: Jun 21 10AM, SOA & BPM Customer Insight Series. Hear how Choice Hotels went from legacy to #oraclesoa http://bit.ly/LsNDGl OTNArchBeat ?New VirtualBox images for Oracle SOA Suite & Oracle BPM Suite 11.1.1.6.0http://ow.ly/bwDAl OracleBlogs ?Process development lifecycle in Oracle BPM 11g http://ow.ly/1ktesY Daniel AmadeiNew post: Oracle BPEL 11g Message Delivery & Recovery.http://amadei.com.br/blog/index.php /oracle-bpel-11g-message-delivery SOA Community ?Sending out the June edition of the #soacommunity newsletter - read it or become a member http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa!#soa #bpm Arun Pareek ?For the past six months Ahmed Aboulnaga and me have been working on Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook.http://lnkd.in/CAvpUQ SOA CommunitySun shine all day no clouds - solar eclipse is over... #sunshine #cloud http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Swarm-Computing Michel SchildmeijerWatch my blog Oracle Service Bus 11g: listing projects and services with WLST - part 1 http://lnkd.in/B7f3GQ @TITAN_GS @wlscommunity OTNArchBeatBook Review: Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Foundation Pack 11gR1: Essentials | Rajesh Rahejahttp://ow.ly/bn2cc OTNArchBeat ?Driving from Business Architecture to Business Process Services | @vghariharan http://ow.ly/bn5UB OTNArchBeat ?SOA Analysis within the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) 2.0 - Part II | Dawit Lessanu http://ow.ly/bn6sX Simone Geib ?Contact me directly for ideas how to improvehttp://bit.ly/advancedsoasuite and additional posts, presentations, white papers, ... #soasuite Simone Geib ?#soasuite advanced OTN page has become too cluttered. Broke it into separate pages to start with. http://bit.ly/advancedsoasuite OracleBlogs ?June Webcast: SOA Gateway Implementation and Troubleshooting (2 sessions) http://ow.ly/1kbRFA ServiceTechSymposium ?New session just posted to calendar: "NoSQL for Data Services, Data Virtualization & Big Data" by Guido Schmutz, Trivadis AG ://ow.ly/bjjOeDebra Lilley ?looks good - real proof people are using the apps ! RT @fteter: Very cool Fusion Applications Help site: http://bit.ly/L3nvOR #FusionApps demed ?rapid proliferation of cloud computing will drive convergence of SOA and cloud paradigms" http://ovum.com/2012/05/18/soa-paves-the-way-for-cloud/ SOA CommunityMiddleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012-HAPPY NEW YEAR! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/middleware-oracle-excellence-awards-2012happy-new-year/ #soacommunity #opn #opnaward #specialization #oracle SOA CommunityHappy New Year #soacommunity thanks for the business! Time for a drink http://pic.twitter.com/zkK08KWB OTNArchBeat ?Who should ‘own’ the Enterprise Architecture? | Michael Glas http://bit.ly/K0ge0Q SOA Communitytop Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; May 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pP ServiceTechSymposiumNew session just posted to Symposium calendar: "Elastic SOA in the Cloud" by Steve Millidge, C2B2 Consulting http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/agenda2012.php #elastic_soa_in_the_cloud orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: How to Set JVM Parameters in Oracle SOA 11Ghttp://ow.ly/1k2cnl ServiceTechSymposium ?New session just posted to Symposium calendar: "SOA Governance at EDP: A Global Energy Company" by Manuel Rosa, Linkhttp://www.servicetechsymposium.com/agenda2012.php#soa_governance_at_edp SOA Community ?VirtualBox image SOA Suite & BPM Suite 11.1.1.6.0&ndash;Your feedback?http://wp.me/p10C8u-qh Oracle MiddlewareSave the date: Jun 21 10AM, SOA & BPM Customer Insight Series. Hear how Choice Hotels went from legacy to#oraclesoa http://bit.ly/LU1y5N OTNArchBeat ?Goodbye, Silos. Hello SOA. | @stephanieoverbyhttp://pub.vitrue.com/NJJO SOA CommunityBPM Standard Edition - to start your BPM project http://wp.me/p10C8u-qj Please feel free to send us your news! And add your blog to our SOA blog wiki. Back to top OVERVIEW OF SOA DIAGNOSTICS IN 11.1.1.6 What tools are available for diagnosing SOA Suite issues? There are a variety of tools available to help you and Support diagnose SOA Suite issues in 11g but it can be confusing as to which tool is appropriate for a particular situation and what their relationships are. This blog post will introduce the various tools and attempt to clarify what each is for and how they are related. Let's first list the tools we'll be addressing: RDA: Remote Diagnostic Agent DFW: Diagnostic Framework Selective Tracing DMS: Dynamic Monitoring Service ODL: Oracle Diagnostic Logging ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository ADRCI: Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter WLDF: WebLogic Diagnostic Framework This overview is not mean to be a comprehensive guide on using all of these tools, however, extensive reference materials are included that will provide many more details on their execution. Another point to note is that all of these tools are applicable for Fusion Middleware as a whole but specific products may or may not have implemented features to leverage them. A couple of the tools have a WebLogic Scripting Tool or 'WLST' interface. WLST is a command interface for executing pre-built functions and custom scripts against a domain. A detailed WLST tutorial is beyond the scope of this post but you can find general information here. There are more specific resources in the below sections.In this post when we refer to 'Enterprise Manager' or 'EM' we are referring to Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. read the full blog post here. Read more on Oracle and post your comment here. Back to top BUSINESS DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT (BDD) DEMO NOW AVAILABLE! For access to the Oracle demo systems please visit OPN and talk to your Partner Expert DSS is pleased to announce the availability of the demo “Business Driven Development“. This innovative demonstration uses a case-study approach to show business users how they can easily streamline their Business Processes - delivering greater efficiency, agility, visibility and collaboration with Oracle BPM and WebCenter. The BDD demonstration uses a case study-based approach to highlight a business problem at a fictional company, Avitek Corporation, and uses Oracle BPM and Oracle WebCenter to solve the business problem. This holistic approach has specifically been used to appeal to a non-technical business analyst user. This demo is NOT focused on product features, but aims to guide users through a complete BPM lifecycle. The scenario is based on improving a simple order process (scenario details are in the demo script). Avitek Corporation is sufferinng from a manual email-driven ordering process. Sales reps don’t know where the customer orders are stuck (no visibility) and finance users are unable to manually approve every order (no automation). There are several areas where this process can be improved with Business Process Management technology. This demo shows how improving following areas will ignificantly help resolve the business problems Avitek Corporation is facing. Areas for improvement include: Utilizing BPM for process management, rather than an unregulated, email-based process. Utilizing automated services, rather than requiring a human to key into a system. For example, Finance checking the customer’s credit rating is something that could be automated. Centralizing business rules that can be integrated into a business process, rather than requiring a human to process them. For example, Finance must determine when orders can be automatically approved. Provide insight and visibility into the process. For example, Sales Rep needs to know the status of their customer’s orders. The BDD Demo uses the following products. Oracle BPM Suite 11g PS4FP Oracle WebCenter 11g PS4FP (for Process Spaces) Oracle Business Activity Monitoring 11g Oracle Database 11g Back to top SOA LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT For access to the Oracle demo systems please visit OPN and talk to your Partner Expert We are pleased to announce the availability of the SOA Management demo that showcases some of the key provisioning and lifecycle management capabilities of SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition (EE). This demo specifically focuses on some of the lifecycle management solutions for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Service Bus (OSB). Demo Highlights The demo showcases the following capabilities. Provisioning of SOA Composites Provisioning of OSB Projects Provision SOA and OSB artifacts in a future maintenance window Back to top ORACLE FUSION APPLICATIONS DESIGN PATTERNS The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns are published! These new, reusable usability solutions and best-practices, which will join the Oracle dashboard patterns and guidelines that are already available online, are used by Oracle to artfully bring to life a new standard in the user experience, or UX, of enterprise applications. Now, the Oracle applications development community can benefit from the science behind the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience, too. These Oracle Fusion Applications UX Design Patterns, or blueprints, enable Oracle applications developers and system implementers everywhere to leverage professional usability insight when: tailoring an Oracle Fusion application, creating coexistence solutions