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WiX 3 Tutorial: Custom EULA License and MSI localization

- by Mladen Prajdic

In this part of the ongoing Wix tutorial series we’ll take a look at how to localize your MSI into different languages. We’re still the mighty SuperForm: Program that takes care of all your label color needs. :) Localizing the MSI With WiX 3.0 localizing an MSI is pretty much a simple and straightforward process. First let look at the WiX project Properties->Build. There you can see "Cultures to build" textbox. Put specific cultures to build into the testbox or leave it empty to build all of them. Cultures have to be in correct culture format like en-US, en-GB or de-DE. Next we have to tell WiX which cultures we actually have in our project. Take a look at the first post in the series about Solution/Project structure and look at the Lang directory in the project structure picture. There we have de-de and en-us subfolders each with its own localized stuff. In the subfolders pay attention to the WXL files Loc_de-de.wxl and Loc_en-us.wxl. Each one has a <String Id="LANG"> under the WixLocalization root node. By including the string with id LANG we tell WiX we want that culture built. For English we have <String Id="LANG">1033</String>, for German <String Id="LANG">1031</String> in Loc_de-de.wxl and for French we’d have to create another file Loc_fr-FR.wxl and put <String Id="LANG">1036</String>. WXL files are localization files. Any string we want to localize we have to put in there. To reference it we use loc keyword like this: !(loc.IdOfTheVariable) => !(loc.MustCloseSuperForm) This is our Loc_en-us.wxl. Note that German wxl has an identical structure but values are in German. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><WixLocalization Culture="en-us" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/localization" Codepage="1252"> <String Id="LANG">1033</String> <String Id="ProductName">SuperForm</String> <String Id="LicenseRtf" Overridable="yes">\Lang\en-us\EULA_en-us.rtf</String> <String Id="ManufacturerName">My Company Name</String> <String Id="AppNotSupported">This application is is not supported on your current OS. Minimal OS supported is Windows XP SP2</String> <String Id="DotNetFrameworkNeeded">.NET Framework 3.5 is required. Please install the .NET Framework then run this installer again.</String> <String Id="MustCloseSuperForm">Must close SuperForm!</String> <String Id="SuperFormNewerVersionInstalled">A newer version of !(loc.ProductName) is already installed.</String> <String Id="ProductKeyCheckDialog_Title">!(loc.ProductName) setup</String> <String Id="ProductKeyCheckDialogControls_Title">!(loc.ProductName) Product check</String> <String Id="ProductKeyCheckDialogControls_Description">Plese Enter following information to perform the licence check.</String> <String Id="ProductKeyCheckDialogControls_FullName">Full Name:</String> <String Id="ProductKeyCheckDialogControls_Organization">Organization:</String> <String Id="ProductKeyCheckDialogControls_ProductKey">Product Key:</String> <String Id="ProductKeyCheckDialogControls_InvalidProductKey">The product key you entered is invalid. Please call user support.</String> </WixLocalization> As you can see from the file we can use localization variables in other variables like we do for SuperFormNewerVersionInstalled string. ProductKeyCheckDialog* strings are to localize a custom dialog for Product key check which we’ll look at in the next post. Built in dialog text localization Under the de-de folder there’s also the WixUI_de-de.wxl file. This files contains German translations of all texts that are in WiX built in dialogs. It can be downloaded from WiX 3.0.5419.0 Source Forge site. Download the wix3-sources.zip and go to \src\ext\UIExtension\wixlib. There you’ll find already translated all WiX texts in 12 Languages. Localizing the custom EULA license Here it gets ugly. We can override the default EULA license easily by overriding WixUILicenseRtf WiX variable like this: <WixVariable Id="WixUILicenseRtf" Value="License.rtf" /> where License.rtf is the name of your custom EULA license file. The downside of this method is that you can only have one license file which means no localization for it. That’s why we need to make a workaround. License is checked on a dialog name LicenseAgreementDialog. What we have to do is overwrite that dialog and insert the functionality for localization. This is a code for LicenseAgreementDialogOverwritten.wxs, an overwritten LicenseAgreementDialog that supports localization. LicenseAcceptedOverwritten replaces the LicenseAccepted built in variable. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><Wix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi"> <Fragment> <UI> <Dialog Id="LicenseAgreementDialogOverwritten" Width="370" Height="270" Title="!(loc.LicenseAgreementDlg_Title)"> <Control Id="LicenseAcceptedOverwrittenCheckBox" Type="CheckBox" X="20" Y="207" Width="330" Height="18" CheckBoxValue="1" Property="LicenseAcceptedOverwritten" Text="!(loc.LicenseAgreementDlgLicenseAcceptedCheckBox)" /> <Control Id="Back" Type="PushButton" X="180" Y="243" Width="56" Height="17" Text="!(loc.WixUIBack)" /> <Control Id="Next" Type="PushButton" X="236" Y="243" Width="56" Height="17" Default="yes" Text="!(loc.WixUINext)"> <Publish Event="SpawnWaitDialog" Value="WaitForCostingDlg">CostingComplete = 1</Publish> <Condition Action="disable"> <![CDATA[ LicenseAcceptedOverwritten <> "1" ]]> </Condition> <Condition Action="enable">LicenseAcceptedOverwritten = "1"</Condition> </Control> <Control Id="Cancel" Type="PushButton" X="304" Y="243" Width="56" Height="17" Cancel="yes" Text="!(loc.WixUICancel)"> <Publish Event="SpawnDialog" Value="CancelDlg">1</Publish> </Control> <Control Id="BannerBitmap" Type="Bitmap" X="0" Y="0" Width="370" Height="44" TabSkip="no" Text="!(loc.LicenseAgreementDlgBannerBitmap)" /> <Control Id="LicenseText" Type="ScrollableText" X="20" Y="60" Width="330" Height="140" Sunken="yes" TabSkip="no">    <Text SourceFile="$(var.ProjectDir)\!(loc.LicenseRtf)" />  </Control> <Control Id="Print" Type="PushButton" X="112" Y="243" Width="56" Height="17" Text="!(loc.WixUIPrint)"> <Publish Event="DoAction" Value="WixUIPrintEula">1</Publish> </Control> <Control Id="BannerLine" Type="Line" X="0" Y="44" Width="370" Height="0" /> <Control Id="BottomLine" Type="Line" X="0" Y="234" Width="370" Height="0" /> <Control Id="Description" Type="Text" X="25" Y="23" Width="340" Height="15" Transparent="yes" NoPrefix="yes" Text="!(loc.LicenseAgreementDlgDescription)" /> <Control Id="Title" Type="Text" X="15" Y="6" Width="200" Height="15" Transparent="yes" NoPrefix="yes" Text="!(loc.LicenseAgreementDlgTitle)" /> </Dialog> </UI> </Fragment></Wix> Look at the Control with Id "LicenseText” and read the comments. We’ve changed the original license text source to "$(var.ProjectDir)\!(loc.LicenseRtf)". var.ProjectDir is the directory of the project file. The !(loc.LicenseRtf) is where the magic happens. Scroll up and take a look at the wxl localization file example. We have the LicenseRtf declared there and it’s been made overridable so developers can change it if they want. The value of the LicenseRtf is the path to our localized EULA relative to the WiX project directory. With little hacking we’ve achieved a fully localizable installer package. The final step is to insert the extended LicenseAgreementDialogOverwritten license dialog into the installer GUI chain. This is how it’s done under the <UI> node of course. <UI>  <Publish Dialog="WelcomeDlg" Control="Next" Event="NewDialog" Value="LicenseAgreementDialogOverwritten">1</Publish> <Publish Dialog="LicenseAgreementDialogOverwritten" Control="Back" Event="NewDialog" Value="WelcomeDlg">1</Publish> <Publish Dialog="LicenseAgreementDialogOverwritten" Control="Next" Event="NewDialog" Value="ProductKeyCheckDialog">LicenseAcceptedOverwritten = "1" AND NOT OLDER_VERSION_FOUND</Publish> <Publish Dialog="InstallDirDlg" Control="Back" Event="NewDialog" Value="ProductKeyCheckDialog">1</Publish> </UI> For a thing that should be simple for the end developer to do, localization can be a bit advanced for the novice WiXer. Hope this post makes the journey easier and that next versions of WiX improve this process. WiX 3 tutorial by Mladen Prajdic navigation WiX 3 Tutorial: Solution/Project structure and Dev resources WiX 3 Tutorial: Understanding main wxs and wxi file WiX 3 Tutorial: Generating file/directory fragments with Heat.exe WiX 3 Tutorial: Custom EULA License and MSI localization WiX 3 Tutorial: Product Key Check custom action WiX 3 Tutorial: Building an updater WiX 3 Tutorial: Icons and installer pictures WiX 3 Tutorial: Creating a Bootstrapper

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Dynamic JSON Parsing in .NET with JsonValue

- by Rick Strahl

So System.Json has been around for a while in Silverlight, but it's relatively new for the desktop .NET framework and now moving into the lime-light with the pending release of ASP.NET Web API which is bringing a ton of attention to server side JSON usage. The JsonValue, JsonObject and JsonArray objects are going to be pretty useful for Web API applications as they allow you dynamically create and parse JSON values without explicit .NET types to serialize from or into. But even more so I think JsonValue et al. are going to be very useful when consuming JSON APIs from various services. Yes I know C# is strongly typed, why in the world would you want to use dynamic values? So many times I've needed to retrieve a small morsel of information from a large service JSON response and rather than having to map the entire type structure of what that service returns, JsonValue actually allows me to cherry pick and only work with the values I'm interested in, without having to explicitly create everything up front. With JavaScriptSerializer or DataContractJsonSerializer you always need to have a strong type to de-serialize JSON data into. Wouldn't it be nice if no explicit type was required and you could just parse the JSON directly using a very easy to use object syntax? That's exactly what JsonValue, JsonObject and JsonArray accomplish using a JSON parser and some sweet use of dynamic sauce to make it easy to access in code. Creating JSON on the fly with JsonValue Let's start with creating JSON on the fly. It's super easy to create a dynamic object structure. JsonValue uses the dynamic keyword extensively to make it intuitive to create object structures and turn them into JSON via dynamic object syntax. Here's an example of creating a music album structure with child songs using JsonValue:[TestMethod] public void JsonValueOutputTest() { // strong type instance var jsonObject = new JsonObject(); // dynamic expando instance you can add properties to dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; album.Artist = "AC/DC"; album.YearReleased = 1977; album.Songs = new JsonArray() as dynamic; dynamic song = new JsonObject(); song.SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; song.SongLength = "4:11"; album.Songs.Add(song); song = new JsonObject(); song.SongName = "Love at First Feel"; song.SongLength = "3:10"; album.Songs.Add(song); Console.WriteLine(album.ToString()); } This produces proper JSON just as you would expect: {"AlbumName":"Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap","Artist":"AC\/DC","YearReleased":1977,"Songs":[{"SongName":"Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap","SongLength":"4:11"},{"SongName":"Love at First Feel","SongLength":"3:10"}]} The important thing about this code is that there's no explicitly type that is used for holding the values to serialize to JSON. I am essentially creating this value structure on the fly by adding properties and then serialize it to JSON. This means this code can be entirely driven at runtime without compile time restraints of structure for the JSON output. Here I use JsonObject() to create a new object and immediately cast it to dynamic. JsonObject() is kind of similar in behavior to ExpandoObject in that it allows you to add properties by simply assigning to them. Internally, JsonValue/JsonObject these values are stored in pseudo collections of key value pairs that are exposed as properties through the DynamicObject functionality in .NET. The syntax gets a little tedious only if you need to create child objects or arrays that have to be explicitly defined first. Other than that the syntax looks like normal object access sytnax. Always remember though these values are dynamic - which means no Intellisense and no compiler type checking. It's up to you to ensure that the values you create are accessed consistently and without typos in your code. Note that you can also access the JsonValue instance directly and get access to the underlying type. This means you can assign properties by string, which can be useful for fully data driven JSON generation from other structures. Below you can see both styles of access next to each other:// strong type instance var jsonObject = new JsonObject(); // you can explicitly add values here jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // expando style instance you can just 'use' properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; JsonValue internally stores properties keys and values in collections and you can iterate over them at runtime. You can also manipulate the collections if you need to to get the object structure to look exactly like you want. Again, if you've used ExpandoObject before JsonObject/Value are very similar in the behavior of the structure. Reading JSON strings into JsonValue The JsonValue structure supports importing JSON via the Parse() and Load() methods which can read JSON data from a string or various streams respectively. Essentially JsonValue includes the core JSON parsing to turn a JSON string into a collection of JsonValue objects that can be then referenced using familiar dynamic object syntax. Here's a simple example:[TestMethod] public void JsonValueParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"{""Name"":""Rick"",""Company"":""West Wind"",""Entered"":""2012-03-16T00:03:33.245-10:00""}"; dynamic json = JsonValue.Parse(jsonString); // values require casting string name = json.Name; string company = json.Company; DateTime entered = json.Entered; Assert.AreEqual(name, "Rick"); Assert.AreEqual(company, "West Wind"); } The JSON string represents an object with three properties which is parsed into a JsonValue object and cast to dynamic. Once cast to dynamic I can then go ahead and access the object using familiar object syntax. Note that the actual values - json.Name, json.Company, json.Entered - are actually of type JsonPrimitive and I have to assign them to their appropriate types first before I can do type comparisons. The dynamic properties will automatically cast to the right type expected as long as the compiler can resolve the type of the assignment or usage. The AreEqual() method oesn't as it expects two object instances and comparing json.Company to "West Wind" is comparing two different types (JsonPrimitive to String) which fails. So the intermediary assignment is required to make the test pass. The JSON structure can be much more complex than this simple example. Here's another example of an array of albums serialized to JSON and then parsed through with JsonValue():[TestMethod] public void JsonArrayParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"[ { ""Id"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""AlbumName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""Artist"": ""AC/DC"", ""YearReleased"": 1977, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2810521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61kTaH-uZBL._AA115_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00008BXJ4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=westwindtechn-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00008BXJ4"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""SongLength"": ""4:11"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Love at First Feel"", ""SongLength"": ""3:10"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Big Balls"", ""SongLength"": ""2:38"" } ] }, { ""Id"": ""67280fb8"", ""AlbumName"": ""Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace"", ""Artist"": ""Foo Fighters"", ""YearReleased"": 2007, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2810521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41mtlesQPVL._SL500_AA280_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000UFAURI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=westwindtechn-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000UFAURI"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""67280fb8"", ""SongName"": ""The Pretender"", ""SongLength"": ""4:29"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""67280fb8"", ""SongName"": ""Let it Die"", ""SongLength"": ""4:05"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""67280fb8"", ""SongName"": ""Erase/Replay"", ""SongLength"": ""4:13"" } ] }, { ""Id"": ""7b919432"", ""AlbumName"": ""End of the Silence"", ""Artist"": ""Henry Rollins Band"", ""YearReleased"": 1992, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2800521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FO3rb1tuL._SL160_AA160_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/End-Silence-Rollins-Band/dp/B0000040OX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1302232195&sr=8-5"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Low Self Opinion"", ""SongLength"": ""5:24"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Grip"", ""SongLength"": ""4:51"" } ] } ]"; dynamic albums = JsonValue.Parse(jsonString); foreach (dynamic album in albums) { Console.WriteLine(album.AlbumName + " (" + album.YearReleased.ToString() + ")"); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { Console.WriteLine("\t" + song.SongName ); } } Console.WriteLine(albums[0].AlbumName); Console.WriteLine(albums[0].Songs[1].SongName);} It's pretty sweet how easy it becomes to parse even complex JSON and then just run through the object using object syntax, yet without an explicit type in the mix. In fact it looks and feels a lot like if you were using JavaScript to parse through this data, doesn't it? And that's the point…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET Web Api JSON Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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From Binary to Data Structures

