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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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• What&rsquo;s New in ASP.NET 4.0 Part Two: WebForms and Visual Studio Enhancements

  - by Rick Strahl

  In the last installment I talked about the core changes in the ASP.NET runtime that I’ve been taking advantage of. In this column, I’ll cover the changes to the Web Forms engine and some of the cool improvements in Visual Studio that make Web and general development easier. WebForms The WebForms engine is the area that has received most significant changes in ASP.NET 4.0. Probably the most widely anticipated features are related to managing page client ids and of ViewState on WebForm pages. Take Control of Your ClientIDs Unique ClientID generation in ASP.NET has been one of the most complained about “features” in ASP.NET. Although there’s a very good technical reason for these unique generated ids - they guarantee unique ids for each and every server control on a page - these unique and generated ids often get in the way of client-side JavaScript development and CSS styling as it’s often inconvenient and fragile to work with the long, generated ClientIDs. In ASP.NET 4.0 you can now specify an explicit client id mode on each control or each naming container parent control to control how client ids are generated. By default, ASP.NET generates mangled client ids for any control contained in a naming container (like a Master Page, or a User Control for example). The key to ClientID management in ASP.NET 4.0 are the new ClientIDMode and ClientIDRowSuffix properties. ClientIDMode supports four different ClientID generation settings shown below. For the following examples, imagine that you have a Textbox control named txtName inside of a master page control container on a WebForms page. <%@Page Language="C#"      MasterPageFile="~/Site.Master"     CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="WebApplication1.WebForm2"  %> <asp:Content ID="content"  ContentPlaceHolderID="content"               runat="server"               ClientIDMode="Static" >       <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName" /> </asp:Content> The four available ClientIDMode values are: AutoID This is the existing behavior in ASP.NET 1.x-3.x where full naming container munging takes place. <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"        id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> This should be familiar to any ASP.NET developer and results in fairly unpredictable client ids that can easily change if the containership hierarchy changes. For example, removing the master page changes the name in this case, so if you were to move a block of script code that works against the control to a non-Master page, the script code immediately breaks. Static This option is the most deterministic setting that forces the control’s ClientID to use its ID value directly. No naming container naming at all is applied and you end up with clean client ids: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName"         type="text" id="txtName" /> Note that the name property which is used for postback variables to the server still is munged, but the ClientID property is displayed simply as the ID value that you have assigned to the control. This option is what most of us want to use, but you have to be clear on that because it can potentially cause conflicts with other controls on the page. If there are several instances of the same naming container (several instances of the same user control for example) there can easily be a client id naming conflict. Note that if you assign Static to a data-bound control, like a list child control in templates, you do not get unique ids either, so for list controls where you rely on unique id for child controls, you’ll probably want to use Predictable rather than Static. I’ll write more on this a little later when I discuss ClientIDRowSuffix. Predictable The previous two values are pretty self-explanatory. Predictable however, requires some explanation. To me at least it’s not in the least bit predictable. MSDN defines this value as follows: This algorithm is used for controls that are in data-bound controls. The ClientID value is generated by concatenating the ClientID value of the parent naming container with the ID value of the control. If the control is a data-bound control that generates multiple rows, the value of the data field specified in the ClientIDRowSuffix property is added at the end. For the GridView control, multiple data fields can be specified. If the ClientIDRowSuffix property is blank, a sequential number is added at the end instead of a data-field value. Each segment is separated by an underscore character (_). The key that makes this value a bit confusing is that it relies on the parent NamingContainer’s ClientID to build its own ClientID value. This effectively means that the value is not predictable at all but rather very tightly coupled to the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For my simple textbox example, if the ClientIDMode property of the parent naming container (Page in this case) is set to “Predictable” you’ll get this: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"         id="content_txtName" /> which gives an id that based on walking up to the currently active naming container (the MasterPage content container) and starting the id formatting from there downward. Think of this as a semi unique name that’s guaranteed unique only for the naming container. If, on the other hand, the Page is set to “AutoID” you get the following with Predictable on txtName: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"         id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> The latter is effectively the same as if you specified AutoID because it inherits the AutoID naming from the Page and Content Master Page control of the page. But again - predictable behavior always depends on the parent naming container and how it generates its id, so the id may not always be exactly the same as the AutoID generated value because somewhere in the NamingContainer chain the ClientIDMode setting may be set to a different value. For example, if you had another naming container in the middle that was set to Static you’d end up effectively with an id that starts with the NamingContainers id rather than the whole ctl000_content munging. The most common use for Predictable is likely to be for data-bound controls, which results in each data bound item getting a unique ClientID. Unfortunately, even here the behavior can be very unpredictable depending on which data-bound control you use - I found significant differences in how template controls in a GridView behave from those that are used in a ListView control. For example, GridView creates clean child ClientIDs, while ListView still has a naming container in the ClientID, presumably because of the template container on which you can’t set ClientIDMode. Predictable is useful, but only if all naming containers down the chain use this setting. Otherwise you’re right back to the munged ids that are pretty unpredictable. Another property, ClientIDRowSuffix, can be used in combination with ClientIDMode of Predictable to force a suffix onto list client controls. For example: <asp:GridView runat="server" ID="gvItems"              AutoGenerateColumns="false"             ClientIDMode="Static"              ClientIDRowSuffix="Id">     <Columns>     <asp:TemplateField>         <ItemTemplate>             <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtName"                        Text='<%# Eval("Name") %>'                   ClientIDMode="Predictable"/>         </ItemTemplate>     </asp:TemplateField>     <asp:TemplateField>         <ItemTemplate>         <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtId"                     Text='<%# Eval("Id") %>'                     ClientIDMode="Predictable" />         </ItemTemplate>     </asp:TemplateField>     </Columns>  </asp:GridView> generates client Ids inside of a column in the master page described earlier: <td>     <span id="txtName_0">Rick</span> </td> where the value after the underscore is the ClientIDRowSuffix field - in this case “Id” of the item data bound to the control. Note that all of the child controls require ClientIDMode=”Predictable” in order for the ClientIDRowSuffix to be applied, and the parent GridView controls need to be set to Static either explicitly or via Naming Container inheritance to give these simple names. It’s a bummer that ClientIDRowSuffix doesn’t work with Static to produce this automatically. Another real problem is that other controls process the ClientIDMode differently. For example, a ListView control processes the Predictable ClientIDMode differently and produces the following with the Static ListView and Predictable child controls: <span id="ctrl0_txtName_0">Rick</span> I couldn’t even figure out a way using ClientIDMode to get a simple ID that also uses a suffix short of falling back to manually generated ids using <%= %> expressions instead. Given the inconsistencies inside of list controls using <%= %>, ids for the ListView might not be a bad idea anyway. Inherit The final setting is Inherit, which is the default for all controls except Page. This means that controls by default inherit the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For more detailed information on ClientID behavior and different scenarios you can check out a blog post of mine on this subject: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/54760.aspx. ClientID Enhancements Summary The ClientIDMode property is a welcome addition to ASP.NET 4.0. To me this is probably the most useful WebForms feature as it allows me to generate clean IDs simply by setting ClientIDMode="Static" on either the page or inside of Web.config (in the Pages section) which applies the setting down to the entire page which is my 95% scenario. For the few cases when it matters - for list controls and inside of multi-use user controls or custom server controls) - I can use Predictable or even AutoID to force controls to unique names. For application-level page development, this is easy to accomplish and provides maximum usability for working with client script code against page controls. ViewStateMode Another area of large criticism for WebForms is ViewState. ViewState is used internally by ASP.NET to persist page-level changes to non-postback properties on controls as pages post back to the server. It’s a useful mechanism that works great for the overall mechanics of WebForms, but it can also cause all sorts of overhead for page operation as ViewState can very quickly get out of control and consume huge amounts of bandwidth in your page content. ViewState can also wreak havoc with client-side scripting applications that modify control properties that are tracked by ViewState, which can produce very unpredictable results on a Postback after client-side updates. Over the years in my own development, I’ve often turned off ViewState on pages to reduce overhead. Yes, you lose some functionality, but you can easily implement most of the common functionality in non-ViewState workarounds. Relying less on heavy ViewState controls and sticking with simpler controls or raw HTML constructs avoids getting around ViewState problems. In ASP.NET 3.x and prior, it wasn’t easy to control ViewState - you could turn it on or off and if you turned it off at the page or web.config level, you couldn’t turn it back on for specific controls. In short, it was an all or nothing approach. With ASP.NET 4.0, the new ViewStateMode property gives you more control. It allows you to disable ViewState globally either on the page or web.config level and then turn it back on for specific controls that might need it. ViewStateMode only works when EnableViewState="true" on the page or web.config level (which is the default). You can then use ViewStateMode of Disabled, Enabled or Inherit to control the ViewState settings on the page. If you’re shooting for minimal ViewState usage, the ideal situation is to set ViewStateMode to disabled on the Page or web.config level and only turn it back on particular controls: <%@Page Language="C#"      CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2"        ClientIDMode="Static"                ViewStateMode="Disabled"     EnableViewState="true"  %> <!-- this control has viewstate  --> <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName"  ViewStateMode="Enabled" />       <!-- this control has no viewstate - it inherits  from parent container --> <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtAddress" /> Note that the EnableViewState="true" at the Page level isn’t required since it’s the default, but it’s important that the value is true. ViewStateMode has no effect if EnableViewState="false" at the page level. The main benefit of ViewStateMode is that it allows you to more easily turn off ViewState for most of the page and enable only a few key controls that might need it. For me personally, this is a perfect combination as most of my WebForm apps can get away without any ViewState at all. But some controls - especially third party controls - often don’t work well without ViewState enabled, and now it’s much easier to selectively enable controls rather than the old way, which required you to pretty much turn off ViewState for all controls that you didn’t want ViewState on. Inline HTML Encoding HTML encoding is an important feature to prevent cross-site scripting attacks in data entered by users on your site. In order to make it easier to create HTML encoded content, ASP.NET 4.0 introduces a new Expression syntax using <%: %> to encode string values. The encoding expression syntax looks like this: <%: "<script type='text/javascript'>" +     "alert('Really?');</script>" %> which produces properly encoded HTML: &lt;script type=&#39;text/javascript&#39; &gt;alert(&#39;Really?&#39;);&lt;/script&gt; Effectively this is a shortcut to: <%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode( "<script type='text/javascript'>" + "alert('Really?');</script>") %> Of course the <%: %> syntax can also evaluate expressions just like <%= %> so the more common scenario applies this expression syntax against data your application is displaying. Here’s an example displaying some data model values: <%: Model.Address.Street %> This snippet shows displaying data from your application’s data store or more importantly, from data entered by users. Anything that makes it easier and less verbose to HtmlEncode text is a welcome addition to avoid potential cross-site scripting attacks. Although I listed Inline HTML Encoding here under WebForms, anything that uses the WebForms rendering engine including ASP.NET MVC, benefits from this feature. ScriptManager Enhancements The ASP.NET ScriptManager control in the past has introduced some nice ways to take programmatic and markup control over script loading, but there were a number of shortcomings in this control. The ASP.NET 4.0 ScriptManager has a number of improvements that make it easier to control script loading and addresses a few of the shortcomings that have often kept me from using the control in favor of manual script loading. The first is the AjaxFrameworkMode property which finally lets you suppress loading the ASP.NET AJAX runtime. Disabled doesn’t load any ASP.NET AJAX libraries, but there’s also an Explicit mode that lets you pick and choose the library pieces individually and reduce the footprint of ASP.NET AJAX script included if you are using the library. There’s also a new EnableCdn property that forces any script that has a new WebResource attribute CdnPath property set to a CDN supplied URL. If the script has this Attribute property set to a non-null/empty value and EnableCdn is enabled on the ScriptManager, that script will be served from the specified CdnPath. [assembly: WebResource(    "Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js",    "application/x-javascript",    CdnPath =  "http://mysite.com/scripts/ww.jquery.min.js")] Cool, but a little too static for my taste since this value can’t be changed at runtime to point at a debug script as needed, for example. Assembly names for loading scripts from resources can now be simple names rather than fully qualified assembly names, which make it less verbose to reference scripts from assemblies loaded from your bin folder or the assembly reference area in web.config: <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id"          EnableCdn="true"         AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled">     <Scripts>         <asp:ScriptReference          Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js"         Assembly="Westwind.Web" />     </Scripts>        </asp:ScriptManager> The ScriptManager in 4.0 also supports script combining via the CompositeScript tag, which allows you to very easily combine scripts into a single script resource served via ASP.NET. Even nicer: You can specify the URL that the combined script is served with. Check out the following script manager markup that combines several static file scripts and a script resource into a single ASP.NET served resource from a static URL (allscripts.js): <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id"          EnableCdn="true"         AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled">     <CompositeScript          Path="~/scripts/allscripts.js">         <Scripts>             <asp:ScriptReference                    Path="~/scripts/jquery.js" />             <asp:ScriptReference                    Path="~/scripts/ww.jquery.js" />             <asp:ScriptReference            Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.editors.js"                 Assembly="Westwind.Web" />         </Scripts>     </CompositeScript> </asp:ScriptManager> When you render this into HTML, you’ll see a single script reference in the page: <script src="scripts/allscripts.debug.js"          type="text/javascript"></script> All you need to do to make this work is ensure that allscripts.js and allscripts.debug.js exist in the scripts folder of your application - they can be empty but the file has to be there. This is pretty cool, but you want to be real careful that you use unique URLs for each combination of scripts you combine or else browser and server caching will easily screw you up royally. The script manager also allows you to override native ASP.NET AJAX scripts now as any script references defined in the Scripts section of the ScriptManager trump internal references. So if you want custom behavior or you want to fix a possible bug in the core libraries that normally are loaded from resources, you can now do this simply by referencing the script resource name in the Name property and pointing at System.Web for the assembly. Not a common scenario, but when you need it, it can come in real handy. Still, there are a number of shortcomings in this control. For one, the ScriptManager and ClientScript APIs still have no common entry point so control developers are still faced with having to check and support both APIs to load scripts so that controls can work on pages that do or don’t have a ScriptManager on the page. The CdnUrl is static and compiled in, which is very restrictive. And finally, there’s still no control over where scripts get loaded on the page - ScriptManager still injects scripts into the middle of the HTML markup rather than in the header or optionally the footer. This, in turn, means there is little control over script loading order, which can be problematic for control developers. MetaDescription, MetaKeywords Page Properties There are also a number of additional Page properties that correspond to some of the other features discussed in this column: ClientIDMode, ClientTarget and ViewStateMode. Another minor but useful feature is that you can now directly access the MetaDescription and MetaKeywords properties on the Page object to set the corresponding meta tags programmatically. Updating these values programmatically previously required either <%= %> expressions in the page markup or dynamic insertion of literal controls into the page. You can now just set these properties programmatically on the Page object in any Control derived class on the page or the Page itself: Page.MetaKeywords = "ASP.NET,4.0,New Features"; Page.MetaDescription = "This article discusses the new features in ASP.NET 4.0"; Note, that there’s no corresponding ASP.NET tag for the HTML Meta element, so the only way to specify these values in markup and access them is via the @Page tag: <%@Page Language="C#"      CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2"      ClientIDMode="Static"                MetaDescription="Article that discusses what's                      new in ASP.NET 4.0"     MetaKeywords="ASP.NET,4.0,New Features" %> Nothing earth shattering but quite convenient. Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements for Web Development For Web development there are also a host of editor enhancements in Visual Studio 2010. Some of these are not Web specific but they are useful for Web developers in general. Text Editors Throughout Visual Studio 2010, the text editors have all been updated to a new core engine based on WPF which provides some interesting new features for various code editors including the nice ability to zoom in and out with Ctrl-MouseWheel to quickly change the size of text. There are many more API options to control the editor and although Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t yet use many of these features, we can look forward to enhancements in add-ins and future editor updates from the various language teams that take advantage of the visual richness that WPF provides to editing. On the negative side, I’ve noticed that occasionally the code editor and especially the HTML and JavaScript editors will lose the ability to use various navigation keys like arrows, back and delete keys, which requires closing and reopening the documents at times. This issue seems to be well documented so I suspect this will be addressed soon with a hotfix or within the first service pack. Overall though, the code editors work very well, especially given that they were re-written completely using WPF, which was one of my big worries when I first heard about the complete redesign of the editors. Multi-Targeting Visual Studio now targets all versions of the .NET framework from 2.0 forward. You can use Visual Studio 2010 to work on your ASP.NET 2, 3.0 and 3.5 applications which is a nice way to get your feet wet with the new development environment without having to make changes to existing applications. It’s nice to have one tool to work in for all the different versions. Multi-Monitor Support One cool feature of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to drag windows out of the Visual Studio environment and out onto the desktop including onto another monitor easily. Since Web development often involves working with a host of designers at the same time - visual designer, HTML markup window, code behind and JavaScript editor - it’s really nice to be able to have a little more screen real estate to work on each of these editors. Microsoft made a welcome change in the environment. IntelliSense Snippets for HTML and JavaScript Editors The HTML and JavaScript editors now finally support IntelliSense scripts to create macro-based template expansions that have been in the core C# and Visual Basic code editors since Visual Studio 2005. Snippets allow you to create short XML-based template definitions that can act as static macros or real templates that can have replaceable values that can be embedded into the expanded text. The XML syntax for these snippets is straight forward and it’s pretty easy to create custom snippets manually. You can easily create snippets using XML and store them in your custom snippets folder (C:\Users\rstrahl\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Code Snippets\Visual Web Developer\My HTML Snippets and My JScript Snippets), but it helps to use one of the third-party tools that exist to simplify the process for you. I use SnippetEditor, by Bill McCarthy, which makes short work of creating snippets interactively (http://snippeteditor.codeplex.com/). Note: You may have to manually add the Visual Studio 2010 User specific Snippet folders to this tool to see existing ones you’ve created. Code snippets are some of the biggest time savers and HTML editing more than anything deals with lots of repetitive tasks that lend themselves to text expansion. Visual Studio 2010 includes a slew of built-in snippets (that you can also customize!) and you can create your own very easily. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to spend a little time examining your coding patterns and find the repetitive code that you write and convert it into snippets. I’ve been using CodeRush for this for years, but now you can do much of the basic expansion natively for HTML and JavaScript snippets. jQuery Integration Is Now Native jQuery is a popular JavaScript library and recently Microsoft has recently stated that it will become the primary client-side scripting technology to drive higher level script functionality in various ASP.NET Web projects that Microsoft provides. In Visual Studio 2010, the default full project template includes jQuery as part of a new project including the support files that provide IntelliSense (-vsdoc files). IntelliSense support for jQuery is now also baked into Visual Studio 2010, so unlike Visual Studio 2008 which required a separate download, no further installs are required for a rich IntelliSense experience with jQuery. Summary ASP.NET 4.0 brings many useful improvements to the platform, but thankfully most of the changes are incremental changes that don’t compromise backwards compatibility and they allow developers to ease into the new features one feature at a time. None of the changes in ASP.NET 4.0 or Visual Studio 2010 are monumental or game changers. The bigger features are language and .NET Framework changes that are also optional. This ASP.NET and tools release feels more like fine tuning and getting some long-standing kinks worked out of the platform. It shows that the ASP.NET team is dedicated to paying attention to community feedback and responding with changes to the platform and development environment based on this feedback. If you haven’t gotten your feet wet with ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, there’s no reason not to give it a shot now - the ASP.NET 4.0 platform is solid and Visual Studio 2010 works very well for a brand new release. Check it out. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• ASP.Net MVC 2 DropDownListFor in EditorTemplate