that existing users will be delighted with, thus enabling graceful user transitions to Oracle Fusion Applications down the road, or designing exciting, new, highly usable applications in the cloud or on-premise. Based on the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) components, the Oracle Fusion Applications patterns and guidelines are proven with real users and in the Applications UX usability labs, so you can get right to work coding productivity-enhancing designs that provide an advantage for your entire business. What’s the best way to get started? We’ve made that easy, too. The Design Filter Tool (DeFT) selects the best pattern for your user type and task. Simply adapt your selection for your own task flow and content, and you’re on your way to a really great applications user experience. More Oracle applications design patterns and training are coming your way in the future. To provide feedback on the sets that are currently available, let me know in the comments! Read more on Fusionapps and post your comment here. Back to top UPDATED ORACLE MATERIAL Integrated SOA Gateway Documentation - Implementation Guide | Developer’s Guide Webcast Series: Oracle’s SOA and Oracle Business Process Management Solutions (Choice Hotels, Eaton, Farmers Insurance) BAM design pointers By Kavitha Srinivasan Seeking Oracle Fusion Middleware Go Live StoriesOracle Fusion Middleware product management is looking for recent go live stories to share with the Oracle sales team, sales consulting, product management and other internal groups. Customer contact details may remain anonymous. Your successful implementation will be featured in a quarterly report. The chance to present on an internal webcast is also available. Contact Maria Forney ([email protected]) if you have a noteworthy implementation success story. This is a good opportunity for partners interested in showcasing Oracle Fusion Middleware implementations, and gaining more exposure within Oracle. Performance tuning resources. All in one: docs, blogs, WPs, ppts: http://bit.ly/soa_resources Back to top HAVE YOU MISSED OUR LAST SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY WEBCASTS? UPK Webcast Business Driven Application Management & BPM11g & Application Grid & GoldenGate & Fusion Middleware Pricing & OC4J to WebLogic & Next Generation SOA & Fusion Middleware in Utility & Fusion Middleware in Communications & Fusion Middleware in Public Services & Fusion Middleware in Financial Services Please check your local OPN trainings calendar for additional training dates and locations. Back to top SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY CALENDAR On-Demand Trainings Event Name Language Type SOA Virtual Developers Day English Tech In-Class Trainings Date Event name Location / Country Contact person Type 09-13.07.2012 BPM Suite 11g advanced training by David Read Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 09-13.07.2012 ADF 11g advanced training by Grant Ronald and Frank Nimphius Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 09-13.07.2012 WebCenter Portal advanced training by Stefan Krantz and Angelo Santagata Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 10.07.2012 Fusion Middleware Virtual Developer Day Online OTN Tech 10- 12.07.2012 WebLogic 12c training by Cosmin Tudor Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 16-18.07.2012 SOA Suite 11g advanced training by Niall Commiskey Munich, Germany Jürgen Kress Tech 16-18.07.2012 ADF for BPM Suite 11g advanced training by David Read Munich, Germany Jürgen Kress Tech 16-18.07.2012 WebCenter Sites 11g advanced training by Product Management Munich, Germany Jürgen Kress Tech 17-20.07.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 23-26.07.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 29-31.08.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 02-05.10.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 15-18.10.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 28-30.11.2012 Oracle AIA 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 11-14.12.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 20-22.2.2013 Oracle AIA 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 14-17.1.2013 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 15-18.3.2013 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech Please check your local OPN Training Calendar for additional training and locations here. Back to top SOASCHOOL.COM - SOA CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL(SOACP) PROGRAM The SOASchool.com - SOA Certified Professional (SOACP) program is dedicated to excellence in the field of SOA and service-oriented computing. Through a series of seasoned course modules and exams, IT professionals have the opportunity to obtain a number of different certifications to recognize their accomplishment of gaining "project ready" SOA proficiency. This comprehensive and strictly vendor-neutral program was developed in cooperation with best-selling SOA author Thomas Erl and several major SOA organizations and academic institutions. Through the involvement of the SOA Education Committee, course contents and certification requirements are constantly reviewed and revised to stay current with developments in the service-oriented computing industry. The program is currently comprised of 12 course modules and 5 certifications and is expanding to 18 course modules and 8 certifications throughout 2009. For more information, visit www.soaschool.com and www.soacp.com. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Back to top YOUR CONTENT ON THE NEWSLETTER AND ON THE SOA COMMUNITY PORTAL Publishing Your StoriesWe would like to invite our partners to publish information in the newsletter or on our SOA Community portal. Especially we are looking for your real life experience with our SOA technology. Please send your documents to Jürgen Kress. We look forward to getting your suggestions! Back to top SOA DISCUSSION FORUM BECOMES INTERACTIVE AT THE SOA COMMUNITY! Do you want to chat to experts, including partners and Oracle SOA Product Development? Do you want to get the latest information about our SOA solutions and events?Attend our private online SOA Discussion Forum at OTN. Please send your OTN forums user name to Brigitte Felisaz. You must be a registered user to access the SOA Discussion Forum. Back to top INVITE YOUR COLLEAGUES TO JOIN THE SOA COMMUNITY Please feel free to invite your colleagues to join the SOA Community and to participate in the SOA Assessment tests. For registration please login the Oracle PartnerNetwork and go to: www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa For any questions on the above or concerning SOA and Oracle in general please contact the Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels SOA Team. Best regardsOracle EMEA SOA TeamJürgen Kress Jürgen KressSOA Partner Adoption EMEATel. +49 89 1430 1479E-Mail: [email protected]

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• ASP.NET Web API Exception Handling

  - by Fredrik N

  When I talk about exceptions in my product team I often talk about two kind of exceptions, business and critical exceptions. Business exceptions are exceptions thrown based on “business rules”, for example if you aren’t allowed to do a purchase. Business exceptions in most case aren’t important to log into a log file, they can directly be shown to the user. An example of a business exception could be "DeniedToPurchaseException”, or some validation exceptions such as “FirstNameIsMissingException” etc. Critical Exceptions are all other kind of exceptions such as the SQL server is down etc. Those kind of exception message need to be logged and should not reach the user, because they can contain information that can be harmful if it reach out to wrong kind of users. I often distinguish business exceptions from critical exceptions by creating a base class called BusinessException, then in my error handling code I catch on the type BusinessException and all other exceptions will be handled as critical exceptions. This blog post will be about different ways to handle exceptions and how Business and Critical Exceptions could be handled. Web API and Exceptions the basics When an exception is thrown in a ApiController a response message will be returned with a status code set to 500 and a response formatted by the formatters based on the “Accept” or “Content-Type” HTTP header, for example JSON or XML. Here is an example:   public IEnumerable<string> Get() { throw new ApplicationException("Error!!!!!"); return new string[] { "value1", "value2" }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The response message will be: HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Content-Length: 860 Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 { "ExceptionType":"System.ApplicationException","Message":"Error!!!!!","StackTrace":" at ..."} .