- by Cédric Menzi

Table of Contents Introduction PE file format and COFF header COFF file header BaseCoffReader Byte4ByteCoffReader UnsafeCoffReader ManagedCoffReader Conclusion History This article is also available on CodeProject Introduction Sometimes, you want to parse well-formed binary data and bring it into your objects to do some dirty stuff with it. In the Windows world most data structures are stored in special binary format. Either we call a WinApi function or we want to read from special files like images, spool files, executables or may be the previously announced Outlook Personal Folders File. Most specifications for these files can be found on the MSDN Libarary: Open Specification In my example, we are going to get the COFF (Common Object File Format) file header from a PE (Portable Executable). The exact specification can be found here: PECOFF PE file format and COFF header Before we start we need to know how this file is formatted. The following figure shows an overview of the Microsoft PE executable format. Source: Microsoft Our goal is to get the PE header. As we can see, the image starts with a MS-DOS 2.0 header with is not important for us. From the documentation we can read "...After the MS DOS stub, at the file offset specified at offset 0x3c, is a 4-byte...". With this information we know our reader has to jump to location 0x3c and read the offset to the signature. The signature is always 4 bytes that ensures that the image is a PE file. The signature is: PE\0\0. To prove this we first seek to the offset 0x3c, read if the file consist the signature. So we need to declare some constants, because we do not want magic numbers. private const int PeSignatureOffsetLocation = 0x3c; private const int PeSignatureSize = 4; private const string PeSignatureContent = "PE"; Then a method for moving the reader to the correct location to read the offset of signature. With this method we always move the underlining Stream of the BinaryReader to the start location of the PE signature. private void SeekToPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // seek to the offset for the PE signagure br.BaseStream.Seek(PeSignatureOffsetLocation, SeekOrigin.Begin); // read the offset int offsetToPeSig = br.ReadInt32(); // seek to the start of the PE signature br.BaseStream.Seek(offsetToPeSig, SeekOrigin.Begin); } Now, we can check if it is a valid PE image by reading of the next 4 byte contains the content PE. private bool IsValidPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // read 4 bytes to get the PE signature byte[] peSigBytes = br.ReadBytes(PeSignatureSize); // convert it to a string and trim \0 at the end of the content string peContent = Encoding.Default.GetString(peSigBytes).TrimEnd('\0'); // check if PE is in the content return peContent.Equals(PeSignatureContent); } With this basic functionality we have a good base reader class to try the different methods of parsing the COFF file header. COFF file header The COFF header has the following structure: Offset Size Field 0 2 Machine 2 2 NumberOfSections 4 4 TimeDateStamp 8 4 PointerToSymbolTable 12 4 NumberOfSymbols 16 2 SizeOfOptionalHeader 18 2 Characteristics If we translate this table to code, we get something like this: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public MachineType Machine; public ushort NumberOfSections; public uint TimeDateStamp; public uint PointerToSymbolTable; public uint NumberOfSymbols; public ushort SizeOfOptionalHeader; public Characteristic Characteristics; } BaseCoffReader All readers do the same thing, so we go to the patterns library in our head and see that Strategy pattern or Template method pattern is sticked out in the bookshelf. I have decided to take the template method pattern in this case, because the Parse() should handle the IO for all implementations and the concrete parsing should done in its derived classes. public CoffHeader Parse() { using (var br = new BinaryReader(File.Open(_fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))) { SeekToPeSignature(br); if (!IsValidPeSignature(br)) { throw new BadImageFormatException(); } return ParseInternal(br); } } protected abstract CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br); First we open the BinaryReader, seek to the PE signature then we check if it contains a valid PE signature and rest is done by the derived implementations. Byte4ByteCoffReader The first solution is using the BinaryReader. It is the general way to get the data. We only need to know which order, which data-type and its size. If we read byte for byte we could comment out the first line in the CoffHeader structure, because we have control about the order of the member assignment. protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { CoffHeader coff = new CoffHeader(); coff.Machine = (MachineType)br.ReadInt16(); coff.NumberOfSections = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.TimeDateStamp = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.PointerToSymbolTable = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.NumberOfSymbols = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.SizeOfOptionalHeader = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.Characteristics = (Characteristic)br.ReadInt16(); return coff; } If the structure is as short as the COFF header here and the specification will never changed, there is probably no reason to change the strategy. But if a data-type will be changed, a new member will be added or ordering of member will be changed the maintenance costs of this method are very high. UnsafeCoffReader Another way to bring the data into this structure is using a "magically" unsafe trick. As above, we know the layout and order of the data structure. Now, we need the StructLayout attribute, because we have to ensure that the .NET Runtime allocates the structure in the same order as it is specified in the source code. We also need to enable "Allow unsafe code (/unsafe)" in the project's build properties. Then we need to add the following constructor to the CoffHeader structure. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { unsafe { fixed (byte* packet = &data[0]) { this = *(CoffHeader*)packet; } } } } The "magic" trick is in the statement: this = *(CoffHeader*)packet;. What happens here? We have a fixed size of data somewhere in the memory and because a struct in C# is a value-type, the assignment operator = copies the whole data of the structure and not only the reference. To fill the structure with data, we need to pass the data as bytes into the CoffHeader structure. This can be achieved by reading the exact size of the structure from the PE file. protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { return new CoffHeader(br.ReadBytes(Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)))); } This solution is the fastest way to parse the data and bring it into the structure, but it is unsafe and it could introduce some security and stability risks. ManagedCoffReader In this solution we are using the same approach of the structure assignment as above. But we need to replace the unsafe part in the constructor with the following managed part: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { IntPtr coffPtr = IntPtr.Zero; try { int size = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)); coffPtr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(size); Marshal.Copy(data, 0, coffPtr, size); this = (CoffHeader)Marshal.PtrToStructure(coffPtr, typeof(CoffHeader)); } finally { Marshal.FreeHGlobal(coffPtr); } } } Conclusion We saw that we can parse well-formed binary data to our data structures using different approaches. The first is probably the clearest way, because we know each member and its size and ordering and we have control about the reading the data for each member. But if add member or the structure is going change by some reason, we need to change the reader. The two other solutions use the approach of the structure assignment. In the unsafe implementation we need to compile the project with the /unsafe option. We increase the performance, but we get some security risks.

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Integrate SharePoint 2010 with Team Foundation Server 2010

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Our client is using a brand new shiny installation of SharePoint 2010, so we need to integrate our upgraded Team Foundation Server 2010 instance into it. In order to do that you need to run the Team Foundation Server 2010 install on the SharePoint 2010 server and choose to install only the “Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies”. We want out upgraded Team Project Collection to create any new portal in this SharePoint 2010 server farm. There a number of goodies above and beyond a solution file that requires the install, with the main one being the TFS2010 client API. These goodies allow proper integration with the creation and viewing of Work Items from SharePoint a new feature with TFS 2010. This works in both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 with the level of integration dependant on the version of SharePoint that you are running. There are three levels of integration with “SharePoint Services 3.0” or “SharePoint Foundation 2010” being the lowest. This level only offers reporting services framed integration for reporting along with Work Item Integration and document management. The highest is Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) Enterprise with Excel Services integration providing some lovely dashboards. Figure: Dashboards take the guessing out of Project Planning and estimation. Plus writing these reports would be boring! The Extensions that you need are on the same installation media as the main TFS install and the only difference is the options you pick during the install. Figure: Installing the TFS 2010 Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies onto SharePoint 2010 Annoyingly you may need to reboot a couple of times, but on this server the process was MUCH smother than on our internal server. I think this was mostly to do with this being a clean install. Once it is installed you need to run the configuration. This will add all of the Solution and Templates that are needed for SharePoint to work properly with TFS. Figure: This is where all the TFS 2010 goodies are added to your SharePoint 2010 server and the TFS 2010 object model is installed. Figure: All done, you have everything installed, but you still need to configure it Now that we have the TFS 2010 SharePoint Extensions installed on our SharePoint 2010 server we need to configure them both so that they will talk happily to each other. Configuring the SharePoint 2010 Managed path for Team Foundation Server 2010 In order for TFS to automatically create your project portals you need a wildcard managed path setup. This is where TFS will create the portal during the creation of a new Team project. To find the managed paths page for any application you need to first select the “Managed web applications” link from the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration screen. Figure: Find the “Manage web applications” link under the “Application Management” section. On you are there you will see that the “Managed Paths” are there, they are just greyed out and selecting one of the applications will enable it to be clicked. Figure: You need to select an application for the SharePoint 2010 ribbon to activate. Figure: You need to select an application before you can get to the Managed Paths for that application. Now we need to add a managed path for TFS 2010 to create its portals under. I have gone for the obvious option of just calling the managed path “TFS02” as the TFS 2010 server is the second TFS server that the client has installed, TFS 2008 being the first. This links the location to the server name, and as you can’t have two projects of the same name in two separate project collections there is unlikely to be any conflicts. Figure: Add a “tfs02” wildcard inclusion path to your SharePoint site. Configure the Team Foundation Server 2010 connection to SharePoint 2010 In order to have you new TFS 2010 Server talk to and create sites in SharePoint 2010 you need to tell the TFS server where to put them. As this TFS 2010 server was installed in out-of-the-box mode it has a SharePoint Services 3.0 (the free one) server running on the same box. But we want to change that so we can use the external SharePoint 2010 instance. Just open the “Team Foundation Server Administration Console” and navigate to the “SharePoint Web Applications” section. Here you click “Add” and enter the details for the Managed path we just created. Figure: If you have special permissions on your SharePoint you may need to add accounts to the “Service Accounts” section. Before we can se this new SharePoint 2010 instance to be the default for our upgraded Team Project Collection we need to configure SharePoint to take instructions from our TFS server. Configure SharePoint 2010 to connect to Team Foundation Server 2010 On your SharePoint 2010 server open the Team Foundation Server Administration Console and select the “Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies” node. Here we need to “grant access” for our TFS 2010 server to create sites. Click the “Grant access” link and fill out the full URL to the TFS server, for example http://servername.domain.com:8080/tfs, and if need be restrict the path that TFS sites can be created on. Remember that when the users create a new team project they can change the default and point it anywhere they like as long as it is an authorised SharePoint location. Figure: Grant access for your TFS 2010 server to create sites in SharePoint 2010 Now that we have an authorised location for our team project portals to be created we need to tell our Team Project Collection that this is where it should stick sites by default for any new Team Projects created. Configure the Team Foundation Server 2010 Team Project Collection to create new sites in SharePoint 2010 Back on out TFS 2010 server we need to setup the defaults for our upgraded Team Project Collection to the new SharePoint 2010 integration we have just set up. On the TFS 2010 server open up the “Team Foundation Server Administration Console” again and navigate to the “Team Project Collections” node. Once you are there you will see a list of all of your TPC’s and in our case we have a DefaultCollection as well as out named and Upgraded collection for TFS 2008. If you select the “SharePoint Site” tab we can see that it is not currently configured. Figure: Our new Upgrade TFS2008 Team Project Collection does not have SharePoint configured Select to “Edit Default Site Location” and select the new integration point that we just set up for SharePoint 2010. Once you have selected the “SharePoint Web Application” (the thing we just configured) then it will give you an example based on that configuration point and the name of the Team Project Collection that we are configuring. Figure: Set the default location for new Team Project Portals to be created for this Team Project Collection This is where the reason for configuring the Extensions on the SharePoint 2010 server before doing this last bit becomes apparent. TFS 2010 is going to create a site at our http://sharepointserver/tfs02/ location called http://sharepointserver/tfs02/[TeamProjectCollection], or whatever we had specified, and it would have had difficulty doing this if we had not given it permission first. Figure: If there is no Team Project Collection site at this location the TFS 2010 server is going to create one This will create a nice Team Project Collection parent site to contain the Portals for any new Team Projects that are created. It is with noting that it will not create portals for existing Team Projects as this process is run during the Team Project Creation wizard. Figure: Just a basic parent site to host all of your new Team Project Portals as sub sites You will need to add all of the users that will be creating Team Projects to be Administrators of this site so that they will not get an error during the Project Creation Wizard. You may also want to customise this as a proper portal to your projects if you are going to be having lots of them, but it is really just a default placeholder so you have a top level site that you can backup and point at. You have now integrated SharePoint 2010 and team Foundation Server 2010! You can now go forth and multiple your Team Projects for this Team Project Collection or you can continue to add portals to your other Collections. Technorati Tags: TFS 2010,Sharepoint 2010,VS ALM

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Version Assemblies with TFS 2010 Continuous Integration

- by Steve Michelotti

When I first heard that TFS 2010 had moved to Workflow Foundation for Team Build, I was *extremely* skeptical. I’ve loved MSBuild and didn’t quite understand the reasons for this change. In fact, given that I’ve been exclusively using Cruise Control for Continuous Integration (CI) for the last 5+ years of my career, I was skeptical of TFS for CI in general. However, after going through the learning process for TFS 2010 recently, I’m starting to become a believer. I’m also starting to see some of the benefits with Workflow Foundation for the overall processing because it gives you constructs not available in MSBuild such as parallel tasks, better control flow constructs, and a slightly better customization story. The first customization I had to make to the build process was to version the assemblies of my solution. This is not new. In fact, I’d recommend reading Mike Fourie’s well known post on Versioning Code in TFS before you get started. This post describes several foundational aspects of versioning assemblies regardless of your version of TFS. The main points are: 1) don’t use source control operations for your version file, 2) use a schema like <Major>.<Minor>.<IncrementalNumber>.0, and 3) do not keep AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion in sync. To do this in TFS 2010, the best post I’ve found has been Jim Lamb’s post of building a custom TFS 2010 workflow activity. Overall, this post is excellent but the primary issue I have with it is that the assembly version numbers produced are based in a date and look like this: “2010.5.15.1”. This is definitely not what I want. I want to be able to communicate to the developers and stakeholders that we are producing the “1.1 release” or “1.2 release” – which would have an assembly version number of “1.1.317.0” for example. In this post, I’ll walk through the process of customizing the assembly version number based on this method – customizing the concepts in Lamb’s post to suit my needs. I’ll also be combining this with the concepts of Fourie’s post – particularly with regards to the standards around how to version the assemblies. The first thing I’ll do is add a file called SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs to the root of my solution that looks like this: 1: using System; 2: using System.Reflection; 3: [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.1.0.0")] 4: [assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.1.0.0")] I’ll then add that file as a Visual Studio link file to each project in my solution by right-clicking the project, “Add – Existing Item…” then when I click the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file, making sure I “Add As Link”: Now the Solution Explorer will show our file. We can see that it’s a “link” file because of the black arrow in the icon within all our projects. Of course you’ll need to remove the AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes from the AssemblyInfo.cs files to avoid the duplicate attributes since they now leave in the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file. This is an extremely common technique so that all the projects in our solution can be versioned as a unit. At this point, we’re ready to write our custom activity. The primary consideration is that I want the developer and/or tech lead to be able to easily be in control of the Major.Minor and then I want the CI process to add the third number with a unique incremental number. We’ll leave the fourth position always “0” for now – it’s held in reserve in case the day ever comes where we need to do an emergency patch to Production based on a branched version. Writing the Custom Workflow Activity Similar to Lamb’s post, I’m going to write two custom workflow activities. The “outer” activity (a xaml activity) will be pretty straight forward. It will check if the solution version file exists in the solution root and, if so, delegate the replacement of version to the AssemblyVersionInfo activity which is a CodeActivity highlighted in red below: Notice that the arguments of this activity are the “solutionVersionFile” and “tfsBuildNumber” which will be passed in. The tfsBuildNumber passed in will look something like this: “CI_MyApplication.4” and we’ll need to grab the “4” (i.e., the incremental revision number) and put that in the third position. Then we’ll need to honor whatever was specified for Major.Minor in the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file. For example, if the SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs file had “1.1.0.0” for the AssemblyVersion (as shown in the first code block near the beginning of this post), then we want to resulting file to have “1.1.4.0”. Before we do anything, let’s put together a unit test for all this so we can know if we get it right: 1: [TestMethod] 2: public void Assembly_version_should_be_parsed_correctly_from_build_name() 3: { 4: // arrange 5: const string versionFile = "SolutionAssemblyVersionInfo.cs"; 6: WriteTestVersionFile(versionFile); 7: var activity = new VersionAssemblies(); 8: var arguments = new Dictionary<string, object> { 9: { "tfsBuildNumber", "CI_MyApplication.4"}, 10: { "solutionVersionFile", versionFile} 11: }; 12: 13: // act 14: var result = WorkflowInvoker.Invoke(activity, arguments); 15: 16: // assert 17: Assert.AreEqual("1.2.4.0", (string)result["newAssemblyFileVersion"]); 18: var lines = File.ReadAllLines(versionFile); 19: Assert.IsTrue(lines.Contains("[assembly: AssemblyVersion(\"1.2.0.0\")]")); 20: Assert.IsTrue(lines.Contains("[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(\"1.2.4.0\")]")); 21: } 22: 23: private void WriteTestVersionFile(string versionFile) 24: { 25: var fileContents = "using System.Reflection;\n" + 26: "[assembly: AssemblyVersion(\"1.2.0.0\")]\n" + 27: "[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(\"1.2.0.0\")]"; 28: File.WriteAllText(versionFile, fileContents); 29: } At this point, the code for our AssemblyVersion activity is pretty straight forward: 1: [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.Agent)] 2: public class AssemblyVersionInfo : CodeActivity 3: { 4: [RequiredArgument] 5: public InArgument<string> FileName { get; set; } 6: 7: [RequiredArgument] 8: public InArgument<string> TfsBuildNumber { get; set; } 9: 10: public OutArgument<string> NewAssemblyFileVersion { get; set; } 11: 12: protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) 13: { 14: var solutionVersionFile = this.FileName.Get(context); 15: 16: // Ensure that the file is writeable 17: var fileAttributes = File.GetAttributes(solutionVersionFile); 18: File.SetAttributes(solutionVersionFile, fileAttributes & ~FileAttributes.ReadOnly); 19: 20: // Prepare assembly versions 21: var majorMinor = GetAssemblyMajorMinorVersionBasedOnExisting(solutionVersionFile); 22: var newBuildNumber = GetNewBuildNumber(this.TfsBuildNumber.Get(context)); 23: var newAssemblyVersion = string.Format("{0}.{1}.0.0", majorMinor.Item1, majorMinor.Item2); 24: var newAssemblyFileVersion = string.Format("{0}.{1}.{2}.0", majorMinor.Item1, majorMinor.Item2, newBuildNumber); 25: this.NewAssemblyFileVersion.Set(context, newAssemblyFileVersion); 26: 27: // Perform the actual replacement 28: var contents = this.GetFileContents(newAssemblyVersion, newAssemblyFileVersion); 29: File.WriteAllText(solutionVersionFile, contents); 30: 31: // Restore the file's original attributes 32: File.SetAttributes(solutionVersionFile, fileAttributes); 33: } 34: 35: #region Private Methods 36: 37: private string GetFileContents(string newAssemblyVersion, string newAssemblyFileVersion) 38: { 39: var cs = new StringBuilder(); 40: cs.AppendLine("using System.Reflection;"); 41: cs.AppendFormat("[assembly: AssemblyVersion(\"{0}\")]", newAssemblyVersion); 42: cs.AppendLine(); 43: cs.AppendFormat("[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion(\"{0}\")]", newAssemblyFileVersion); 44: return cs.ToString(); 45: } 46: 47: private Tuple<string, string> GetAssemblyMajorMinorVersionBasedOnExisting(string filePath) 48: { 49: var lines = File.ReadAllLines(filePath); 50: var versionLine = lines.Where(x => x.Contains("AssemblyVersion")).FirstOrDefault(); 51: 52: if (versionLine == null) 53: { 54: throw new InvalidOperationException("File does not contain [assembly: AssemblyVersion] attribute"); 55: } 56: 57: return ExtractMajorMinor(versionLine); 58: } 59: 60: private static Tuple<string, string> ExtractMajorMinor(string versionLine) 61: { 62: var firstQuote = versionLine.IndexOf('"') + 1; 63: var secondQuote = versionLine.IndexOf('"', firstQuote); 64: var version = versionLine.Substring(firstQuote, secondQuote - firstQuote); 65: var versionParts = version.Split('.'); 66: return new Tuple<string, string>(versionParts[0], versionParts[1]); 67: } 68: 69: private string GetNewBuildNumber(string buildName) 70: { 71: return buildName.Substring(buildName.LastIndexOf(".") + 1); 72: } 73: 74: #endregion 75: } At this point the final step is to incorporate this activity into the overall build template. Make a copy of the DefaultTempate.xaml – we’ll call it DefaultTemplateWithVersioning.xaml. Before the build and labeling happens, drag the VersionAssemblies activity in. Then set the LabelName variable to “BuildDetail.BuildDefinition.Name + "-" + newAssemblyFileVersion since the newAssemblyFileVersion was produced by our activity. Configuring CI Once you add your solution to source control, you can configure CI with the build definition window as shown here. The main difference is that we’ll change the Process tab to reflect a different build number format and choose our custom build process file: When the build completes, we’ll see the name of our project with the unique revision number: If we look at the detailed build log for the latest build, we’ll see the label being created with our custom task: We can now look at the history labels in TFS and see the project name with the labels (the Assignment activity I added to the workflow): Finally, if we look at the physical assemblies that are produced, we can right-click on any assembly in Windows Explorer and see the assembly version in its properties: Full Traceability We now have full traceability for our code. There will never be a question of what code was deployed to Production. You can always see the assembly version in the properties of the physical assembly. That can be traced back to a label in TFS where the unique revision number matches. The label in TFS gives you the complete snapshot of the code in your source control repository at the time the code was built. This type of process for full traceability has been used for many years for CI – in fact, I’ve done similar things with CCNet and SVN for quite some time. This is simply the TFS implementation of that pattern. The new features that TFS 2010 give you to make these types of customizations in your build process are quite easy once you get over the initial curve.