  - by tschreck

  I have a view model that looks like this: namespace AutoForm.Models { public class ProductViewModel { [UIHint("DropDownList")] public String Category { get; set; } [ScaffoldColumn(false)] public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> CategoryList { get; set; } ... } } It has Category and CategoryList properties. The CategoryList is the source data for the Category dropdown UI element. I have an EditorTemplate that looks like this: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<ProductViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="AutoForm.Models"%> <%=Html.DropDownListFor(m => m.Category , Model.CategoryList ) %> NOTE: this EditorTemplate is strongly typed to ProductViewModel My Controller is populating CategoryList property with data from a database. I cannot get the DropDownListFor template to render a drop down list with data from CategoryList. I know CategoryList is getting populated with data in the controller because I see the data when I debug and step through the controller. Here's my error message in the browser: Server Error in '/' Application. Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Source Error: Line 2: <%@ Import Namespace="AutoForm.Models"% Line 3: Line 4: <%=Html.DropDownListFor(m = m.Category, Model.CategoryList) % Source File: c:\ProjectStore\AutoForm\AutoForm\Views\Shared\EditorTemplates\DropDownList.ascx Line: 4 Any ideas? Thanks Tom As a followup, I noticed that ViewData.Model is null when I'm stepping through the code in the EditorTemplate. I have the EditorTemplate strongly typed to "ProductViewModel" which is also the type that's passed to the View in the controller. I'm perplexed as to why ViewData.Model is null even though it's getting populated in the controller before getting passed to the view.

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• Validation firing in ASP.NET MVC

  - by rkrauter

  I am lost on this MVC project I am working on. I also read Brad Wilsons article. http://bradwilson.typepad.com/blog/2010/01/input-validation-vs-model-validation-in-aspnet-mvc.html I have this: public class Employee { [Required] public int ID { get; set; } [Required] public string FirstName { get; set; } [Required] public string LastName { get; set; } } and these in a controller: public ActionResult Edit(int id) { var emp = GetEmployee(); return View(emp); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Edit(int id, Employee empBack) { var emp = GetEmployee(); if (TryUpdateModel(emp,new string[] { "LastName"})) { Response.Write("success"); } return View(emp); } public Employee GetEmployee() { return new Employee { FirstName = "Tom", LastName = "Jim", ID = 3 }; } and my view has the following: <% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%> <%= Html.ValidationSummary() %> <fieldset> <legend>Fields</legend> <div class="editor-label"> <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.FirstName) %> </div> <div class="editor-field"> <%= Html.DisplayFor(model => model.FirstName) %> </div> <div class="editor-label"> <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.LastName) %> </div> <div class="editor-field"> <%= Html.TextBoxOrLabelFor(model => model.LastName, true)%> <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.LastName) %> </div> <p> <input type="submit" value="Save" /> </p> </fieldset> <% } %> Note that the only field editable is the LastName. When I postback, I get back the original employee and try to update it with only the LastName property. But but I see on the page is the following error: •The FirstName field is required. This from what I understand, is because the TryUpdateModel failed. But why? I told it to update only the LastName property. I am using MVC2 RTM Thanks in advance.

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• Using sem_t in a Qt Project

  - by thauburger

  Hi everyone, I'm working on a simulation in Qt (C++), and would like to make use of a Semaphore wrapper class I made for the sem_t type. Although I am including semaphore.h in my wrapper class, running qmake provides the following error: 'sem_t does not name a type' I believe this is a library/linking error, since I can compile the class without problems from the command line. I've read that you can specify external libraries to include during compilation. However, I'm a) not sure how to do this in the project file, and b) not sure which library to include in order to access semaphore.h. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tom Here's the wrapper class for reference: Semaphore.h #ifndef SEMAPHORE_H #define SEMAPHORE_H #include <semaphore.h> class Semaphore { public: Semaphore(int initialValue = 1); int getValue(); void wait(); void post(); private: sem_t mSemaphore; }; #endif Semaphore.cpp #include "Semaphore.h" Semaphore::Semaphore(int initialValue) { sem_init(&mSemaphore, 0, initialValue); } int Semaphore::getValue() { int value; sem_getvalue(&mSemaphore, &value); return value; } void Semaphore::wait() { sem_wait(&mSemaphore); } void Semaphore::post() { sem_post(&mSemaphore); } And, the QT Project File: TARGET = RestaurantSimulation TEMPLATE = app QT += SOURCES += main.cpp \ RestaurantGUI.cpp \ RestaurantSetup.cpp \ WidgetManager.cpp \ RestaurantView.cpp \ Table.cpp \ GUIFood.cpp \ GUIItem.cpp \ GUICustomer.cpp \ GUIWaiter.cpp \ Semaphore.cpp HEADERS += RestaurantGUI.h \ RestaurantSetup.h \ WidgetManager.h \ RestaurantView.h \ Table.h \ GUIFood.h \ GUIItem.h \ GUICustomer.h \ GUIWaiter.h \ Semaphore.h FORMS += RestaurantSetup.ui LIBS += Full Compiler Output: g++ -c -pipe -g -gdwarf-2 -arch i386 -Wall -W -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_SHARED - I/usr/local/Qt4.6/mkspecs/macx-g++ -I. - I/Library/Frameworks/QtCore.framework/Versions/4/Headers -I/usr/include/QtCore - I/Library/Frameworks/QtGui.framework/Versions/4/Headers -I/usr/include/QtGui - I/usr/include -I. -I. -F/Library/Frameworks -o main.o main.cpp In file included from RestaurantGUI.h:10, from main.cpp:2: Semaphore.h:14: error: 'sem_t' does not name a type make: *** [main.o] Error 1 make: Leaving directory `/Users/thauburger/Desktop/RestaurantSimulation' Exited with code 2. Error while building project RestaurantSimulation When executing build step 'Make'

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• How can I import one Gradle script into another?

  - by Ant

  Hi all, I have a complex gradle script that wraps up a load of functionality around building and deploying a number of netbeans projects to a number of environments. The script works very well, but in essence it is all configured through half a dozen maps holding project and environment information. I want to abstract the tasks away into another file, so that I can simply define my maps in a simple build file, and import the tasks from the other file. In this way, I can use the same core tasks for a number of projects and configure those projects with a simple set of maps. Can anyone tell me how I can import one gradle file into another, in a similar manner to Ant's task? I've trawled Gradle's docs to no avail so far. Additional Info After Tom's response below, I thought I'd try and clarify exactly what I mean. Basically I have a gradle script which runs a number of subprojects. However, the subprojects are all Netbeans projects, and come with their own ant build scripts, so I have tasks in gradle to call each of these. My problem is that I have some configuration at the top of the file, such as: projects = [ [name:"MySubproject1", shortname: "sub1", env:"mainEnv", cvs_module="mod1"], [name:"MySubproject2", shortname: "sub2", env:"altEnv", cvs_module="mod2"] ] I then generate tasks such as: projects.each({ task "checkout_$it.shortname" << { // Code to for example check module out from cvs using config from 'it'. } }) I have many of these sort of task generation snippets, and all of them are generic - they entirely depend on the config in the projects list. So what I want is a way to put this in a separate script and import it in the following sort of way: projects = [ [name:"MySubproject1", shortname: "sub1", env:"mainEnv", cvs_module="mod1"], [name:"MySubproject2", shortname: "sub2", env:"altEnv", cvs_module="mod2"] ] import("tasks.gradle") // This will import and run the script so that all tasks are generated for the projects given above. So in this example, tasks.gradle will have all the generic task generation code in, and will get run for the projects defined in the main build.gradle file. In this way, tasks.gradle is a file that can be used by all large projects that consist of a number of sub-projects with Netbeans ant build files.