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   The stack trace will be returned to the client, this is because of making it easier to debug. Be careful so you don’t leak out some sensitive information to the client. So as long as you are developing your API, this is not harmful. In a production environment it can be better to log exceptions and return a user friendly exception instead of the original exception. There is a specific exception shipped with ASP.NET Web API that will not use the formatters based on the “Accept” or “Content-Type” HTTP header, it is the exception is the HttpResponseException class. Here is an example where the HttpReponseExcetpion is used: // GET api/values [ExceptionHandling] public IEnumerable<string> Get() { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError)); return new string[] { "value1", "value2" }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The response will not contain any content, only header information and the status code based on the HttpStatusCode passed as an argument to the HttpResponseMessage. Because the HttpResponsException takes a HttpResponseMessage as an argument, we can give the response a content: public IEnumerable<string> Get() { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError) { Content = new StringContent("My Error Message"), ReasonPhrase = "Critical Exception" }); return new string[] { "value1", "value2" }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   The code above will have the following response:   HTTP/1.1 500 Critical Exception Content-Length: 5 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 My Error Message .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The Content property of the HttpResponseMessage doesn’t need to be just plain text, it can also be other formats, for example JSON, XML etc. By using the HttpResponseException we can for example catch an exception and throw a user friendly exception instead: public IEnumerable<string> Get() { try { DoSomething(); return new string[] { "value1", "value2" }; } catch (Exception e) { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError) { Content = new StringContent("An error occurred, please try again or contact the administrator."), ReasonPhrase = "Critical Exception" }); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Adding a try catch to every ApiController methods will only end in duplication of code, by using a custom ExceptionFilterAttribute or our own custom ApiController base class we can reduce code duplicationof code and also have a more general exception handler for our ApiControllers . By creating a custom ApiController’s and override the ExecuteAsync method, we can add a try catch around the base.ExecuteAsync method, but I prefer to skip the creation of a own custom ApiController, better to use a solution that require few files to be modified. The ExceptionFilterAttribute has a OnException method that we can override and add our exception handling. Here is an example: using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Net; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web.Http; using System.Web.Http.Filters; public class ExceptionHandlingAttribute : ExceptionFilterAttribute { public override void OnException(HttpActionExecutedContext context) { if (context.Exception is BusinessException) { throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError) { Content = new StringContent(context.Exception.Message), ReasonPhrase = "Exception" }); } //Log Critical errors Debug.WriteLine(context.Exception); throw new HttpResponseException(new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError) { Content = new StringContent("An error occurred, please try again or contact the administrator."), ReasonPhrase = "Critical Exception" }); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Note: Something to have in mind is that the ExceptionFilterAttribute will be ignored if the ApiController action method throws a HttpResponseException. The code above will always make sure a HttpResponseExceptions will be returned, it will also make sure the critical exceptions will show a more user friendly message. The OnException method can also be used to log exceptions. By using a ExceptionFilterAttribute the Get() method in the previous example can now look like this: public IEnumerable<string> Get() { DoSomething(); return new string[] { "value1", "value2" }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } To use the an ExceptionFilterAttribute, we can for example add the ExceptionFilterAttribute to our ApiControllers methods or to the ApiController class definition, or register it globally for all ApiControllers. You can read more about is here. Note: If something goes wrong in the ExceptionFilterAttribute and an exception is thrown that is not of type HttpResponseException, a formatted exception will be thrown with stack trace etc to the client. How about using a custom IHttpActionInvoker? We can create our own IHTTPActionInvoker and add Exception handling to the invoker. The IHttpActionInvoker will be used to invoke the ApiController’s ExecuteAsync method. Here is an example where the default IHttpActionInvoker, ApiControllerActionInvoker, is used to add exception handling: public class MyApiControllerActionInvoker : ApiControllerActionInvoker { public override Task<HttpResponseMessage> InvokeActionAsync(HttpActionContext actionContext, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var result = base.InvokeActionAsync(actionContext, cancellationToken); if (result.Exception != null && result.Exception.GetBaseException() != null) { var baseException = result.Exception.GetBaseException(); if (baseException is BusinessException) { return Task.Run<HttpResponseMessage>(() => new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError) { Content = new StringContent(baseException.Message), ReasonPhrase = "Error" }); } else { //Log critical error Debug.WriteLine(baseException); return Task.Run<HttpResponseMessage>(() => new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError) { Content = new StringContent(baseException.Message), ReasonPhrase = "Critical Error" }); } } return result; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You can register the IHttpActionInvoker with your own IoC to resolve the MyApiContollerActionInvoker, or add it in the Global.asax: GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Services.Remove(typeof(IHttpActionInvoker), GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Services.GetActionInvoker()); GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Services.Add(typeof(IHttpActionInvoker), new MyApiControllerActionInvoker()); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   How about using a Message Handler for Exception Handling? By creating a custom Message Handler, we can handle error after the ApiController and the ExceptionFilterAttribute is invoked and in that way create a global exception handler, BUT, the only thing we can take a look at is the HttpResponseMessage, we can’t add a try catch around the Message Handler’s SendAsync method. The last Message Handler that will be used in the Wep API pipe-line is the HttpControllerDispatcher and this Message Handler is added to the HttpServer in an early stage. The HttpControllerDispatcher will use the IHttpActionInvoker to invoke the ApiController method. The HttpControllerDipatcher has a try catch that will turn ALL exceptions into a HttpResponseMessage, so that is the reason why a try catch around the SendAsync in a custom Message Handler want help us. If we create our own Host for the Wep API we could create our own custom HttpControllerDispatcher and add or exception handler to that class, but that would be little tricky but is possible. We can in a Message Handler take a look at the HttpResponseMessage’s IsSuccessStatusCode property to see if the request has failed and if we throw the HttpResponseException in our ApiControllers, we could use the HttpResponseException and give it a Reason Phrase and use that to identify business exceptions or critical exceptions. I wouldn’t add an exception handler into a Message Handler, instead I should use the ExceptionFilterAttribute and register it globally for all ApiControllers. BUT, now to another interesting issue. What will happen if we have a Message Handler that throws an exception?  Those exceptions will not be catch and handled by the ExceptionFilterAttribute. I found a  bug in my previews blog post about “Log message Request and Response in ASP.NET WebAPI” in the MessageHandler I use to log incoming and outgoing messages. Here is the code from my blog before I fixed the bug:   public abstract class MessageHandler : DelegatingHandler { protected override async Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var corrId = string.Format("{0}{1}", DateTime.Now.Ticks, Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId); var requestInfo = string.Format("{0} {1}", request.Method, request.RequestUri); var requestMessage = await request.Content.ReadAsByteArrayAsync(); await IncommingMessageAsync(corrId, requestInfo, requestMessage); var response = await base.SendAsync(request, cancellationToken); var responseMessage = await response.Content.ReadAsByteArrayAsync(); await OutgoingMessageAsync(corrId, requestInfo, responseMessage); return response; } protected abstract Task IncommingMessageAsync(string correlationId, string requestInfo, byte[] message); protected abstract Task OutgoingMessageAsync(string correlationId, string requestInfo, byte[] message); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   If a ApiController throws a HttpResponseException, the Content property of the HttpResponseMessage from the SendAsync will be NULL. So a null reference exception is thrown within the MessageHandler. The yellow screen of death will be returned to the client, and the content is HTML and the Http status code is 500. The bug in the MessageHandler was solved by adding a check against the HttpResponseMessage’s IsSuccessStatusCode property: public abstract class MessageHandler : DelegatingHandler { protected override async Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var corrId = string.Format("{0}{1}", DateTime.Now.Ticks, Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId); var requestInfo = string.Format("{0} {1}", request.Method, request.RequestUri); var requestMessage = await request.Content.ReadAsByteArrayAsync(); await IncommingMessageAsync(corrId, requestInfo, requestMessage); var response = await base.SendAsync(request, cancellationToken); byte[] responseMessage; if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode) responseMessage = await response.Content.ReadAsByteArrayAsync(); else responseMessage = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(response.ReasonPhrase); await OutgoingMessageAsync(corrId, requestInfo, responseMessage); return response; } protected abstract Task IncommingMessageAsync(string correlationId, string requestInfo, byte[] message); protected abstract Task OutgoingMessageAsync(string correlationId, string requestInfo, byte[] message); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If we don’t handle the exceptions that can occur in a custom Message Handler, we can have a hard time to find the problem causing the exception. The savior in this case is the Global.asax’s Application_Error: protected void Application_Error() { var exception = Server.GetLastError(); Debug.WriteLine(exception); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I would recommend you to add the Application_Error to the Global.asax and log all exceptions to make sure all kind of exception is handled. Summary There are different ways we could add Exception Handling to the Wep API, we can use a custom ApiController, ExceptionFilterAttribute, IHttpActionInvoker or Message Handler. The ExceptionFilterAttribute would be a good place to add a global exception handling, require very few modification, just register it globally for all ApiControllers, even the IHttpActionInvoker can be used to minimize the modifications of files. Adding the Application_Error to the global.asax is a good way to catch all unhandled exception that can occur, for example exception thrown in a Message Handler.   If you want to know when I have posted a blog post, you can follow me on twitter @fredrikn

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• Tip/Trick: Fix Common SEO Problems Using the URL Rewrite Extension

  - by ScottGu

  Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site’s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries.  This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have.  It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site.  The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites.  They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we’ve shipped.  This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites (www.scottgu.com) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I’ll cover later in this blog post:   Search Relevancy and URL Splitting Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site’s “search relevancy” are: How many other sites link to your content.  Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site.  If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site.  Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above.  In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL).  Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in theory – but you might wonder what exactly this means in practice and how you avoid it. 4 Really Common SEO Problems Your Sites Might Have Below are 4 really common scenarios that can cause your site to inadvertently expose multiple URLs for the same content.  When this happens external sites linking to yours will end up splitting their page links across multiple URLs - and as a result cause you to have a lower page ranking with search engines than you deserve. SEO Problem #1: Default Document IIS (and other web servers) supports the concept of a “default document”.  This allows you to avoid having to explicitly specify the page you want to serve at either the root of the web-site/application, or within a sub-directory.  This is convenient – but means that by default this content is available via two different publically exposed URLs (which is bad).  For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx SEO Problem #2: Different URL Casings Web developers often don’t realize URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web.  This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx SEO Problem #3: Trailing Slashes Consider the below two URLs – they might look the same at first, but they are subtly different. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ SEO Problem #4: Canonical Host Names Sometimes sites support scenarios where they support a web-site with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself.  This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ How to Easily Fix these SEO Problems in 10 minutes (or less) using IIS Rewrite If you haven’t been careful when coding your sites, chances are you are suffering from one (or more) of the above SEO problems.  Addressing these issues will improve your search engine relevancy ranking and drive more traffic to your site. The “good news” is that fixing the above 4 issues is really easy using the URL Rewrite Extension.  This is a completely free Microsoft extension available for IIS 7.x (on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and Windows Vista).  The great thing about using the IIS Rewrite extension is that it allows you to fix the above problems *without* having to change any code within your applications.  You can easily install the URL Rewrite Extension in under 3 minutes using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (a free tool we ship that automates setting up web servers and development machines).  Just click the green “Install Now” button on the URL Rewrite Spotlight page to install it on your Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 or Windows Vista machine: Once installed you’ll find that a new “URL Rewrite” icon is available within the IIS 7 Admin Tool: Double-clicking the icon will open up the URL Rewrite admin panel – which will display the list of URL Rewrite rules configured for a particular application or site: Notice that our rewrite rule list above is currently empty (which is the default when you first install the extension).  We can click the “Add Rule…” link button in the top-right of the panel to add and enable new URL Rewriting logic for our site.  Scenario 1: Handling Default Document Scenarios One of the SEO problems I discussed earlier in this post was the scenario where the “default document” feature of IIS causes you to inadvertently expose two URLs for the same content on your site.  For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the second URL to instead go to the first one.  We will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  Let’s look at how we can create such a rule.  We’ll begin by clicking the “Add Rule” link in the screenshot above.  This will cause the below dialog to display: We’ll select the “Blank Rule” template within the “Inbound rules” section to create a new custom URL Rewriting rule.  This will display an empty pane like below: Don’t worry – setting up the above rule is easy.  The following 4 steps explain how to do so: Step 1: Name the Rule Our first step will be to name the rule we are creating.  Naming it with a descriptive name will make it easier to find and understand later.  Let’s name this rule our “Default Document URL Rewrite” rule: Step 2: Setup the Regular Expression that Matches this Rule Our second step will be to specify a regular expression filter that will cause this rule to execute when an incoming URL matches the regex pattern.   Don’t worry if you aren’t good with regular expressions - I suck at them too. The trick is to know someone who is good at them or copy/paste them from a web-site.  Below we are going to specify the following regular expression as our pattern rule: (.*?)/?Default\.aspx$ This pattern will match any URL string that ends with Default.aspx. The "(.*?)" matches any preceding character zero or more times. The "/?" part says to match the slash symbol zero or one times. The "$" symbol at the end will ensure that the pattern will only match strings that end with Default.aspx.  Combining all these regex elements allows this rule to work not only for the root of your web site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/default.aspx) but also for any application or subdirectory within the site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx.  Because the “ignore case” checkbox is selected it will match both “Default.aspx” as well as “default.aspx” within the URL.   One nice feature built-into the rule editor is a “Test pattern” button that you can click to bring up a dialog that allows you to test out a few URLs with the rule you are configuring: Above I've added a “products/default.aspx” URL and clicked the “Test” button.  This will give me immediate feedback on whether the rule will execute for it.  Step 3: Setup a Permanent Redirect Action We’ll then setup an action to occur when our regular expression pattern matches the incoming URL: In the dialog above I’ve changed the “Action Type” drop down to be a “Redirect” action.  