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Upgrading from TFS 2010 RC to TFS 2010 RTM done

- by Martin Hinshelwood

Today is the big day, with the Launch of Visual Studio 2010 already done in Asia, and rolling around the world towards us, we are getting ready for the RTM (Released). We have had TFS 2010 in Production for nearly 6 months and have had only minimal problems. Update 12th April 2010 – Added Scott Hanselman’s tweet about the MSDN download release time. SSW was the first company in the world outside of Microsoft to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server to production, not once, but twice. I am hoping to make it 3 in a row, but with all the hype around the new version, and with it being a production release and not just a go-live, I think there will be a lot of competition. Developers: MSDN will be updated with #vs2010 downloads and details at 10am PST *today*! @shanselman - Scott Hanselman Same as before, we need to Uninstall 2010 RC and install 2010 RTM. The installer will take care of all the complexity of actually upgrading any schema changes. If you are upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS2010 you can follow our Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration and read my post on our successes. We run TFS 2010 in a Hyper-V virtual environment, so we have the advantage of running a snapshot as well as taking a DB backup. Done - Snapshot the hyper-v server Microsoft does not support taking a snapshot of a running server, for very good reason, and Brian Harry wrote a post after my last upgrade with the reason why you should never snapshot a running server. Done - Uninstall Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 RC You will need to uninstall all of the Visual Studio 2010 RC client bits that you have on the server. Done - Uninstall TFS 2010 RC Done - Install TFS 2010 RTM Done - Configure TFS 2010 RTM Pick the Upgrade option and point it at your existing “tfs_Configuration” database to load all of the existing settings Done - Upgrade the SharePoint Extensions Upgrade Build Servers (Pending) Test the server The back out plan, and you should always have one, is to restore the snapshot. Upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done The first thing you need to do is off the TFS server and then log into the Hyper-v server and create a snapshot. Figure: Make sure you turn the server off and delete all old snapshots before you take a new one I noticed that the snapshot that was taken before the Beta 2 to RC upgrade was still there. You should really delete old snapshots before you create a new one, but in this case the SysAdmin (who is currently tucked up in bed) asked me not to. I guess he is worried about a developer messing up his server Turn your server on and wait for it to boot in anticipation of all the nice shiny RTM’ness that is coming next. The upgrade procedure for TFS2010 is to uninstal the old version and install the new one. Figure: Remove Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server RC from the system. Figure: Most of the heavy lifting is done by the Uninstaller, but make sure you have removed any of the client bits first. Specifically Visual Studio 2010 or Team Explorer 2010. Once the uninstall is complete, this took around 5 minutes for me, you can begin the install of the RTM. Running the 64 bit OS will allow the application to use more than 2GB RAM, which while not common may be of use in heavy load situations. Figure: It is always recommended to install the 64bit version of a server application where possible. I do not think it is likely, with SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010 and even Windows Server 2008 R2 being 64 bit only, I do not think there will be another release of a server app that is 32bit. You then need to choose what it is you want to install. This depends on how you are running TFS and on how many servers. In our case we run TFS and the Team Foundation Build Service (controller only) on out TFS server along with Analysis services and Reporting Services. But our SharePoint server lives elsewhere. Figure: This always confuses people, but in reality it makes sense. Don’t install what you do not need. Every extra you install has an impact of performance. If you are integrating with SharePoint you will need to run this install on every Front end server in your farm and don’t forget to upgrade your Build servers and proxy servers later. Figure: Selecting only Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Team Foundation Build Services (TFBS) It is worth noting that if you have a lot of builds kicking off, and hence a lot of get operations against your TFS server, you can use a proxy server to cache the source control on another server in between your TFS server and your build servers. Figure: Installing Microsoft .NET Framework 4 takes the most time. Figure: Now run Windows Update, and SSW Diagnostic to make sure all your bits and bobs are up to date. Note: SSW Diagnostic will check your Power Tools, Add-on’s, Check in Policies and other bits as well. Configure Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done Now you can configure the server. If you have no key you will need to pick “Install a Trial Licence”, but it is only £500, or free with a MSDN subscription. Anyway, if you pick Trial you get 90 days to get your key. Figure: You can pick trial and add your key later using the TFS Server Admin. Here is where the real choices happen. We are doing an Upgrade from a previous version, so I will pick Upgrade the same as all you folks that are using the RC or TFS 2008. Figure: The upgrade wizard takes your existing 2010 or 2008 databases and upgraded them to the release. Once you have entered your database server name you can click “List available databases” and it will show what it can upgrade. Figure: Select your database from the list and at this point, make sure you have a valid backup. At this point you have not made ANY changes to the databases. At this point the configuration wizard will load configuration from your existing database if you have one. If you are upgrading TFS 2008 refer to Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration. Mostly during the wizard the default values will suffice, but depending on the configuration you want you can pick different options. Figure: Set the application tier account and Authentication method to use. We use NTLM to keep things simple as we host our TFS server externally for our remote developers. Figure: Setting your TFS server URL’s to be the remote URL’s allows the reports to be accessed without using VPN. Very handy for those remote developers. Figure: Detected the existing Warehouse no problem. Figure: Again we love green ticks. It gives us a warm fuzzy feeling. Figure: The username for connecting to Reporting services should be a domain account (if you are on a domain that is). Figure: Setup the SharePoint integration to connect to your external SharePoint server. You can take the option to connect later. You then need to run all of your readiness checks. These check can save your life! it will check all of the settings that you have entered as well as checking all the external services are configures and running properly. There are two reasons that TFS 2010 is so easy and painless to install where previous version were not. Microsoft changes the install to two steps, Install and configuration. The second reason is that they have pulled out all of the stops in making the install run all the checks necessary to make sure that once you start the install that it will complete. if you find any errors I recommend that you report them on http://connect.microsoft.com so everyone can benefit from your misery. Figure: Now we have everything setup the configuration wizard can do its work. Figure: Took a while on the “Web site” stage for some point, but zipped though after that. Figure: last wee bit. TFS Needs to do a little tinkering with the data to complete the upgrade. Figure: All upgraded. I am not worried about the yellow triangle as SharePoint was being a little silly Exception Message: TF254021: The account name or password that you specified is not valid. (type TfsAdminException) Exception Stack Trace: at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Management.Controls.WizardCommon.AccountSelectionControl.TestLogon(String connectionString) at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.WorkerThreadStart(Object argument) [Info @16:10:16.307] Benign exception caught as part of verify: Exception Message: TF255329: The following site could not be accessed: http://projects.ssw.com.au/. The server that you specified did not return the expected response. Either you have not installed the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products on this server, or a firewall is blocking access to the specified site or the SharePoint Central Administration site. For more information, see the Microsoft Web site (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161206). (type TeamFoundationServerException) Exception Stack Trace: at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.SharePoint.WssUtilities.VerifyTeamFoundationSharePointExtensions(ICredentials credentials, Uri url) at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.VerifySharePointSitesUrl.Verify() Inner Exception Details: Exception Message: TF249064: The following Web service returned an response that is not valid: http://projects.ssw.com.au/_vti_bin/TeamFoundationIntegrationService.asmx. This Web service is used for the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products. Either the extensions are not installed, the request resulted in HTML being returned, or there is a problem with the URL. Verify that the following URL points to a valid SharePoint Web application and that the application is available: http://projects.ssw.com.au. If the URL is correct and the Web application is operating normally, verify that a firewall is not blocking access to the Web application. (type TeamFoundationServerInvalidResponseException) Exception Data Dictionary: ResponseStatusCode = InternalServerError I’ll look at SharePoint after, probably the SharePoint box just needs a restart or a kick If there is a problem with SharePoint it will come out in testing, But I will definatly be passing this on to Microsoft. Upgrading the SharePoint connector to TFS 2010 You will need to upgrade the Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies on all of your SharePoint farm front end servers. To do this uninstall the TFS 2010 RC from it in the same way as the server, and then install just the RTM Extensions. Figure: Only install the SharePoint Extensions on your SharePoint front end servers. TFS 2010 supports both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010. Figure: When you configure SharePoint it uploads all of the solutions and templates. Figure: Everything is uploaded Successfully. Figure: TFS even remembered the settings from the previous installation, fantastic. Upgrading the Team Foundation Build Servers to TFS 2010 Just like on the SharePoint servers you will need to upgrade the Build Server to the RTM. Just uninstall TFS 2010 RC and then install only the Team Foundation Build Services component. Unlike on the SharePoint server you will probably have some version of Visual Studio installed. You will need to remove this as well. (Coming Soon) Connecting Visual Studio 2010 / 2008 / 2005 and Eclipse to TFS2010 If you have developers still on Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 you will need do download the respective compatibility pack: Visual Studio Team System 2005 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 If you are using Eclipse you can download the new Team Explorer Everywhere install for connecting to TFS. Get your developers to check that you have the latest version of your applications with SSW Diagnostic which will check for Service Packs and hot fixes to Visual Studio as well. Technorati Tags: TFS,TFS2010,TFS 2010,Upgrade

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kernel module compiling error

- by wati

sh@ubuntu:/home/ccpp/helloworld$ make gcc-4.6 -O2 -DMODULE -D_KERNEL_ -W -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -isystem /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include -c -o hello-1.o hello-1.c hello-1.c:4:0: warning: "MODULE" redefined [enabled by default] <command-line>:0:0: note: this is the location of the previous definition hello-1.c:6:0: warning: "_KERNEL_" redefined [enabled by default] <command-line>:0:0: note: this is the location of the previous definition In file included from /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:4:0, from /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/module.h:9, from hello-1.c:7: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/types.h:13:2: warning: #warning "Attempt to use kernel headers from user space, see http://kernelnewbies.org/KernelHeaders" [-Wcpp] In file included from /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/module.h:9:0, from hello-1.c:7: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘INIT_LIST_HEAD’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:26:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:27:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘__list_add’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:41:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:42:5: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:43:5: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:44:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_add’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:62:28: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_add_tail’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:76:22: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘__list_del’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:88:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:89:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘__list_del_entry’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:101:18: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:101:31: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_del’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:106:18: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:106:31: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:107:7: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:108:7: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_replace’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:125:5: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:125:17: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:126:5: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:127:5: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:127:17: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:128:5: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_is_last’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:179:13: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_empty’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:188:13: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_empty_careful’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:206:31: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:207:40: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_rotate_left’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:219:15: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_is_singular’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:230:35: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:230:49: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘__list_cut_position’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:236:37: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:237:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:237:19: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:238:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:239:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:240:7: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:241:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:242:11: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_cut_position’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:265:8: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘__list_splice’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:277:32: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:278:31: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:280:7: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:281:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:283:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:284:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_splice’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:296:33: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_splice_tail’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:308:27: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_splice_init’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:322:33: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘list_splice_tail_init’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:339:27: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘INIT_HLIST_NODE’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:572:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:573:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘hlist_unhashed’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:578:11: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘hlist_empty’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:583:11: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘__hlist_del’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:588:29: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:589:31: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:592:7: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘hlist_del’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:598:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:599:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘hlist_add_head’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:612:30: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:613:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:615:8: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:615:20: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:616:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:617:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:617:15: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘hlist_add_before’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:624:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:624:17: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:625:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:626:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:626:18: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:627:5: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘hlist_add_after’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:633:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:633:16: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:634:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:635:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:635:18: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:637:9: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:638:7: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:638:29: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘hlist_add_fake’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:644:3: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:644:15: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h: In function ‘hlist_move_list’: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:654:5: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:654:18: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:655:9: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:656:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:656:27: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/list.h:657:5: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type In file included from /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/module.h:12:0, from hello-1.c:7: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/cache.h: At top level: /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic/build/include/linux/cache.h:5:23: fatal error: asm/cache.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated. make: *** [hello-1.o] Error 1 i got this error after compiling an helloworld program my program is #define MODULE #define LINUX #define _KERNEL_ #include <linux/module.h> #include <linux/kernel.h> int init_module(void) { printk("<1>hello World 1.\n"); return 0; } void cleanup_module(void) { printk(KERN_ALERT "goodbye world 1.\n"); } MODULE_LICENSE("GPL"); my make file is: TARGET := hello-1 WARN := -W -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes INCLUDE := -isystem /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include CFLAGS := -O2 -DMODULE -D_KERNEL_ ${WARN} ${INCLUDE} CC := gcc-4.6 ${TARGET}.o: ${TARGET}.c .PHONY: clean clean: rm -rf ${TARGET}.o iam usin kernel 3.2.0.25 as novice i can't able to figure out where the problem is I SEARCHED EVERY THING I CAN TO KNOW ABOUT THIS ERROR BUT I CANT UNDERSTAND &I GET IRRELEVANT DOCS anybody help me please

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Windows 7 Phone Database – Querying with Views and Filters

- by SeanMcAlinden

I’ve just added a feature to Rapid Repository to greatly improve how the Windows 7 Phone Database is queried for performance (This is in the trunk not in Release V1.0). The main concept behind it is to create a View Model class which would have only the minimum data you need for a page. This View Model is then stored and retrieved rather than the whole list of entities. Another feature of the views is that they can be pre-filtered to even further improve performance when querying. You can download the source from the Microsoft Codeplex site http://rapidrepository.codeplex.com/. Setting up a view Lets say you have an entity that stores lots of data about a game result for example: GameScore entity public class GameScore : IRapidEntity { public Guid Id { get; set; } public string GamerId {get;set;} public string Name { get; set; } public Double Score { get; set; } public Byte[] ThumbnailAvatar { get; set; } public DateTime DateAdded { get; set; } } On your page you want to display a list of scores but you only want to display the score and the date added, you create a View Model for displaying just those properties. GameScoreView public class GameScoreView : IRapidView { public Guid Id { get; set; } public Double Score { get; set; } public DateTime DateAdded { get; set; } } Now you have the view model, the first thing to do is set up the view at application start up. This is done using the following syntax. View Setup public MainPage() { RapidRepository<GameScore>.AddView<GameScoreView>(x => new GameScoreView { DateAdded = x.DateAdded, Score = x.Score }); } As you can see, using a little bit of lambda syntax, you put in the code for constructing a single view, this is used internally for mapping an entity to a view. *Note* you do not need to map the Id property, this is done automatically, a view model id will always be the same as it’s corresponding entity. Adding Filters One of the cool features of the view is that you can add filters to limit the amount of data stored in the view, this will dramatically improve performance. You can add multiple filters using the fluent syntax if required. In this example, lets say that you will only ever show the scores for the last 10 days, you could add a filter like the following: Add single filter public MainPage() { RapidRepository<GameScore>.AddView<GameScoreView>(x => new GameScoreView { DateAdded = x.DateAdded, Score = x.Score }) .AddFilter(x => x.DateAdded > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10)); } If you wanted to further limit the data, you could also say only scores above 100: Add multiple filters public MainPage() { RapidRepository<GameScore>.AddView<GameScoreView>(x => new GameScoreView { DateAdded = x.DateAdded, Score = x.Score }) .AddFilter(x => x.DateAdded > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10)) .AddFilter(x => x.Score > 100); } Querying the view model So the important part is how to query the data. This is done using the repository, there is a method called Query which accepts the type of view as a generic parameter (you can have multiple View Model types per entity type) You can either use the result of the query method directly or perform further querying on the result is required. Querying the View public void DisplayScores() { RapidRepository<GameScore> repository = new RapidRepository<GameScore>(); List<GameScoreView> scores = repository.Query<GameScoreView>(); // display logic } Further Filtering public void TodaysScores() { RapidRepository<GameScore> repository = new RapidRepository<GameScore>(); List<GameScoreView> todaysScores = repository.Query<GameScoreView>().Where(x => x.DateAdded > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1)).ToList(); // display logic } Retrieving the actual entity Retrieving the actual entity can be done easily by using the GetById method on the repository. Say for example you allow the user to click on a specific score to get further information, you can use the Id populated in the returned View Model GameScoreView and use it directly on the repository to retrieve the full entity. Get Full Entity public void GetFullEntity(Guid gameScoreViewId) { RapidRepository<GameScore> repository = new RapidRepository<GameScore>(); GameScore fullEntity = repository.GetById(gameScoreViewId); // display logic } Synchronising The View If you are upgrading from Rapid Repository V1.0 and are likely to have data in the repository already, you will need to perform a synchronisation to ensure the views and entities are fully in sync. You can either do this as a one off during the application upgrade or if you are a little more cautious, you could run this at each application start up. Synchronise the view public void MyUpgradeTasks() { RapidRepository<GameScore>.SynchroniseView<GameScoreView>(); } It’s worth noting that in normal operation, the view keeps itself in sync with the entities so this is only really required if you are upgrading from V1.0 to V2.0 when it gets released shortly. Summary I really hope you like this feature, it will be great for performance and I believe supports good practice by promoting the use of View Models for specific pages. I’m hoping to produce a beta for this over the next few days, I just want to add some more tests and hopefully iron out any bugs. I would really appreciate any thoughts on this feature and would really love to know of any bugs you find. You can download the source from the following : http://rapidrepository.codeplex.com/ Kind Regards, Sean McAlinden.