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• Time required for a process to complete

  - by yelkawar

  I am new to C# world. I am attempting to calculate time taken by a algorithum for the purpose of comparison. Following code measures the elapsed time from when a subroutine is called until the subroutine returns to the main program.This example is taken from "Data structures through C#" by Michael McMillan. After running this program the output is Time=0, which is incorrect. The program appears to be logically correct. Can anybody help me. Following is the code using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Collections; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace Chap1 { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { int num1 = 100; int num2 = 200; Console.WriteLine("num1: " + num1); Console.WriteLine("num2: " + num2); Swap<int>(ref num1, ref num2); Console.WriteLine("num1: " + num1); Console.WriteLine("num2: " + num2); string str1 = "Sam"; string str2 = "Tom"; Console.WriteLine("String 1: " + str1); Console.WriteLine("String 2: " + str2); Swap<string>(ref str1, ref str2); Console.WriteLine("String 1: " + str1); Console.WriteLine("String 2: " + str2); Console.ReadKey(); } static void Swap<T>(ref T val1, ref T val2) { T temp; temp = val1; val1 = val2; val2 = temp; } } class Timing { TimeSpan StartTiming; TimeSpan duration; public Timing() { StartTiming = new TimeSpan(0); duration = new TimeSpan(0); } public TimeSpan startTime() { GC.Collect(); GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers(); StartTiming = Process.GetCurrentProcess().Threads[0].UserProcessorTime; return StartTiming; } public void stopTime() { duration = Process.GetCurrentProcess().Threads[0].UserProcessorTime.Subtract(StartTiming); } public TimeSpan result() { return duration; } } }

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• Google Docs iphone library error reporting

  - by phil harris

  I'm in the process of adding a Google Docs interface to my iPhone app, and I'm largely following the example in the GoogleDocs.m file from Tom Saxton's example app. The objective-c library I'm using is from http://code.google.com/p/gdata-objectivec-client/wiki/GDataObjCIntroduction The library file used is from gdata-objectivec-client-1.10.0.zip. This service:username:password method is a slight variant of the one found in the Saxton file GoogleDocs.m starting at line 351: - (void)service:(NSString *)username password:(NSString *)password { if(service == nil) { service = [[[GDataServiceGoogleDocs alloc] init] autorelease]; [service setUserAgent:s_strUserAgent]; [service setShouldCacheDatedData:NO]; [service setServiceShouldFollowNextLinks:NO]; (void)[service authenticateWithDelegate:self didAuthenticateSelector:@selector(ticket:authenticatedWithError:)]; } // update the username/password each time the service is requested if (username != nil && [username length] && password != nil && [password length]) [service setUserCredentialsWithUsername:username password:password]; else [service setUserCredentialsWithUsername:nil password:nil]; } // associated callback for service:username:password: method - (void)ticket:(GDataServiceTicket *)ticket authenticatedWithError:(NSError *)error { NSLog(@"%@",@"authenticatedWithError called"); if(error == nil) [self selectBackupRestore]; else { NSLog(@"error code(%d)", [error code]); NSLog(@"error domain(%d)", [error domain]); NSLog(@"localizedDescription(%@)", error.localizedDescription); NSLog(@"localizedFailureReason(%@)", error.localizedFailureReason); NSLog(@"localizedRecoveryOptions(%@)", error.localizedRecoveryOptions); NSLog(@"localizedRecoverySuggestion(%@)", error.localizedRecoverySuggestion); } } Please note the service:username:password method and the callback compile and run fine. The problem is that the callback is passing a non-nil NSError object. I added an NSLog() for every error reporting attribute of NSError and the (Xcode) log output of a test run is below. [Session started at 2010-05-27 12:27:16 -0700.] 2010-05-27 12:27:38.778 iFilebox[74596:207] authenticatedWithError called 2010-05-27 12:27:38.779 iFilebox[74596:207] error code(-1) 2010-05-27 12:27:38.780 iFilebox[74596:207] error domain(499324) 2010-05-27 12:27:38.781 iFilebox[74596:207] localizedDescription(Operation could not be completed. (com.google.GDataServiceDomain error -1.)) 2010-05-27 12:27:38.782 iFilebox[74596:207] localizedFailureReason((null)) 2010-05-27 12:27:38.782 iFilebox[74596:207] localizedRecoveryOptions((null)) 2010-05-27 12:27:38.783 iFilebox[74596:207] localizedRecoverySuggestion((null)) My essential question is in the error reporting. I was hoping the localizedDescription would be more specific of the error. All I get for the error code value is -1, and the only description of the error is "Operation could not be completed. (com.google.GDataServiceDomain error -1.". Not very helpful. Does anyone know what a GDataServiceDomain error -1 is? Where can I find a full list of all error codes returned, and a description of what they mean?

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• LINQ Except operator and object equality

  - by Abhijeet Patel

  Here is an interesting issue I noticed when using the Except Operator: I have list of users from which I want to exclude some users: The list of users is coming from an XML file: The code goes like this: interface IUser { int ID { get; set; } string Name { get; set; } } class User: IUser { #region IUser Members public int ID { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } #endregion public override string ToString() { return ID + ":" +Name; } public static IEnumerable<IUser> GetMatchingUsers(IEnumerable<IUser> users) { IEnumerable<IUser> localList = new List<User> { new User{ ID=4, Name="James"}, new User{ ID=5, Name="Tom"} }.OfType<IUser>(); var matches = from u in users join lu in localList on u.ID equals lu.ID select u; return matches; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("Users.xml"); IEnumerable<IUser> users = doc.Element("Users").Elements("User").Select (u => new User { ID = (int)u.Attribute("id"), Name = (string)u.Attribute("name") } ).OfType<IUser>(); //still a query, objects have not been materialized var matches = User.GetMatchingUsers(users); var excludes = users.Except(matches); // excludes should contain 6 users but here it contains 8 users } } When I call User.GetMatchingUsers(users) I get 2 matches as expected. The issue is that when I call users.Except(matches) The matching users are not being excluded at all! I am expecting 6 users ut "excludes" contains all 8 users instead. Since all I'm doing in GetMatchingUsers(IEnumerable users) is taking the IEnumerable and just returning the IUsers whose ID's match( 2 IUsers in this case), my understanding is that by default "Except" will use reference equality for comparing the objects to be excluded. Is this not how "Except" behaves? What is even more interesting is that if I materialize the objects using .ToList() and then get the matching users, and call "Except", everything works as expected! Like so: IEnumerable users = doc.Element("Users").Elements("User").Select (u = new User { ID = (int)u.Attribute("id"), Name = (string)u.Attribute("name") } ).OfType().ToList(); //explicity materializing all objects by calling ToList() var matches = User.GetMatchingUsers(users); var excludes = users.Except(matches); // excludes now contains 6 users as expected I don't see why I should need to materialize objects for calling "Except" given that its defined on IEnumerable? Any suggesstions / insights would be much appreciated.

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• Looping class, for template engine kind of thing

  - by tarnfeld

  Hey, I am updating my class Nesty so it's infinite but I'm having a little trouble.... Here is the class: <?php Class Nesty { // Class Variables private $text; private $data = array(); private $loops = 0; private $maxLoops = 0; public function __construct($text,$data = array(),$maxLoops = 5) { // Set the class vars $this->text = $text; $this->data = $data; $this->maxLoops = $maxLoops; } // Loop funtion private function loopThrough($data) { if( ($this->loops +1) > $this->maxLoops ) { die("ERROR: Too many loops!"); } else { $keys = array_keys($data); for($x = 0; $x < count($keys); $x++) { if(is_array($data[$keys[$x]])) { $this->loopThrough($data[$keys[$x]]); } else { return $data[$keys[$x]]; } } } } // Templater method public function template() { echo $this->loopThrough($this->data); } } ?> Here is the code you would use to create an instance of the class: <?php // The nested array $data = array( "person" => array( "name" => "Tom Arnfeld", "age" => 15 ), "product" => array ( "name" => "Cakes", "price" => array ( "single" => 59, "double" => 99 ) ), "other" => "string" ); // Retreive the template text $file = "TestData.tpl"; $fp = fopen($file,"r"); $text = fread($fp,filesize($file)); // Create the Nesty object require_once('Nesty.php'); $nesty = new Nesty($text,$data); // Save the newly templated text to a variable $message $message = $nesty->template(); // Print out $message on the page echo("<pre>".$message."</pre>"); ?> Any ideas?

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• Exchange 2010 OWA - a few questions about using multiple mailboxes

  - by Alexey Smolik

  We have an Exchange 2010 SP2 deployment and we need that our users could access multiple mailboxes in OWA. The problem is that a user (eg John Smith) needs to access not just somebody else's (eg Tom Anderson) mailboxes, but his OWN mailboxes, e.g. in different domains: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc. Of course it is preferable for the user to work with all of his mailboxes from a single window. Such mailboxes can be added as multiple Exchange accounts in Outlook, that works almost fine. But in OWA, there are problems: 1) In the left pane - as I've learned - we can open only Inbox folders from other mailboxes. No way to view all folders like in Outlook? 2) With Send-As permissions set, when trying to send a message from another address, that message is saved in the Sent Items folder of the mailbox that is opened in OWA, and not in the mailbox the message is sent from. The same thing with the trash can. Is there a way to fix that? Also, this problem exists in desktop Outlook when mailboxes are added automatically via the Auto Mapping feature, so that we need to turn it off and add the accounts manually. Is there a simpler workaround? 3) Okay, suppose we only open Inbox folders in the left pane. The problem is that the mailbox names shown there are formed from Display Name attributes. But those names are all identical! All the mailboxes are owned by John Smith, so they should be all named John Smith - so that letter recepient sees "John Smith" in the "from" field, no matter what mailbox it is sent from. Also, the user knows what's his name - no need to tell him. He wants to know what mailbox he works with. So we need a way to either: a) customize OWA to show mailbox email address instead of user Display Name, or b) make Exchange use another attribute to put in the "from" field when sending letters 4) Okay, we can switch between mailboxes using "Open Other Mailbox" in the upper-right corner menu. But: a) To select a mailbox we need to enter its name (or first letters). It there a way to show a list of links to mailboxes the user has full access to? Eg in the page header... b) If we start entering the first letters, we see a popup list with possible mailboxes to be opened. But there are all mailboxes (apparently from GAL), not only mailboxes the user has permission to open! How to filter that popup list? c) The same problem as in (3) with mailbox naming. We can see the opened mailbox email address ONLY in the page URL, which is insufficient for many users. In the left pane we see "John Smith" which is useless. 5) Each mailbox is tied with a separate user in AD. If one has several mailboxes, we need to have additional dummy AD accounts, create additional OUs to store them, etc. That's not very nice, is there any standartized, optimal way to build such a structure? We would really appreciate any answers or additional info for any of these questions. Thank you in advance.

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• TLS (STARTTLS) Failure After 10.6 Upgrade to Open Directory Master

  - by Thomas Kishel

  Hello, Environment: Mac OS X 10.6.3 install/import of a MacOS X 10.5.8 Open Directory Master server. After that upgrade, LDAP+TLS fails on our MacOS X 10.5, 10.6, CentOS, Debian, and FreeBSD clients (Apache2 and PAM). Testing using ldapsearch: ldapsearch -ZZ -H ldap://gnome.darkhorse.com -v -x -b "dc=darkhorse,dc=com" '(uid=donaldr)' uid ... fails with: ldap_start_tls: Protocol error (2) Testing adding "-d 9" fails with: res_errno: 2, res_error: <unsupported extended operation>, res_matched: <> Testing without requiring STARTTLS or with LDAPS: ldapsearch -H ldap://gnome.darkhorse.com -v -x -b "dc=darkhorse,dc=com" '(uid=donaldr)' uid ldapsearch -H ldaps://gnome.darkhorse.com -v -x -b "dc=darkhorse,dc=com" '(uid=donaldr)' uid ... succeeds with: # donaldr, users, darkhorse.com dn: uid=donaldr,cn=users,dc=darkhorse,dc=com uid: donaldr # search result search: 2 result: 0 Success # numResponses: 2 # numEntries: 1 result: 0 Success (We are specifying "TLS_REQCERT never" in /etc/openldap/ldap.conf) Testing with openssl: openssl s_client -connect gnome.darkhorse.com:636 -showcerts -state ... succeeds: CONNECTED(00000003) SSL_connect:before/connect initialization SSL_connect:SSLv2/v3 write client hello A SSL_connect:SSLv3 read server hello A depth=1 /C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department verify error:num=19:self signed certificate in certificate chain verify return:0 SSL_connect:SSLv3 read server certificate A SSL_connect:SSLv3 read server done A SSL_connect:SSLv3 write client key exchange A SSL_connect:SSLv3 write change cipher spec A SSL_connect:SSLv3 write finished A SSL_connect:SSLv3 flush data SSL_connect:SSLv3 read finished A --- Certificate chain 0 s:/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=MIS/CN=gnome.darkhorse.com i:/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department 1 s:/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department i:/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department --- Server certificate -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- <deleted for brevity> -----END CERTIFICATE----- subject=/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=MIS/CN=gnome.darkhorse.com issuer=/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department --- No client certificate CA names sent --- SSL handshake has read 2640 bytes and written 325 bytes --- New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is AES256-SHA Server public key is 1024 bit Compression: NONE Expansion: NONE SSL-Session: Protocol : TLSv1 Cipher : AES256-SHA Session-ID: D3F9536D3C64BAAB9424193F81F09D5C53B7D8E7CB5A9000C58E43285D983851 Session-ID-ctx: Master-Key: E224CC065924DDA6FABB89DBCC3E6BF89BEF6C0BD6E5D0B3C79E7DE927D6E97BF12219053BA2BB5B96EA2F6A44E934D3 Key-Arg : None Start Time: 1271202435 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) So we believe that the slapd daemon is reading our certificate and writing it to LDAP clients. Apple Server Admin adds ProgramArguments ("-h ldaps:///") to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openldap.slapd.plist and TLSCertificateFile, TLSCertificateKeyFile, TLSCACertificateFile, and TLSCertificatePassphraseTool to /etc/openldap/slapd_macosxserver.conf when enabling SSL in the LDAP section of the Open Directory service. While that appears enough for LDAPS, it appears that this is not enough for TLS. Comparing our 10.6 and 10.5 slapd.conf and slapd_macosxserver.conf configuration files yields no clues. Replacing our certificate (generated with a self-signed ca) with an Apple Server Admin generated self signed certificate results in no change in ldapsearch results. Setting -d to 256 in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openldap.slapd.plist logs: 4/13/10 5:23:35 PM org.openldap.slapd[82162] conn=384 op=0 EXT oid=1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.20037 4/13/10 5:23:35 PM org.openldap.slapd[82162] conn=384 op=0 do_extended: unsupported operation "1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.20037" 4/13/10 5:23:35 PM org.openldap.slapd[82162] conn=384 op=0 RESULT tag=120 err=2 text=unsupported extended operation Any debugging advice much appreciated. -- Tom Kishel

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• Expert iptables help needed?

