Search Results

Search found 21511 results on 861 pages for 'appstore approval process'.

Page 765/861 | < Previous Page | 761 762 763 764 765 766 767 768 769 770 771 772  | Next Page >

• Time to stop using &ldquo;Execute Package Task&rdquo;&ndash; a way to execute package in SSIS catalog taking advantage of the new project deployment model ,and the logging and reporting feature

  - by Kevin Shyr

  I set out to find a way to dynamically call package in SSIS 2012.  The following are 2 excellent blogs I found; I used them heavily.  The code below has some addition to parameter types and message types, but was made essentially derived entirely from the blogs. http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2011/07/16/ssis-logging-in-denali.aspx http://www.ssistalk.com/2012/07/24/quick-tip-run-ssis-2012-packages-synchronously-and-other-execution-options/   The code: Every package will be called by a PackageController package.  The packageController is initialized with some information on which package to run and what information to pass in.   The following is the stored procedure called from the “Execute SQL Task”.  Here is the highlight of the stored procedure It takes in packageName, project name, and folder name (folder in SSIS project deployment to SSIS catalog) The stored procedure sets the package variables of the upcoming package execution Execute package in SSIS Catalog Get the status of the execution.  Also, if exists, get the error message’s message_id and store them in the management database. Return value to “Execute SQL Task” to manage failure properly CREATE PROCEDURE [AUDIT].[LaunchPackageExecutionInSSISCatalog]        @PackageName NVARCHAR(255)        , @ProjectFolder NVARCHAR(255)        , @ProjectName NVARCHAR(255)        , @AuditKey INT        , @DisableNotification BIT        , @PackageExecutionLogID INT AS BEGIN TRY        DECLARE @execution_id BIGINT = 0;        -- Create a package execution        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[create_execution]                     @package_name=@PackageName,                     @execution_id=@execution_id OUTPUT,                     @folder_name=@ProjectFolder,                     @project_name=@ProjectName,                     @use32bitruntime=False;          UPDATE [AUDIT].[PackageInstanceExecutionLog] WITH(ROWLOCK)        SET [SSISCatalogExecutionID] = @execution_id        WHERE [PackageInstanceExecutionLogID] = @PackageExecutionLogID          -- this is to set the execution synchronized so that I can check the result in the end        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'SYNCHRONIZED',                     @parameter_value=1; -- true          /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: setting parameters                     Source table:  SSISDB.internal.object_parameters              object_type list:                     20: project level variables                     30: package level variables                     50: execution parameter         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=30,                     @parameter_name=N'FromParent_AuditKey',                     @parameter_value=@AuditKey; -- true          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=30,                     @parameter_name=N'FromParent_DisableNotification',                     @parameter_value=@DisableNotification; -- true          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=30,                     @parameter_name=N'FromParent_PackageInstanceExecutionID',                     @parameter_value=@PackageExecutionLogID; -- true        /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: setting variables END         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/            /* This section is carried over from example code           I don't see a reason to change them yet        */        -- Set our package parameters        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'DUMP_ON_EVENT',                     @parameter_value=1; -- true          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'DUMP_EVENT_CODE',                     @parameter_value=N'0x80040E4D;0x80004005';          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'LOGGING_LEVEL',                     @parameter_value= 1; -- Basic          EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[set_execution_parameter_value]                     @execution_id,                      @object_type=50,                     @parameter_name=N'DUMP_ON_ERROR',                     @parameter_value=1; -- true                              /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: EXECUTING         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/        EXEC [SSISDB].[catalog].[start_execution]                     @execution_id;        /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: EXECUTING END         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/            /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: checking execution result                     Source table:  [SSISDB].[catalog].[executions]              status:                     1: created                     2: running                     3: cancelled                     4: failed                     5: pending                     6: ended unexpectedly                     7: succeeded                     8: stopping                     9: completed         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/        if EXISTS(SELECT TOP 1 1                            FROM [SSISDB].[catalog].[executions] WITH(NOLOCK)                            WHERE [execution_id] = @execution_id                                  AND [status] NOT IN (2, 7, 9)) BEGIN                /********************************************************               ********************************************************                     Section: logging error messages                            Source table:  [SSISDB].[internal].[operation_messages]                     message type:                            10:  OnPreValidate                             20:  OnPostValidate                             30:  OnPreExecute                             40:  OnPostExecute                             60:  OnProgress                             70:  OnInformation                             90:  Diagnostic                             110:  OnWarning                            120:  OnError                            130:  Failure                            140:  DiagnosticEx                             200:  Custom events                             400:  OnPipeline                     message source type:                            10:  Messages logged by the entry APIs (e.g. T-SQL, CLR Stored procedures)                             20:  Messages logged by the external process used to run package (ISServerExec)                             30:  Messages logged by the package-level objects                             40:  Messages logged by tasks in the control flow                             50:  Messages logged by containers (For, ForEach, Sequence) in the control flow                             60:  Messages logged by the Data Flow Task                                    ********************************************************               ********************************************************/                INSERT INTO AUDIT.PackageInstanceExecutionOperationErrorLink                     SELECT @PackageExecutionLogID                                  ,[operation_message_id]                            FROM [SSISDB].[internal].[operation_messages] WITH(NOLOCK)                            WHERE operation_id = @execution_id                                  AND message_type IN (120, 130)                           EXEC [AUDIT].[FailPackageInstanceExecution] @PackageExecutionLogID, 'SSISDB Internal operation_messages found'                GOTO ReturnTrueAsErrorFlag                /********************************************************               ********************************************************                     Section: checking messages END               ********************************************************               ********************************************************/                /* This part is not really working, so now using rowcount to pass status              --DECLARE @PackageErrorMessage NVARCHAR(4000)              --SET @PackageErrorMessage = @PackageName + 'failed with executionID: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(20), @execution_id)                --RAISERROR (@PackageErrorMessage -- Message text.              --     , 18 -- Severity,              --     , 1 -- State,              --     , N'check table AUDIT.PackageInstanceExecutionErrorMessages' -- First argument.              --     );              */        END        ELSE BEGIN              GOTO ReturnFalseAsErrorFlagToSignalSuccess        END        /********************************************************         ********************************************************              Section: checking execution result END         ********************************************************         ********************************************************/ END TRY BEGIN CATCH        DECLARE @SSISCatalogCallError NVARCHAR(MAX)        SELECT @SSISCatalogCallError = ERROR_MESSAGE()          EXEC [AUDIT].[FailPackageInstanceExecution] @PackageExecutionLogID, @SSISCatalogCallError          GOTO ReturnTrueAsErrorFlag END CATCH;     /********************************************************  ********************************************************    Section: end result  ********************************************************  ********************************************************/ ReturnTrueAsErrorFlag:        SELECT CONVERT(BIT, 1) AS PackageExecutionErrorExists ReturnFalseAsErrorFlagToSignalSuccess:        SELECT CONVERT(BIT, 0) AS PackageExecutionErrorExists   GO