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Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData

- by Stephen Walther

At the last MIX conference, Netflix announced that they are exposing their catalog of movie information using the OData protocol. This is great news! This means that you can take advantage of all of the advanced OData querying features against a live database of Netflix movies. In this blog entry, I’ll demonstrate how you can use Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData to create a simple movie lookup form. The form enables you to enter a movie title, or part of a movie title, and display a list of matching movies. For example, Figure 1 illustrates the movies displayed when you enter the value robot into the lookup form. Using the Netflix OData Catalog API You can learn about the Netflix OData Catalog API at the following website: http://developer.netflix.com/docs/oData_Catalog The nice thing about this website is that it provides plenty of samples. It also has a good general reference for OData. For example, the website includes a list of OData filter operators and functions. The Netflix Catalog API exposes 4 top-level resources: Titles – A database of Movie information including interesting movie properties such as synopsis, BoxArt, and Cast. People – A database of people information including interesting information such as Awards, TitlesDirected, and TitlesActedIn. Languages – Enables you to get title information in different languages. Genres – Enables you to get title information for specific movie genres. OData is REST based. This means that you can perform queries by putting together the right URL. For example, if you want to get a list of the movies that were released after 2010 and that had an average rating greater than 4 then you can enter the following URL in the address bar of your browser: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=ReleaseYear gt 2010&AverageRating gt 4 Entering this URL returns the movies in Figure 2. Creating the Movie Lookup Form The complete code for the Movie Lookup form is contained in Listing 1. Listing 1 – MovieLookup.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Netflix with jQuery</title> <style type="text/css"> #movieTemplateContainer div { width:400px; padding: 10px; margin: 10px; border: black solid 1px; } </style> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <label>Search Movies:</label> <input id="movieName" size="50" /> <button id="btnLookup">Lookup</button> <div id="movieTemplateContainer"></div> <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnLookup").click(function () { // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); }); function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } </script> </body> </html> The HTML page in Listing 1 includes two JavaScript libraries: <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> The first script tag retrieves jQuery from the Microsoft Ajax CDN. You can learn more about the Microsoft Ajax CDN by visiting the following website: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/cdn.ashx The second script tag is used to reference Resig’s micro-templating library. Because I want to use a template to display each movie, I need this library: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/ When you enter a value into the Search Movies input field and click the button, the following JavaScript code is executed: // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); This code Is used to build a query that will be executed against the Netflix Catalog API. For example, if you enter the search phrase King Kong then the following URL is created: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=substringof(‘King%20Kong’,Name)&$callback=callback&$format=json This query includes the following parameters: $filter – You assign a filter expression to this parameter to filter the movie results. $callback – You assign the name of a JavaScript callback method to this parameter. OData calls this method to return the movie results. $format – you assign either the value json or xml to this parameter to specify how the format of the movie results. Notice that all of the OData parameters -- $filter, $callback, $format -- start with a dollar sign $. The Movie Lookup form uses JSONP to retrieve data across the Internet. Because WCF Data Services supports JSONP, and Netflix uses WCF Data Services to expose movies using the OData protocol, you can use JSONP when interacting with the Netflix Catalog API. To learn more about using JSONP with OData, see Pablo Castro’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/archive/2009/02/25/adding-support-for-jsonp-and-url-controlled-format-to-ado-net-data-services.aspx The actual JSONP call is performed by calling the $.ajax() method. When this call successfully completes, the JavaScript callback() method is called. The callback() method looks like this: function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } The movie results from Netflix are passed to the callback method. The callback method takes advantage of Resig’s micro-templating library to display each of the movie results. A template used to display each movie is passed to the tmpl() method. The movie template looks like this: <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script> This template looks like a server-side ASP.NET template. However, the template is rendered in the client (browser) instead of the server. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to demonstrate how well jQuery works with OData. We managed to use a number of interesting open-source libraries and open protocols while building the Movie Lookup form including jQuery, JSONP, JSON, and OData.

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Run Windows in Ubuntu with VMware Player

- by Matthew Guay

Are you an enthusiast who loves their Ubuntu Linux experience but still needs to use Windows programs? Here’s how you can get the full Windows experience on Ubuntu with the free VMware Player. Linux has become increasingly consumer friendly, but still, the wide majority of commercial software is only available for Windows and Macs. Dual-booting between Windows and Linux has been a popular option for years, but this is a frustrating solution since you have to reboot into the other operating system each time you want to run a specific application. With virtualization, you’ll never have to make this tradeoff. VMware Player makes it quick and easy to install any edition of Windows in a virtual machine. With VMware’s great integration tools, you can copy and paste between your Linux and Windows programs and even run native Windows applications side-by-side with Linux ones. Getting Started Download the latest version of VMware Player for Linux, and select either the 32-bit or 64-bit version, depending on your system. VMware Player is a free download, but requires registration. Sign in with your VMware account, or create a new one if you don’t already have one. VMware Player is fairly easy to install on Linux, but you will need to start out the installation from the terminal. First, enter the following to make sure the installer is marked as executable, substituting version/build_number for the version number on the end of the file you downloaded. chmod +x ./VMware-Player-version/build_number.bundle Then, enter the following to start the install, again substituting your version number: gksudo bash ./VMware-Player-version/build_number.bundle You may have to enter your administrator password to start the installation, and then the VMware Player graphical installer will open. Choose whether you want to check for product updates and submit usage data to VMware, and then proceed with the install as normal. VMware Player installed in only a few minutes in our tests, and was immediately ready to run, no reboot required. You can now launch it from your Ubuntu menu: click Applications \ System Tools \ VMware Player. You’ll need to accept the license agreement the first time you run it. Welcome to VMware Player! Now you can create new virtual machines and run pre-built ones on your Ubuntu desktop. Install Windows in VMware Player on Ubuntu Now that you’ve got VMware setup, it’s time to put it to work. Click the Create a New Virtual Machine as above to start making a Windows virtual machine. In the dialog that opens, select your installer disk or ISO image file that you want to install Windows from. In this example, we’re select a Windows 7 ISO. VMware will automatically detect the operating system on the disk or image. Click Next to continue. Enter your Windows product key, select the edition of Windows to install, and enter your name and password. You can leave the product key field blank and enter it later. VMware will ask if you want to continue without a product key, so just click Yes to continue. Now enter a name for your virtual machine and select where you want to save it. Note: This will take up at least 15Gb of space on your hard drive during the install, so make sure to save it on a drive with sufficient storage space. You can choose how large you want your virtual hard drive to be; the default is 40Gb, but you can choose a different size if you wish. The entire amount will not be used up on your hard drive initially, but the virtual drive will increase in size up to your maximum as you add files. Additionally, you can choose if you want the virtual disk stored as a single file or as multiple files. You will see the best performance by keeping the virtual disk as one file, but the virtual machine will be more portable if it is broken into smaller files, so choose the option that will work best for your needs. Finally, review your settings, and if everything looks good, click Finish to create the virtual machine. VMware will take over now, and install Windows without any further input using its Easy Install. This is one of VMware’s best features, and is the main reason we find it the easiest desktop virtualization solution to use. Installing VMware Tools VMware Player doesn’t include the VMware Tools by default; instead, it automatically downloads them for the operating system you’re installing. Once you’ve downloaded them, it will use those tools anytime you install that OS. If this is your first Windows virtual machine to install, you may be prompted to download and install them while Windows is installing. Click Download and Install so your Easy Install will finish successfully. VMware will then download and install the tools. You may need to enter your administrative password to complete the install. Other than this, you can leave your Windows install unattended; VMware will get everything installed and running on its own. Our test setup took about 30 minutes, and when it was done we were greeted with the Windows desktop ready to use, complete with drivers and the VMware tools. The only thing missing was the Aero glass feature. VMware Player is supposed to support the Aero glass effects in virtual machines, and although this works every time when we use VMware Player on Windows, we could not get it to work in Linux. Other than that, Windows is fully ready to use. You can copy and paste text, images, or files between Ubuntu and Windows, or simply drag-and-drop files between the two. Unity Mode Using Windows in a window is awkward, and makes your Windows programs feel out of place and hard to use. This is where Unity mode comes in. Click Virtual Machine in VMware’s menu, and select Enter Unity. Your Windows desktop will now disappear, and you’ll see a new Windows menu underneath your Ubuntu menu. This works the same as your Windows Start Menu, and you can open your Windows applications and files directly from it. By default, programs from Windows will have a colored border and a VMware badge in the corner. You can turn this off from the VMware settings pane. Click Virtual Machine in VMware’s menu and select Virtual Machine Settings. Select Unity under the Options tab, and uncheck the Show borders and Show badges boxes if you don’t want them. Unity makes your Windows programs feel at home in Ubuntu. Here we have Word 2010 and IE8 open beside the Ubuntu Help application. Notice that the Windows applications show up in the taskbar on the bottom just like the Linux programs. If you’re using the Compiz graphics effects in Ubuntu, your Windows programs will use them too, including the popular wobbly windows effect. You can switch back to running Windows inside VMware Player’s window by clicking the Exit Unity button in the VMware window. Now, whenever you want to run Windows applications in Linux, you can quickly launch it from VMware Player. Conclusion VMware Player is a great way to run Windows on your Linux computer. It makes it extremely easy to get Windows installed and running, lets you run your Windows programs seamlessly alongside your Linux ones. VMware products work great in our experience, and VMware Player on Linux was no exception. If you’re a Windows user and you’d like to run Ubuntu on Windows, check out our article on how to Run Ubuntu in Windows with VMware Player. Link Download VMware Player 3 (Registration required) Download Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day trial Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Enable Copy and Paste from Ubuntu VMware GuestInstall VMware Tools on Ubuntu Edgy EftRestart the Ubuntu Gnome User Interface QuicklyHow to Add a Program to the Ubuntu Startup List (After Login)How To Run Ubuntu in Windows 7 with VMware Player TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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Running ASP.NET Webforms and ASP.NET MVC side by side

- by rajbk

One of the nice things about ASP.NET MVC and its older brother ASP.NET WebForms is that they are both built on top of the ASP.NET runtime environment. The advantage of this is that, you can still run them side by side even though MVC and WebForms are different frameworks. Another point to note is that with the release of the ASP.NET routing in .NET 3.5 SP1, we are able to create SEO friendly URLs that do not map to specific files on disk. The routing is part of the core runtime environment and therefore can be used by both WebForms and MVC. To run both frameworks side by side, we could easily create a separate folder in your MVC project for all our WebForm files and be good to go. What this post shows you instead, is how to have an MVC application with WebForm pages that both use a common master page and common routing for SEO friendly URLs. A sample project that shows WebForms and MVC running side by side is attached at the bottom of this post. So why would we want to run WebForms and MVC in the same project? WebForms come with a lot of nice server controls that provide a lot of functionality. One example is the ReportViewer control. Using this control and client report definition files (RDLC), we can create rich interactive reports (with charting controls). I show you how to use the ReportViewer control in a WebForm project here : Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010. We can create even more advanced reports by using SQL reporting services that can also be rendered by the ReportViewer control. Now, consider the sample MVC application I blogged about called ASP.NET MVC Paging/Sorting/Filtering using the MVCContrib Grid and Pager. Assume you were given the requirement to add a UI to the MVC application where users could interact with a report and be given the option to export the report to Excel, PDF or Word. How do you go about doing it? This is a perfect scenario to use the ReportViewer control and RDLCs. As you saw in the post on creating the ASP.NET report, the ReportViewer control is a Web Control and is designed to be run in a WebForm project with dependencies on, amongst others, a ScriptManager control and the beloved Viewstate. Since MVC and WebForm both run under the same runtime, the easiest thing to is to add the WebForm application files (index.aspx, rdlc, related class files) into our MVC project. You can copy the files over from the WebForm project into the MVC project. Create a new folder in our MVC application called CommonReports. Add the index.aspx and rdlc file from the Webform project Right click on the Index.aspx file and convert it to a web application. This will add the index.aspx.designer.cs file (this step is not required if you are manually adding a WebForm aspx file into the MVC project). Verify that all the type names for the ObjectDataSources in code behind to point to the correct ProductRepository and fix any compiler errors. Right click on Index.aspx and select “View in browser”. You should see a screen like the one below: There are two issues with our page. It does not use our site master page and the URL is not SEO friendly. Common Master Page The easiest way to use master pages with both MVC and WebForm pages is to have a common master page that each inherits from as shown below. The reason for this is most WebForm controls require them to be inside a Form control and require ControlState or ViewState. ViewMasterPages used in MVC, on the other hand, are designed to be used with content pages that derive from ViewPage with Viewstate turned off. By having a separate master page for MVC and WebForm that inherit from the Root master page,, we can set properties that are specific to each. For example, in the Webform master, we can turn on ViewState, add a form tag etc. Another point worth noting is that if you set a WebForm page to use a MVC site master page, you may run into errors like the following: A ViewMasterPage can be used only with content pages that derive from ViewPage or ViewPage<TViewItem> or Control 'MainContent_MyButton' of type 'Button' must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server. Since the ViewMasterPage inherits from MasterPage as seen below, we make our Root.master inherit from MasterPage, MVC.master inherit from ViewMasterPage and Webform.master inherits from MasterPage. We define the attributes on the master pages like so: Root.master <%@ Master Inherits="System.Web.UI.MasterPage" … %> MVC.master <%@ Master MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Root.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage" … %> WebForm.master <%@ Master MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Root.Master" Inherits="NorthwindSales.Views.Shared.Webform" %> Code behind: public partial class Webform : System.Web.UI.MasterPage {} We make changes to our reports aspx file to use the Webform.master. See the source of the master pages in the sample project for a better understanding of how they are connected. SEO friendly links We want to create SEO friendly links that point to our report. A request to /Reports/Products should render the report located in ~/CommonReports/Products.aspx. Simillarly to support future reports, a request to /Reports/Sales should render a report in ~/CommonReports/Sales.aspx. Lets start by renaming our index.aspx file to Products.aspx to be consistent with our routing criteria above. As mentioned earlier, since routing is part of the core runtime environment, we ca easily create a custom route for our reports by adding an entry in Global.asax. public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); //Custom route for reports routes.MapPageRoute( "ReportRoute", // Route name "Reports/{reportname}", // URL "~/CommonReports/{reportname}.aspx" // File ); routes.MapRoute( "Default", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults ); } With our custom route in place, a request to Reports/Employees will render the page at ~/CommonReports/Employees.aspx. We make this custom route the first entry since the routing system walks the table from top to bottom, and the first route to match wins. Note that it is highly recommended that you write unit tests for your routes to ensure that the mappings you defined are correct. Common Menu Structure The master page in our original MVC project had a menu structure like so: <ul id="menu"> <li> <%=Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home") %></li> <li> <%=Html.ActionLink("Products", "Index", "Products") %></li> <li> <%=Html.ActionLink("Help", "Help", "Home") %></li> </ul> We want this menu structure to be common to all pages/views and hence should reside in Root.master. Unfortunately the Html.ActionLink helpers will not work since Root.master inherits from MasterPage which does not have the helper methods available. The quickest way to resolve this issue is to use RouteUrl expressions. Using RouteUrl expressions, we can programmatically generate URLs that are based on route definitions. By specifying parameter values and a route name if required, we get back a URL string that corresponds to a matching route. We move our menu structure to Root.master and change it to use RouteUrl expressions: <ul id="menu"> <li> <asp:HyperLink ID="hypHome" runat="server" NavigateUrl="<%$RouteUrl:routename=default,controller=home,action=index%>">Home</asp:HyperLink></li> <li> <asp:HyperLink ID="hypProducts" runat="server" NavigateUrl="<%$RouteUrl:routename=default,controller=products,action=index%>">Products</asp:HyperLink></li> <li> <asp:HyperLink ID="hypReport" runat="server" NavigateUrl="<%$RouteUrl:routename=ReportRoute,reportname=products%>">Product Report</asp:HyperLink></li> <li> <asp:HyperLink ID="hypHelp" runat="server" NavigateUrl="<%$RouteUrl:routename=default,controller=home,action=help%>">Help</asp:HyperLink></li> </ul> We are done adding the common navigation to our application. The application now uses a common theme, routing and navigation structure. Conclusion We have seen how to do the following through this post Add a WebForm page from a WebForm project to an existing ASP.NET MVC application Use a common master page for both WebForm and MVC pages Use routing for SEO friendly links Use a common menu structure for both WebForm and MVC. The sample project is attached below. Version: VS 2010 RTM Remember to change your connection string to point to your Northwind database NorthwindSalesMVCWebform.zip

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Azure - Part 4 - Table Storage Service in Windows Azure