  - by Asad Moeen

  After a detailed analysis, I collected these details. I am under a UDP Flood which is more of application dependent. I run a Game-Server and an attacker is flooding me with "getstatus" query which makes the GameServer respond by making the replies to the query which cause output to the attacker's IP as high as 30mb/s and server lag. Here are the packet details, Packet starts with 4 bytes 0xff and then getstatus. Theoretically, the packet is like "\xff\xff\xff\xffgetstatus " Now that I've tried a lot of iptables variations like state and rate-limiting along side but those didn't work. Rate Limit works good but only when the Server is not started. As soon as the server starts, no iptables rule seems to block it. Anyone else got more solutions? someone asked me to contact the provider and get it done at the Network/Router but that looks very odd and I believe they might not do it since that would also affect other clients. Responding to all those answers, I'd say: Firstly, its a VPS so they can't do it for me. Secondly, I don't care if something is coming in but since its application generated so there has to be a OS level solution to block the outgoing packets. At least the outgoing ones must be stopped. Secondly, its not Ddos since just 400kb/s input generates 30mb/s output from my GameServer. That never happens in a D-dos. Asking the provider/hardware level solution should be used in that case but this one is different. And Yes, Banning his IP stops the flood of outgoing packets but he has many more IP-Addresses as he spoofs his original so I just need something to block him automatically. Even tried a lot of Firewalls but as you know they are just front-ends to iptables so if something doesn't work on iptables, what would the firewalls do? These were the rules I tried, iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name DDOS --rsource iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 1 --hitcount 5 --name DDOS --rsource -j DROP It works for the attacks on un-used ports but when the server is listening and responding to the incoming queries by the attacker, it never works. Okay Tom.H, your rules were working when I modified them somehow like this: iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m length --length 1:1024 -m recent --set --name XXXX --rsource iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m string --string "xxxxxxxxxx" --algo bm --to 65535 -m recent --update --seconds 1 --hitcount 15 --name XXXX --rsource -j DROP They worked for about 3 days very good where the string "xxxxxxxxx" would be rate-limited, blocked if someone flooded and also didn't affect the clients. But just today, I tried updating the chain to try to remove a previously blocked IP so for that I had to flush the chain and restore this rule ( iptables -X and iptables -F ), some clients were already connected to servers including me. So restoring the rules now would also block some of the clients string completely while some are not affected. So does this mean I need to restart the server or why else would this happen because the last time the rules were working, there was no one connected?

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• My 3D Games crashing in these scenarios

  - by desaivv

  I have a situation here which I am unable to solve. I bought a PC last year March, here are my specs: Intel Core i3 550 @ 3GHz 4 GB RAM @400 MHz XFX GeForce 9500 GT graphics card 1GB @550MHz 500 GB HDD Lately as soon as I load my save game of Skyrim, it crashes. I have been playing Skyrim since I joined Gaming.SE site. Crashes as in the entire scene gets red lines. I can not ALT + TAB back or even CTRL + ALT + DEL either. My only recourse is a hard reset via the power button. Can not take a screen shot either. I have the latest Forceware 296.10 drivers also. This has been happening since the last 2 weeks. I always use Driver Sweeper to clean my old drivers, since that is what XFXForce recommends before installing new drivers. I installed MSI Afterburner lately to see my GPU temperature. My GPU is default, never over-clocked it. In MSI's Afterburner, I can not adjust fan speed. It is greyed out. Also in settings there is no fan tab. With normal Internet browsing it stays at 51 C. Ran Memtest86 over night with level 11. Took about 13 hours, but no errors in my RAM. I even re-installed my OS, with just the 296 drivers. The fan for the GPU does come on. I can play Diablo 2. I can not get past Warcraft 3's menu selection. There WAS some dust in my machine, but I always try and keep everything clean, since in my home town dust is an issue. Always keep cool my entire PC cabinet. My friend came with his functioning graphics card, we bought our PCs at the same time with exact same specifications. His card did not work either. Same problem with the scene freezing with red lines. I did do my research before posting here. That is how I was able to learn about MSI Afterburner, Driver Sweeper, SpeedFan etc. I followed posts on Tom's Hardware too regarding people that had similar problems. One person suggested and was followed by worked as well the suggestion to "Bake the card in an oven". Since I bought it, played Diablo 2 for months, Starcraft 2 campaign for months and Skyrim recently for months. Bought ME3 also. I am at my wits end. I do not know what else to do. I can go out and buy a card, but my friend's card did not work either. I can use the machine for Eclipse or VS2010 development just fine. Just not with 3D gaming. I originally posted this question on Gaming.SE But I was directed here. I have browsed the SU database for my problem and found this, this, and this. But none of these cover my question. My machine is only one year old. Can some experienced superuser(s) shed some light on this scenario? Is it a 3D graphics card problem? Will a brand new card work? What else can I try to pin point the problem? Can it be the Motherboard? Thanks.

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• I have finally traded my Blackberry in for a Droid!

  - by Bob Porter

  Over the years I have used a number of different types of phones. Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Nokia, and now Android. Until the Blackberry, which was my last phone (and I still have one issued from my office) I had never found a phone that “just worked” especially with email and messaging. The Blackberry did, and does, excel at those functions. My last personal phone was a Storm 1 which was Blackberry’s first touch screen phone. The Storm 2 was an improved version that fixed some screen press detection issues from the first model and it added Wifi. Over the last few years I have watched others acquire and fall in love with their ‘Droid’s including a number of iPhone users which surprised me. Our office has until recently only supported Blackberry phones, adding iPhones within the last year or so. When I spoke with our internal telecom folks they confirmed they were evaluating Android phones, but felt they still were not secure enough out of the box for corporate use and SOX compliance. That being said, as a personal phone, the Droid Rocks! I am impressed with its speed, the number of apps available, and the overall design. It is not as “flashy” as an iPhone but it does everything that I care about and more. The model I bought is the Motorola Droid 2 Global from Verizon. It is currently running Android 2.2 for it’s OS, 2.3 is just around the corner. It has 8 gigs of internal flash memory and can handle up to a 32 gig SDCard. (I currently have 2 8 gig cards, one for backups, and have ordered a 16 gig card!) Being a geek at heart, I “rooted” the phone which means gained superuser access to the OS on the phone. And opens a number of doors for further modifications down the road. Also being a geek meant I have already setup a development environment and built and deployed the obligatory “Hello Droid” application. I will be writing of my development experiences with this new platform here often, to start off I thought I would share my current application list to give you an idea what I am using. Zedge: http://market.android.com/details?id=net.zedge.android XDA: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.quoord.tapatalkxda.activity WRAL.com: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mylocaltv.wral Wireless Tether: http://market.android.com/details?id=android.tether Winamp: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.nullsoft.winamp Win7 Clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.toggles.win7 Wifi Analyzer: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.farproc.wifi.analyzer WeatherBug: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.aws.android Weather Widget Forecast Addon: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.weather.forecastaddon Weather & Toggle Widgets: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather2 Vlingo: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.vlingo.client VirtualTENHO-G: http://market.android.com/details?id=jp.bustercurry.virtualtenho_g Twitter: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.twitter.android TweetDeck: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.thedeck.android.app Tricorder: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.hermit.tricorder Titanium Backup PRO: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackupPro Titanium Backup: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup Terminal Emulator: http://market.android.com/details?id=jackpal.androidterm Talking Tom Free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.outfit7.talkingtom Stock Blue: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.adw.theme.stockblue ST: Red Alert Free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.oldplanets.redalertwallpaper ST: Red Alert: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.oldplanets.redalertwallpaperplus Solitaire: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.kmagic.solitaire Skype: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.skype.raider Silent Time Lite: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.QuiteHypnotic.SilentTime ShopSavvy: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.biggu.shopsavvy Shopper: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.shopper Shiny clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.clock.shiny ShareMyApps: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mattlary.shareMyApps Sense Glass ADW Theme: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dtanquary.senseglassadwtheme ROM Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.koushikdutta.rommanager Roboform Bookmarklet Installer: http://market.android.com/details?id=roboformBookmarkletInstaller.android.com RealCalc: http://market.android.com/details?id=uk.co.nickfines.RealCalc Package Buddy: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.psyrus.packagebuddy Overstock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.overstock OMGPOP Toggle: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.toggle.omgpop OI File Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.openintents.filemanager nook: http://market.android.com/details?id=bn.ereader MyAtlas-Google Maps Navigation ext: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adaptdroid.navbookfree3 MSN Droid: http://market.android.com/details?id=msn.droid.im Matrix Live Wallpaper: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.jarodyv.livewallpaper.matrix LogMeIn: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.logmein.ignitionpro.android Liveshare: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.cooliris.app.liveshare Kobo: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.kobobooks.android Instant Heart Rate: http://market.android.com/details?id=si.modula.android.instantheartrate IMDb: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.imdb.mobile Home Plus Weather: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.skin.weather.homeplus Handcent SMS: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.handcent.nextsms H7C Clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.clock.skin.h7c GTasks: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.dayup.gtask GPS Status: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.eclipsim.gpsstatus2 Google Voice: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.googlevoice Google Sky Map: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid Google Reader: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.reader GoMarks: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androappsdev.gomarks Goggles: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.unveil Glossy Black Weather: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather.skin.glossyblack Fox News: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.foxnews.android Foursquare: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.joelapenna.foursquared FBReader: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.geometerplus.zlibrary.ui.android Fandango: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.fandango Facebook: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.facebook.katana Extensive Notes Pro: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.flufflydelusions.app.extensive_notes_donate Expense Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.expensemanager Espresso UI (LightShow w/ Slide): http://market.android.com/details?id=com.jaguirre.slide.lightshow Engadget: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.aol.mobile.engadget Earth: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.earth Drudge: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.iavian.dreport Dropbox: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dropbox.android DroidForums: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.quoord.tapatalkdrodiforums.activity DroidArmor ADW: http://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.addesigns.droidarmorADW Droid Weather Icons: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather.skins.white Droid 2 Bootstrapper: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.koushikdutta.droid2.bootstrap doubleTwist: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.doubleTwist.androidPlayer Documents To Go: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dataviz.docstogo Digital Clock Widget: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.maize.digitalClock Desk Home: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.cowbellsoftware.deskdock Default Clock: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.clock.skins.defaultclock Daily Expense Manager: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.techahead.ExpenseManager ConnectBot: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.connectbot Colorized Weather Icons: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.widget.weather.colorized Chrome to Phone: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.chrometophone CardStar: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.cardstar.android Books: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.books Black Ipad Toggle: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.toggle.widget.skin.blackipad Black Glass ADW Theme: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.dtanquary.blackglassadwtheme Bing: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.microsoft.mobileexperiences.bing BeyondPod Unlock Key: http://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.beyondpod.unlockkey BeyondPod: http://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.beyondpod BeejiveIM: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.beejive.im Beautiful Widgets Animations Addon: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.bw.forecast Beautiful Widgets: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.beautifulwidgets Beautiful Live Weather: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.levelup.beautifullive BBC News: http://market.android.com/details?id=net.jimblackler.newswidget Barnacle Wifi Tether: http://market.android.com/details?id=net.szym.barnacle Barcode Scanner: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.zxing.client.android ASTRO SMB Module: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro.smb ASTRO Pro: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro.pro ASTRO Bluetooth Module: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro.network.bluetooth ASTRO: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.metago.astro AppBrain App Market: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.appspot.swisscodemonkeys.apps App Drawer Icon Pack: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adwtheme.appdrawericonpack androidVNC: http://market.android.com/details?id=android.androidVNC AndroidGuys: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.handmark.mpp.AndroidGuys Android System Info: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.electricsheep.asi AndFTP: http://market.android.com/details?id=lysesoft.andftp ADWTheme Red: http://market.android.com/details?id=adw.theme.red ADWLauncher EX: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.adwfreak.launcher ADW.Theme.One: http://market.android.com/details?id=org.adw.theme.one ADW.Faded theme: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.xrcore.adwtheme.faded ADW Gingerbread: http://market.android.com/details?id=me.robertburns.android.adwtheme.gingerbread Advanced Task Killer Free: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.rechild.advancedtaskkiller Adobe Reader: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.reader Adobe Flash Player 10.1: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.flashplayer Adobe AIR: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.adobe.air 3G Auto OnOff: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.yuantuo --- Generated by ShareMyApps http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mattlary.shareMyApps Sent from my Droid