  Read the article

• Restricting Input in HTML Textboxes to Numeric Values

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ok, here’s a fairly basic one – how to force a textbox to accept only numeric input. Somebody asked me this today on a support call so I did a few quick lookups online and found the solutions listed rather unsatisfying. The main problem with most of the examples I could dig up was that they only include numeric values, but that provides a rather lame user experience. You need to still allow basic operational keys for a textbox – navigation keys, backspace and delete, tab/shift tab and the Enter key - to work or else the textbox will feel very different than a standard text box. Yes there are plug-ins that allow masked input easily enough but most are fixed width which is difficult to do with plain number input. So I took a few minutes to write a small reusable plug-in that handles this scenario. Imagine you have a couple of textboxes on a form like this: <div class="containercontent"> <div class="label">Enter a number:</div> <input type="text" name="txtNumber1" id="txtNumber1" value="" class="numberinput" /> <div class="label">Enter a number:</div> <input type="text" name="txtNumber2" id="txtNumber2" value="" class="numberinput" /> </div> and you want to restrict input to numbers. Here’s a small .forceNumeric() jQuery plug-in that does what I like to see in this case: [Updated thanks to Elijah Manor for a couple of small tweaks for additional keys to check for] <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $(".numberinput").forceNumeric(); }); // forceNumeric() plug-in implementation jQuery.fn.forceNumeric = function () { return this.each(function () { $(this).keydown(function (e) { var key = e.which || e.keyCode; if (!e.shiftKey && !e.altKey && !e.ctrlKey && // numbers key >= 48 && key <= 57 || // Numeric keypad key >= 96 && key <= 105 || // comma, period and minus key == 190 || key == 188 || key == 109 || // Backspace and Tab and Enter key == 8 || key == 9 || key == 13 || // Home and End key == 35 || key == 36 || // left and right arrows key == 37 || key == 39 || // Del and Ins key == 46 || key == 45) return true; return false; }); }); } </script> With the plug-in in place in your page or an external .js file you can now simply use a selector to apply it: $(".numberinput").forceNumeric(); The plug-in basically goes through each selected element and hooks up a keydown() event handler. When a key is pressed the handler is fired and the keyCode of the event object is sent. Recall that jQuery normalizes the JavaScript Event object between browsers. The code basically white-lists a few key codes and rejects all others. It returns true to indicate the keypress is to go through or false to eat the keystroke and not process it which effectively removes it. Simple and low tech, and it works without too much change of typical text box behavior.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in JavaScript  jQuery  HTML  

  Read the article

• OWB 11gR2 - Find and Search Metadata in Designer

  - by David Allan

  Here are some tools and techniques for finding objects, specifically in the design repository. There are ways of navigating and collating objects that are useful for day to day development and build-time usage - this includes features out of the box and utilities constructed on top. There are a variety of techniques to navigate and find objects in the repository, the first 3 are out of the box, the 4th is an expert utility. Navigating by the tree, grouping by project and module - ok if you are aware of the exact module/folder that objects reside in. The structure panel is a useful way of finding parts of an object, especially when large rather than using the canvas. In large scale projects it helps to have accelerators (either find or collections below). Advanced find to search by name - 11gR2 included a find capability specifically for large scale projects. There were improvements in both the tree search and the object editors (including highlighting in mapping for example). So you can now do regular expression based search and quickly navigate to objects within a repository. Collections - logically organize your objects into virtual folders by shortcutting the actual objects. This is useful for a range of things since all the OWB services operate on collections too (export/import, validation, deployment). See the post here for new collection functionality in 11gR2. Reports for searching by type, updated on, updated by etc. Useful for activities such as periodic incremental actions (deploy all mappings changed in the past week). The report style view is useful since I can quickly see who changed what and when. You can see all the audit details for objects within each objects property inspector, but its useful to just get all objects changed today or example, all objects changed since my last build etc. This utility combines both UI extensions via experts and the public views on the repository. In the figure to the right you see the contextual option 'Object Search' which invokes the utility, you can see I have quite a number of modules within my project. Figure out all the potential objects which have been changed is not simple. The utility is an expert which provides this kind of search capability. The utility provides a report of the objects in the design repository which satisfy some filter criteria. The type of criteria includes; objects updated in the last n days optionally filter the objects updated by user filter the user by project and by type (table/mappings etc.) The search dialog appears with these options, you can multi-select the object types, so for example you can select TABLE and MAPPING. Its also possible to search across projects if need be. If you have multiple users using the repository you can define the OWB user name in the 'Updated by' property to restrict the report to just that user also. Finally there is a search name that will be used for some of the options such as building a collection - this name is used for the collection to be built. In the example I have done, I've just searched my project for all process flows and mappings that users have updated in the last 7 days. The results of the query are returned in a table containing the object names, types, full path and audit details. The columns are sort-able, you can sort the results by name, type, path etc. One of the cool things here, is that you can then perform operations on these objects - such as edit them, export single selection or entire results to MDL, create a collection from the results (now you have a saved set of references in the repository, you could do deploy/export etc.), create a deployment script from the results...or even add in your own ideas! You see from this that you can do bulk operations on sets of objects based on search results. So for example selecting the 'Build Collection' option creates a collection with all of the objects from my search, you can subsequently deploy/generate/maintain this collection of objects. Under the hood of the expert if just basic OMB commands from the product and the use of the public views on the design repository. You can see how easy it is to build up macro-like capabilities that will help you do day-to-day as well as build like tasks on sets of objects.

  Read the article

• How to make software development decisions based on facts

  - by Laila

  We love to hear stories about the many and varied ways our customers use the tools that we develop, but in our earnest search for stories and feedback, we'd rather forgotten that some of our keenest users are fellow RedGaters, in the same building. It was almost by chance that we discovered how the SQL Source Control team were using SmartAssembly. As it happens, there is a separate account (here on Simple-Talk) of how SmartAssembly was used to support the Early Access program; by providing answers to specific questions about how the SQL Source Control product was used. But what really got us all grinning was how valuable the SQL Source Control team found the reports that SmartAssembly was quickly and painlessly providing. So gather round, my friends, and I'll tell you the Tale Of The Framework Upgrade . <strange mirage effect to denote a flashback. A subtle background string of music starts playing in minor key> Kevin and his team were undecided. They weren't sure whether they could move their software product from .NET 2 to .NET 3.5 , let alone to .NET 4. You see, they were faced with having to guess what version of .NET was already installed on the average user's machine, which I'm sure you'll agree is no easy task. Upgrading their code to .NET 3.5 might put a barrier to people trying the tool, which was the last thing Kevin wanted: "what if our users have to download X, Y, and Z before being able to open the application?" he asked. That fear of users having to do half an hour of downloads (.followed by at least ten minutes of installation. followed by a five minute restart) meant that Kevin's team couldn't take advantage of WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). This made them sad, because WCF would have allowed them to write their code in a much simpler way, and in hours instead of days (as was the case with .NET 2). Oh sure, they had a gut feeling that this probably wasn't the case, 3.5 had been out for so many years, but they weren't sure. <background music switches to major key> SmartAssembly Feature Usage Reporting gave Kevin and his team exactly what they needed: hard data on their users' systems, both hardware and software. I was there, I saw it happen, and that's not the sort of thing a woman quickly forgets. I'll always remember his last words (before he went to lunch): "You get lots of free information by just checking a box in SmartAssembly" is what he said. For example, they could see how many CPU cores their customers were using, and found out that they should be making use of parallelism to take advantage of available cores. But crucially, (and this is the moral of my tale, dear reader), Kevin saw that 99% of SQL Source Control's users were on .NET 3.5 or above.   So he knew that they could make the switch and that is was safe to do so. With this reassurance, they could use WCF to not only make development easier, but to also give them a really nice way to do inter-process communication between the Source Control and the SQL Compare products. To have done that on .NET 2.0 was certainly possible <knowing chuckle>, but Microsoft have made it a lot easier with WCF. <strange mirage effect to denote end of flashback> So you see, with Feature Usage Reporting, they finally got the hard evidence they needed to safely make the switch to .NET 3.5, knowing it would not inconvenience their users. And that, my friends, is just the sort of thing we like to hear.