- by Shaun

In Windows Azure platform there are 3 storage we can use to save our data on the cloud. They are the Table, Blob and Queue. Before the Chinese New Year Microsoft announced that Azure SDK 1.1 had been released and it supports a new type of storage – Drive, which allows us to operate NTFS files on the cloud. I will cover it in the coming few posts but now I would like to talk a bit about the Table Storage. Concept of Table Storage Service The most common development scenario is to retrieve, create, update and remove data from the data storage. In the normal way we communicate with database. When we attempt to move our application over to the cloud the most common requirement should be have a storage service. Windows Azure provides a in-build service that allow us to storage the structured data, which is called Windows Azure Table Storage Service. The data stored in the table service are like the collection of entities. And the entities are similar to rows or records in the tradtional database. An entity should had a partition key, a row key, a timestamp and set of properties. You can treat the partition key as a group name, the row key as a primary key and the timestamp as the identifer for solving the concurrency problem. Different with a table in a database, the table service does not enforce the schema for tables, which means you can have 2 entities in the same table with different property sets. The partition key is being used for the load balance of the Azure OS and the group entity transaction. As you know in the cloud you will never know which machine is hosting your application and your data. It could be moving based on the transaction weight and the number of the requests. If the Azure OS found that there are many requests connect to your Book entities with the partition key equals “Novel” it will move them to another idle machine to increase the performance. So when choosing the partition key for your entities you need to make sure they indecate the category or gourp information so that the Azure OS can perform the load balance as you wish. Consuming the Table Although the table service looks like a database, you cannot access it through the way you are using now, neither ADO.NET nor ODBC. The table service exposed itself by ADO.NET Data Service protocol, which allows you can consume it through the RESTful style by Http requests. The Azure SDK provides a sets of classes for us to connect it. There are 2 classes we might need: TableServiceContext and TableServiceEntity. The TableServiceContext inherited from the DataServiceContext, which represents the runtime context of the ADO.NET data service. It provides 4 methods mainly used by us: CreateQuery: It will create a IQueryable instance from a given type of entity. AddObject: Add the specified entity into Table Service. UpdateObject: Update an existing entity in the Table Service. DeleteObject: Delete an entity from the Table Service. Beofre you operate the table service you need to provide the valid account information. It’s something like the connect string of the database but with your account name and the account key when you created the storage service on the Windows Azure Development Portal. After getting the CloudStorageAccount you can create the CloudTableClient instance which provides a set of methods for using the table service. A very useful method would be CreateTableIfNotExist. It will create the table container for you if it’s not exsited. And then you can operate the eneities to that table through the methods I mentioned above. Let me explain a bit more through an exmaple. We always like code rather than sentence. Straightforward Accessing to the Table Here I would like to build a WCF service on the Windows Azure platform, and for now just one requirement: it would allow the client to create an account entity on the table service. The WCF service would have a method named Register and accept an instance of the account which the client wants to create. After perform some validation it will add the entity into the table service. So the first thing I should do is to create a Cloud Application on my VIstial Studio 2010 RC. (The Azure SDK 1.1 only supports VS2008 and VS2010 RC.) The solution should be like this below. Then I added a configuration items for the storage account through the Settings section under the cloud project. (Double click the Services file under Roles folder and navigate to the Setting section.) This setting will be used when to retrieve my storage account information. Since for now I just in the development phase I will select “UseDevelopmentStorage=true”. And then I navigated to the WebRole.cs file under my WCF project. If you have read my previous posts you would know that this file defines the process when the application start, and terminate on the cloud. What I need to do is to when the application start, set the configuration publisher to load my config file with the config name I specified. So the code would be like below. I removed the original service and contract created by the VS template and add my IAccountService contract and its implementation class - AccountService. And I add the service method Register with the parameters: email, password and it will return a boolean value to indicates the result which is very simple. At this moment if I press F5 the application will be established on my local development fabric and I can see my service runs well through the browser. Let’s implement the service method Rigister, add a new entity to the table service. As I said before the entities you want to store in the table service must have 3 properties: partition key, row key and timespan. You can create a class with these 3 properties. The Azure SDK provides us a base class for that named TableServiceEntity in Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient namespace. So what we need to do is more simply, create a class named Account and let it derived from the TableServiceEntity. And I need to add my own properties: Email, Password, DateCreated and DateDeleted. The DateDeleted is a nullable date time value to indecate whether this entity had been deleted and when. Do you notice that I missed something here? Yes it’s the partition key and row key I didn’t assigned. The TableServiceEntity base class defined 2 constructors one was a parameter-less constructor which will be used to fill values into the properties from the table service when retrieving data. The other was one with 2 parameters: partition key and row key. As I said below the partition key may affect the load balance and the row key must be unique so here I would like to use the email as the parition key and the email plus a Guid as the row key. OK now we finished the entity class we need to store onto the table service. The next step is to create a data access class for us to add it. Azure SDK gives us a base class for it named TableServiceContext as I mentioned below. So let’s create a class for operate the Account entities. The TableServiceContext need the storage account information for its constructor. It’s the combination of the storage service URI that we will create on Windows Azure platform, and the relevant account name and key. The TableServiceContext will use this information to find the related address and verify the account to operate the storage entities. Hence in my AccountDataContext class I need to override this constructor and pass the storage account into it. All entities will be saved in the table storage with one or many tables which we call them “table containers”. Before we operate an entity we need to make sure that the table container had been created on the storage. There’s a method we can use for that: CloudTableClient.CreateTableIfNotExist. So in the constructor I will perform it firstly to make sure all method will be invoked after the table had been created. Notice that I passed the storage account enpoint URI and the credentials to specify where my storage is located and who am I. Another advise is that, make your entity class name as the same as the table name when create the table. It will increase the performance when you operate it over the cloud especially querying. Since the Register WCF method will add a new account into the table service, here I will create a relevant method to add the account entity. Before implement, I should add a reference - System.Data.Services.Client to the project. This reference provides some common method within the ADO.NET Data Service which can be used in the Windows Azure Table Service. I will use its AddObject method to create my account entity. Since the table service are not fully implemented the ADO.NET Data Service, there are some methods in the System.Data.Services.Client that TableServiceContext doesn’t support, such as AddLinks, etc. Then I implemented the serivce method to add the account entity through the AccountDataContext. You can see in the service implmentation I load the storage account information through my configuration file and created the account table entity from the parameters. Then I created the AccountDataContext. If it’s my first time to invoke this method the constructor of the AccountDataContext will create a table container for me. Then I use Add method to add the account entity into the table. Next, let’s create a farely simple client application to test this service. I created a windows console application and added a service reference to my WCF service. The metadata information of the WCF service cannot be retrieved if it’s deployed on the Windows Azure even though the <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/> had been set. If we need to get its metadata we can deploy it on the local development service and then changed the endpoint to the address which is on the cloud. In the client side app.config file I specified the endpoint to the local development fabric address. And the just implement the client to let me input an email and a password then invoke the WCF service to add my acocunt. Let’s run my application and see the result. Of course it should return TRUE to me. And in the local SQL Express I can see the data had been saved in the table. Summary In this post I explained more about the Windows Azure Table Storage Service. I also created a small application for demostration of how to connect and consume it through the ADO.NET Data Service Managed Library provided within the Azure SDK. I only show how to create an eneity in the storage service. In the next post I would like to explain about how to query the entities with conditions thruogh LINQ. I also would like to refactor my AccountDataContext class to make it dyamic for any kinds of entities. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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Metro: Introduction to the WinJS ListView Control

- by Stephen.Walther

The goal of this blog entry is to provide a quick introduction to the ListView control – just the bare minimum that you need to know to start using the control. When building Metro style applications using JavaScript, the ListView control is the primary control that you use for displaying lists of items. For example, if you are building a product catalog app, then you can use the ListView control to display the list of products. The ListView control supports several advanced features that I plan to discuss in future blog entries. For example, you can group the items in a ListView, you can create master/details views with a ListView, and you can efficiently work with large sets of items with a ListView. In this blog entry, we’ll keep things simple and focus on displaying a list of products. There are three things that you need to do in order to display a list of items with a ListView: Create a data source Create an Item Template Declare the ListView Creating the ListView Data Source The first step is to create (or retrieve) the data that you want to display with the ListView. In most scenarios, you will want to bind a ListView to a WinJS.Binding.List object. The nice thing about the WinJS.Binding.List object is that it enables you to take a standard JavaScript array and convert the array into something that can be bound to the ListView. It doesn’t matter where the JavaScript array comes from. It could be a static array that you declare or you could retrieve the array as the result of an Ajax call to a remote server. The following JavaScript file – named products.js – contains a list of products which can be bound to a ListView. (function () { "use strict"; var products = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { name: "Milk", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Oranges", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Wine", price: 8.55 }, { name: "Apples", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Steak", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Eggs", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Mushrooms", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Yogurt", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Soup", price: 1.99 }, { name: "Cereal", price: 2.44 }, { name: "Pepsi", price: 1.99 } ]); WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { products: products }); })(); The products variable represents a WinJS.Binding.List object. This object is initialized with a plain-old JavaScript array which represents an array of products. To avoid polluting the global namespace, the code above uses the module pattern and exposes the products using a namespace. The list of products is exposed to the world as ListViewDemos.products. To learn more about the module pattern and namespaces in WinJS, see my earlier blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/22/metro-namespaces-and-modules.aspx Creating the ListView Item Template The ListView control does not know how to render anything. It doesn’t know how you want each list item to appear. To get the ListView control to render something useful, you must create an Item Template. Here’s what our template for rendering an individual product looks like: <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> This template displays the product name and price from the data source. Normally, you will declare your template in the same file as you declare the ListView control. In our case, both the template and ListView are declared in the default.html file. To learn more about templates, see my earlier blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/27/metro-using-templates.aspx Declaring the ListView The final step is to declare the ListView control in a page. Here’s the markup for declaring a ListView: <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate') }"> </div> You declare a ListView by adding the data-win-control to an HTML DIV tag. The data-win-options attribute is used to set two properties of the ListView. The ListView is associated with its data source with the itemDataSource property. Notice that the data source is ListViewDemos.products.dataSource and not just ListViewDemos.products. You need to associate the ListView with the dataSoure property. The ListView is associated with its item template with the help of the itemTemplate property. The ID of the item template — #productTemplate – is used to select the template from the page. Here’s what the complete version of the default.html page looks like: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewDemos</title>  <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script>  <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script src="/js/products.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .product { width: 200px; height: 100px; border: white solid 1px; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate') }"> </div> </body> </html> Notice that the page above includes a reference to the products.js file: <script src=”/js/products.js” type=”text/javascript”></script> The page above also contains a Template control which contains the ListView item template. Finally, the page includes the declaration of the ListView control. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe the minimal set of steps which you must complete to use the WinJS ListView control to display a simple list of items. You learned how to create a data source, declare an item template, and declare a ListView control.

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Week in Geek: FBI Back Door in OpenBSD Edition

- by Asian Angel

This week we learned how to migrate bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo, fix annoying arrows, play old-school DOS games, schedule smart computer shutdowns, use breaks in Microsoft Word to better format documents, check the condition of hard-disks using Linux disk utilities, & what the Linux fstab is and how it works. Photo by Jameson42. Random Geek Links Another week with extra news link goodness to help keep you up to date. Photo by justmakeit. Report of FBI back door roils OpenBSD community Allegations that the FBI surreptitiously placed a back door into the OpenBSD operating system have alarmed the computer security community, prompting calls for an audit of the source code and claims that the charges must be a hoax. Fortinet: Job outlook improving for cybercrooks In an ironic twist in the job market, more positions will open up for developers who can write customized malware packers, people who can break CAPTCHA codes, and distributors who can spread malicious code, according to Fortinet. Enisa: Malware for smartphones is a ’serious risk’ Businesses and consumers are at risk of data breaches through smartphone use, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency. The trick with the f: Google and Microsoft web sites distribute malware Last week, Google’s DoubleClick advertising platform and Microsoft’s rad.msn.com online ad network briefly distributed malware to other web sites in the form of advertising banners. New scam tactic: Fake disk defraggers It would appear that scammers are trying out new programs to see which might best confuse potential victims and evade detection by legitimate antivirus software. Microsoft closes IE and Stuxnet holes As previously announced, Microsoft has released 17 security updates to close 40 security holes. All four Windows holes so far disclosed in connection with Stuxnet have now been closed. Microsoft Offers H.264 Support to Firefox on Windows via Add-On The new HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in add-on from Microsoft offers users that are running Firefox on Windows 7 H.264 support for HTML5 video playback. Google proclaims Chrome business-ready Google has announced that Chrome is ready for corporate use. Microsoft Tells Exchange Customers to Think Twice Before Opting for Google Message Continuity This week, Microsoft is telling companies still running Exchange 2010’s precursors that they should carefully consider the implications of embracing Google Message Continuity. Who Google has in mind for its Chrome OS users Steven Vaughan-Nichols explains why he feels that Chrome OS will be ideal for either office-workers or people who need a computer, but do not know the first thing about how to use one safely. Oracle takes office suite to the cloud Oracle has introduced Cloud Office 1.0, a cloud-based version of its office suite, which is aimed at web and mobile users. Mozilla pays premiums for reports of vulnerabilities The Mozilla Foundation has followed Google’s example by expanding its rewards program for reports of vulnerabilities in its Web applications. Who bought those 882 Novell patents? Not just Microsoft The mysterious CPTN Holdings — the organization that bought the 882 Novell patents as part of the terms of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell – has been unmasked (Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle). Appeals court: Feds need warrants for e-mail Police must obtain search warrants before perusing Internet users’ e-mail records, a federal appeals court ruled today in a landmark decision that struck down part of a 1986 law allowing warrantless access. Geek Video of the Week What happens when someone plays a wicked prank by shoveling crazy snow paths that lead to dead ends or turn back on themselves? Watch to find out! Photo by CollegeHumor. Janitor Snow Shoveling Prank Random TinyHacker Links The Oatmeal on Cat vs Internet What lengths will our poor neglected kitty hero have to go to in order to get some attention? Guide On Using JoliCloud With Windows JoliCloud is a nifty operating system that’s made for people who need a light-weight OS that’s mostly cloud based. Check this guide on using it with Windows. Use Cameyo to Easily Create Portable Programs Here’s a nifty tool to make portable apps out of programs in Windows. Check out the guide to do it. Better Family Tech Support A nice new site by Google to help members of family understand how computers work. Track Your Stolen Mobile Phone With F-Secure A useful anti-theft tool for your mobile phone. Super User Questions Another week with great answers to popular questions from Super User. What Chrome password manager fits my requirements? What’s the best way to be able to reimage windows computers? Could you suggest feature-rich disk-based personal backup program for linux (and I’ve seen a few)? What is IPv6 and why should I care? Is there any way to find out what programs are trying to connect to Internet on windows? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Here are our hottest articles full of geeky goodness from this past week at HTG. 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Kills Viruses Dead. Download It Now. Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? Ask the Readers: Would You Be Willing to Give Windows Up and Use a Different O.S.? The Twelve Days of Geekmas One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy reading through our latest batch of retro-geek goodness from one year ago. Macrium Reflect is a Free and Easy To Use Backup Utility How To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd How To Restore Windows 7 from a System Image How To Manage Hard Drive Space Used by Windows 7 Backup and Restore How To Manage Hibernate Mode in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week, so see you back here again after the holidays! Got a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by mitjamavsar. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Deathwing the Destroyer – WoW Cataclysm Dragon Wallpaper Drag2Up Lets You Drag and Drop Files to the Web With Ease The Spam Police Parts 1 and 2 – Goodbye Spammers [Videos] Snow Angels Theme for Windows 7 Exploring the Jungle Ruins Wallpaper Protect Your Privacy When Browsing with Chrome and Iron Browser

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Create a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash Drive

- by Trevor Bekolay

The Ubuntu Live CD isn’t just useful for trying out Ubuntu before you install it, you can also use it to maintain and repair your Windows PC. Even if you have no intention of installing Linux, every Windows user should have a bootable Ubuntu USB drive on hand in case something goes wrong in Windows. Creating a bootable USB flash drive is surprisingly easy with a small self-contained application called UNetbootin. It will even download Ubuntu for you! Note: Ubuntu will take up approximately 700 MB on your flash drive, so choose a flash drive with at least 1 GB of free space, formatted as FAT32. This process should not remove any existing files on the flash drive, but to be safe you should backup the files on your flash drive. Put Ubuntu on your flash drive UNetbootin doesn’t require installation; just download the application and run it. Select Ubuntu from the Distribution drop-down box, then 9.10_Live from the Version drop-down box. If you have a 64-bit machine, then select 9.10_Live_x64 for the Version. At the bottom of the screen, select the drive letter that corresponds to the USB drive that you want to put Ubuntu on. If you select USB Drive in the Type drop-down box, the only drive letters available will be USB flash drives. Click OK and UNetbootin will start doing its thing. First it will download the Ubuntu Live CD. Then, it will copy the files from the Ubuntu Live CD to your flash drive. The amount of time it takes will vary depending on your Internet speed, an when it’s done, click on Exit. You’re not planning on installing Ubuntu right now, so there’s no need to reboot. If you look at the USB drive now, you should see a bunch of new files and folders. If you had files on the drive before, they should still be present. You’re now ready to boot your computer into Ubuntu 9.10! How to boot into Ubuntu When the time comes that you have to boot into Ubuntu, or if you just want to test and make sure that your flash drive works properly, you will have to set your computer to boot off of the flash drive. The steps to do this will vary depending on your BIOS – which varies depending on your motherboard. To get detailed instructions on changing how your computer boots, search for your motherboard’s manual (or your laptop’s manual for a laptop). For general instructions, which will suffice for 99% of you, read on. Find the important keyboard keys When your computer boots up, a bunch of words and numbers flash across the screen, usually to be ignored. This time, you need to scan the boot-up screen for a few key words with some associated keys: Boot menu and Setup. Typically, these will show up at the bottom of the screen. If your BIOS has a Boot Menu, then read on. Otherwise, skip to the Hard: Using Setup section. Easy: Using the Boot Menu If your BIOS offers a Boot Menu, then during the boot-up process, press the button associated with the Boot Menu. In our case, this is ESC. Our example Boot Menu doesn’t have the ability to boot from USB, but your Boot Menu should have some options, such as USB-CDROM, USB-HDD, USB-FLOPPY, and others. Try the options that start with USB until you find one that works. Don’t worry if it doesn’t work – you can just restart and try again. Using the Boot Menu does not change the normal boot order on your system, so the next time you start up your computer it will boot from the hard drive as normal. Hard: Using Setup If your BIOS doesn’t offer a Boot Menu, then you will have to change the boot order in Setup. Note: There are some options in BIOS Setup that can affect the stability of your machine. Take care to only change the boot order options. Press the button associated with Setup. In our case, this is F2. If your BIOS Setup has a Boot tab, then switch to it and change the order such that one of the USB options occurs first. There may be several USB options, such as USB-CDROM, USB-HDD, USB-FLOPPY, and others; try them out to see which one works for you. If your BIOS does not have a boot tab, boot order is commonly found in Advanced CMOS Options. Note that this changes the boot order permanently until you change it back. If you plan on only plugging in a bootable flash drive when you want to boot from it, then you could leave the boot order as it is, but you may find it easier to switch the order back to the previous order when you reboot from Ubuntu. Booting into Ubuntu If you set the right boot option, then you should be greeted with the UNetbootin screen. Press enter to start Ubuntu with the default options, or wait 10 seconds for this to happen automatically. Ubuntu will start loading. It should go straight to the desktop with no need for a username or password. And that’s it! From this live desktop session, you can try out Ubuntu, and even install software that is not included in the live CD. Installed software will only last for the duration of your session – the next time you start up the live CD it will be back to its original state. Download UNetbootin from sourceforge.net Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayReset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista SetupHow To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7Speed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoost TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer Create Talking Photos using Fotobabble

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Is there anyway to get the cyberphunks pidgin OTR plugin to be less verbose?