The “Redirect Type” will be a HTTP 301 Permanent redirect – which means search engines will follow it. I’ve also set the “Redirect URL” property to be: {R:1}/ This indicates that we want to redirect the web client requesting the original URL to a new URL that has the originally requested URL path - minus the "Default.aspx" in it.  For example, requests for http://scottgu.com/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/, and requests for http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/photos/ The "{R:N}" regex construct, where N >= 0, is called a back-reference and N is the back-reference index. In the case of our pattern "(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$", if the input URL is "products/Default.aspx" then {R:0} will contain "products/Default.aspx" and {R:1} will contain "products".  We are going to use this {R:1}/ value to be the URL we redirect users to.  Step 4: Apply and Save the Rule Our final step is to click the “Apply” button in the top right hand of the IIS admin tool – which will cause the tool to persist the URL Rewrite rule into our application’s root web.config file (under a <system.webServer/rewrite> configuration section): <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Because IIS 7.x and ASP.NET share the same web.config files, you can actually just copy/paste the above code into your web.config files using Visual Studio and skip the need to run the admin tool entirely.  This also makes adding/deploying URL Rewrite rules with your ASP.NET applications really easy. Step 5: Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx Notice that the second URL automatically redirects to the first one.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and should update the page ranking of http://scottgu.com to include links to http://scottgu.com/default.aspx as well. Scenario 2: Different URL Casing Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is that URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web.  This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL to instead go to the second (all lower-case) one.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: Unlike the previous scenario (where we created a “Blank Rule”), with this scenario we can take advantage of a built-in “Enforce lowercase URLs” rule template.  When we click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that enforces the use of lowercase letters in URLs: When we click the “Yes” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if an incoming URL has upper-case characters in it – and automatically send users to a lower-case version of the URL: We can click the “Apply” button to use this rule “as-is” and have it apply to all incoming URLs to our site.  Because my www.scottgu.com site uses ASP.NET Web Forms, I’m going to make one small change to the rule we generated above – which is to add a condition that will ensure that URLs to ASP.NET’s built-in “WebResource.axd” handler are excluded from our case-sensitivity URL Rewrite logic.  URLs to the WebResource.axd handler will only come from server-controls emitted from my pages – and will never be linked to from external sites.  While my site will continue to function fine if we redirect these URLs to automatically be lower-case – doing so isn’t necessary and will add an extra HTTP redirect to many of my pages.  The good news is that adding a condition that prevents my URL Rewriting rule from happening with certain URLs is easy.  We simply need to expand the “Conditions” section of the form above We can then click the “Add” button to add a condition clause.  This will bring up the “Add Condition” dialog: Above I’ve entered {URL} as the Condition input – and said that this rule should only execute if the URL does not match a regex pattern which contains the string “WebResource.axd”.  This will ensure that WebResource.axd URLs to my site will be allowed to execute just fine without having the URL be re-written to be all lower-case. Note: If you have static resources (like references to .jpg, .css, and .js files) within your site that currently use upper-case characters you’ll probably want to add additional condition filter clauses so that URLs to them also don’t get redirected to be lower-case (just add rules for patterns like .jpg, .gif, .js, etc).  Your site will continue to work fine if these URLs get redirected to be lower case (meaning the site won’t break) – but it will cause an extra HTTP redirect to happen on your site for URLs that don’t need to be redirected for SEO reasons.  So setting up a condition clause makes sense to add. When I click the “ok” button above and apply our lower-case rewriting rule the admin tool will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has a capital “A”) automatically does a redirect to a lower-case version of the URL.  Scenario 3: Trailing Slashes Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is the scenario of trailing slashes within URLs.  The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that does not have a trailing slash) to instead go to the second one that does.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Append or remove the trailing slash symbol” rule template.  When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that automatically redirects users to a URL with a trailing slash if one isn’t present: Like within our previous lower-casing rewrite rule we’ll add one additional condition clause that will exclude WebResource.axd URLs from being processed by this rule.  This will avoid an unnecessary redirect for happening for those URLs. When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL doesn’t have a trailing slash – and if the URL is not processed by either a directory or a file.  This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*[^/])$" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ Notice that the first URL (which has no trailing slash) automatically does a redirect to a URL with the trailing slash.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. Scenario 4: Canonical Host Names The final SEO problem I discussed earlier are scenarios where a site works with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself.  This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that has a www prefix) to instead go to the second URL.  Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve.  To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again.  This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Canonical domain name” rule template.  When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a redirect rule that automatically redirects users to a primary host name URL: Above I’m entering the primary URL address I want to expose to the web: scottgu.com.  When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL has another leading domain name prefix.  This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration>     <system.webServer>         <rewrite>             <rules>                 <rule name="Cannonical Hostname">                     <match url="(.*)" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^scottgu\.com$" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="http://scottgu.com/{R:1}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" />                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" />                 </rule>                 <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true">                     <match url="(.*[^/])$" />                     <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />                         <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />                         <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" />                     </conditions>                     <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" />                 </rule>             </rules>         </rewrite>     </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site.  Try the following two URLs on my site: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has the “www” prefix) now automatically does a redirect to the second URL which does not have the www prefix.  Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. 4 Simple Rules for Improved SEO The above 4 rules are pretty easy to setup and should take less than 15 minutes to configure on existing sites you already have.  The beauty of using a solution like the URL Rewrite Extension is that you can take advantage of it without having to change code within your web-site – and without having to break any existing links already pointing at your site.  Users who follow existing links will be automatically redirected to the new URLs you wish to publish.  And search engines will start to give your site a higher search relevancy ranking – which will list your site higher in search results and drive more traffic to it. Customizing your URL Rewriting rules further is easy to-do either by editing the web.config file directly, or alternatively, just double click the URL Rewrite icon within the IIS 7.x admin tool and it will list all the active rules for your web-site or application: Clicking any of the rules above will open the rules editor back up and allow you to tweak/customize/save them further. Summary Measuring and improving SEO is something every developer building a public-facing web-site needs to think about and focus on.  If you haven’t already, download and use the SEO Toolkit to analyze the SEO of your sites today. New URL Routing features in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms 4 make it much easier to build applications that have more control over the URLs that are published.  Tools like the URL Rewrite Extension that I’ve talked about in this blog post make it much easier to improve the URLs that are published from sites you already have built today – without requiring you to change a lot of code. The URL Rewrite Extension provides a bunch of additional great capabilities – far beyond just SEO - as well.  I’ll be covering these additional capabilities more in future blog posts. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release