  Read the article

• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 22 (sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats Dynamic Management Function is used to return information about the fragmentation levels, page counts, depth, number of levels, record counts, etc. about the indexes on your database instance. One row is returned for each level in a given index, which we will discuss more later. The function takes a total of 5 input parameters which are (1) database_id, (2) object_id, (3) index_id, (4) partition_number, and (5) the mode of the scan level that you would like to run. Let’s use this function with our AdventureWorks2012 database to better illustrate the information it provides. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL) As you can see from the result set, there is a lot of beneficial information returned from this DMF. The first couple of columns in the result set (database_id, object_id, index_id, partition_number, index_type_desc, alloc_unit_type_desc) are either self-explanatory or have been explained in our previous blog sessions so I will not go into detail about these at this time. The next column in the result set is the index_depth which represents how deep the index goes. For example, If we have a large index that contains 1 root page, 3 intermediate levels, and 1 leaf level, our index depth would be 5. The next column is the index_level which refers to what level (of the depth) a particular row is referring to. Next is probably one of the most beneficial columns in this result set, which is the avg_fragmentation_in_percent. This column shows you how fragmented a particular level of an index may be. Many people use this column within their index maintenance jobs to dynamically determine whether they should do REORG’s or full REBUILD’s of a given index. The fragment count represents the number of fragments in a leaf level while the avg_fragment_size_in_pages represents the number of pages in a fragment. The page_count column tells you how many pages are in a particular index level. From my result set above, you see the the remaining columns all have NULL values. This is because I did not specify a ‘mode’ in my query and as a result it used the ‘LIMITED’ mode by default. The LIMITED mode is meant to be lightweight so it does collect information for every column in the result set. I will re-run my query again using the ‘DETAILED’ mode and you will see we now have results for these rows. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(db_id('AdventureWorks2012'), NULL, NULL, NULL, ‘DETAILED’)   From the remaining columns, you see we get even more detailed information such as how many records are in a particular index level (record_count). We have a column for ghost_record_count which represents the number of records that have been marked for deletion, but have not physically been removed by the background ghost cleanup process. We later see information on the MIN, MAX, and AVG record size in bytes. The forwarded_record_count column refers to records that have been updated and now no longer fit within the row on the page anymore and thus have to be moved. A forwarded record is left in the original location with a pointer to the new location. The last column in the result set is the compressed_page_count column which tells you how many pages in your index have been compressed. This is a very powerful DMF that returns good information about the current indexes in your system. However, based on the mode you select, it could be a very resource intensive function so be careful with how you use it. For more information on this Dynamic Management Function, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188917.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

  Read the article

• 2010 April Fools Joke

  - by Dane Morgridge

  I started at my current job at the end of March last year and there were some pretty funny April fools jokes.  Nothing super crazy, but pretty funny.  One guy came in and there was a tree in his cube.  We (me and the rest of my team) were planning for a couple of weeks on what we could do that would be just awesome.  We had a lot of really good ideas but nothing was spectacular.  Then Steve Andrews had a brilliant idea (yes it's true).  Since we have internal DNS servers we could redirect DNS to our internal servers for a site such as cnn.com.  Then we would lift the code from the site and create our own home page that would contain news about people in the company.  Steve was actually laughing so hard when he thought of the idea that it took him almost 30 minutes to spit it out. I thought, "this is perfect". I had enlisted a couple of people to help come up with the stories and at the same time we were trying to figure out how to get everybody to the site the morning of the 1st.  Then it hit me.  We could have the main article be one of my getting picked up by the FBI on hacking charges.  Then Chris (my boss) could send an email out telling everyone that I would not be there today and direct them to the site.  That would for sure get everyone to go to cnn.com first thing and see our prank.  I begun the process of looking for photos I could crop myself into and found the perfect one.  Then my wife took a good pic with our Canon 40D and I went to work.  The night before I didn't have any other stories due to everyone being really busy at work, but I decided to go ahead with just the FBI bust on it's own.  I got everything working and tested and coordinated with Chris for me to come in late so no one would see me at the office until after everyone had seen the joke. And so the morning of April fools came and I was waiting at home and the email was perfect.  Chris told everyone that I wouldn't be in and that not to answer any questions if you got any calls from anybody.  The Photoshop job I did was not perfect, but good enough and I even wrote an article with it that went into more detail about how I had been classified as a terrorist and all kinds of stuff. People at work started getting the emails and a few people didn't realize it was a joke (as I had hoped), including some from senior management (one person in particular who shall remain nameless in this post).  Emails started flying around about how to contain the situation and how to handle bad PR.  He basically bought it hook, line and sinker and then went in to crisis mode.  It was awesome! He did finally realize it was a joke and I will likely print and frame the email he sent out.  In short, April fools this year was a huge success.

  Read the article

• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge: TEAM Informatics

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. Here comes another Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge entry, this one courtesy of TEAM Informatics (@teaminformatics). As their name suggests, their entry was a true team effort, featuring the work of Jon Chartrand, Deepthi Sanikommu, Dmitry Shtulman, Raghavendra Joshi, and Daniel Stitely with Wayne Boerger doing the presentation honors. Speaking of the presentation, Wayne’s laptop wouldn’t project onto the plasma we had in the OTN Lounge, but luckily, Noel (@noelportugal) had his iPad and VGA dongle in his backpack of goodies, so they were able to improvise by using the iPad camera to capture Wayne’s demo and project the video to the plasma. Code will find a way. Anyway, TEAM built Do Over, an integration with Atlassian’s JIRA, coincidentally something I’ve chatted with Rich (@rmanalan) about in the past. The basic idea is simple; integrate JIRA issues with Oracle Social Network to expand and centralize the conversation around issue resolution. In Dmitry’s words: We were able to put together a team on fairly short notice and, after batting a few ideas around, decided to pursue an integration with JIRA, an issue and project tracking tool used in-house at TEAM.  After getting to know WebCenter Social, we saw immediate benefits that a JIRA integration could bring, primarily due to the fact that JIRA only allows assignment of an issue to one person at a time.  Integrating Social would allow collaboration and issue resolution to happen right from the JIRA Issue interface. TEAM tackled a very common pain point among developers, i.e. including everyone who needs to be involved in issue resolution into a single thread. If you’ve ever fixed bugs or participated in that process, you’ll know that not everyone has access to the issue resolution system, which makes consolidating discussion time-consuming and fragmented. Why? Because we typically use email as the tool for collaboration. Oracle Social Network allows for all parties involved to work in a single, private and secure conversation, and through its RESTful Public API, information from external systems like JIRA can be brought in for context. TEAM only had time to address half the solution, but given more time, I’m sure they would have made the integration bidirectional, allowing for relevant commentary to be pushed back to JIRA, closing the loop. Here are some screenshot of their integration. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } When Oracle Social Network is released, TEAM will have something they use internally to work on issues, and maybe they’ll even productize their work and add it to the Atlassian Marketplace so that other JIRA users can benefit from the combination of Oracle Social Network and JIRA. Thanks to everyone at TEAM for participating in our challenge. We hope they had a good experience. Look for the details of the other entries this week. Be sure to check out a full recap from Dmitry over on the TEAM blog.