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• Scott Guthrie in Glasgow

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Last week Scott Guthrie was in Glasgow for his new Guathon tour, which was a roaring success. Scott did talks on the new features in Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET MVC 2 and Windows Phone 7. Scott talked from 10am till 4pm, so this can only contain what I remember and I am sure lots of things he discussed just went in one ear and out another, however I have tried to capture at least all of my Ohh’s and Ahh’s. Visual Studio 2010 Right now you can download and install Visual Studio 2010 Candidate Release, but soon we will have the final product in our hands. With it there are some amazing improvements, and not just in the IDE. New versions of VB and C# come out of the box as well as Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 integration. The new Intellisense features allow inline support for Types and Dictionaries as well as being able to type just part of a name and have the list filter accordingly. Even better, and my personal favourite is one that Scott did not mention, and that is that it is not case sensitive so I can actually find things in C# with its reasonless case sensitivity (Scott, can we please have an option to turn that off.) Another nice feature is the Routing engine that was created for ASP.NET MVC is now available for WebForms which is good news for all those that just imported the MVC DLL’s to get at it anyway. Another fantastic feature that will need some exploring is the ability to add validation rules to your entities and have them validated automatically on the front end. This removes the need to add your own validators and means that you can control an objects validation rules from a single location, the object. A simple command “GridView.EnableDynamicData(gettype(product))“ will enable this feature on controls. What was not clear was wither there would be support for this in WPF and WinForms as well. If there is, we can write our validation rules once and use everywhere. I was disappointed to here that there would be no inbuilt support for the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with VS2010, but I think it will be there for .vNext. Because I have been concentrating on the Visual Studio ALM enhancements to VS2010 I found this section invaluable as I now know at least some of what I missed. Silverlight 4 I am not a big fan of Silverlight. There I said it, and I will probably get lynched for it. My big problem with Silverlight is that most of the really useful things I leaned from WPF do not work. I am only going to mention one thing and that is “x:Type”. If you are a WPF developer you will know how much power these 6 little letters provide; the ability to target templates at object types being the the most magical and useful. But, and this is a massive but, if you are developing applications that MUST run on platforms other than windows then Silverlight is your only choice (well that and Flash, but lets just not go there). And Silverlight has a huge install base as well.. 60% of all internet connected devices have Silverlight. Can Adobe say that? Even though I am not a fan of it my current project is a Silverlight one. If you start your XAML experience with Silverlight you will not be disappointed and neither will the users of the applications you build. Scott showed us a fantastic application called “Silverface” that is a Silverlight 4 Out of Browser application. I have looked for a link and can’t find one, but true to form, here is a fantastic WPF version called Fish Bowl from Microsoft. ASP.NET MVC 2 ASP.NET MVC is something I have played with but never used in anger. It is definitely the way forward, but WebForms is not dead yet. there are still circumstances when WebForms are better. If you are starting from greenfield and you are using TDD, then MVC is ultimately the only way you can go. New in version 2 are Dynamic Scaffolding helpers that let you control how data is presented in the UI from the Entities. Adding validation rules and other options that make sense there can help improve the overall ease of developing the UI. Also the Microsoft team have heard the cries of help from the larger site builders and provided “Areas” which allow a level of categorisation to your Controllers and Views. These work just like add-ins and have their own folder, but also have sub Controllers and Views. Areas are totally pluggable and can be dropped onto existing sites giving the ability to have boxed products in MVC, although what you do with all of those views is anyone's guess. They have been listening to everyone again with the new option to encapsulate UI using the Html.Action or Html.ActionRender. This uses the existing  .ascx functionality in ASP.NET to render partial views to the screen in certain areas. While this was possible before, it makes the method official thereby opening it up to the masses and making it a standard. At the end of the session Scott pulled out some IIS goodies including the IIS SEO Toolkit which can be used to verify your own site is “good” for search engine consumption. Better yet he suggested that you run it against your friends sites and shame them with how bad they are. note: make sure you have fixed yours first. Windows Phone 7 Series I had already seen the new UI for WP7 and heard about the developer story, but Scott brought that home by building a twitter application in about 20 minutes using the emulator. Scott’s only mistake was loading @plip’s tweets into the app… And guess what, it was written in Silverlight. When Windows Phone 7 launches you will be able to use about 90% of the codebase of your existing Silverlight application and use it on the phone! There are two downsides to the new WP7 architecture: No, your existing application WILL NOT work without being converted to either a Silverlight or XNA UI. NO, you will not be able to get your applications onto the phone any other way but through the Marketplace. Do I think these are problems? No, not even slightly. This phone is aimed at consumers who have probably never tried to install an application directly onto a device. There will be support for enterprise apps in the future, but for now enterprises should stay on Windows Phone 6.5.x devices. Post Event drinks At the after event drinks gathering Scott was checking out my HTC HD2 (released to the US this month on T-Mobile) and liked the Windows Phone 6.5.5 build I have on it. We discussed why Microsoft were not going to allow Windows Phone 7 Series onto it with my understanding being that it had 5 buttons and not 3, while Scott was sure that there was more to it from a hardware standpoint. I think he is right, and although the HTC HD2 has a DX9 compatible processor, it was never built with WP7 in mind. However, as if by magic Saturday brought fantastic news for all those that have already bought an HD2: Yes, this appears to be Windows Phone 7 running on a HTC HD2. The HD2 itself won't be getting an official upgrade to Windows Phone 7 Series, so all eyes are on the ROM chefs at the moment. The rather massive photos have been posted by Tom Codon on HTCPedia and they've apparently got WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and other bits working. The ROM isn't online yet but according to the post there's a beta version coming soon. Leigh Geary - http://www.coolsmartphone.com/news5648.html  What was Scott working on on his flight back to the US?   Technorati Tags: VS2010,MVC2,WP7S,WP7 Follow: @CAMURPHY, @ColinMackay, @plip and of course @ScottGu

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• XNA Notes 010

  - by George Clingerman

  With GDC 2011 wrapping up there were a LOT of great interviews and posts with and about XNA and XBLIG and some of our more notorious developers. Definitely worth spending many, many hours watching, listening and reading all those. Very inspiring! Also, don’t forget to get signed up for Dream Build Play! And just as an early warning reminder do NOT, I repeat do NOT wait to submit your game the last day. There are major issues submitting the last day every year and you do not want all your hard work to be hanging on whether your entry actually went through in that last day. Plan on submitting a few days if not a week before. I’m serious, you’ll thank yourself later! Now on to what’s happening in the XNA community! Time Critical XNA News: PAX East Meet Up (really wish I was going!) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71921/439262.aspx Want to stay panicked about the countdown to Dream Build Play? Mike McLaughlin shares his DBP countdown clock http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/44454458960252928 XNA Team: Nick Gravelyn Only needs less than 600 new users in his unique marketing plan for Pixel Man 2 http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ And hares his ad revenue numbers with his XNA WP7 games http://theoneswiththelight.com/2011/my-results-with-ad-revenue-for-wp7-games/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn posts his 15,000th App Hub forum post and shares a few thoughts on the MVP summit http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx Chris Williams shares his thoughts on the MVP summit http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx XNA Developers: Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best games Wraps up GDC http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/gdc-2011-wrapped.html And shares the wonderful screenshots from Serious Sam. (I’m so jealous people at PAX East willl be playing a demo of this game!) http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/serious-sam-double-d.html James Silva of Ska Studios announces http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/09/vampire-smile-at-hotel-sierra/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/08/vengeance-begins-april-6th/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/04/good-morning-gato-52/ Michael McLaughlin writes an extremely useful set of tips for XNA WP7 developers http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/10/tips-for-xna-wp7-developers.aspx Robert Boyd “the one man XBLIG improving machine” posts his 9 tips for marketing an Xbox LIVE Indie Gam http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110309/7183/9_Tips_for_XBLIG_Marketing.php http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/77534/470586.aspx#470586 And shares his day by day experience at GDC this year http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7118/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_1.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7123/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_2.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110303/7129/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_3.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7133/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_4.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7160/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_5.php Phillipe Da Silva releases new IGF Pong Sample preview http://www.vimeo.com/20904070 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Gamergeddon posts XBox Indie Game Roundup for March 6th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/03/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-march-6th/ Dealspwn interviews FortressCraft developer Projector Games http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-minecraft-clones-venting-haters-part-1/ http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-part-2-trials-tribulations-indie-development/ Writings of Mass Destruction continues the Xbox LIVE Indie Game a day campaign, here’s his take on FishCraft (be sure to check out his other posts!) http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/03/05/day-116-fishcraft/ Tom Ogburn shares his GDC notes on the XBLIG panel jotted quickly while attending the panel http://twitter.com/#!/TOgburn/status/44454191028125696 http://www.starlitskygames.com/blogs/site_news/archive/2011/03/06/802.aspx Dave Voyles of Armless Octopus has crazy good coverage on XNA and Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers at GDC 2011. Interviews and articles all extremely well done! http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/06/gdc-2011-successful-indie-developers-share-insight-on-microsofts-self-publishing-service/ There’s honestly so many posts and interviews you should just hit his front page and scroll down through all of the latest ones. http://www.armlessoctopus.com/ GameMarx Episode 12 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/27/ep-12-march-4-2011.aspx B.U.T.T.O.N now on Steam! http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/03/button_party_game_now_on_steam.php German Xbox Dashboard gets review program from GamePro http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/07/gamepo-indie-review-show-debuts-on-german-xbox-dashboard/ XboxIndies.com (one of the best XNA sites out there at this point!) continues to add review sites to it’s main review feed. (And don’t forget to play with that awesome XBLIG pivot control!) http://xboxindies.com/ Kris Steele of FunInfused Games shares early footage of his game World of Chalk http://twitter.com/#!/kriswd40/status/45007114371989504 Raymond Matthews of Darkstarmatryx reviews FunInfused Games Abduction Action http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=264 TheVideoGamerRob reviews Zombie Football Carnage http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/xblig-review-zombie-football-carnage/ XBLIG Square Off Making the Jump to WP7 http://www.wp7connect.com/2011/03/08/xblig-square-off-will-make-the-jump-to-windows-phone/ Mommy’s Best Games making the news round with their Serious Sam announcement http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/09/serious-sam-gets-serious-indie-cred-with-new-indie-series/ Most quoted and linked XBLIG article of the week with the least amount of actual facts and reporting. Shared only because it makes me sad that this is the best coverage we get. (Hey reporters, there’s LOT and LOTS of XBLIG and XNA experts you can contact if you need to check up on facts or wonder why on questions like, Why can’t XBLIGs have Nazis? There’s actually a real answer for that..) http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/06/xblig-facts-nazi-killing-a-no-no-revenue-a-yes-yes/ XNA Development: Mort8088 has been in an XNA tutorial writing frenzy releasing 4 XNA 4.0 entry level tutorials this week! http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-0-intro/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-1-fonts/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-2-sprites/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-3-input-from-keyboard/ Interesting discussion on what it means to be a community (you do have to sign up to be a member of the XNA UK forums to read it...) http://twitter.com/#!/XNAUK/status/44705269254594560 Slyprid continues his incredible pace on Transmute and shares screens of his new Animation Builder http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/45169271847911424 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/ Philippe Da Silva wants to know who is using IGF for their games. If it’s you, drop him a note letting him know! http://twitter.com/#!/philippedasilva/status/44325893719588864 New Sunburn Video Tutorials released http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/03/07/new-documentation-video-tutorials.aspx Loading and rendering animated collada models using XNA 4.0 http://bunkernetz.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/loading-and-rendering-animated-collada-models-using-xna-4-0/ XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 6 Accelerometer Input http://buzzgamesnews.blogspot.com/2011/03/xna-for-silverlight-developers-part-6.html

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• Base de Datos Oracle, su mejor opción para reducir costos de IT