  - by Jon Galloway

  ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesSummary for lazy readers: Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download on the Visual Studio site and on MSDN subscriber downloads) Visual Studio 2013 installs side by side with Visual Studio 2012 and supports round-tripping between Visual Studio versions, so you can try it out without committing to a switch Visual Studio 2013 ships with the new version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0 The new releases ASP.NET focuses on One ASP.NET, so core features and web tools work the same across the platform (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application) New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system, and a new identity system Visual Studio 2013 is an incredible editor for web files, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, LESS, Coffeescript, Handlebars, Angular, Ember, Knockdown, etc. Top links: Visual Studio 2013 content on the ASP.NET site are in the standard new releases area: http://www.asp.net/vnext ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release Notes Short intro videos on the new Visual Studio web editor features from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 post on the official .NET Web Development and Tools Blog Scott Guthrie's post: Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework Okay, for those of you who are still with me, let's dig in a bit. Quick web dev notes on downloading and installing Visual Studio 2013 I found Visual Studio 2013 to be a pretty fast install. According to Brian Harry's release post, installing over pre-release versions of Visual Studio is supported.  I've installed the release version over pre-release versions, and it worked fine. If you're only going to be doing web development, you can speed up the install if you just select Web Developer tools. Of course, as a good Microsoft employee, I'll mention that you might also want to install some of those other features, like the Store apps for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but they do download and install a lot of other stuff (e.g. the Windows Phone SDK sets up Hyper-V and downloads several GB's of VM's). So if you're planning just to do web development for now, you can pick just the Web Developer Tools and install the other stuff later. If you've got a fast internet connection, I recommend using the web installer instead of downloading the ISO. The ISO includes all the features, whereas the web installer just downloads what you're installing. Visual Studio 2013 development settings and color theme When you start up Visual Studio, it'll prompt you to pick some defaults. These are totally up to you -whatever suits your development style - and you can change them later. As I said, these are completely up to you. I recommend either the Web Development or Web Development (Code Only) settings. The only real difference is that Code Only hides the toolbars, and you can switch between them using Tools / Import and Export Settings / Reset. Web Development settings Web Development (code only) settings Usually I've just gone with Web Development (code only) in the past because I just want to focus on the code, although the Standard toolbar does make it easier to switch default web browsers. More on that later. Color theme Sigh. Okay, everyone's got their favorite colors. I alternate between Light and Dark depending on my mood, and I personally like how the low contrast on the window chrome in those themes puts the emphasis on my code rather than the tabs and toolbars. I know some people got pretty worked up over that, though, and wanted the blue theme back. I personally don't like it - it reminds me of ancient versions of Visual Studio that I don't want to think about anymore. So here's the thing: if you install Visual Studio Ultimate, it defaults to Blue. The other versions default to Light. If you use Blue, I won't criticize you - out loud, that is. You can change themes really easily - either Tools / Options / Environment / General, or the smart way: ctrl+q for quick launch, then type Theme and hit enter. Signing in During the first run, you'll be prompted to sign in. You don't have to - you can click the "Not now, maybe later" link at the bottom of that dialog. I recommend signing in, though. It's not hooked in with licensing or tracking the kind of code you write to sell you components. It is doing good things, like  syncing your Visual Studio settings between computers. More about that here. So, you don't have to, but I sure do. Overview of shiny new things in ASP.NET land There are a lot of good new things in ASP.NET. I'll list some of my favorite here, but you can read more on the ASP.NET site. One ASP.NET You've heard us talk about this for a while. The idea is that options are good, but choice can be a burden. When you start a new ASP.NET project, why should you have to make a tough decision - with long-term consequences - about how your application will work? If you want to use ASP.NET Web Forms, but have the option of adding in ASP.NET MVC later, why should that be hard? It's all ASP.NET, right? Ideally, you'd just decide that you want to use ASP.NET to build sites and services, and you could use the appropriate tools (the green blocks below) as you needed them. So, here it is. When you create a new ASP.NET application, you just create an ASP.NET application. Next, you can pick from some templates to get you started... but these are different. They're not "painful decision" templates, they're just some starting pieces. And, most importantly, you can mix and match. I can pick a "mostly" Web Forms template, but include MVC and Web API folders and core references. If you've tried to mix and match in the past, you're probably aware that it was possible, but not pleasant. ASP.NET MVC project files contained special project type GUIDs, so you'd only get controller scaffolding support in a Web Forms project if you manually edited the csproj file. Features in one stack didn't work in others. Project templates were painful choices. That's no longer the case. Hooray! I just did a demo in a presentation last week where I created a new Web Forms + MVC + Web API site, built a model, scaffolded MVC and Web API controllers with EF Code First, add data in the MVC view, viewed it in Web API, then added a GridView to the Web Forms Default.aspx page and bound it to the Model. In about 5 minutes. Sure, it's a simple example, but it's great to be able to share code and features across the whole ASP.NET family. Authentication In the past, authentication was built into the templates. So, for instance, there was an ASP.NET MVC 4 Intranet Project template which created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application that was preconfigured for Windows Authentication. All of that authentication stuff was built into each template, so they varied between the stacks, and you couldn't reuse them. You didn't see a lot of changes to the authentication options, since they required big changes to a bunch of project templates. Now, the new project dialog includes a common authentication experience. When you hit the Change Authentication button, you get some common options that work the same way regardless of the template or reference settings you've made. These options work on all ASP.NET frameworks, and all hosting environments (IIS, IIS Express, or OWIN for self-host) The default is Individual User Accounts: This is the standard "create a local account, using username / password or OAuth" thing; however, it's all built on the new Identity system. More on that in a second. The one setting that has some configuration to it is Organizational Accounts, which lets you configure authentication using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, or Office 365. Identity There's a new identity system. We've taken the best parts of the previous ASP.NET Membership and Simple Identity systems, rolled in a lot of feedback and made big enhancements to support important developer concerns like unit testing and extensiblity. I've written long posts about ASP.NET identity, and I'll do it again. Soon. This is not that post. The short version is that I think we've finally got just the right Identity system. Some of my favorite features: There are simple, sensible defaults that work well - you can File / New / Run / Register / Login, and everything works. It supports standard username / password as well as external authentication (OAuth, etc.). It's easy to customize without having to re-implement an entire provider. It's built using pluggable pieces, rather than one large monolithic system. It's built using interfaces like IUser and IRole that allow for unit testing, dependency injection, etc. You can easily add user profile data (e.g. URL, twitter handle, birthday). You just add properties to your ApplicationUser model and they'll automatically be persisted. Complete control over how the identity data is persisted. By default, everything works with Entity Framework Code First, but it's built to support changes from small (modify the schema) to big (use another ORM, store your data in a document database or in the cloud or in XML or in the EXIF data of your desktop background or whatever). It's configured via OWIN. More on OWIN and Katana later, but the fact that it's built using OWIN means it's portable. You can find out more in the Authentication and Identity section of the ASP.NET site (and lots more content will be going up there soon). New Bootstrap based project templates The new project templates are built using Bootstrap 3. Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a front-end framework that brings a lot of nice benefits: It's responsive, so your projects will automatically scale to device width using CSS media queries. For example, menus are full size on a desktop browser, but on narrower screens you automatically get a mobile-friendly menu. The built-in Bootstrap styles make your standard page elements (headers, footers, buttons, form inputs, tables etc.) look nice and modern. Bootstrap is themeable, so you can reskin your whole site by dropping in a new Bootstrap theme. Since Bootstrap is pretty popular across the web development community, this gives you a large and rapidly growing variety of templates (free and paid) to choose from. Bootstrap also includes a lot of very useful things: components (like progress bars and badges), useful glyphicons, and some jQuery plugins for tooltips, dropdowns, carousels, etc.). Here's a look at how the responsive part works. When the page is full screen, the menu and header are optimized for a wide screen display: When I shrink the page down (this is all based on page width, not useragent sniffing) the menu turns into a nice mobile-friendly dropdown: For a quick example, I grabbed a new free theme off bootswatch.com. For simple themes, you just need to download the boostrap.css file and replace the /content/bootstrap.css file in your project. Now when I refresh the page, I've got a new theme: Scaffolding The big change in scaffolding is that it's one system that works across ASP.NET. You can create a new Empty Web project or Web Forms project and you'll get the Scaffold context menus. For release, we've got MVC 5 and Web API 2 controllers. We had a preview of Web Forms scaffolding in the preview releases, but they weren't fully baked for RTM. Look for them in a future update, expected pretty soon. This scaffolding system wasn't just changed to work across the ASP.NET frameworks, it's also built to enable future extensibility. That's not in this release, but should also hopefully be out soon. Project Readme page This is a small thing, but I really like it. When you create a new project, you get a Project_Readme.html page that's added to the root of your project and opens in the Visual Studio built-in browser. I love it. A long time ago, when you created a new project we just dumped it on you and left you scratching your head about what to do next. Not ideal. Then we started adding a bunch of Getting Started information to the new project templates. That told you what to do next, but you had to delete all of that stuff out of your website. It doesn't belong there. Not ideal. This is a simple HTML file that's not integrated into your project code at all. You can delete it if you want. But, it shows a lot of helpful links that are current for the project you just created. In the future, if we add new wacky project types, they can create readme docs with specific information on how to do appropriately wacky things. Side note: I really like that they used the internal browser in Visual Studio to show this content rather than popping open an HTML page in the default browser. I hate that. It's annoying. If you're doing that, I hope you'll stop. What if some unnamed person has 40 or 90 tabs saved in their browser session? When you pop open your "Thanks for installing my Visual Studio extension!" page, all eleventy billion tabs start up and I wish I'd never installed your thing. Be like these guys and pop stuff Visual Studio specific HTML docs in the Visual Studio browser. ASP.NET MVC 5 The biggest change with ASP.NET MVC 5 is that it's no longer a separate project type. It integrates well with the rest of ASP.NET. In addition to that and the other common features we've already looked at (Bootstrap templates, Identity, authentication), here's what's new for ASP.NET MVC. Attribute routing ASP.NET MVC now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers. This supports some pretty complex, customized routing scenarios, and it allows you to keep your route information right with your controller actions if you'd like. Here's a controller that includes an action whose method name is Hiding, but I've used AttributeRouting to configure it to /spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo public class SampleController : Controller { [Route("spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo")] public string Hiding() { return "You found me!"; } } I enable that in my RouteConfig.cs, and I can use that in conjunction with my other MVC routes like this: public class RouteConfig { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes(); routes.MapRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); } } You can read more about Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 here. Filter enhancements There are two new additions to filters: Authentication Filters and Filter Overrides. Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorized requests. Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features. Attribute Routing ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article. OAuth 2.0 ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN (discussed below). This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson. Lots more There's a huge list of other features, including CORS (cross-origin request sharing), IHttpActionResult, IHttpRequestContext, and more. I think the best overview is in the release notes. OWIN and Katana I've written about OWIN and Katana recently. I'm a big fan. OWIN is the Open Web Interfaces for .NET. It's a spec, like HTML or HTTP, so you can't install OWIN. The benefit of OWIN is that it's a community specification, so anyone who implements it can plug into the ASP.NET stack, either as middleware or as a host. Katana is the Microsoft implementation of OWIN. It leverages OWIN to wire up things like authentication, handlers, modules, IIS hosting, etc., so ASP.NET can host OWIN components and Katana components can run in someone else's OWIN implementation. Howard Dierking just wrote a cool article in MSDN magazine describing Katana in depth: Getting Started with the Katana Project. He had an interesting example showing an OWIN based pipeline which leveraged SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and NancyFx components in the same stack. If this kind of thing makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, don't worry, but keep an eye on it. You're going to see some cool things happen as a result of ASP.NET becoming more and more pluggable. Visual Studio Web Tools Okay, this stuff's just crazy. Visual Studio has been adding some nice web dev features over the past few years, but they've really cranked it up for this release. Visual Studio is by far my favorite code editor for all web files: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and lots of popular libraries. Stop thinking of Visual Studio as a big editor that you only use to write back-end code. Stop editing HTML and CSS in Notepad (or Sublime, Notepad++, etc.). Visual Studio starts up in under 2 seconds on a modern computer with an SSD. Misspelling HTML attributes or your CSS classes or jQuery or Angular syntax is stupid. It doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a silly person who wastes time. Browser Link Browser Link is a real-time, two-way connection between Visual Studio and all connected browsers. It's only attached when you're running locally, in debug, but it applies to any and all connected browser, including emulators. You may have seen demos that showed the browsers refreshing based on changes in the editor, and I'll agree that's pretty cool. But it's really just the start. It's a two-way connection, and it's built for extensiblity. That means you can write extensions that push information from your running application (in IE, Chrome, a mobile emulator, etc.) back to Visual Studio. Mads and team have showed off some demonstrations where they enabled edit mode in the browser which updated the source HTML back on the browser. It's also possible to look at how the rendered HTML performs, check for compatibility issues, watch for unused CSS classes, the sky's the limit. New HTML editor The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Here's a 3 minute tour from Mads Kristensen. The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Lots more Visual Studio web dev features That's just a sampling - there's a ton of great features for JavaScript editing, CSS editing, publishing, and Page Inspector (which shows real-time rendering of your page inside Visual Studio). Here are some more short videos showing those features. Lots, lots more Okay, that's just a summary, and it's still quite a bit. Head on over to http://asp.net/vnext for more information, and download Visual Studio 2013 now to get started!