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for June 08, 2010 -- #877

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Miroslav Miroslavov, Chris Klug, Beau, Christian Schormann(-2-), Dan Wahlin, Pete Brown, Michael S. Scherotter, Philipp Sumi, Andy Wigley, and Phil Middlemiss. Shoutouts: Mark Tucker set about learning Caliburn, and in the process is writing a Caliburn Book: Chapters 1-3 Jesse Liberty has a great link-laden post up about why we should all be learning/using Blend: Why Developers Should, Must, Do Care About The New Expression Blend be sure to read what he says about WP7 development, however! Charlie Kindel announced an Install problem with the Developer Tools CTP Refresh and the WP7 tools... check this out if you're having problems. John Papa has a good post up on the happenings yesterday: Expression Studio 4 Launch of Blend, SketchFlow, Encoder and More! Erik Mork & Company's latest "This Week in Silverlight" is titled First Drop: Prism v4 – First Drop is Available From SilverlightCream.com: Animated navigation between Pages Miroslav Miroslavov has Part 8 of his "Silverlight in Action" series up, detailing cool things from the CompleteIT site... this one is on Animated navigation between pages. Subtitling videos Chris Klug got a gig adding subtitles to videos for Microsoft (sweet) ... and no, not *that* kind of subtitles... read how he approached the final solution. Silverlight Watermark TextBox I'm not sure we can have too many Watermark TextBoxes, and neither does Beau , who sent me a link to this one... give it a dance and decide. Blend 4: Collaborative SketchFlow Feedback with SharePoint With the new Blend release, Christian Schormann has a post up describing the lashup to Sharepoint for sharing Sketchflow and getting feedback. New Utility, Links, and Tutorials for Path-Based Layout Christian Schormann also has a collection of resources for Path-Based Layouts, including a utility "that lets you apply a whole bunch of position-specific effects without having to write any code"... lots of links to resources here. Tales from the Trenches – Building a Real-World Silverlight Line of Business Application Dan Wahlin draws on his recent experience and lays out some of the fun and pitfalls of building LOB apps in Silverlight... WCF, MVVM, slides, and code included WPF (and Silverlight): Choose your Fonts and Text Rendering Options Wisely Pete Brown has a great post up on using fonts wisely across multiple platforms... lots of info and good discussion in the comments as well. Ball Watch USA Remember the awesome watch Michael S. Scherotter did in Silverlight 1 and then converted to Updated Ball Trainmaster Cannonball Watch to Silverlight 2? Well... there's now a contest underfoot and 8 videos to help you get started... all good stuff, and good luck! ... Michael has a post up about the contest: Enter to Win a Ball Watch by Creating One in Silverlight Announcing Sketchables – Rapid Mockup Creation with SketchFlow By way of Jesse Libertyhttp://jesseliberty.com/2010/06/08/why-developers-should-must-do-care-about-the-new-expression-blend/, this is a cool production by Philipp Sumi about a simple mockup framework he's created. Perst - a database for Windows Phone 7 Silverlight I think one of my first comments to Michael Washington back at the MVP Summit 2010 was that we'd need a database engine, and too cool, but we've got one, Andy Wigley discusses Perst in this post... to save you some time, here's the Perst site A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 7 Phil Middlemiss has part 7 of his great theme-building series up... this time he's giving the accordian control a once-over. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• Migrating SQL Server Databases – The DBA’s Checklist (Part 3)

  - by Sadequl Hussain

  Continuing from Part 2 of the Database Migration Checklist series: Step 10: Full-text catalogs and full-text indexing This is one area of SQL Server where people do not seem to take notice unless something goes wrong. Full-text functionality is a specialised area in database application development and is not usually implemented in your everyday OLTP systems. Nevertheless, if you are migrating a database that uses full-text indexing on one or more tables, you need to be aware a few points. First of all, SQL Server 2005 now allows full-text catalog files to be restored or attached along with the rest of the database. However, after migration, if you are unable to look at the properties of any full-text catalogs, you are probably better off dropping and recreating it. You may also get the following error messages along the way: Msg 9954, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 The Full-Text Service (msftesql) is disabled. The system administrator must enable this service. This basically means full text service is not running (disabled or stopped) in the destination instance. You will need to start it from the Configuration Manager. Similarly, if you get the following message, you will also need to drop and recreate the catalog and populate it. Msg 7624, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Full-text catalog ‘catalog_name‘ is in an unusable state. Drop and re-create this full-text catalog. A full population of full-text indexes can be a time and resource intensive operation. Obviously you will want to schedule it for low usage hours if the database is restored in an existing production server. Also, bear in mind that any scheduled job that existed in the source server for populating the full text catalog (e.g. nightly process for incremental update) will need to be re-created in the destination. Step 11: Database collation considerations Another sticky area to consider during a migration is the collation setting. Ideally you would want to restore or attach the database in a SQL Server instance with the same collation. Although not used commonly, SQL Server allows you to change a database’s collation by using the ALTER DATABASE command: ALTER DATABASE database_name COLLATE collation_name You should not be using this command for no reason as it can get really dangerous.  When you change the database collation, it does not change the collation of the existing user table columns.  However the columns of every new table, every new UDT and subsequently created variables or parameters in code will use the new setting. The collation of every char, nchar, varchar, nvarchar, text or ntext field of the system tables will also be changed. Stored procedure and function parameters will be changed to the new collation and finally, every character-based system data type and user defined data types will also be affected. And the change may not be successful either if there are dependent objects involved. You may get one or multiple messages like the following: Cannot ALTER ‘object_name‘ because it is being referenced by object ‘dependent_object_name‘. That is why it is important to test and check for collation related issues. Collation also affects queries that use comparisons of character-based data.  If errors arise due to two sides of a comparison being in different collation orders, the COLLATE keyword can be used to cast one side to the same collation as the other. Continues…