  - by Ivan Hassig

  Por Victoria Cadavid Sr. Sales Cosultant Oracle Direct Uno de los principales desafíos en la administración de centros de datos es la reducción de costos de operación. A medida que las compañías crecen y los proveedores de tecnología ofrecen soluciones cada vez más robustas, conservar el equilibrio entre desempeño, soporte al negocio y gestión del Costo Total de Propiedad es un desafío cada vez mayor para los Gerentes de Tecnología y para los Administradores de Centros de Datos. Las estrategias más comunes para conseguir reducción en los costos de administración de Centros de Datos y en la gestión de Tecnología de una organización en general, se enfocan en la mejora del desempeño de las aplicaciones, reducción del costo de administración y adquisición de hardware, reducción de los costos de almacenamiento, aumento de la productividad en la administración de las Bases de Datos y mejora en la atención de requerimientos y prestación de servicios de mesa de ayuda, sin embargo, las estrategias de reducción de costos deben contemplar también la reducción de costos asociados a pérdida y robo de información, cumplimiento regulatorio, generación de valor y continuidad del negocio, que comúnmente se conciben como iniciativas aisladas que no siempre se adelantan con el ánimo de apoyar la reducción de costos. Una iniciativa integral de reducción de costos de TI, debe contemplar cada uno de los factores que  generan costo y pueden ser optimizados. En este artículo queremos abordar la reducción de costos de tecnología a partir de la adopción del que según los expertos es el motor de Base de Datos # del mercado.Durante años, la base de datos Oracle ha sido reconocida por su velocidad, confiabilidad, seguridad y capacidad para soportar cargas de datos tanto de aplicaciones altamente transaccionales, como de Bodegas de datos e incluso análisis de Big Data , ofreciendo alto desempeño y facilidades de administración, sin embrago, cuando pensamos en proyectos de reducción de costos de IT, además de la capacidad para soportar aplicaciones (incluso aplicaciones altamente transaccionales) con alto desempeño, pensamos en procesos de automatización, optimización de recursos, consolidación, virtualización e incluso alternativas más cómodas de licenciamiento. La Base de Datos Oracle está diseñada para proveer todas las capacidades que un área de tecnología necesita para reducir costos, adaptándose a los diferentes escenarios de negocio y a las capacidades y características de cada organización.Es así, como además del motor de Base de Datos, Oracle ofrece una serie de soluciones para optimizar la administración de la información a través de mecanismos de optimización del uso del storage, continuidad del Negocio, consolidación de infraestructura, seguridad y administración automática, que propenden por un mejor uso de los recursos de tecnología, ofrecen opciones avanzadas de configuración y direccionan la reducción de los tiempos de las tareas operativas más comunes. Una de las opciones de la base de datos que se pueden provechar para reducir costos de hardware es Oracle Real Application Clusters. Esta solución de clustering permite que varios servidores (incluso servidores de bajo costo) trabajen en conjunto para soportar Grids o Nubes Privadas de Bases de Datos, proporcionando los beneficios de la consolidación de infraestructura, los esquemas de alta disponibilidad, rápido desempeño y escalabilidad por demanda, haciendo que el aprovisionamiento, el mantenimiento de las bases de datos y la adición de nuevos nodos se lleve e cabo de una forma más rápida y con menos riesgo, además de apalancar las inversiones en servidores de menor costo. Otra de las soluciones que promueven la reducción de costos de Tecnología es Oracle In-Memory Database Cache que permite almacenar y procesar datos en la memoria de las aplicaciones, permitiendo el máximo aprovechamiento de los recursos de procesamiento de la capa media, lo que cobra mucho valor en escenarios de alta transaccionalidad. De este modo se saca el mayor provecho de los recursos de procesamiento evitando crecimiento innecesario en recursos de hardware. Otra de las formas de evitar inversiones innecesarias en hardware, aprovechando los recursos existentes, incluso en escenarios de alto crecimiento de los volúmenes de información es la compresión de los datos. Oracle Advanced Compression permite comprimir hasta 4 veces los diferentes tipos de datos, mejorando la capacidad de almacenamiento, sin comprometer el desempeño de las aplicaciones. Desde el lado del almacenamiento también se pueden conseguir reducciones importantes de los costos de IT. En este escenario, la tecnología propia de la base de Datos Oracle ofrece capacidades de Administración Automática del Almacenamiento que no solo permiten una distribución óptima de los datos en los discos físicos para garantizar el máximo desempeño, sino que facilitan el aprovisionamiento y la remoción de discos defectuosos y ofrecen balanceo y mirroring, garantizando el uso máximo de cada uno de los dispositivos y la disponibilidad de los datos. Otra de las soluciones que facilitan la administración del almacenamiento es Oracle Partitioning, una opción de la Base de Datos que permite dividir grandes tablas en estructuras más pequeñas. Esta aproximación facilita la administración del ciclo de vida de la información y permite por ejemplo, separar los datos históricos (que generalmente se convierten en información de solo lectura y no tienen un alto volumen de consulta) y enviarlos a un almacenamiento de bajo costos, conservando la data activa en dispositivos de almacenamiento más ágiles. Adicionalmente, Oracle Partitioning facilita la administración de las bases de datos que tienen un gran volumen de registros y mejora el desempeño de la base de datos gracias a la posibilidad de optimizar las consultas haciendo uso únicamente de las particiones relevantes de una tabla o índice en el proceso de búsqueda. Otros factores adicionales, que pueden generar costos innecesarios a los departamentos de Tecnología son: La pérdida, corrupción o robo de datos y la falta de disponibilidad de las aplicaciones para dar soporte al negocio. Para evitar este tipo de situaciones que pueden acarrear multas y pérdida de negocios y de dinero, Oracle ofrece soluciones que permiten proteger y auditar la base de datos, recuperar la información en caso de corrupción o ejecución de acciones que comprometan la integridad de la información y soluciones que permitan garantizar que la información de las aplicaciones tenga una disponibilidad de 7x24. Ya hablamos de los beneficios de Oracle RAC, para facilitar los procesos de Consolidación y mejorar el desempeño de las aplicaciones, sin embrago esta solución, es sumamente útil en escenarios dónde las organizaciones de quieren garantizar una alta disponibilidad de la información, ante fallo de los servidores o en eventos de desconexión planeada para realizar labores de mantenimiento. Además de Oracle RAC, existen soluciones como Oracle Data Guard y Active Data Guard que permiten replicar de forma automática las bases de datos hacia un centro de datos de contingencia, permitiendo una recuperación inmediata ante eventos que deshabiliten por completo un centro de datos. Además de lo anterior, Active Data Guard, permite aprovechar la base de datos de contingencia para realizar labores de consulta, mejorando el desempeño de las aplicaciones. Desde el punto de vista de mejora en la seguridad, Oracle cuenta con soluciones como Advanced security que permite encriptar los datos y los canales a través de los cueles se comparte la información, Total Recall, que permite visualizar los cambios realizados a la base de datos en un momento determinado del tiempo, para evitar pérdida y corrupción de datos, Database Vault que permite restringir el acceso de los usuarios privilegiados a información confidencial, Audit Vault, que permite verificar quién hizo qué y cuándo dentro de las bases de datos de una organización y Oracle Data Masking que permite enmascarar los datos para garantizar la protección de la información sensible y el cumplimiento de las políticas y normas relacionadas con protección de información confidencial, por ejemplo, mientras las aplicaciones pasan del ambiente de desarrollo al ambiente de producción. Como mencionamos en un comienzo, las iniciativas de reducción de costos de tecnología deben apalancarse en estrategias que contemplen los diferentes factores que puedan generar sobre costos, los factores de riesgo que puedan acarrear costos no previsto, el aprovechamiento de los recursos actuales, para evitar inversiones innecesarias y los factores de optimización que permitan el máximo aprovechamiento de las inversiones actuales. Como vimos, todas estas iniciativas pueden ser abordadas haciendo uso de la tecnología de Oracle a nivel de Base de Datos, lo más importante es detectar los puntos críticos a nivel de riesgo, diagnosticar las proporción en que están siendo aprovechados los recursos actuales y definir las prioridades de la organización y del área de IT, para así dar inicio a todas aquellas iniciativas que de forma gradual, van a evitar sobrecostos e inversiones innecesarias, proporcionando un mayor apoyo al negocio y un impacto significativo en la productividad de la organización. Más información http://www.oracle.com/lad/products/database/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=otnes 1Fuente: Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide 2011 by Colleen Graham, Joanne Correia, David Coyle, Fabrizio Biscotti, Matthew Cheung, Ruggero Contu, Yanna Dharmasthira, Tom Eid, Chad Eschinger, Bianca Granetto, Hai Hong Swinehart, Sharon Mertz, Chris Pang, Asheesh Raina, Dan Sommer, Bhavish Sood, Marianne D'Aquila, Laurie Wurster and Jie Zhang. - March 29, 2012 2Big Data: Información recopilada desde fuentes no tradicionales como blogs, redes sociales, email, sensores, fotografías, grabaciones en video, etc. que normalmente se encuentran de forma no estructurada y en un gran volumen

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• First PC Build (Part 1)

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tonyt/archive/2014/08/05/157959.aspxA couple of months ago I made the decision to build myself a new computer. The intended use is gaming and for using the last real version of Photoshop. I was motivated by the poor state of console gaming and a simple desire to do something I haven’t done before – build a PC from the ground up. I’ve been using PCs for more than two decades. I’ve replaced a component hear and there, but for the last 10 years or so I’ve only used laptops. Therefore, this article will be written from the perspective of someone familiar with PCs, but completely new at building. I’m not an expert and this is not a definitive guide for building a PC, but I do hope that it encourages you to try it yourself. Component List Research There was a lot of research necessary, because building a PC is completely new to me, and I haven’t kept up with what’s out there. The first thing you want to do is nail down what your goals are. Your goals are going to be driven by what you want to do with your computer and personal choice. Don’t neglect the second one, because if you’re doing this for fun you want to get what you want. In my case, I focused on three things: performance, longevity, and aesthetics. The performance aspect is important for gaming and Photoshop. This will drive what components you get. For example, heavy gaming use is going to drive your choice of graphics card. Longevity is relevant to me, because I don’t want to be changing things out anytime soon for the next hot game. The consequence of performance and longevity is cost. Finally, aesthetics was my next consideration. I could have just built a box, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as fun for me. Aesthetics might not be important to you. They are for me. I also like gadgets and that played into at least one purchase for this build. I used PC Part Picker to put together my component list. I found it invaluable during the process and I’d recommend it to everyone. One caveat is that I wouldn’t trust the compatibility aspects. It does a pretty good job of not steering you wrong, but do your own research. The rest of it isn’t really sexy. I started out with what appealed to me and then I made changes and additions as I dived deep into researching each component and interaction I could find. The resources I used are innumerable. I used reviews, product descriptions, forum posts (praises and problems), et al. to assist me. I also asked friends into gaming what they thought about my component list. And when I got near the end I posted my list to the Reddit /r/buildapc forum. I cannot stress the value of extra sets of eyeballs and first hand experiences. Some of the resources I used: PC Part Picker Tom’s Hardware bit-tech Reddit Purchase PC Part Picker favors certain vendors. You should look at others too. In my case I found their favorites to be the best. My priorities were out-the-door price and shipping time. I knew that once I started getting parts I’d want to start building. Luckily, I timed it well and everything arrived within the span of a few days. Here are my opinions on the vendors I ended up using in alphabetical order. Amazon.com is a good, reliable choice. They have excellent customer service in my experience, and I knew I wouldn’t have trouble with them. However, shipping time is often a problem when you use their free shipping unless you order expensive items (I’ve found items over $100 ship quickly). Ultimately though, price wasn’t always the best and their collection of sales tax in my state turned me off them. I did purchase my case from them. I ordered the mouse as well, but I cancelled after it was stuck four days in a “shipping soon” state. I purchased the mouse locally. Best Buy is not my favorite place to do business. There’s a lot of history with poor, uninterested sales representatives and they used to have a lot of bad anti-consumer policies. That’s a lot better now, but the bad taste is still in my mouth. I ended up purchasing the accessories from them including mouse (locally) and headphones. NCIX is a company that I’ve never heard of before. It popped up as a recommendation for my CPU cooler on PC Part Picker. I didn’t do a lot of research on the company, because their policy on you buying insurance for your orders turned me off. That policy makes it clear to me that the company finds me responsible for the shipment once it leaves their dock. That’s not right, and may run afoul of state laws. Regardless they shipped my CPU cooler quickly and I didn’t have a problem. NewEgg.com is a well known company. I had never done business with them, but I’m glad I did. They shipped quickly and provided good visibility over everything. The prices were also the best in most cases. My main complaint is that they have a lot of exchange only return policies on components. To their credit those policies are listed in the cart underneath each item. The visibility tells me that they’re not playing any shenanigans and made me comfortable dealing with that risk. The vast majority of what I ordered came from them. Coming Next In the next part I’ll tackle my build experience.

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• Running a simple integration scenario using the Oracle Big Data Connectors on Hadoop/HDFS cluster