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• Windows Phone 7 development: reading RSS feeds

  - by DigiMortal

  One limitation on Windows Phone 7 is related to System.Net namespace classes. There is no convenient way to read data from web. There is no WebClient class. There is no GetResponse() method – we have to do it all asynchronously because compact framework has limited set of classes we can use in our applications to communicate with internet. In this posting I will show you how to read RSS-feeds on Windows Phone 7. NB! This is my draft code and it may contain some design flaws and some questionable solutions. This code is intended to use as test-drive for Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools and I don’t suppose you are going to use this code in production environment. Current state of my RSS-reader Currently my RSS-reader for Windows Phone 7 is very simple, primitive and uses almost all defaults that come out-of-box with Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools. My first goal before going on with nicer user interface design was making RSS-reading work because instead of convenient classes from .NET Framework we have to use very limited classes from .NET Framework CE. This is why I took the reading of RSS-feeds as my first task. There are currently more things to solve regarding user-interface. As I am pretty new to all this Silverlight stuff I am not very sure if I can modify default controls easily or should I write my own controls that have better look and that work faster. The image on right shows you how my RSS-reader looks like right now. Upper side of screen is filled with list that shows headlines from this blog. The bottom part of screen is used to show description of selected posting. You can click on the image to see it in original size. In my next posting I will show you some improvements of my RSS-reader user interface that make it look nicer. But currently it is nice enough to make sure that RSS-feeds are read correctly. FeedItem class As this is most straight-forward part of the following code I will show you RSS-feed items class first. I think we have to stop on it because it is simple one. public class FeedItem {     public string Title { get; set; }     public string Description { get; set; }     public DateTime PublishDate { get; set; }     public List<string> Categories { get; set; }     public string Link { get; set; }       public FeedItem()     {         Categories = new List<string>();     } } RssClient RssClient takes feed URL and when asked it loads all items from feed and gives them back to caller through ItemsReceived event. Why it works this way? Because we can make responses only using asynchronous methods. I will show you in next section how to use this class. Although the code here is not very good but it works like expected. I will refactor this code later because it needs some more efforts and investigating. But let’s hope I find excellent solution. :) public class RssClient {     private readonly string _rssUrl;       public delegate void ItemsReceivedDelegate(RssClient client, IList<FeedItem> items);     public event ItemsReceivedDelegate ItemsReceived;       public RssClient(string rssUrl)     {         _rssUrl = rssUrl;     }       public void LoadItems()     {         var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(_rssUrl);         var result = (IAsyncResult)request.BeginGetResponse(ResponseCallback, request);     }       void ResponseCallback(IAsyncResult result)     {         var request = (HttpWebRequest)result.AsyncState;         var response = request.EndGetResponse(result);           var stream = response.GetResponseStream();         var reader = XmlReader.Create(stream);         var items = new List<FeedItem>(50);           FeedItem item = null;         var pointerMoved = false;           while (!reader.EOF)         {             if (pointerMoved)             {                 pointerMoved = false;             }             else             {                 if (!reader.Read())                     break;             }               var nodeName = reader.Name;             var nodeType = reader.NodeType;               if (nodeName == "item")             {                 if (nodeType == XmlNodeType.Element)                     item = new FeedItem();                 else if (nodeType == XmlNodeType.EndElement)                     if (item != null)                     {                         items.Add(item);                         item = null;                     }                   continue;             }               if (nodeType != XmlNodeType.Element)                 continue;               if (item == null)                 continue;               reader.MoveToContent();             var nodeValue = reader.ReadElementContentAsString();             // we just moved internal pointer             pointerMoved = true;               if (nodeName == "title")                 item.Title = nodeValue;             else if (nodeName == "description")                 item.Description =  Regex.Replace(nodeValue,@"<(.|\n)*?>",string.Empty);             else if (nodeName == "feedburner:origLink")                 item.Link = nodeValue;             else if (nodeName == "pubDate")             {                 if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(nodeValue))                     item.PublishDate = DateTime.Parse(nodeValue);             }             else if (nodeName == "category")                 item.Categories.Add(nodeValue);         }           if (ItemsReceived != null)             ItemsReceived(this, items);     } } This method is pretty long but it works. Now let’s try to use it in Windows Phone 7 application. Using RssClient And this is the fragment of code behing the main page of my application start screen. You can see how RssClient is initialized and how items are bound to list that shows them. public MainPage() {     InitializeComponent();       SupportedOrientations = SupportedPageOrientation.Portrait | SupportedPageOrientation.Landscape;     listBox1.Width = Width;       var rssClient = new RssClient("http://feedproxy.google.com/gunnarpeipman");     rssClient.ItemsReceived += new RssClient.ItemsReceivedDelegate(rssClient_ItemsReceived);     rssClient.LoadItems(); }   void rssClient_ItemsReceived(RssClient client, IList<FeedItem> items) {     Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate()     {         listBox1.ItemsSource = items;     });            } Conclusion As you can see it was not very hard task to read RSS-feed and populate list with feed entries. Although we are not able to use more powerful classes that are part of full version on .NET Framework we can still live with limited set of classes that .NET Framework CE provides.

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