  Read the article

• Installing SharePoint 2010 in one machine with built in database

  - by sreejukg

  It is very easy to deploy SharePoint 2010 in a single server using the built-in database. Normally one need to choose such installation for evaluation purposes. When installing with default settings, setup installs Microsoft SQL server 2008 express database along with SharePoint. After installing SharePoint, you need to run SharePoint products and technology configuration wizard which will install central admin website and creates the configuration database and content database for SharePoint sites. Limitations 1. You can not perform this installation on a domain controller 2. The maximum size for express edition database is 4 GB SharePoint 2010 only supports 64 bit operating systems. The installation steps are for windows server r2 64 bit enterprise edition. Installation steps The first screen for the installation is as follows As a first step you need to install the s/w prerequisites. Click on the corresponding link Click next, here you have to agree on the license terms. Select the checkbox and then click next. The installation will starts. The progress will be updated in the screen. This may take some time as during this process, there are some components needs to be downloaded from internet. Make sure you are connected to the internet, then only the installation will become a success. If any error occurs, it will display the error, you need to configure in order to continue. If everything ok you will receive the following success page. Click finish to exit the installation window. Now from the first screen, select Install SharePoint server. This will install SharePoint and SQL server 2008 express edition. First you need to enter the product key for SharePoint. Enter the product key and clicks continue. Now you need to accept the license agreement. Select the checkbox and click on continue. Select the installation type you want.   Now click on the standalone button. In production scenario, you need to select the server farm installation. This article only cover the first option, installing server farm is not in the scope of this article. Once you click on the standalone, the installation starts and you can view the progress as below. If any error occurred during installation, you will get the details and link to the log file. Refer log file and fix the corresponding issue and then start the installation again. If installation completes without any error, you will see the below screen. Make sure you selected the check box “Run the SharePoint products Configuration Wizard now” and click close. The SharePoint products configuration wizard starts. Click next; you will get the following warning Click yes and the configuration steps starts. You can view the progress for each step. Once completed the below screen appears to the user. Click finish to complete the installation. Now SharePoint installation is completed. You can navigate to SharePoint central administration website from the administrative tools and start building your portal. Good luck

  Read the article

• upgraded "Compiz' and "Unity", now no Unity 3D on screen

  - by user18432

  Today when I logged in to my Ubuntu 12.04, the update manager told me of some upgrades. Compiz and Unity were in those upgrades. After I installed the upgrades, I can no longer get the Unity panel on the left side of screen or the systray at the top of screen. I now have to run Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity 2D. My laptop is a HP Pavilion dv9000 with Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 video. I tried to run "unity --reset" but it says there are serious issues with compiz. I have cut & pasted the read out from the terminal below. [09:35:02] xxxxxxx@L01U1204:~$ unity --reset unity-panel-service: no process found Checking if settings need to be migrated ...no Checking if internal files need to be migrated ...no Backend : gconf Integration : true Profile : unity Adding plugins Initializing core options...done compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x2e00004 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x580005a compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x3600006 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x3200255 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x1600002 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x1400002 Initializing composite options...done Initializing opengl options...done Initializing decor options...done Initializing vpswitch options...done Initializing snap options...done Initializing mousepoll options...done Initializing resize options...done Initializing place options...done Initializing move options...done Initializing wall options...done Initializing grid options...done I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/home/brwright/.compiz/session/10afaca1703486b216133648409481824100000130110002" Initializing session options...done Initializing gnomecompat options...done Initializing animation options...done Initializing fade options...done Initializing unitymtgrabhandles options...done Initializing workarounds options...done Initializing scale options...done compiz (expo) - Warn: failed to bind image to texture Initializing expo options...done Initializing ezoom options...done compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin '/usr/lib/compiz/libunityshell.so' : /usr/lib/compiz/libunityshell.so: undefined symbol: _ZNK5unity4dash10Controller6windowEv compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'unityshell' compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000090! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000093! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000096! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000099! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x700009c! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x700009f! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. Initializing annotate options...done Initializing blur options...done Initializing clone options...done Initializing colorfilter options...done Initializing commands options...done Initializing cube options...done Initializing imgjpeg options...done Initializing kdecompat options...done Initializing mag options...done Initializing neg options...done Initializing obs options...done Initializing opacify options...done Initializing put options...done Initializing resizeinfo options...done Initializing ring options...done Initializing rotate options...done Initializing scaleaddon options...done Initializing screenshot options...done Initializing shift options...done Initializing staticswitcher options...done Initializing switcher options...done Initializing thumbnail options...done Initializing unityshell options...done Initializing water options...done Initializing winrules options...done Initializing wobbly options...done Setting Update "main_menu_key" Setting Update "run_key" Starting gtk-window-decorator As you can see the terminal never comes back to the CI prompt. I must do a control C to get to the CI prompt, but then the OS is frozen. I have to reboot and run Unity 2D in able to do anything on my laptop. I hope I have explained this enough and provided some useful info. I am at a loss to understand what the problem is, or what exactly what is causing the problem. Is it Unity or Compiz? Can anyone help?

  Read the article

• Kanban Tools Review

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  The first two sessions on Sunday were Collaboration and why it is so hard and the following, which was a perfect following session was on Kanban.  While in that second session two online Saas Style Tools were mentioned; AgileZen and Leankit.  I decided right then and there that I would throw together some first impressions and setup some sample projects.  I did this by setting up an account and creating the projects. Agile Zen Account Creation Setting up the initial account required an e-mail verification, which is understandable.  Within a few seconds it was mailed out and I was logged in. Setting Up the Kanban Board The initial setup of the board was pretty easy.  I maybe clicked around an extra few times, but overall everything I needed to use the tool was immediately available.  The representation of everything was very similar to what one expects in a real Kanban Board too.  This is a HUGE plus, especially if a team is smart and places this tool in a centrally viewable area to allow for visibility. Each of the board items is just like a post it, being blue, grey, green, pink, or one of another few colors.  Dragging them onto each swim lane on the board was flawless, making changes through the work super easy and intuitive. The other thing I really liked about AgileZen is that the Kanban Board had the swim lanes setup immediately.  One can change them, but when you know you immediately need a Ready Lane, Working Lane, and a Complete Lane it is nice to just have them right in front of you in the interface.  In addition, the Backlog is simply a little tab on the left hand side.  This is perfect for the Backlog Queue.  Out of the way, with the focus on the primary items. Once  I got the items onto the board I was easily able to get back to the actual work at hand versus playing around with the tool.  The fact that it was so easy to use, fast and easy UX, and overall a great layout put me back to work on things I needed to do versus sitting a playing with the tool.  That, in the end is the key to using these tools. LeanKit Kanban Account Creation Setting up the account got me straight into the online tool.  This I thought was pretty cool. Setting Up the Kanban Board Setting up the Kanban Board within Leankit was a bit of trouble.  There were multiple UX issues in regard to process and intuitiveness.  The Leankit basically forces one to design the whole board first, making no assumptions about how the board should look.  The swim lanes in my humble opinion should be setup immediately without any manipulation with the most common lanes;  ready, working, and complete. The other UX hiccup that I had a problem with is that as soon as I managed to get the swim lanes into place, I wanted to remove the redundant Backlog Lane.  The Backlog Lane, or Backlog Bucket should be somewhere that I accidentally added as a lane.  Then on top of that I screwed up and added an item inside the lane, which then prevented me from deleting the lane.  I had to go back out of the lane manipulation, remove the item, and then remove the excess lane.  Summary Leankit wasn't a bad interface, it just wasn't as good as AgileZen.  The AgileZen interface was just better UX design overall.  AgileZen also presents a much better user interface graphical design all together.  It is much closer to what the Kanban Board would look like if it were a physical Kanban Board.  Since one of the HUGE reasons for Kanban is to increase visibility, the fact the design is similar to what a real Kanban Board is actually a pretty big deal. This is an image (click for larger) that shows the two Kanban Boards side by side.  The one on the left is AgileZen and the right is Leankit. Original Entry

  Read the article

• When to implement: Together with or after the source product?