  - by hamsun

  Between the elephant ( the tradional image of the Hadoop framework) and the Oracle Iron Man (Big Data..) an english setter could be seen as the link to the right data Data, Data, Data, we are living in a world where data technology based on popular applications , search engines, Webservers, rich sms messages, email clients, weather forecasts and so on, have a predominant role in our life. More and more technologies are used to analyze/track our behavior, try to detect patterns, to propose us "the best/right user experience" from the Google Ad services, to Telco companies or large consumer sites (like Amazon:) ). The more we use all these technologies, the more we generate data, and thus there is a need of huge data marts and specific hardware/software servers (as the Exadata servers) in order to treat/analyze/understand the trends and offer new services to the users. Some of these "data feeds" are raw, unstructured data, and cannot be processed effectively by normal SQL queries. Large scale distributed processing was an emerging infrastructure need and the solution seemed to be the "collocation of compute nodes with the data", which in turn leaded to MapReduce parallel patterns and the development of the Hadoop framework, which is based on MapReduce and a distributed file system (HDFS) that runs on larger clusters of rather inexpensive servers. Several Oracle products are using the distributed / aggregation pattern for data calculation ( Coherence, NoSql, times ten ) so once that you are familiar with one of these technologies, lets says with coherence aggregators, you will find the whole Hadoop, MapReduce concept very similar. Oracle Big Data Appliance is based on the Cloudera Distribution (CDH), and the Oracle Big Data Connectors can be plugged on a Hadoop cluster running the CDH distribution or equivalent Hadoop clusters. In this paper, a "lab like" implementation of this concept is done on a single Linux X64 server, running an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0, and a single node Apache hadoop-1.2.1 HDFS cluster, using the SQL connector for HDFS. The whole setup is fairly simple: Install on a Linux x64 server ( or virtual box appliance) an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0 server Get the Apache Hadoop distribution from: http://mir2.ovh.net/ftp.apache.org/dist/hadoop/common/hadoop-1.2.1. Get the Oracle Big Data Connectors from: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/bdc/big-data-connectors/downloads/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen. Check the java version of your Linux server with the command: java -version java version "1.7.0_40" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_40-b43) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.0-b56, mixed mode) Decompress the hadoop hadoop-1.2.1.tar.gz file to /u01/hadoop-1.2.1 Modify your .bash_profile export HADOOP_HOME=/u01/hadoop-1.2.1 export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_HOME/bin export HIVE_HOME=/u01/hive-0.11.0 export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_HOME/bin:$HIVE_HOME/bin (also see my sample .bash_profile) Set up ssh trust for Hadoop process, this is a mandatory step, in our case we have to establish a "local trust" as will are using a single node configuration copy the new public keys to the list of authorized keys connect and test the ssh setup to your localhost: We will run a "pseudo-Hadoop cluster", in what is called "local standalone mode", all the Hadoop java components are running in one Java process, this is enough for our demo purposes. We need to "fine tune" some Hadoop configuration files, we have to go at our $HADOOP_HOME/conf, and modify the files: core-site.xml hdfs-site.xml mapred-site.xml check that the hadoop binaries are referenced correctly from the command line by executing: hadoop -version As Hadoop is managing our "clustered HDFS" file system we have to create "the mount point" and format it , the mount point will be declared to core-site.xml as: The layout under the /u01/hadoop-1.2.1/data will be created and used by other hadoop components (MapReduce = /mapred/...) HDFS is using the /dfs/... layout structure format the HDFS hadoop file system: Start the java components for the HDFS system As an additional check, you can use the GUI Hadoop browsers to check the content of your HDFS configurations: Once our HDFS Hadoop setup is done you can use the HDFS file system to store data ( big data : )), and plug them back and forth to Oracle Databases by the means of the Big Data Connectors ( which is the next configuration step). You can create / use a Hive db, but in our case we will make a simple integration of "raw data" , through the creation of an External Table to a local Oracle instance ( on the same Linux box, we run the Hadoop HDFS one node cluster and one Oracle DB). Download some public "big data", I use the site: http://france.meteofrance.com/france/observations, from where I can get *.csv files for my big data simulations :). Here is the data layout of my example file: Download the Big Data Connector from the OTN (oraosch-2.2.0.zip), unzip it to your local file system (see picture below) Modify your environment in order to access the connector libraries , and make the following test: [oracle@dg1 bin]$./hdfs_stream Usage: hdfs_stream locationFile [oracle@dg1 bin]$ Load the data to the Hadoop hdfs file system: hadoop fs -mkdir bgtest_data hadoop fs -put obsFrance.txt bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt hadoop fs -ls /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt [oracle@dg1 bg-data-raw]$ hadoop fs -ls /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Found 1 items -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle supergroup 54103 2013-10-22 06:10 /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt [oracle@dg1 bg-data-raw]$hadoop fs -ls hdfs:///user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Found 1 items -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle supergroup 54103 2013-10-22 06:10 /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Check the content of the HDFS with the browser UI: Start the Oracle database, and run the following script in order to create the Oracle database user, the Oracle directories for the Oracle Big Data Connector (dg1 it’s my own db id replace accordingly yours): #!/bin/bash export ORAENV_ASK=NO export ORACLE_SID=dg1 . oraenv sqlplus /nolog <<EOF CONNECT / AS sysdba; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY osch_bin_path AS '/u01/orahdfs-2.2.0/bin'; CREATE USER BGUSER IDENTIFIED BY oracle; GRANT CREATE SESSION, CREATE TABLE TO BGUSER; GRANT EXECUTE ON sys.utl_file TO BGUSER; GRANT READ, EXECUTE ON DIRECTORY osch_bin_path TO BGUSER; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY BGT_LOG_DIR as '/u01/BG_TEST/logs'; GRANT READ, WRITE ON DIRECTORY BGT_LOG_DIR to BGUSER; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY BGT_DATA_DIR as '/u01/BG_TEST/data'; GRANT READ, WRITE ON DIRECTORY BGT_DATA_DIR to BGUSER; EOF Put the following in a file named t3.sh and make it executable, hadoop jar $OSCH_HOME/jlib/orahdfs.jar \ oracle.hadoop.exttab.ExternalTable \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.tableName=BGTEST_DP_XTAB \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.defaultDirectory=BGT_DATA_DIR \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.dataPaths="hdfs:///user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt" \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.columnCount=7 \ -D oracle.hadoop.connection.url=jdbc:oracle:thin:@//localhost:1521/dg1 \ -D oracle.hadoop.connection.user=BGUSER \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.printStackTrace=true \ -createTable --noexecute then test the creation fo the external table with it: [oracle@dg1 samples]$ ./t3.sh ./t3.sh: line 2: /u01/orahdfs-2.2.0: Is a directory Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS Release 2.2.0 - Production Copyright (c) 2011, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Enter Database Password:] The create table command was not executed. The following table would be created. CREATE TABLE "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB" ( "C1" VARCHAR2(4000), "C2" VARCHAR2(4000), "C3" VARCHAR2(4000), "C4" VARCHAR2(4000), "C5" VARCHAR2(4000), "C6" VARCHAR2(4000), "C7" VARCHAR2(4000) ) ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL ( TYPE ORACLE_LOADER DEFAULT DIRECTORY "BGT_DATA_DIR" ACCESS PARAMETERS ( RECORDS DELIMITED BY 0X'0A' CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8 STRING SIZES ARE IN CHARACTERS PREPROCESSOR "OSCH_BIN_PATH":'hdfs_stream' FIELDS TERMINATED BY 0X'2C' MISSING FIELD VALUES ARE NULL ( "C1" CHAR(4000), "C2" CHAR(4000), "C3" CHAR(4000), "C4" CHAR(4000), "C5" CHAR(4000), "C6" CHAR(4000), "C7" CHAR(4000) ) ) LOCATION ( 'osch-20131022081035-74-1' ) ) PARALLEL REJECT LIMIT UNLIMITED; The following location files would be created. osch-20131022081035-74-1 contains 1 URI, 54103 bytes 54103 hdfs://localhost:19000/user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Then remove the --noexecute flag and create the external Oracle table for the Hadoop data. Check the results: The create table command succeeded. CREATE TABLE "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB" ( "C1" VARCHAR2(4000), "C2" VARCHAR2(4000), "C3" VARCHAR2(4000), "C4" VARCHAR2(4000), "C5" VARCHAR2(4000), "C6" VARCHAR2(4000), "C7" VARCHAR2(4000) ) ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL ( TYPE ORACLE_LOADER DEFAULT DIRECTORY "BGT_DATA_DIR" ACCESS PARAMETERS ( RECORDS DELIMITED BY 0X'0A' CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8 STRING SIZES ARE IN CHARACTERS PREPROCESSOR "OSCH_BIN_PATH":'hdfs_stream' FIELDS TERMINATED BY 0X'2C' MISSING FIELD VALUES ARE NULL ( "C1" CHAR(4000), "C2" CHAR(4000), "C3" CHAR(4000), "C4" CHAR(4000), "C5" CHAR(4000), "C6" CHAR(4000), "C7" CHAR(4000) ) ) LOCATION ( 'osch-20131022081719-3239-1' ) ) PARALLEL REJECT LIMIT UNLIMITED; The following location files were created. osch-20131022081719-3239-1 contains 1 URI, 54103 bytes 54103 hdfs://localhost:19000/user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt This is the view from the SQL Developer: and finally the number of lines in the oracle table, imported from our Hadoop HDFS cluster SQL select count(*) from "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB"; COUNT(*) ---------- 1151 In a next post we will integrate data from a Hive database, and try some ODI integrations with the ODI Big Data connector. Our simplistic approach is just a step to show you how these unstructured data world can be integrated to Oracle infrastructure. Hadoop, BigData, NoSql are great technologies, they are widely used and Oracle is offering a large integration infrastructure based on these services. Oracle University presents a complete curriculum on all the Oracle related technologies: NoSQL: Introduction to Oracle NoSQL Database Using Oracle NoSQL Database Big Data: Introduction to Big Data Oracle Big Data Essentials Oracle Big Data Overview Oracle Data Integrator: Oracle Data Integrator 12c: New Features Oracle Data Integrator 11g: Integration and Administration Oracle Data Integrator: Administration and Development Oracle Data Integrator 11g: Advanced Integration and Development Oracle Coherence 12c: Oracle Coherence 12c: New Features Oracle Coherence 12c: Share and Manage Data in Clusters Oracle Coherence 12c: Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Fundamentals for Oracle Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Fundamentals for SQL Server Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for Oracle Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for DB2 Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for Teradata Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for HP NonStop Oracle GoldenGate 11g Management Pack: Overview Oracle GoldenGate 11g Troubleshooting and Tuning Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Advanced Configuration for Oracle Other Resources: Apache Hadoop : http://hadoop.apache.org/ is the homepage for these technologies. "Hadoop Definitive Guide 3rdEdition" by Tom White is a classical lecture for people who want to know more about Hadoop , and some active "googling " will also give you some more references. About the author: Eugene Simos is based in France and joined Oracle through the BEA-Weblogic Acquisition, where he worked for the Professional Service, Support, end Education for major accounts across the EMEA Region. He worked in the banking sector, ATT, Telco companies giving him extensive experience on production environments. Eugen currently specializes in Oracle Fusion Middleware teaching an array of courses on Weblogic/Webcenter, Content,BPM /SOA/Identity-Security/GoldenGate/Virtualisation/Unified Comm Suite) throughout the EMEA region.

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• Skanska Builds Global Workforce Insight with Cloud-Based HCM System