- by Matt

Is there anyway to get the cyberphunk piding OTR plugin to be less verbose? Sometimes I get hundreds of lines notifying me of the same thing... (6:40:56 PM) OTR Error: You sent encrypted data to anoynmous, who wasn't expecting it. (6:40:57 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (6:40:57 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (6:40:57 PM) Error setting up private conversation: Malformed message received (6:40:58 PM) OTR Error: You sent encrypted data to anoynmous, who wasn't expecting it. (6:40:58 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (6:40:58 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (6:40:59 PM) Error setting up private conversation: Malformed message received (6:40:59 PM) OTR Error: You sent encrypted data to anoynmous, who wasn't expecting it. (6:41:00 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (6:41:00 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (6:41:00 PM) Error setting up private conversation: Malformed message received (6:41:01 PM) OTR Error: You sent encrypted data to anoynmous, who wasn't expecting it. (6:41:01 PM) Attempting to refresh the private conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745... (6:41:01 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (6:41:01 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (6:41:02 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (6:41:02 PM) Error setting up private conversation: Malformed message received (6:41:02 PM) OTR Error: You sent encrypted data to anoynmous, who wasn't expecting it. (6:41:02 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (6:41:02 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (6:41:03 PM) Error setting up private conversation: Malformed message received (6:41:03 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (6:41:03 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (6:41:03 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (6:41:03 PM) OTR Error: You sent encrypted data to anoynmous, who wasn't expecting it. (6:41:04 PM) Error setting up private conversation: Malformed message received (6:41:09 PM) Attempting to refresh the private conversation with [email protected]/Adium39B22966... (6:41:11 PM) Unverified conversation with [email protected]/Adium39B22966 started. (6:41:11 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (6:41:11 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. **(6:41:16 PM) Anonymous: yea** (6:41:20 PM) [email protected]/91A31EC5: yarrr (**6:41:25 PM) Anonymous: sup? (6:41:29 PM) [email protected]/91A31EC5: nothing (6:41:33 PM) [email protected]/91A31EC5: just speaking like a pirate (6:41:51 PM) Anonymous: word (7:13:47 PM) Anonymous: how late you workin? (9:18:12 PM) [email protected]/91A31EC5: not too late** (9:18:13 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:13 PM) Unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745 started. (9:18:13 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:14 PM) Error setting up private conversation: Malformed message received (9:18:14 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:14 PM) Unverified conversation with [email protected]/Adium39B22966 started. (9:18:14 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:15 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:15 PM) Unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745 started. (9:18:15 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:15 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:16 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (9:18:16 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:16 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:17 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (9:18:17 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:17 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:18 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (9:18:18 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:18 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:19 PM) Unverified conversation with [email protected]/Adium39B22966 started. (9:18:19 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:19 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:20 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Adium39B22966. (9:18:20 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:20 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:20 PM) Attempting to refresh the private conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745... (9:18:21 PM) Unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745 started. (9:18:21 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:21 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:21 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:21 PM) Successfully refreshed the unverified conversation with [email protected]/Gaim939DD745. (9:18:21 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:21 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:22 PM) We received an unreadable encrypted message from [email protected]. (9:18:23 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent. (9:18:24 PM) OTR Error: You transmitted an unreadable encrypted message. (9:18:25 PM) We received an unreadable encrypted message from [email protected]. (9:18:26 PM) Unverified conversation with [email protected]/Adium39B22966 started. (9:18:26 PM) The last message to [email protected] was resent.

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Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

- by Stephen Walther

Microsoft has asked my company, Superexpert Consulting, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the Ajax Control Toolkit moving forward. In this blog entry, I discuss our strategy for improving the Ajax Control Toolkit. Why the Ajax Control Toolkit? The Ajax Control Toolkit is one of the most popular projects on CodePlex. In fact, some have argued that it is among the most successful open-source projects of all time. It consistently receives over 3,500 downloads a day (not weekends -- workdays). A mind-boggling number of developers use the Ajax Control Toolkit in their ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Why does the Ajax Control Toolkit continue to be such a popular project? The Ajax Control Toolkit fills a strong need in the ASP.NET Web Forms world. The Toolkit enables Web Forms developers to build richly interactive JavaScript applications without writing any JavaScript. For example, by taking advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit, a Web Forms developer can add modal dialogs, popup calendars, and client tabs to a web application simply by dragging web controls onto a page. The Ajax Control Toolkit is not for everyone. If you are comfortable writing JavaScript then I recommend that you investigate using jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit. However, if you are a Web Forms developer and you don’t want to get your hands dirty writing JavaScript, then the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great solution. The Ajax Control Toolkit is Vast The Ajax Control Toolkit consists of 40 controls. That’s a lot of controls (For the sake of comparison, jQuery UI consists of only 8 controls – those slackers J). Furthermore, developers expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on browsers both old and new. For example, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 9 and every version of Internet Explorer in between. People also expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. And, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with different operating systems. Yikes, that is a lot of combinations. The biggest challenge which my company faces in supporting the Ajax Control Toolkit is ensuring that the Ajax Control Toolkit works across all of these different browsers and operating systems. Testing, Testing, Testing Because we wanted to ensure that we could easily test the Ajax Control Toolkit with different browsers, the very first thing that we did was to set up a dedicated testing server. The dedicated server -- named Schizo -- hosts 4 virtual machines so that we can run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 at the same time (We also use the virtual machines to host the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari). The five developers on our team (plus me) can each publish to a separate FTP website on the testing server. That way, we can quickly test how changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit affect different browsers. QUnit Tests for the Ajax Control Toolkit Introducing regressions – introducing new bugs when trying to fix existing bugs – is the concern which prevents me from sleeping well at night. There are so many people using the Ajax Control Toolkit in so many unique scenarios, that it is difficult to make improvements to the Ajax Control Toolkit without introducing regressions. In order to avoid regressions, we decided early on that it was extremely important to build good test coverage for the 40 controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We’ve been focusing a lot of energy on building automated JavaScript unit tests which we can use to help us discover regressions. We decided to write the unit tests with the QUnit test framework. We picked QUnit because it is quickly becoming the standard unit testing framework in the JavaScript world. For example, it is the unit testing framework used by the jQuery team, the jQuery UI team, and many jQuery UI plugin developers. We had to make several enhancements to the QUnit framework in order to test the Ajax Control Toolkit. For example, QUnit does not support tests which include postbacks. We modified the QUnit framework so that it works with IFrames so we could perform postbacks in our automated tests. At this point, we have written hundreds of QUnit tests. For example, we have written 135 QUnit tests for the Accordion control. The QUnit tests are included with the Ajax Control Toolkit source code in a project named AjaxControlToolkit.Tests. You can run all of the QUnit tests contained in the project by opening the Default.aspx page. Automating the QUnit Tests across Multiple Browsers Automated tests are useless if no one ever runs them. In order for the QUnit tests to be useful, we needed an easy way to run the tests automatically against a matrix of browsers. We wanted to run the unit tests against Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari automatically. Expecting a developer to run QUnit tests against every browser after every check-in is just too much to expect. It takes 20 seconds to run the Accordion QUnit tests. We are testing against 8 browsers. That would require the developer to open 8 browsers and wait for the results after each change in code. Too much work. Therefore, we built a JavaScript Test Server. Our JavaScript Test Server project was inspired by John Resig’s TestSwarm project. The JavaScript Test Server runs our QUnit tests in a swarm of browsers (running on different operating systems) automatically. Here’s how the JavaScript Test Server works: 1. We created an ASP.NET page named RunTest.aspx that constantly polls the JavaScript Test Server for a new set of QUnit tests to run. After the RunTest.aspx page runs the QUnit tests, the RunTest.aspx records the test results back to the JavaScript Test Server. 2. We opened the RunTest.aspx page on instances of Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Google, and Safari. Now that we have the JavaScript Test Server setup, we can run all of our QUnit tests against all of the browsers which we need to support with a single click of a button. A New Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit Each Month The Ajax Control Toolkit Issue Tracker contains over one thousand five hundred open issues and feature requests. So we have plenty of work on our plates J At CodePlex, anyone can vote for an issue to be fixed. Originally, we planned to fix issues in order of their votes. However, we quickly discovered that this approach was inefficient. Constantly switching back and forth between different controls was too time-consuming. It takes time to re-familiarize yourself with a control. Instead, we decided to focus on two or three controls each month and really focus on fixing the issues with those controls. This way, we can fix sets of related issues and avoid the randomization caused by context switching. Our team works in monthly sprints. We plan to do another release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each and every month. So far, we have competed one release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which was released on April 1, 2011. We plan to release a new version in early May. Conclusion Fortunately, I work with a team of smart developers. We currently have 5 developers working on the Ajax Control Toolkit (not full-time, they are also building two very cool ASP.NET MVC applications). All the developers who work on our team are required to have strong JavaScript, jQuery, and ASP.NET MVC skills. In the interest of being as transparent as possible about our work on the Ajax Control Toolkit, I plan to blog frequently about our team’s ongoing work. In my next blog entry, I plan to write about the two Ajax Control Toolkit controls which are the focus of our work for next release.

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TFS 2010 Basic Concepts

- by jehan

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Here, I’m going to discuss some key Architectural changes and concepts that have taken place in TFS 2010 when compared to TFS 2008. In TFS 2010 Installation, First you need to do the Installation and then you have to configure the Installation Feature from the available features. This is bit similar to SharePoint Installation, where you will first do the Installation and then configure the SharePoint Farms. 1) Installation Features available in TFS2010: a) Basic: It is the most compact TFS installation possible. It will install and configure Source Control, Work Item tracking and Build Services only. (SharePoint and Reporting Integration will not be possible). b) Standard Single Server: This is suitable for Single Server deployment of TFS. It will install and configure Windows SharePoint Services for you and will use the default instance of SQL Server. c) Advanced: It is suitable, if you want use Remote Servers for SQL Server Databases, SharePoint Products and Technologies and SQL Server Reporting Services. d) Application Tier Only: If you want to configure high availability for Team Foundation Server in a Load Balanced Environment (NLB) or you want to move Team Foundation Server from one server to other or you want to restore TFS. e) Upgrade: If you want to upgrade from a prior version of TFS. Note: One more important thing to know here about TFS 2010 Basic is that, it can be installed on Client Operations Systems(Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP3), Where as earlier you cannot Install previous version of TFS (2008 and 2005) on client OS. 2) Team Project Collections: Connect to TFS dialog box in TFS 2008: In TFS 2008, the TFS Server contains a set of Team Projects and each project may or may not be independent of other projects and every checkin gets a ever increasing changeset ID irrespective of the team project in which it is checked in and the same applies to work items also, who also gets unique Work Item Ids.The main problem with this approach was that there are certain things which were impossible to do; those were required as per the Application Development Process. a) If something has gone wrong in one team project and now you want to restore it back to earlier state where it was working properly then it requires you to restore the Database of Team Foundation Server from the backup you have taken as per your Maintenance plans and because of this the other team projects may lose out on the work which is not backed up. b) Your company had a merge with some other company and now you have two TFS servers. One TFS Server which you are working on and other TFS server which other company was working and now after the merge you want to integrate the team projects from two TFS servers into one, which is almost impossible to achieve in TFS 2008. Though you can create the Team Projects in one server manually (In Source Control) which you want to integrate from the other TFS Server, but will lose out on History of Change Sets and Work items and others which are very important. There were few more issues of this sort, which were difficult to resolve in TFS 2008. To resolve issues related to above kind of scenarios which were mainly related TFS Maintenance, Integration, migration and Security, Microsoft has come up with Team Project Collections concept in TFS 2010.This concept is similar to SharePoint Site Collections and if you are familiar with SharePoint Architecture, then it will help you to understand TFS 2010 Architecture easily. Connect to TFS dialog box in TFS 2010: In above dialog box as you can see there are two Team Project Collections, each team project can contain any number of team projects as you can see on right side it shows the two Team Projects in Team Project Collection (Default Collection) which I have chosen. Note: You can connect to only one Team project Collection at a time using an instance of TFS Team Explorer. How does it work? To introduce Team Project Collections, changes have been done in reorganization of TFS databases. TFS 2008 was composed of 5-7 databases partitioned by subsystem (each for Version Control, Work Item Tracking, Build, Integration, Project Management...) New TFS 2010 database architecture: TFS_Config: It’s the root database and it contains centralized TFS configuration data, including the list of all team projects exist in TFS server. TFS_Warehouse: The data warehouse contains all the reporting data of served by this server (farm). TFS_* : This contains individual team project collection data. This database contains all the operational data of team project collection regardless of subsystem.In additional to this, you will have databases for SharePoint and Report Server. 3) TFS Farms: As TFS 2010 is more flexible to configure as multiple Application tiers and multiple Database tiers, so it will be more appropriate to call as TFS Farm if you going for multi server installation of TFS. NLB support for TFS application tiers – With TFS 2010: you can configure multiple TFS application tier machines to serve the same set of Team Project Collections. The primary purpose of NLB support is to enable a cleaner and more complete high availability than in TFS 2008. Even if any application tier in the farm fails then farm will automatically continue to work with hardly any indication to end users of a problem. SQL data tiers: With 2010 you can configure many SQL Servers. Each Database can be configured to be on any SQL Server because each Team Project Collection is an independent database. This feature can also be used to load balance databases across SQL Servers.These new capabilities will significantly change the way enterprises manage their TFS installations in the future. With Team Project Collections and TFS farms, you can create a single, arbitrarily large TFS installation. You can grow it incrementally by adding ATs and SQL Servers as needed.

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WinInet Apps failing when Internet Explorer is set to Offline Mode

- by Rick Strahl

Ran into a nasty issue last week when all of a sudden many of my old applications that are using WinInet for HTTP access started failing. Specifically, the WinInet HttpSendRequest() call started failing with an error of 2, which when retrieving the error boils down to: WinInet Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified Now this error can pop up in many legitimate scenarios with WinInet such as when no Internet connection is available or the HTTP configuration (usually configured in Internet Explorer’s options) is misconfigured. The error typically means that the server in question cannot be found or more specifically an Internet connection can’t be established. In this case the problem started suddenly and was causing some of my own applications (old Visual FoxPro apps using my own wwHttp library) and all Adobe Air applications (which apparently uses WinInet for its basic HTTP stack) along with a few more oddball applications to fail instantly when trying to connect via HTTP. Most other applications – all of my installed browsers, email clients, various social network updaters all worked just fine. It seems it was only WinInet apps that were failing. Yet oddly Internet Explorer appeared to be working. So the problem seemed to be isolated to those ‘classic’ applications using WinInet. WinInet’s base configuration uses the Internet Explorer options dialog. To check this out I typically go to the Internet Explorer options and find the Connection tab, and check out the LAN Setup. Make sure there are no rogue proxy settings or configuration scripts that are invalid. Trying with Auto-configuration on and off also can often fix ‘real’ configuration errors. This time however this wasn’t a problem – nothing in the LAN configuration was set (all default). I also played with the Automatic detection of settings which also had no effect. I also tried to use Fiddler to see if that would tell me something. Fiddler has a few additional WinInet configuration options in its configuration. Running Fiddler and hitting an HTTP request using WinInet would never actually hit Fiddler – the failure would occur before WinInet ever fired up the HTTP connection to go through the Fiddler HTTP proxy. And the Culprit is: Internet Explorer’s Work Offline Option The culprit in this situation was Internet Explorer which at some point, unknown to me switched into Offline Mode and was then shut down: When this Offline mode is checked when IE is running *or* if IE gets shut down with this flag set, all applications using WinInet by default assume that it’s running in offline mode. Depending on your caching HTTP headers and whether the page was cached previously you may or may not get a response or an error. For an independent non-browser application this will be highly unpredictable and likely result in failures getting online – especially if the application forces requests to always reload by disabling HTTP caching (as I do on most of my dynamic HTTP clients). What makes this especially tricky is that even when IE is in offline mode in the browser, you can still browse around the Web *if* you have a connection. IE will try to load anything it has cached from the local cache, but as soon as you hit a URL that isn’t cached it will automatically try to access that URL and uncheck the Work Offline option. Conversely if you get knocked off the Internet and browse in IE 9, IE will automatically go into offline mode. I never explicitly set offline mode – it just automatically sets itself on and off depending on the connection. Problem is if you’re not using IE all the time (as I do – rarely and just for testing so usually a few commonly used URLs) and you left it in offline mode when you exit, offline mode stays set which results in the above head scratcher. Ack. This isn’t new behavior in IE 9 BTW – this behavior has always been there, but I think what’s different is that IE now automatically switches between online and offline modes without notifying you at all, so it’s hard to tell when you are offline. Fixing the Issue in your Code If you have an application that is using WinInet, there’s a WinInet option called INTERNET_OPTION_IGNORE_OFFLINE. I just checked this out in my own applications and Internet Explorer 9 and it works, but apparently it’s been broken for some older releases (I can’t confirm how far back though) – lots of posts seem to suggest the flag doesn’t work. However, in IE 9 at least it does seem to work if you call InternetSetOption before you call HttpOpenRequest with the Http Session handle. In FoxPro code I use: DECLARE INTEGER InternetSetOption ; IN WININET.DLL ; INTEGER HINTERNET,; INTEGER dwFlags,; INTEGER @dwValue,; INTEGER cbSize lnOptionValue = 1 && BOOL TRUE pass by reference *** Set needed SSL flags lnResult=InternetSetOption(this.hHttpSession,; INTERNET_OPTION_IGNORE_OFFLINE ,; && 77 @lnOptionValue ,4) DECLARE INTEGER HttpOpenRequest ; IN WININET.DLL ; INTEGER hHTTPHandle,; STRING lpzReqMethod,; STRING lpzPage,; STRING lpzVersion,; STRING lpzReferer,; STRING lpzAcceptTypes,; INTEGER dwFlags,; INTEGER dwContextw hHTTPResult=HttpOpenRequest(THIS.hHttpsession,; lcVerb,; tcPage,; NULL,NULL,NULL,; INTERNET_FLAG_RELOAD + ; IIF(THIS.lsecurelink,INTERNET_FLAG_SECURE,0) + ; this.nHTTPServiceFlags,0) … And this fixes the issue at least for IE 9… In my FoxPro wwHttp class I now call this by default to never get bitten by this again… This solves the problem permanently for my HTTP client. I never want to see offline operation in an HTTP client API – it’s just too unpredictable in handling errors and the last thing you want is getting unpredictably stale data. Problem solved but this behavior is – well ugly. But then that’s to be expected from an API that’s based on Internet Explorer, eh?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in HTTP Windows

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Integrating WIF with WCF Data Services