  - by Jeremy Oosthuizen

  Somebody recently relayed a prospect's question to me: How hard would it be to implement OUBI after the source product (CC&B, WAM or NMS) has already been implemented? Fact is that MOST non-OUBI Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence implementations take place after the source application(s) are in place and hopefully stable. If an organization decides that they need better reporting and management information, then the logical path (see The Data Warehouse Institute's Data Warehouse Maturity Model) is to a Data Warehouse -- no matter when their last applications were implemented. If there is a pre-built Data Warehouse for their specific application, or even for the desired business process in their industry, they're in luck. Else they have to design and build from scratch, using a toolset. The implementation of a toolset is unlike the implementation of OUBI which, like OBI Apps, contain pre-built ETL routines and user content. Much has been written before about the advantages of that. So, because OUBI is designed specifically for Oracle Utilities transactional products, we often implement them in parallel -- with OUBI lagging a little behind by necessity, like Reporting. Customers know from the start they're going to need the solution, and therefore purchase the products at the same time. My biggest argument FOR a parallel installation/implementation of OUBI with the source product is two-fold: - There could be things (which is the technical term for data elements) that customers figure out they need when implementing OUBI, which are often easier added to the source product's implementation project, than to add later; - OUBI's ETL often points out errors (severe or not) with converted data, which are easier to fix during the source product's implementation project, or it may even be impossible to fix afterwards. The Conversion routines sometimes miss these errors, because the source system can live with the not-quite-perfect converted data. If the data can't be properly extracted, i.e. the proper Dimensions linked to the Facts, then it can't get into OUBI. That means it can't be analyzed effectively along with the rest of the organization's data. Then there is also the throw-away-work argument, which may be significant. The operational / transactional system cannot go live without reports on Day 1. A lot of those reports would be taken care of by the implementation of OUBI. If OUBI is implemented after go-live, those reports STILL have to be built during the source product's implementation project, but they become throw-away after the OUBI implementation. I have sometimes been told that it is better to implement OUBI after the source product, because it cuts down on scope and risk for the source product's implementation project. All I can say to that, is bah humbug. No, seriously, given the arguments above, planning has to include the OUBI implementation and it has to be managed properly -- just like any other implementation. If so, it should not add any risk and it should be included in the scope from the start. The answer to the prospect's question is therefore that it is not that much more difficult; after all, most DW/BI implemenations are done like that. They just have to consider the points above.

  Read the article

• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 23 (sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats Dynamic Management View is used to return usage information about the various indexes on your SQL Server instance. Let’s have a look at this DMV against our AdventureWorks2012 database so we can examine the information returned. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats WHERE database_id = db_id('AdventureWorks2012') The first three columns in the result set represent the database_id, object_id, and index_id of a given row. You can join these columns back to other system tables to extract the actual database, object, and index names. The next four columns are probably the most beneficial columns within this DMV. First, the user_seeks column represents the number of times that a user query caused a seek operation against a particular index. The user_scans column represents how many times a user query caused a scan operation on a particular index. The user_lookups column represents how many times an index was used to perform a lookup operation. The user_updates column refers to how many times an index had to be updated due to a write operation that effected a particular index. The last_user_seek, last_user_scan, last_user_lookup, and last_user_update columns provide you with DATETIME information about when the last user scan, seek, lookup, or update operation was performed. The remaining columns in the result set are the same as the ones we previously discussed, except instead of the various operations being generated from user requests, they are generated from system background requests. This is an extremely useful DMV and one of my favorites when it comes to Index Maintenance. As we all know, indexes are extremely beneficial with improving the performance of your read operations. But indexes do have a downside as well. Indexes slow down the performance of your write operations, and they also require additional resources for storage. For this reason, in my opinion, it is important to regularly analyze the indexes on your system to make sure the indexes you have are being used efficiently. My AdventureWorks2012 database is only used for demonstrating or testing things, so I dont have a lot of meaningful information here, but for a Production system, if you see an index that is never getting any seeks, scans, or lookups, but is constantly getting a ton of updates, it more than likely would be a good candidate for you to consider removing. You would not be getting much benefit from the index, but yet it is incurring a cost on your system due to it constantly having to be updated for your write operations, not to mention the additional storage it is consuming. You should regularly analyze your indexes to ensure you keep your database systems as efficient and lean as possible. One thing to note is that these DMV statistics are reset every time SQL Server is restarted. Therefore it would not be a wise idea to make decisions about removing indexes after a Server Reboot or a cluster roll. If you restart your SQL Server instances frequently, for example if you schedule weekly/monthly cluster rolls, then you may not capture indexes that are being used for weekly/monthly reports that run for business users. And if you remove them, you may have some upset people at your desk on Monday morning. If you would like to begin analyzing your indexes to possibly remove the ones that your system is not using, I would recommend building a process to load this DMV information into a table on scheduled basis, depending on how frequently you perform an operation that would reset these statistics, then you can analyze the data over a period of time to get a more accurate view of what indexes are really being used and which ones or not. For more information about this DMV, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188755.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

  Read the article

• Who should ‘own’ the Enterprise Architecture?

  - by Michael Glas

  I recently had a discussion around who should own an organization’s Enterprise Architecture. It was spawned by an article titled “Busting CIO Myths” in CIO magazine1 where the author interviewed Jeanne Ross, director of MIT's Center for Information Systems Research and co-author of books on enterprise architecture, governance and IT value.In the article Jeanne states that companies need to acknowledge that "architecture says everything about how the company is going to function, operate, and grow; the only person who can own that is the CEO". "If the CEO doesn't accept that role, there really can be no architecture."The first question that came up when talking about ownership was whether you are talking about a person, role, or organization (there are pros and cons to each, but in general, I like to assign accountability to as few people as possible). After much thought and discussion, I came to the conclusion that we were answering the wrong question. Instead of talking about ownership we were talking about responsibility and accountability, and the answer varies depending on the particular role of the organization’s Enterprise Architecture and the activities of the enterprise architect(s).Instead of looking at just who owns the architecture, think about what the person/role/organization should do. This is one possible scenario (thanks to Bob Covington): The CEO should own the Enterprise Strategy which guides the business architecture. The Business units should own the business processes and information which guide the business, application and information architectures. The CIO should own the technology, IT Governance and the management of the application and information architectures/implementations. The EA Governance Team owns the EA process.  If EA is done well, the governance team consists of both IT and the business. While there are many more roles and responsibilities than listed here, it starts to provide a clearer understanding of ‘ownership’. Now back to Jeanne’s statement that the CEO should own the architecture. If you agree with the statement about what the architecture is (and I do agree), then ultimately the CEO does need to own it. However, what we ended up with was not really ownership, but more statements around roles and responsibilities tied to aspects of the enterprise architecture. You can debate the semantics of ownership vs. responsibility and accountability, but in the end the important thing is to come to a clearer understanding that is easily communicated (and hopefully measured) around the question “Who owns the Enterprise Architecture”.The next logical step . . . create a RACI matrix that details the findings . . . but that is a step that each organization needs to do on their own as it will vary based on current EA maturity, company culture, and a variety of other factors. Who ‘owns’ the Enterprise Architecture in your organization? 1 CIO Magazine Article (Busting CIO Myths): http://www.cio.com/article/704943/Busting_CIO_Myths Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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;}