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By David Baum - Originally posted on Profit Peter Bjork grew up building things. He started his work life learning all sorts of trades at his father’s construction company in the northern part of Sweden. So in college, it was natural for him to pursue a bachelor’s degree in construction engineering—but he broke new ground when he added a master’s degree in finance to his curriculum vitae. Written on a traditional résumé, Bjork’s current title (vice president of information systems strategies) doesn’t reveal the diversity of his experience—that he’s adept with hammer and nails as well as rows and columns. But a big part of his current job is to work with his counterparts in human resources (HR) designing, building, and deploying the systems needed to get a complete view of the skills and potential of Skanska’s 22,000-strong white-collar workforce. And Bjork believes that complete view is essential to Skanska’s success. “Our business is really all about people,” says Bjork, who has worked with Skanska for 16 years. “You can have equipment and financial resources, but to truly succeed in a business like ours you need to have the right people in the right places. That’s what this system is helping us accomplish.” In a global HR environment that suffers from a paradox of high unemployment and a scarcity of skilled labor, managers need to have a complete understanding of workforce capabilities to develop management skills, recruit for open positions, ensure that staff is getting the training they need, and reduce attrition. Skanska’s human capital management (HCM) systems, based on Oracle Talent Management Cloud, play a critical role delivering that understanding. “Skanska’s philosophy of having great people, encouraging their development, and giving them the chance to move across business units has nurtured a culture of collaboration, but managing a diverse workforce spread across the globe is a monumental challenge,” says Annika Lindholm, global human resources system owner in the HR department at Skanska’s headquarters just outside of Stockholm, Sweden. “We depend heavily on Oracle’s cloud technology to support our HCM function.” Construction, Workers For Skanska’s more than 60,000 employees and contractors, managing huge construction projects is an everyday job. Beyond erecting signature buildings, management’s goal is to build a corporate culture where valuable talent can be sought out and developed, bringing in the right mix of people to support and grow the business. “Of all the companies in our space, Skanska is probably one of the strongest ones, with a laser focus on people and people development,” notes Tom Crane, chief HR and communications officer for Skanska in the United States. “Our business looks like equipment and material, but all we really have at the end of the day are people and their intellectual capital. Without them, second only to clients, of course, you really can’t achieve great things in the high-profile environment in which we work.” During the 1990s, Skanska entered an expansive growth phase. A string of successful acquisitions paved the way for the company’s transformation into a global enterprise. “Today the company’s focus is on profitable growth,” continues Crane. “But you can’t really achieve growth unless you are doing a very good job of developing your people and having the right people in the right places and driving a culture of growth.” In the United States alone, Skanska has more than 8,000 employees in four distinct business units: Skanska USA Building, also known as the Construction Manager, builds everything at ground level and above—hospitals, educational facilities, stadiums, airport terminals, and other massive projects. Skanska USA Civil does everything at ground level and below, such as light rail, water treatment facilities, power plants or power industry facilities, highways, and bridges. Skanska Infrastructure Development develops public-private partnerships—projects in which Skanska adds equity and also arranges for outside financing. Skanska Commercial Development acts like a commercial real estate developer, acquiring land and building offices on spec or build-to-suit for its clients. Skanska's international portfolio includes construction of the new Meadowlands Stadium. Getting the various units to operate collaboratatively helps Skanska deliver high value to clients and shareholders. “When we have this collaboration among units, it allows us to enrich each of the business units and, at the same time, develop our future leaders to be more facile in operating across business units—more accepting of a ‘one Skanska’ approach,” explains Crane. Workforce Worldwide But HR needs processes and tools to support managers who face such business dynamics. Oracle Talent Management Cloud is helping Skanska implement world-class recruiting strategies and generate the insights needed to drive quality hiring practices, internal mobility, and a proactive approach to building talent pipelines. With their new cloud system in place, Skanska HR leaders can manage everything from recruiting, compensation, and goal and performance management to employee learning and talent review—all as part of a single, cohesive software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment. Skanska has successfully implemented two modules from Oracle Talent Management Cloud—the recruiting and performance management modules—and is in the process of implementing the learn module. Internally, they call the systems Skanska Recruit, Skanska Talent, and Skanska Learn. The timing is apropos. With high rates of unemployment in recent years, there have been many job candidates on the market. However, talent scarcity continues to frustrate recruiters. Oracle Taleo Recruiting Cloud Service, one of the applications in the Oracle Talent Management cloud portfolio, enables Skanska managers to create more-intelligent recruiting strategies, pulling high-performer profile statistics to create new candidate profiles and using multitiered screening and assessments to ensure that only the best-suited candidate applications make it to the recruiter’s desk. Tools such as applicant tracking, interview management, and requisition management help recruiters and hiring managers streamline the hiring process. Oracle’s cloud-based software system automates and streamlines many other HR processes for Skanska’s multinational organization and delivers insight into the success of recruiting and talent-management efforts. “The Oracle system is definitely helping us to construct global HR processes,” adds Bjork. “It is really important that we have a business model that is decentralized, so we can effectively serve our local markets, and interact with our global ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems as well. We would not be able to do this without a really good, well-integrated HCM system that could support these efforts.” A key piece of this effort is something Skanska has developed internally called the Skanska Leadership Profile. Core competencies, on which all employees are measured, are used in performance reviews to determine weak areas but also to discover talent, such as those who will be promoted or need succession plans. This global profiling system brings consistency to the way HR professionals evaluate and review talent across the company, with a consistent set of ratings and a consistent definition of competencies. All salaried employees in Skanska are tied to a talent management process that gives opportunity for midyear and year-end reviews. Using the performance management module, managers can align individual goals with corporate goals; provide clear visibility into how each employee contributes to the success of the organization; and drive a strategic, end-to-end talent management strategy with a single, integrated system for all talent-related activities. This is critical to a company that is highly focused on ensuring that every employee has a development plan linked to his or her succession potential. “Our approach all along has been to deploy software applications that are seamless to end users,” says Crane. “The beauty of a cloud-based system is that much of the functionality takes place behind the scenes so we can focus on making sure users can access the data when they need it. This model greatly improves their efficiency.” The employee profile not only sets a competency baseline for new employees but is also integrated with Skanska’s other back-office Oracle systems to ensure consistency in the way information is used to support other business functions. “Since we have about a dozen different HR systems that are providing us with information, we built a master database that collects all the information,” explains Lindholm. “That data is sent not only to Oracle Talent Management Cloud, but also to other systems that are dependent on this information.” Collaboration to Scale Skanska is poised to launch a new Oracle module to link employee learning plans to the review process and recruitment assessments. According to Crane, connecting these processes allows Skanska managers to see employees’ progress and produce an updated learning program. For example, as employees take classes, supervisors can consult the Oracle Talent Management Cloud portal to monitor progress and align it to each individual’s training and development plan. “That’s a pretty compelling solution for an organization that wants to manage its talent on a real-time basis and see how the training is working,” Crane says. Rolling out Oracle Talent Management Cloud was a joint effort among HR, IT, and a global group that oversaw the worldwide implementation. Skanska deployed the solution quickly across all markets at once. In the United States, for example, more than 35 offices quickly got up to speed on the new system via webinars for employees and face-to-face training for the HR group. “With any migration, there are moments when you hold your breath, but in this case, we had very few problems getting the system up and running,” says Crane. Lindholm adds, “There has been very little resistance to the system as users recognize its potential. Customizations are easy, and a lasting partnership has developed between Skanska and Oracle when help is needed. They listen to us.” Bjork elaborates on the implementation process from an IT perspective. “Deploying a SaaS system removes a lot of the complexity,” he says. “You can downsize the IT part and focus on the business part, which increases the probability of a successful implementation. If you want to scale the system, you make a quick phone call. That’s all it took recently when we added 4,000 users. We didn’t have to think about resizing the servers or hiring more IT people. Oracle does that for us, and they have provided very good support.” As a result, Skanska has been able to implement a single, cost-effective talent management solution across the organization to support its strategy to recruit and develop a world-class staff. Stakeholders are confident that they are providing the most efficient recruitment system possible for competent personnel at all levels within the company—from skilled workers at construction sites to top management at headquarters. And Skanska can retain skilled employees and ensure that they receive the development opportunities they need to grow and advance.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, July 27, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, July 27, 2013Popular ReleasesSharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.10: - Added support for RAR Decryption (thanks to https://github.com/hrasyid) - Embedded some BouncyCastle crypto classes to allow RAR Decryption and Winzip AES Decryption in Portable and Windows Store DLLs - Built in Release (I think)Memory Teaser Game: Full Release 1.1.0: -> Fixed Memory leak issue. -> Restart game button issue. -> Added Splash screen. -> Changed Release Icon. This is the version 1.1.0.0VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.46: changes FIXED LoginOfflineBrowser: Preview Release: This is a preview release so that others can help me find bugs. This should be pretty stable, but any bugs found should be reported here as an Issue.Home Access Plus+: v9.4.0727: Released to allow you to disable secure LDAP queriesOpen Source Job board: Version X3: Full version of job board, didn't have monies to fund it so it's free.DSeX DragonSpeak eXtended Editor: Version 1.0.116.0726: Cleaned up Wizard Interface Added Functionality for RTF UndoRedo IE Inserting Text from Wizard output to the Tabbed Editor Added Sanity Checks to Search/Replace Dialog to prevent crashes Fixed Template and Paste undoredo Fix Undoredo Blank spots Added New_FileTag Const = "(New FIle)" Added Filename to Modified FileClose queries (Thanks Lothus Marque)Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.6.0: What's New in Math.NET Numerics 2.6 - Announcement, Explanations and Sample Code. New: Linear Curve Fitting Linear least-squares fitting (regression) to lines, polynomials and linear combinations of arbitrary functions. Multi-dimensional fitting. Also works well in F# with the F# extensions. New: Root Finding Brent's method. ~Candy Chiu, Alexander Täschner Bisection method. ~Scott Stephens, Alexander Täschner Broyden's method, for multi-dimensional functions. ~Alexander Täschner ...Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer: .NET Gadgeteer Core 2.43.800: The .NET Gadgeteer Core installer includes the core libraries and end user project templates for Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer. This is a prerequisite for end users to build and deploy .NET Gadgeteer projects. It includes a project template wizard in the New Project dialog in Visual Studio 2012 or 2010 (or express versions) under the Gadgeteer tab - ".NET Gadgeteer Application". This template uses a graphical designer built for Visual Studio which allows end users to visually configure .NET Gadget...FogBugzPd - Project Dashboard For FogBugz: 1.0: First public release of FogBugzPd. Zip File includes web application. Requires: IIS 7+ Sql Server 2008/2012 or Sql Server Express 2012 .NET 4.5Open Url Rewriter for DotNetNuke: Open Url Rewriter Core 0.4.3 (Beta): bug fix for removing home page New Tab with rules count for each Portal with memory use estimation OpenUrlRewriter_00.04.03_Install.zip : for dnn 6.01 to 7.06 OpenUrlRewriter71_00.04.03_Install.zip : for dnn 7.1KerbalAlarmClock: v2.5.0.0 Release: Version 2.5.0.0 Recompiled it for 0.21 Fixed some issues with Hyperbolic orbits and AN/DN NodesAJAX Control Toolkit: July 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - July 2013 Release Version 7.0725July 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Specular Antialiasing Sample: Sample code to complement my presentation that's part of the Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course at SIGGRAPH 2013, entitled "Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886". Demonstrates various methods of preventing aliasing from specular BRDF's when using high-frequency normal maps. The zip file contains source code as well as a pre-compiled x64 binary.Kartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.5003: This fixes an issue where search engines appear to identify as IE and so trigger the noIE page if there is not a non-responsive skin specified.GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI 1.3.5 Alpha (20130723): ????????Alpha?，???????????，?????????????。 ??????????GoAgent???（???phus lu?GitHub??????GoAgent??????，??????????????????） ????????????????????????Bug ?????????。??????????????。 ????issue????，????????，????????????????。LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.13.07.22: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionYou can make visual elements of the circuit been visible on its symbols. This way you can build composite displays, keyboards and reuse them. Please read about displays for more details http://ww...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.08: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.4.3: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.4.3 ?? ??Bilibili????????????? ???????????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2.10?...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.6.601: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.6.6. These zip files are also available as a NuGet package: https://nuget.org/profiles/dlemstra/New Projectsagree grammar engineering environment: agree is a concurrent parse/generation engine, a .NET implementation of the DELPH-IN joint reference formalism for natural language analysis. AWF's Utility Library: A collection of awf utilities C# chat client with server: Newest chat with client and server.Charming components for Windows Phone: Build Charming apps for Windows Phone. Adds ready-made Search, Share and Settings functionality to Windows Phone. Share more code across platforms.Darkorbit Configuration Manager: config manager dark orbit darkorbit eltepvpers heaven 'Heaven. configuration manager configurationmanagerDarkorbit MultiTool: dark orbit darkorbit multi tool mulitool heaven 'Heaven. elitepvpers awesome skylab bot trade bot techcenter bot multiaccount diabind: Python binding of DIA (Debug Interface Access) SDKDoodle .Net Connector: This library allows an easy access to the Doodle REST API.DssCECB Version 2.0: aaaeCommunity: e-communityEFDemo: This is a demo for Entity frameworkEmployee Directory Webpart in SharePoint 2010: Employee Directory for SharePoint 2010EntityContext: A lightweight wrapper around Entity Framework allowing for accessing some internals of the framework, as well as, some functionality usually required.EwsRelentless: This is a sample application which demonstrates you might place a heavy load of EWS calls against an Exchange server in order to test performance. FogBugzPd - Project Dashboard For FogBugz: This tool helps PMs, Tech Leads and Executives to see actual progress on the projects tracked in FogBugz.HP Battery Health Scan Script: Silently runs HP Battery Check Utility and saves result to an Access DB.I am following: Users can follow nearly everything in SharePoint 2013. This solution provides a list of followed contend where ever you need it in you SharePoint.Image Viewer: Simple image viewer written for academic purposes LIBRERIA PRISA: sistema de ventasLiduv: Facilitate teachers daily work including creating marks and lesson drafts, curricula and calculating marks for written tests etc.Maze Builder Library: A builder for random maze generationPayPal Express Checkout for nopCommerce: nopCommerce plugin to allow for PayPal Express Checkout. Full integration with shipping options.PsTest - UnitTesting for PowerShell: PsTest is a lightweight UnitTesting Module for use in PowerShell. It lets PowerShell users create, discover and run UnitTests in PowerShell.SIGE: sistema integral gestion educativaSql Mass Dumper: Sql Mass Dumper. A simple project to dump all the data in your SQL Server in XML or in JSON format.SSIS Wait Task: A SSIS task which suspends execution for a time period or until a specific time. Additionally a sql statement can be defined that can also delay execution.Tactical Combat - Unity3d Game: A first person shooter! The main character is Billy Hills, need a story plot.The open source customer relation and billing software.: Memtem in a open source customer relation and billing software written in C#.NET.Tridion Gateway Service: WCF Support for the Tridion TOM COM APIWINJS CTK: WinJS Control kit is a set of custom WINJS controls that are not supported by Windows 8.

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• Android custom ListView unable to click on items

  - by MattC

  So I have a custom ListView object. The list items have two textviews stacked on top of each other, plus a horizontal progress bar that I want to remain hidden until I actually do something. To the far right is a checkbox that I only want to display when the user needs to download updates to their database(s). When I disable the checkbox by setting the visibility to Visibility.GONE, I am able to click on the list items. When the checkbox is visible, I am unable to click on anything in the list except the checkboxes. I've done some searching but haven't found anything relevant to my current situation. I found this question but I'm using an overridden ArrayAdapter since I'm using ArrayLists to contain the list of databases internally. Do I just need to get the LinearLayout view and add an onClickListener like Tom did? I'm not sure. Here's the listview row layout XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="?android:attr/listPreferredItemHeight" android:padding="6dip"> <LinearLayout android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="0dip" android:layout_weight="1" android:layout_height="fill_parent"> <TextView android:id="@+id/UpdateNameText" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="0dip" android:layout_weight="1" android:textSize="18sp" android:gravity="center_vertical" /> <TextView android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="0dip" android:layout_weight="1" android:id="@+id/UpdateStatusText" android:singleLine="true" android:ellipsize="marquee" /> <ProgressBar android:id="@+id/UpdateProgress" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:indeterminateOnly="false" android:progressDrawable="@android:drawable/progress_horizontal" android:indeterminateDrawable="@android:drawable/progress_indeterminate_horizontal" android:minHeight="10dip" android:maxHeight="10dip" /> </LinearLayout> <CheckBox android:text="" android:id="@+id/UpdateCheckBox" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" /> </LinearLayout> And here's the class that extends the ListActivity. Obviously it's still in development so forgive the things that are missing or might be left laying around: import java.util.List; import android.app.ListActivity; import android.content.Context; import android.os.Bundle; import android.view.LayoutInflater; import android.view.View; import android.view.ViewGroup; import android.widget.ArrayAdapter; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.CheckBox; import android.widget.ListView; import android.widget.ProgressBar; import android.widget.TextView; import com.xxxx.android.R; import com.xxxx.android.DAO.AccountManager; import com.xxxx.android.model.UpdateItem; public class UpdateActivity extends ListActivity { AccountManager lookupDb; boolean allSelected; UpdateListAdapter list; @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); lookupDb = new AccountManager(this); lookupDb.loadUpdates(); setContentView(R.layout.update); allSelected = false; list = new UpdateListAdapter(this, R.layout.update_row, lookupDb.getUpdateItems()); setListAdapter(list);

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• Restart program from a certain line with an if statement?

  - by user1744093

  could anyone help me restart my program from line 46 if the user enters 1 (just after the comment where it states that the next code is going to ask the user for 2 inputs) and if the user enters -1 end it. I cannot think how to do it. I'm new to C# any help you could give would be great! class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { //Displays data in correct Format List<float> inputList = new List<float>(); TextReader tr = new StreamReader("c:/users/tom/documents/visual studio 2010/Projects/DistanceCalculator3/DistanceCalculator3/TextFile1.txt"); String input = Convert.ToString(tr.ReadToEnd()); String[] items = input.Split(','); Console.WriteLine("Point Latitude Longtitude Elevation"); for (int i = 0; i < items.Length; i++) { if (i % 3 == 0) { Console.Write((i / 3) + "\t\t"); } Console.Write(items[i]); Console.Write("\t\t"); if (((i - 2) % 3) == 0) { Console.WriteLine(); } } Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine(); // Ask for two inputs from the user which is then converted into 6 floats and transfered in class Coordinates Console.WriteLine("Please enter the two points that you wish to know the distance between:"); string point = Console.ReadLine(); string[] pointInput = point.Split(' '); int pointNumber = Convert.ToInt16(pointInput[0]); int pointNumber2 = Convert.ToInt16(pointInput[1]); Coordinates distance = new Coordinates(); distance.latitude = (Convert.ToDouble(items[pointNumber * 3])); distance.longtitude = (Convert.ToDouble(items[(pointNumber * 3) + 1])); distance.elevation = (Convert.ToDouble(items[(pointNumber * 3) + 2])); distance.latitude2 = (Convert.ToDouble(items[pointNumber2 * 3])); distance.longtitude2 = (Convert.ToDouble(items[(pointNumber2 * 3) + 1])); distance.elevation2 = (Convert.ToDouble(items[(pointNumber2 * 3) + 2])); //Calculate the distance between two points const double PIx = 3.141592653589793; const double RADIO = 6371; double dlat = ((distance.latitude2) * (PIx / 180)) - ((distance.latitude) * (PIx / 180)); double dlon = ((distance.longtitude2) * (PIx / 180)) - ((distance.longtitude) * (PIx / 180)); double a = (Math.Sin(dlat / 2) * Math.Sin(dlat / 2)) + Math.Cos((distance.latitude) * (PIx / 180)) * Math.Cos((distance.latitude2) * (PIx / 180)) * (Math.Sin(dlon / 2) * Math.Sin(dlon / 2)); double angle = 2 * Math.Atan2(Math.Sqrt(a), Math.Sqrt(1 - a)); double ultimateDistance = (angle * RADIO); Console.WriteLine("The distance between your two points is..."); Console.WriteLine(ultimateDistance); //Repeat the program if the user enters 1, end the program if the user enters -1 Console.WriteLine("If you wish to calculate another distance type 1 and return, if you wish to end the program, type -1."); Console.ReadLine(); if (Convert.ToInt16(Console.ReadLine()) == 1); { //here is where I need it to repeat }

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