- by cibrax

A time ago I discussed how a custom REST Starter kit interceptor could be used to parse a SAML token in the Http Authorization header and wrap that into a ClaimsPrincipal that the WCF services could use. The thing is that code was initially created for Geneva framework, so it got deprecated quickly. I recently needed that piece of code for one of projects where I am currently working on so I decided to update it for WIF. As this interceptor can be injected in any host for WCF REST services, also represents an excellent solution for integrating claim-based security into WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.NET Data Services). The interceptor basically expects a SAML token in the Authorization header. If a token is found, it is parsed and a new ClaimsPrincipal is initialized and injected in the WCF authorization context. public class SamlAuthenticationInterceptor : RequestInterceptor { SecurityTokenHandlerCollection handlers; public SamlAuthenticationInterceptor() : base(false) { this.handlers = FederatedAuthentication.ServiceConfiguration.SecurityTokenHandlers; } public override void ProcessRequest(ref RequestContext requestContext) { SecurityToken token = ExtractCredentials(requestContext.RequestMessage); if (token != null) { ClaimsIdentityCollection claims = handlers.ValidateToken(token); var principal = new ClaimsPrincipal(claims); InitializeSecurityContext(requestContext.RequestMessage, principal); } else { DenyAccess(ref requestContext); } } private void DenyAccess(ref RequestContext requestContext) { Message reply = Message.CreateMessage(MessageVersion.None, null); HttpResponseMessageProperty responseProperty = new HttpResponseMessageProperty() { StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized }; responseProperty.Headers.Add("WWW-Authenticate", String.Format("Basic realm=\"{0}\"", "")); reply.Properties[HttpResponseMessageProperty.Name] = responseProperty; requestContext.Reply(reply); requestContext = null; } private SecurityToken ExtractCredentials(Message requestMessage) { HttpRequestMessageProperty request = (HttpRequestMessageProperty) requestMessage.Properties[HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name]; string authHeader = request.Headers["Authorization"]; if (authHeader != null && authHeader.Contains("<saml")) { XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(new StringReader(authHeader)); var col = SecurityTokenHandlerCollection.CreateDefaultSecurityTokenHandlerCollection(); SecurityToken token = col.ReadToken(xmlReader); return token; } return null; } private void InitializeSecurityContext(Message request, IPrincipal principal) { List<IAuthorizationPolicy> policies = new List<IAuthorizationPolicy>(); policies.Add(new PrincipalAuthorizationPolicy(principal)); ServiceSecurityContext securityContext = new ServiceSecurityContext(policies.AsReadOnly()); if (request.Properties.Security != null) { request.Properties.Security.ServiceSecurityContext = securityContext; } else { request.Properties.Security = new SecurityMessageProperty() { ServiceSecurityContext = securityContext }; } } class PrincipalAuthorizationPolicy : IAuthorizationPolicy { string id = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); IPrincipal user; public PrincipalAuthorizationPolicy(IPrincipal user) { this.user = user; } public ClaimSet Issuer { get { return ClaimSet.System; } } public string Id { get { return this.id; } } public bool Evaluate(EvaluationContext evaluationContext, ref object state) { evaluationContext.AddClaimSet(this, new DefaultClaimSet(System.IdentityModel.Claims.Claim.CreateNameClaim(user.Identity.Name))); evaluationContext.Properties["Identities"] = new List<IIdentity>(new IIdentity[] { user.Identity }); evaluationContext.Properties["Principal"] = user; return true; } } A WCF Data Service, as any other WCF Service, contains a service host where this interceptor can be injected. The following code illustrates how that can be done in the “svc” file. <%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="ContactsDataService" Factory="AppServiceHostFactory" %> using System; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using Microsoft.ServiceModel.Web; class AppServiceHostFactory : ServiceHostFactory { protected override ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) { WebServiceHost2 result = new WebServiceHost2(serviceType, true, baseAddresses); result.Interceptors.Add(new SamlAuthenticationInterceptor()); return result; } } WCF Data Services includes an specific WCF host of out the box (DataServiceHost). However, the service is not affected at all if you replace it with a custom one as I am doing in the code above (WebServiceHost2 is part of the REST Starter kit). Finally, the client application needs to pass the SAML token somehow to the data service. In case you are using any Http client library for consuming the data service, that’s easy to do, you only need to include the SAML token as part of the “Authorization” header. If you are using the auto-generated data service proxy, a little piece of code is needed to inject a SAML token into the DataServiceContext instance. That class provides an event “SendingRequest” that any client application can leverage to include custom code that modified the Http request before it is sent to the service. So, you can easily create an extension method for the DataServiceContext that negotiates the SAML token with an existing STS, and adds that token as part of the “Authorization” header. public static class DataServiceContextExtensions { public static void ConfigureFederatedCredentials(this DataServiceContext context, string baseStsAddress, string realm) { string address = string.Format(STSAddressFormat, baseStsAddress, realm); string token = NegotiateSecurityToken(address); context.SendingRequest += (source, args) => { args.RequestHeaders.Add("Authorization", token); }; } private string NegotiateSecurityToken(string address) { } } I left the NegociateSecurityToken method empty for this extension as it depends pretty much on how you are negotiating tokens from an existing STS. In case you want to end-to-end REST solution that involves an Http endpoint for the STS, you should definitely take a look at the Thinktecture starter STS project in codeplex.

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Creating an AJAX Accordion Menu

- by jaullo

Introduction Ajax is a powerful addition to asp.net that provides new functionality in a simple and agile way This post is dedicated to creating a menu with ajax accordion type. About the Control The basic idea of this control, is to provide a serie of panels and show and hide information inside these panels. The use is very simple, we have to set each panel inside accordion control and give to each panel a Header and of course, we have to set the content of each panel. To use accordion control, u need the ajax control toolkit. know the basic propertyes of accordion control: Before start developing an accordion control, we have to know the basic properties for this control Other accordion propertyes FramesPerSecond - Number of frames per second used in the transition animations RequireOpenedPane - Prevent closing the currently opened pane when its header is clicked (which ensures one pane is always open). The default value is true. SuppressHeaderPostbacks - Prevent the client-side click handlers of elements inside a header from firing (this is especially useful when you want to include hyperlinks in your headers for accessibility) DataSource - The data source to use. DataBind() must be called. DataSourceID - The ID of the data source to use. DataMember - The member to bind to when using a DataSourceID AJAX Accordion Control Extender DataSource The Accordion Control extender of AJAX Control toolkit can also be used as DataBound control. You can bind the data retrieved from the database to the Accordion control. Accordion Control consists of properties such as DataSource and DataSourceID (we can se it above) that can be used to bind the data. HeaderTemplate can used to display the header or title for the pane generated by the Accordion control, a click on which will open or close the ContentTemplate generated by binding the data with Accordion extender. When DataSource is passed to the Accordion control, also use the DataBind method to bind the data. The Accordion control bound with data auto generates the expand/collapse panes along with their headers. This code represents the basic steps to bind the Accordion to a Datasource Collapse Public Sub getCategories() Dim sqlConn As New SqlConnection(conString) sqlConn.Open() Dim sqlSelect As New SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM Categories", sqlConn) sqlSelect.CommandType = System.Data.CommandType.Text Dim sqlAdapter As New SqlDataAdapter(sqlSelect) Dim myDataset As New DataSet() sqlAdapter.Fill(myDataset) sqlConn.Close() Accordion1.DataSource = myDataset.Tables(0).DefaultView Accordion1.DataBind()End Sub Protected Sub Accordion1_ItemDataBound(sender As Object, _ e As AjaxControlToolkit.AccordionItemEventArgs) If e.ItemType = AjaxControlToolkit.AccordionItemType.Content Then Dim sqlConn As New SqlConnection(conString) sqlConn.Open() Dim sqlSelect As New SqlCommand("SELECT productName " & _ "FROM Products where categoryID = '" + _ DirectCast(e.AccordionItem.FindControl("txt_categoryID"),_ HiddenField).Value + "'", sqlConn) sqlSelect.CommandType = System.Data.CommandType.Text Dim sqlAdapter As New SqlDataAdapter(sqlSelect) Dim myDataset As New DataSet() sqlAdapter.Fill(myDataset) sqlConn.Close() Dim grd As New GridView() grd = DirectCast(e.AccordionItem.FindControl("GridView1"), GridView) grd.DataSource = myDataset grd.DataBind() End If End Sub In the above code, we made two things, first, we made a sql select to database to retrieve all data from categories table, this data will be used to set the header and columns of the accordion. Collapse <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server"> </asp:ScriptManager> <ajaxToolkit:Accordion ID="Accordion1" runat="server" TransitionDuration="100" FramesPerSecond="200" FadeTransitions="true" RequireOpenedPane="false" OnItemDataBound="Accordion1_ItemDataBound" ContentCssClass="acc-content" HeaderCssClass="acc-header" HeaderSelectedCssClass="acc-selected"> <HeaderTemplate> <%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,"categoryName") %> </HeaderTemplate> <ContentTemplate> <asp:HiddenField ID="txt_categoryID" runat="server" Value='<%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,"categoryID") %>' /> <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" RowStyle-BackColor="#ededed" RowStyle-HorizontalAlign="Left" AutoGenerateColumns="false" GridLines="None" CellPadding="2" CellSpacing="2" Width="300px"> <Columns> <asp:TemplateField HeaderStyle-HorizontalAlign="Left" HeaderText="Product Name" HeaderStyle-BackColor="#d1d1d1" HeaderStyle-ForeColor="#777777"> <ItemTemplate> <%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,"productName") %> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> </asp:GridView> </ContentTemplate> </ajaxToolkit:Accordion> Here, we use <%#DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,"categoryName") %> to bind accordion header with categoryName, so we made on header for each element found on database. Creating a basic accordion control As we know, to use any of the ajax components, there must be a registered ScriptManager on our site, which will be responsible for managing our controls. So the first thing we will do is create our script manager. Collapse <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server"></asp:ScriptManager> Then we define our accordion element and establish some basic properties: Collapse <cc1:Accordion ID="AccordionCtrl" runat="server" SelectedIndex="0" HeaderCssClass="accordionHeader" ContentCssClass="accordionContent" AutoSize="None" FadeTransitions="true" TransitionDuration="250" FramesPerSecond="40" For our work we must declare PANES accordion inside it, these breads will be responsible for contain information, links or information that we want to show. Collapse <Panes> <cc1:AccordionPane ID="AccordionPane0" runat="server"> <Header>Matenimiento</Header> <Content> <li><a href="mypagina.aspx">My página de prueba</a></li> </Content> </cc1:AccordionPane> To end this work, we have to close all panels and our accordion Collapse </Panes> </cc1:Accordion> Finally complete our example should look like: Collapse <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server"></asp:ScriptManager> <cc1:Accordion ID="AccordionCtrl" runat="server" SelectedIndex="0" HeaderCssClass="accordionHeader" ContentCssClass="accordionContent" AutoSize="None" FadeTransitions="true" TransitionDuration="250" FramesPerSecond="40"> <Panes> <cc1:AccordionPane ID="AccordionPane0" runat="server"> <Header>Matenimiento</Header> <Content> <li><a href="mypagina.aspx">My página de prueba</a></li> </Content> </cc1:AccordionPane> </Panes> </cc1:Accordion>

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Bug Triage

In this blog post brain dump, I'll attempt to describe the process my team tries to follow when dealing with new bug reports (specifically, code defect reports). This is not official Microsoft policy, just the way we do things… if you do things differently and want to share, you can do so at the bottom in the comments (or on your blog).Feature Triage TeamA subset of the feature crew, the triage team (which has representations from the PM, Dev and QA disciplines), looks at all unassigned bugs at regular intervals. This can be weekly or daily (or other frequency) dependent on which part of the product cycle we are in and what the untriaged bug load looks like. They discuss each bug considering the evidence and make a decision of whether the bug goes from Not Yet Assigned to Assigned (plus the name of the DEV to fix this) or whether it goes from Active to Resolved (which means it gets assigned back to the requestor for closure or further debate if they were not present at the triage meeting). Close to critical milestones, the feature triage team needs to further justify bugs they take to additional higher-level triage teams.Bug Opened = Not Yet AssignedSomeone (typically an SDET from the QA team) creates the bug item (e.g. in TFS), ensuring they populate all the relevant fields including: Title, Description, Repro Steps (including the Actual Result at the end of the steps), attachments of code and/or screenshots, Build number that they observed the issue in, regression details if applicable, how it was found, if a test case exists or needs to be created etc. They also indicate their opinion on the Priority and Severity. The bug status is left as Not Yet Assigned."Issue" versus "Fix for issue"The solution to some bugs is easy to determine, e.g. "bug: the column name is misspelled". Obviously the fix is to correct the spelling – still, the triage team should be explicit and enter the correct spelling in the bug's Description. Note that a bad bug name here would be "bug: fix the spelling of the column" (it describes the solution, rather than the problem).Other solutions are trickier to establish, e.g. "bug: the column header is not accessible (can only be clicked on with the mouse, not reached via keyboard)". What is the correct solution here? The last thing to do is leave this undetermined and just assign it to a developer. The solution has to be entered in the description. Behind this type of a bug usually hides a spec defect or a new feature request.The person opening the bug should focus on describing the issue, rather than the solution. The person indicates what the fix is in their opinion by stating the Expected Result (immediately after stating the Actual Result). If they have a complex suggested solution, that should be split out in a separate part, but the triage team has the final say before assigning it. If the solution is lengthy/complicated to describe, the bug can be assigned to the PM. Note: the strict interpretation suggests that any bug with no clear, obvious solution is always a hole in the spec and should always go to the PM. This also ensures the spec gets updated.Not Yet Assigned - Not Yet Assigned (on someone else's plate)If the bug is observed in our feature, but the cause is actually another team, we change the Area Path (which is the way we identify teams in TFS) and leave it as Not Yet Assigned. The triage team may add more comments as appropriate including potentially changing the repro steps. In some cases, we may even resolve the bug in our area path and open a new bug in the area path of the other team.Even though there is no action on a dev on the team, the bug still needs to be tracked. One way of doing this is to implement some notification system that informs the team when the tracked bug changed status; another way is to occasionally run a global query (against all area paths) for bugs that have been opened by a member of the team and follow up with the current owners for stale bugs.Not Yet Assigned - ResolvedThis state transition can only be made by the Feature Triage Team.0. Sometimes the bug description is not clear and in that case it gets Resolved as More Information Needed, so the original requestor can provide it.After understanding what the bug item is about, the first decision is to determine whether it needs to go to a dev.1. If it is a known bug, it gets resolved as "Duplicate" and linked to the existing bug.2. If it is "By Design" it gets resolved as such, indicating that the triage team does not think this is a bug.3. If the bug does not repro on latest bits, it is resolved as "No Repro"4. The most painful: If it is decided that we cannot fix it for this release it gets resolved as "Postponed" or "Won't Fix". The former is typically due to resources and time constraints, while the latter is due to deciding that it is not important enough to consume our resources in any release (yes, not all bugs must be fixed!). For both cases, there are other factors that contribute to the decision such as: existence of a reasonable workaround, frequency we expect users to encounter the issue, dependencies on other team to offer a solution, whether it breaks a core scenario, whether it prohibits customer feedback on a major feature, is it a regression from a previous release, impact of the fix on other partner teams (e.g. User Education, User Experience, Localization/Globalization), whether this is the right fix, does the fix impact performance goals, and last but not least, severity of bug (e.g. loss of customer data, security threat, crash, hang). The bar for fixing a bug goes up as the release date approaches. The triage team becomes hardnosed about which bugs to take, while the developers are busy resolving assigned bugs thus everyone drives for Zero Bug Bounce (ZBB). ZBB is when you have 0 active bugs older than 48 hours.Not Yet Assigned - AssignedIf the bug is something we decide to fix in this release and the solution is known, then it is assigned to a DEV. This is either the developer that will do the work, or a Lead that can further assign it to one of his developer team based on a load balancing algorithm of their choosing.Sometimes, the triage team needs the dev to do some investigation work before deciding whether to take the fix; similarly, the checkin for the fix may be gated on code review by the triage team. In these cases, these instructions are provided in the comments section of the bug and when the developer is done they notify the triage team for final decision.Additionally, a Priority and Severity (from 0 to 4) has to be entered, e.g. a P0 means "drop anything you are doing and fix this now" whereas a P4 is something you get to after all P0,1,2,3 bugs are fixed.From a testing perspective, if the bug was found through ad-hoc testing or an external team, the decision is made whether test cases should be added to avoid future regressions. This is communicated to the QA team.Assigned - ResolvedWhen the developer receives the bug (they should be checking daily for new bugs on their plate looking at bugs in order of priority and from older to newer) they can send it back to triage if the information is not clear. Otherwise, they investigate the bug, setting the Sub Status to "Investigating"; if they cannot make progress, they set the Sub Status to "Blocked" and discuss this with triage or whoever else can help them get unblocked. Once they are unblocked, they set the Sub Status to "Working on Solution"; once they are code complete they send a code review request, setting the Sub Status to "Fix Available". After the iterative code review process is over and everyone is happy with the fix, the developer checks it in and changes the state of the bug from Active (and Assigned to them) to Resolved (and Assigned to someone else).The developer needs to ensure that when the status is changed to Resolved that it is assigned to a QA person. For example, maybe the PM opened the bug, but it should be a QA person that will verify the fix - the developer needs to manually change the assignee in that case. Typically the QA person will send an email to the original requestor notifying them that the fix is verified.Resolved - ??In all cases above, note that the final state was Resolved. What happens after that? The final step should be Closed. The bug is closed once the QA person verifying the fix is happy with it. If the person is not happy, then they change the state from Resolved to Active, thus sending it back to the developer. If the developer and QA person cannot reach agreement, then triage can be brought into it. An easy way to do that is change the status back to Not Yet Assigned with appropriate comments so the triage team can re-review.It is important to note that only QA can close a bug. That means that if the opener of the bug was a PM, when the bug gets resolved by the dev it may land on the PM's plate and after a quick review, the PM would re-assign to an SDET, which is the only role that can close bugs. One exception to this is if the person that filed the bug is external: in that case, we leave it Resolved and assigned to them and also send them a notification that they need to verify the fix. Another exception is if specialized developer knowledge is needed for verifying the bug fix (e.g. it was a refactoring suggestion bug typically not observable by the user) in which case it is fine to have a developer verify the fix, and ideally a different developer to the one that opened the bug.Other links on bug triageA quick search reveals that others have talked about this subject, e.g. here, here, here, here and here.Your take?If you have other best practices your team uses to deal with incoming bug reports, feel free to share in the comments below or on your blog. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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How to use BCDEdit to dual boot Windows installations?