  Read the article

• Add Spell Checking to Your Favorite Windows Apps

  - by Asian Angel

  Some but not all Windows apps have built-in spell checking of some sort. If you want to add spell checking to all of your apps (or a select group) then join us as we look at tinySpell. Note: There is a paid version of this software (tinySpell+) available as well for those who want extra functionality. tinySpell in Action The installation process is simple and straightforward…as soon as you have finished installing tinySpell you will see your new “System Tray Icon”. You can see tinySpell’s “Context Menu” here. Before going any further you may want to have a look through the settings to make any desired display modifications. During our tests we found it very helpful to modify the Spelling Tip options…it will make for a much nicer and easier to read display when you have a spelling error. Clicking on the Applications… Command in the Context Menu will bring up the following window. You can really finesse how active tinySpell will be here: Create a special list of apps that tinySpell will not monitor Create a custom list of apps that tinySpell will monitor If you have any particular or unique words that you would like to add to tinySpell’s Dictionary ahead of time you can do that by clicking on the Dictionary… Command in the Context Menu. Want to check the spelling of a word ahead of time or find that you are just curious about how it is spelled? Click on Open spelling window in the Context Menu to access a special spell check window. For our example we misspelled “spelling” on purpose…notice that the word has turned red. Clicking on the Check Mark Button will open a drop-down list with suggested spellings for the word that you are inquiring about. Click on the appropriate listing if you intend to copy and paste the word. Next we moved on to Notepad. As we were typing tinySpell alerted us when we typed the word “app”. You will hear a small default system sound and see a small popup as shown here if tinySpell thinks a word has been misspelled. The System Tray Icon will also change to a yellow color. You can access the list of suggested spellings by either left clicking on the small popup or the System Tray Icon. If the word is a properly spelled “abbreviation” (or special/custom) like our word here you can select Add to dictionary. Going further in our text document we once again purposely misspelled “spelling”… Left clicking on the popup gave us access to the drop-down list of suggested spellings… And clicking on the correct spelling automatically inserted it into our document in place of the misspelled word. As you can see here tinySpell was even monitoring file names when we went to save the document. Very thorough indeed. Conclusion If your favorite app does not have built-in spell checking, then tinySpell will definitely be a welcome (and very helpful) addition to your Windows system. They offer a portable version as well so you can take it with you to any PC. Links Download tinySpell *Note: The download link is located approximately half-way down the page. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Spell Check Firefox Text Input FieldsEdit the Windows Live Writer Custom DictionaryAccess Your Favorite Google Services in Chrome the Easy WayLaunch External Apps from FirefoxNinite Makes Installing Software Incredibly Simple 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 All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app

  Read the article

• BizTalk Server Monitoring &ndash; SharePoint Web Part

  - by SURESH GIRIRAJAN

  I have been worked with customers using BizTalk as shared infrastructure in the enterprise, where we have two or more BizTalk apps running on it for different Business groups. Also these customers are not using BizTalk ESB portal even though they are using BizTalk ESB exception framework. So main issue with all these Business groups are they don’t have visibility into the BizTalk apps running in prod, even though they are using SCOM and other monitoring stuff in place. So I am trying to address few issues I am going to list below and how I try to mitigate them, first one on the list is how to get visibility into prod, how to provision those access to the BizTalk resources with minimal activity and how can we take advantage of the resources we have today. So I was working on creating REST data services for BizTalk RFID a year ago and available on codeplex. I thought to extend that idea to take advantage of BizTalk Data Services available in codeplex. I extended the BizTalk data services I will upload the updated service soon. So let me start thru how my solution works, so first step I am using the BizTalk data service (REST service) which expose most of the BizTalk artifacts as resources such as Applications, Orchestrations, Send ports, Receive ports, Host instances and In process instances etc. BizTalk Server Monitoring – SharePoint Web Part I am hosting the BizTalk data service in IIS with application pool configured to run under BizTalk administrator credentials. So with this setup I am making the service to make accessible anonymous. Next step of this solution I have created a SharePoint Visual web part which consumes the BizTalk data service and display all the BizTalk Application and Platform settings in read only mode. Even though BizTalk data services offers to browse resources as well perform actions like starting, stopping Orchestrations, Send ports, Receive locations, Host instances etc. Host Instances BizTalk Applications BizTalk Running / Suspended Instances So having this BizTalk Monitoring SharePoint web part, will be added to the SharePoint. This eliminates the need for granting access to the BizTalk users explicitly, so when you have BizTalk contractor or BizTalk application user need to have access to the BizTalk environment all the need is have access to the SharePoint website. You can configure the web part point to different end point based on your environment. I am making this as read only as part of this to make easier for the users and in terms of provisioning. This removes the dependency of BizTalk admin at least for viewing the BizTalk application status and errors etc. If we need to make any changes to the BizTalk application then its application owner responsibility to co-ordinate with BizTalk admins. There are options like BizTalk ESB portal, BizTalk 360 etc… but this one of the approach to reduce number of steps required to give access to BizTalk application users and also to maximize the resource we have in enterprise today. Also you can expose this data service thru Azure Service Bus and access from other apps like mobile devices or create a web site hosted in Azure etc. One last thing I have tested only with BizTalk Server 2010 on x64 VM only, but it should work on other version. I will try to upload the code shortly with instructions how to setup etc.… I welcome thoughts and suggestions… Hope this helps….

  Read the article

• Why Cornell University Chose Oracle Data Masking

  - by Troy Kitch

  One of the eight Ivy League schools, Cornell University found itself in the unfortunate position of having to inform over 45,000 University community members that their personal information had been breached when a laptop was stolen. To ensure this wouldn’t happen again, Cornell took steps to ensure that data used for non-production purposes is de-identified with Oracle Data Masking. A recent podcast highlights why organizations like Cornell are choosing Oracle Data Masking to irreversibly de-identify production data for use in non-production environments. Organizations often copy production data, that contains sensitive information, into non-production environments so they can test applications and systems using “real world” information. Data in non-production has increasingly become a target of cyber criminals and can be lost or stolen due to weak security controls and unmonitored access. Similar to production environments, data breaches in non-production environments can cost millions of dollars to remediate and cause irreparable harm to reputation and brand. Cornell’s applications and databases help carry out the administrative and academic mission of the university. They are running Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions that include highly sensitive faculty, student, alumni, and prospective student data. This data is supported and accessed by a diverse set of developers and functional staff distributed across the university. Several years ago, Cornell experienced a data breach when an employee’s laptop was stolen.  Centrally stored backup information indicated there was sensitive data on the laptop. With no way of knowing what the criminal intended, the university had to spend significant resources reviewing data, setting up service centers to handle constituent concerns, and provide free credit checks and identity theft protection services—all of which cost money and took time away from other projects. To avoid this issue in the future Cornell came up with several options; one of which was to sanitize the testing and training environments. “The project management team was brought in and they developed a project plan and implementation schedule; part of which was to evaluate competing products in the market-space and figure out which one would work best for us.  In the end we chose Oracle’s solution based on its architecture and its functionality.” – Tony Damiani, Database Administration and Business Intelligence, Cornell University The key goals of the project were to mask the elements that were identifiable as sensitive in a consistent and efficient manner, but still support all the previous activities in the non-production environments. Tony concludes,  “What we saw was a very minimal impact on performance. The masking process added an additional three hours to our refresh window, but it was well worth that time to secure the environment and remove the sensitive data. I think some other key points you can keep in mind here is that there was zero impact on the production environment. Oracle Data Masking works in non-production environments only. Additionally, the risk of exposure has been significantly reduced and the impact to business was minimal.” With Oracle Data Masking organizations like Cornell can: Make application data securely available in non-production environments Prevent application developers and testers from seeing production data Use an extensible template library and policies for data masking automation Gain the benefits of referential integrity so that applications continue to work Listen to the podcast to hear the complete interview.  Learn more about Oracle Data Masking by registering to watch this SANS Institute Webcast and view this short demo.