- by Ian Boyd

What are the bcdedit commands necessary to setup dual boot between different installations of Windows?5 Background i recently installed Windows 8 onto a separate hard drive1. Now that Windows 8 in installed i want to dual-boot back to Windows 7. i have my two2 hard drives: So you can see that i have my two disks, with the partitions containing Windows: Windows 7: \\PhysicalDisk0 (partition 03) Windows 8: \\PhysicalDisk2 (partition 1) What i'm trying to figure out how is how to use bcdedit to instruct the thing that boots Windows that there is another Windows installation out there. Running bcdedit now, it shows current configuration: C:\WINDOWS\system32>bcdedit Windows Boot Manager -------------------- identifier {bootmgr} device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume2 description Windows Boot Manager locale en-US inherit {globalsettings} integrityservices Enable default {current} resumeobject {ce153eb7-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f} displayorder {current} toolsdisplayorder {memdiag} timeout 30 Windows Boot Loader ------------------- identifier {current} device partition=C: path \WINDOWS\system32\winload.exe description Windows 8 locale en-US inherit {bootloadersettings} recoverysequence {ce153eb9-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f} integrityservices Enable recoveryenabled Yes allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075 osdevice partition=C: systemroot \WINDOWS resumeobject {ce153eb7-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f} nx OptIn bootmenupolicy Standard hypervisorlaunchtype Auto i cannot find any documentation on the difference between Windows Boot Manager and Windows Boot Loader. Documentation There is some documentation on Bcdedit: Technet: Command Line Reference - Bcdedit Technet: Windows Automated Installation Kit - BCDEdit Command Line Options Whitepaper - BCDEdit Commands for Boot Environment (Word Document) But they don't explain how edit the binary boot configuration data If i had to guess, i would think that a Windows Boot Manager instructs the BIOS what program it should run. That program would give the user a set of boot choices. That leaves Windows Boot Loader do be a particular boot choice, that represents a particular installation of Windows. If that is the case i would need to create a new Windows Boot Loader entry. This means i might want to use the /create parameter: /create Creates a new boot entry: bcdedit [/store filename] /create [id] /d description [/application apptype | /inherit [apptype] | /inherit DEVICE | /device] So i assume a syntax of: >bcdedit /create /d "The old Windows 7" /application osloader Where application can be one of the following types: Apptype Description BOOTSECTOR The boot sector application OSLOADER The Windows boot loader RESUME A resume application Unfortunately, the only documentation about osloader is "The Windows boot loader". i don't see how that can differentiate between Windows 8 on one hard drive, and Windows 7 on another. The other possible parameter when /create a boot loader is >bcdedit /create /D "Windows Vista" /device "The Quick Brown Fox" Unfortunately the documentation is missing for /device: /device Optional. If id is not set to a well-known identifier, the option that is used to specify the new boot entry as an additional device options entry. Since i did not set id to a well-known identifier, i must set /device to "the option that is used to specify the new boot entry as an additional device options entry". i know all those words; they're all English. But i have on idea what it is saying; those words in that order seem nonsensical. So i'm somewhat stymied. i don't want to be like Dan Stolts from Microsoft: I found no content that was particularly helpful when I hosed my machine by playing with BCDEdit. This post would have been ok if there was much more detail especially on the /set command OSDevice, etc. So once I got my machine fixed, I documented the solution and the information is here.... i mean, if a Microsoft guy can't even figure out how to use BCDEdit to edit his BCD, then what chance to i have? Bonus Reading BCDEdit Command-Line Options Bcdedit Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 System Will NOT Boot After Making Changes To Boot Manager Using BCDEdit Visual BCD Editor4 Windows 7 and Windows 8 RTM Dual Boot Setup Footnotes 1 Since the Windows 8 installer would have damaged my Windows 7 install, i decided to unplug my "main" hard drive during the install. Which is a long-winded explanation of why the Windows 8 installer didn't detect the existing Windows 7 install. Normally the installer would have automatically created the required entries for dual-boot. Not that the reason i'm asking the question is important. 2 Really there's three drives, but the third is just bulk storage. The existence of a 3rd hard drive is irrelevant to the question. i only mention it in case someone wants to know why the screenshot has 3 hard drives when i only mention two. 3 i arbitrarily started numbering partitions at "zero"; not to imply that partitions are numbered starting at zero. i only mention partitions because i don't see how any boot-loader could do its job without knowing which partition, and which folder, an installation of Windows is located in. 4 i'm asking about BCDEdit. i tried Visual BCD Editor. It seems to be a visual BCD editor. That is to say that it's a GUI, but still uses the same terminology as BCDEdit, and requires the same knowledge that BCD doesn't document. 5 For simplicity sake we'll assume that all installation of Windows i want to dual-boot between are Windows Vista or later, making them all compatible with the BCDEdit and the binary boot loader. The alternative would require delving into the intricacies of the old ntloader. Nor am i asking about dual booting to Linux; or how to boot to a Virtual Hard Drive (vhd) image. Just modern versions of Windows on existing hard drives in the same machine. Note: You can ignore everything after the word Background. It's all pointless exposition to satisfy some people's need for "research effort" before they'll consider being helpful. Some people have even been known to summarily close questions unless there is research effort. Some people have been know to close questions if there is too much research effort. Some people close questions when i put the note saying that they can ignore everything after the Background out of spite. Some people are just grumpy.

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Mapping UrlEncoded POST Values in ASP.NET Web API

- by Rick Strahl

If there's one thing that's a bit unexpected in ASP.NET Web API, it's the limited support for mapping url encoded POST data values to simple parameters of ApiController methods. When I first looked at this I thought I was doing something wrong, because it seems mighty odd that you can bind query string values to parameters by name, but can't bind POST values to parameters in the same way. To demonstrate here's a simple example. If you have a Web API method like this:[HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(string username, string password) { …} and then hit with a URL like this: http://localhost:88/samples/authenticate?Username=ricks&Password=sekrit it works just fine. The query string values are mapped to the username and password parameters of our API method. But if you now change the method to work with [HttpPost] instead like this:[HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(string username, string password) { …} and hit it with a POST HTTP Request like this: POST http://localhost:88/samples/authenticate HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost:88 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: 30 Username=ricks&Password=sekrit you'll find that while the request works, it doesn't actually receive the two string parameters. The username and password parameters are null and so the method is definitely going to fail. When I mentioned this over Twitter a few days ago I got a lot of responses back of why I'd want to do this in the first place - after all HTML Form submissions are the domain of MVC and not WebAPI which is a valid point. However, the more common use case is using POST Variables with AJAX calls. The following is quite common for passing simple values:$.post(url,{ Username: "Rick", Password: "sekrit" },function(result) {…}); but alas that doesn't work. How ASP.NET Web API handles Content Bodies Web API supports parsing content data in a variety of ways, but it does not deal with multiple posted content values. In effect you can only post a single content value to a Web API Action method. That one parameter can be very complex and you can bind it in a variety of ways, but ultimately you're tied to a single POST content value in your parameter definition. While it's possible to support multiple parameters on a POST/PUT operation, only one parameter can be mapped to the actual content - the rest have to be mapped to route values or the query string. Web API treats the whole request body as one big chunk of data that is sent to a Media Type Formatter that's responsible for de-serializing the content into whatever value the method requires. The restriction comes from async nature of Web API where the request data is read only once inside of the formatter that retrieves and deserializes it. Because it's read once, checking for content (like individual POST variables) first is not possible. However, Web API does provide a couple of ways to access the form POST data: Model Binding - object property mapping to bind POST values FormDataCollection - collection of POST keys/values ModelBinding POST Values - Binding POST data to Object Properties The recommended way to handle POST values in Web API is to use Model Binding, which maps individual urlencoded POST values to properties of a model object provided as the parameter. Model binding requires a single object as input to be bound to the POST data, with each POST key that matches a property name (including nested properties like Address.Street) being mapped and updated including automatic type conversion of simple types. This is a very nice feature - and a familiar one from MVC - that makes it very easy to have model objects mapped directly from inbound data. The obvious drawback with Model Binding is that you need a model for it to work: You have to provide a strongly typed object that can receive the data and this object has to map the inbound data. To rewrite the example above to use ModelBinding I have to create a class maps the properties that I need as parameters:public class LoginData { public string Username { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } } and then accept the data like this in the API method:[HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(LoginData login) { string username = login.Username; string password = login.Password; … } This works fine mapping the POST values to the properties of the login object. As a side benefit of this method definition, the method now also allows posting of JSON or XML to the same endpoint. If I change my request to send JSON like this: POST http://localhost:88/samples/authenticate HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost:88 Accept: application/jsonContent-type: application/json Content-Length: 40 {"Username":"ricks","Password":"sekrit"} it works as well and transparently, courtesy of the nice Content Negotiation features of Web API. There's nothing wrong with using Model binding and in fact it's a common practice to use (view) model object for inputs coming back from the client and mapping them into these models. But it can be kind of a hassle if you have AJAX applications with a ton of backend hits, especially if many methods are very atomic and focused and don't effectively require a model or view. Not always do you have to pass structured data, but sometimes there are just a couple of simple response values that need to be sent back. If all you need is to pass a couple operational parameters, creating a view model object just for parameter purposes seems like overkill. Maybe you can use the query string instead (if that makes sense), but if you can't then you can often end up with a plethora of 'message objects' that serve no further purpose than to make Model Binding work. Note that you can accept multiple parameters with ModelBinding so the following would still work:[HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(LoginData login, string loginDomain) but only the object will be bound to POST data. As long as loginDomain comes from the querystring or route data this will work. Collecting POST values with FormDataCollection Another more dynamic approach to handle POST values is to collect POST data into a FormDataCollection. FormDataCollection is a very basic key/value collection (like FormCollection in MVC and Request.Form in ASP.NET in general) and then read the values out individually by querying each. [HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage Authenticate(FormDataCollection form) { var username = form.Get("Username"); var password = form.Get("Password"); …} The downside to this approach is that it's not strongly typed, you have to handle type conversions on non-string parameters, and it gets a bit more complicated to test such as setup as you have to seed a FormDataCollection with data. On the other hand it's flexible and easy to use and especially with string parameters is easy to deal with. It's also dynamic, so if the client sends you a variety of combinations of values on which you make operating decisions, this is much easier to work with than a strongly typed object that would have to account for all possible values up front. The downside is that the code looks old school and isn't as self-documenting as a parameter list or object parameter would be. Nevertheless it's totally functionality and a viable choice for collecting POST values. What about [FromBody]? Web API also has a [FromBody] attribute that can be assigned to parameters. If you have multiple parameters on a Web API method signature you can use [FromBody] to specify which one will be parsed from the POST content. Unfortunately it's not terribly useful as it only returns content in raw format and requires a totally non-standard format ("=content") to specify your content. For more info in how FromBody works and several related issues to how POST data is mapped, you can check out Mike Stalls post: How WebAPI does Parameter Binding Not really sure where the Web API team thought [FromBody] would really be a good fit other than a down and dirty way to send a full string buffer. Extending Web API to make multiple POST Vars work? Don't think so Clearly there's no native support for multiple POST variables being mapped to parameters, which is a bit of a bummer. I know in my own work on one project my customer actually found this to be a real sticking point in their AJAX backend work, and we ended up not using Web API and using MVC JSON features instead. That's kind of sad because Web API is supposed to be the proper solution for AJAX backends. With all of ASP.NET Web API's extensibility you'd think there would be some way to build this functionality on our own, but after spending a bit of time digging and asking some of the experts from the team and Web API community I didn't hear anything that even suggests that this is possible. From what I could find I'd say it's not possible primarily because Web API's Routing engine does not account for the POST variable mapping. This means [HttpPost] methods with url encoded POST buffers are not mapped to the parameters of the endpoint, and so the routes would never even trigger a request that could be intercepted. Once the routing doesn't work there's not much that can be done. If somebody has an idea how this could be accomplished I would love to hear about it. Do we really need multi-value POST mapping? I think that that POST value mapping is a feature that one would expect of any API tool to have. If you look at common APIs out there like Flicker and Google Maps etc. they all work with POST data. POST data is very prominent much more so than JSON inputs and so supporting as many options that enable would seem to be crucial. All that aside, Web API does provide very nice features with Model Binding that allows you to capture many POST variables easily enough, and logistically this will let you build whatever you need with POST data of all shapes as long as you map objects. But having to have an object for every operation that receives a data input is going to take its toll in heavy AJAX applications, with a lot of types created that do nothing more than act as parameter containers. I also think that POST variable mapping is an expected behavior and Web APIs non-support will likely result in many, many questions like this one: How do I bind a simple POST value in ASP.NET WebAPI RC? with no clear answer to this question. I hope for V.next of WebAPI Microsoft will consider this a feature that's worth adding. Related Articles Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods Mike Stall's post: How Web API does Parameter Binding Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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AutoMapper MappingFunction from Source Type of NameValueCollection

- by REA_ANDREW

I have had a situation arise today where I need to construct a complex type from a source of a NameValueCollection. A little while back I submitted a patch for the Agatha Project to include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract. I realized today that as useful as it is, it did not actually support true REST conformance, as REST should support GET so that you can use JSONP from JavaScript directly meaning you can query cross domain services. My original implementation for POX and JSON used the POST method and this immediately rules out JSONP as from reading, JSONP only works with GET Requests. This then raised another issue. The current operation contract of Agatha and one of its main benefits is that you can supply an array of Request objects in a single request, limiting the about of server requests you need to make. Now, at the present time I am thinking that this will not be the case for the REST imlementation but will yield the benefits of the fact that : The same Request objects can be used for SOAP and RST (POX, JSON) The construct of the JavaScript functions will be simpler and more readable It will enable the use of JSONP for cross domain REST Services The current contract for the Agatha WcfRequestProcessor is at time of writing the following: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessRequests")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] Response[] Process(params Request[] requests); [OperationContract(Name = "ProcessOneWayRequests", IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] void ProcessOneWayRequests(params OneWayRequest[] requests); } My current proposed solution, and at the very early stages of my concept is as follows: [ServiceContract] public interface IWcfRestJsonRequestProcessor { [OperationContract(Name="process")] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Allowed)] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] Response[] Process(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); [OperationContract(Name="processoneway",IsOneWay = true)] [ServiceKnownType("GetKnownTypes", typeof(KnownTypeProvider))] [WebGet(UriTemplate = "process-one-way/{name}/{*parameters}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)] void ProcessOneWayRequests(string name, NameValueCollection parameters); } Now this part I have not yet implemented, it is the preliminart step which I have developed which will allow me to take the name of the Request Type and the NameValueCollection and construct the complex type which is that of the Request which I can then supply to a nested instance of the original IWcfRequestProcessor and work as it should normally. To give an example of some of the urls which you I envisage with this method are: http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getweather/?location=london http://www.url.com/service.svc/json/process/getproductsbycategory/?categoryid=1 http://www.url.om/service.svc/json/process/sayhello/?name=andy Another reason why my direction has gone to a single request for the REST implementation is because of restrictions which are imposed by browsers on the length of the url. From what I have read this is on average 2000 characters. I think that this is a very acceptable usage limit in the context of using 1 request, but I do not think this is acceptable for accommodating multiple requests chained together. I would love to be corrected on that one, I really would but unfortunately from what I have read I have come to the conclusion that this is not the case. The mapping function So, as I say this is just the first pass I have made at this, and I am not overly happy with the try catch for detecting types without default constructors. I know there is a better way but for the minute, it escapes me. I would also like to know the correct way for adding mapping functions and not using the anonymous way that I have used. To achieve this I have used recursion which I am sure is what other mapping function use. As you do have to go as deep as the complex type is. public static object RecurseType(NameValueCollection collection, Type type, string prefix) { try { var returnObject = Activator.CreateInstance(type); foreach (var property in type.GetProperties()) { foreach (var key in collection.AllKeys) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) || key.Length > prefix.Length) { var propertyNameToMatch = String.IsNullOrEmpty(prefix) ? key : key.Substring(property.Name.IndexOf(prefix) + prefix.Length + 1); if (property.Name == propertyNameToMatch) { property.SetValue(returnObject, Convert.ChangeType(collection.Get(key), property.PropertyType), null); } else if(property.GetValue(returnObject,null) == null) { property.SetValue(returnObject, RecurseType(collection, property.PropertyType, String.Concat(prefix, property.PropertyType.Name)), null); } } } } return returnObject; } catch (MissingMethodException) { //Quite a blunt way of dealing with Types without default constructor return null; } } Another thing is performance, I have not measured this in anyway, it is as I say the first pass, so I hope this can be the start of a more perfected implementation. I tested this out with a complex type of three levels, there is no intended logical meaning to the properties, they are simply for the purposes of example. You could call this a spiking session, as from here on in, now I know what I am building I would take a more TDD approach. OK, purists, why did I not do this from the start, well I didn’t, this was a brain dump and now I know what I am building I can. The console test and how I used with AutoMapper is as follows: static void Main(string[] args) { var collection = new NameValueCollection(); collection.Add("Name", "Andrew Rea"); collection.Add("Number", "1"); collection.Add("AddressLine1", "123 Street"); collection.Add("AddressNumber", "2"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeCountry", "United Kingdom"); collection.Add("AddressPostCodeNumber", "3"); AutoMapper.Mapper.CreateMap<NameValueCollection, Person>() .ConvertUsing(x => { return(Person) RecurseType(x, typeof(Person), null); }); var person = AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<NameValueCollection, Person>(collection); Console.WriteLine(person.Name); Console.WriteLine(person.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Line1); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.Number); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Country); Console.WriteLine(person.Address.PostCode.Number); Console.ReadLine(); } Notice the convention that I am using and that this method requires you do use. Each property is prefixed with the constructed name of its parents combined. This is the convention used by AutoMapper and it makes sense. I can also think of other uses for this including using with ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders for creating a complex type from the QueryString which is itself is a NameValueCollection. Hope this is of some help to people and I would welcome any code reviews you could give me. References: Agatha : http://code.google.com/p/agatha-rrsl/ AutoMapper : http://automapper.codeplex.com/ Cheers for now, Andrew P.S. I will have the proposed solution for a more complete REST implementation for AGATHA very soon.

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