  Read the article

• OSB and Coherence Integration

  - by mark.ms.smith

  Anyone who has tried to manage Coherence nodes or tried to cache results in OSB, will appreciate the new functionality now available. As of WebLogic Server 10.3.4, you can use the WebLogic Administration Server, via the Administration Console or WLST, and java-based Node Manager to manage and monitor the life cycle of stand-alone Coherence cache servers. This is a great step forward as the previous options mainly involved writing your own scripts to do this. You can find an excellent description of how this works at James Bayer’s blog. You can also find the WebLogic documentation here.As of Oracle Service Bus 11gR1 (11.1.1.3.0), OSB now supports service result caching for Business Bervices with Coherence. If you use Business Services that return somewhat static results that do not change often, you can configure those Business Services to cache results. For Business Services that use result caching, you can control the time to live for the cached result. After the cached result expires, the next Business Service call results in invoking the back-end service to get the result. This result is then stored in the cache for future requests to access. I’m thinking that this caching functionality would be perfect for some sort of cross reference data that was refreshed nightly by batch. You can find the OSB Business Service documentation here.Result Caching in a dedicated JVMThis example demonstrates these new features by configuring a OSB Business Service to cache results in a separate Coherence JVM managed by WebLogic. The reason why you may want to use a separate, dedicated JVM is that the result cache data could potentially be quite large and you may want to protect your OSB java heap.In this example, the client will call an OSB Proxy Service to get Employee data based on an Employee Id. Using a Business Service, OSB calls an external system. The results are automatically cached and when called again, the respective results are retrieved from the cache rather than the external system.Step 1 – Set up your Coherence Server Via the OSB Administration Server Console, create your Coherence Server to be used as the results cache.Here are the configured Coherence Server arguments from the Server Start tab. Note that I’m using the default Cache Config and Override files in the domain.-Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dtangosol.coherence.override=/app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/user_projects/domains/osb_domain2/config/osb/coherence/osb-coherence-override.xml -Dtangosol.coherence.cluster=OSB-cluster -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=/app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/user_projects/domains/osb_domain2/config/osb/coherence/osb-coherence-cache-config.xml -Dtangosol.coherence.distributed.localstorage=true -Dtangosol.coherence.management=all -Dtangosol.coherence.management.remote=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote Just incase you need it, here is my Coherence Server classpath:/app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/oracle_common/modules/oracle.coherence_3.6/coherence.jar: /app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/modules/features/weblogic.server.modules.coherence.server_10.3.4.0.jar: /app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/oracle_osb/lib/osb-coherence-client.jarBy default, OSB will try and create a local result cache instance. You need to disable this by adding the following JVM parameters to each of the OSB Managed Servers:-Dtangosol.coherence.distributed.localstorage=false -DOSB.coherence.cluster=OSB-clusterIf you need more information on configuring a remote result cache, have a look at the configuration documentration under the heading Using an Out-of-Process Coherence Cache Server.Step 2 – Configure your Business Service Under the respective Business Service Message Handling Configuration (Advanced Properties), you need to enable “Result Caching”. Additionally, you need to determine what the cache data will be keyed on. In the example below, I’m keying it on the unique Employee Id.The Results As this test was on my laptop, the actual timings are just an indication that there is a benefit to caching results. Using my test harness, I sent 10,000 requests to OSB, all with the same Employee Id. In this case, I had result caching disabled.You can see that this caused the back end Business Service (BS_GetEmployeeData) to be called for each request. Then after enabling result caching, I sent the same number of identical requests.You can now see the Business Service was only invoked once on the first request. All subsequent requests used the Results Cache.

  Read the article

• Know Your Audience, And/Or Your Customer

  - by steve.diamond

  Yesterday I gave an internal presentation to about 20 Oracle employees on "messaging," not messaging technology, but embarking on the process of building messages. One of the elements I covered was the importance of really knowing and understanding your audience. As a humorous reference I included two side-by-side photos of Oakland A's fans and Oakland Raiders fans. The Oakland A's fans looked like happy-go-lucky drunk types. The Oakland Raiders fans looked like angry extras from a low budget horror flick. I then asked my presentation attendees what these two groups had in common. Here's what I heard. --They're human (at least I THINK they're human). --They're from Oakland. --They're sports fans. After that, it was anyone's guess. A few days earlier we were putting the finishing touches on a sales presentation for one of our product lines. We had included an upfront "lead in" addressing how the economy is improving, yet that doesn't mean sales executives will have any more resources to add to their teams, invest in technology, etc. This "lead in" included miscellaneous news article headlines and statistics validating the slowly improving economy. When we subjected this presentation to internal review two days ago, this upfront section in particular was scrutinized. "Is the economy really getting better? I (exclamation point) don't think it's really getting better. Haven't you seen the headlines coming out of Greece and Europe?" Then the question TO ME became, "Who will actually be in the audience that sees and hears this presentation? Will s/he be someone like me? Or will s/he be someone like the critic who didn't like our lead-in?" We took the safe route and removed that lead in. After all, why start a "pitch" with a component that is arguably subjective? What if many of our audience members are individuals at organizations still facing a strong headwind? For reasons I won't go into here, it was the right decision to make. The moral of the story: Make sure you really know your audience. Harness the wisdom of the information your organization's CRM systems collect to get that fully informed "customer view." Conduct formal research. Conduct INFORMAL research. Ask lots of questions. Study industries and scenarios that have nothing to do with yours to see "how they do it." Stop strangers in coffee shops and on the street...seriously. Last week I caught up with an old friend from high school who recently retired from a 25 year career with the USMC. He said, "I can learn something from every single person I come into contact with." What a great way of approaching the world. Then, think about and write down what YOU like and dislike as a customer. But also remember that when it comes to your company's products, you are most likely NOT the customer, so don't go overboard in superimposing your own world view. Approaching the study of customers this way adds rhyme, reason and CONTEXT to lengthy blog posts like this one. Know your audience.

  Read the article

• Book Review: Programming Windows Identity Foundation

  - by DigiMortal

  Programming Windows Identity Foundation by Vittorio Bertocci is right now the only serious book about Windows Identity Foundation available. I started using Windows Identity Foundation when I made my first experiments on Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service. I wanted to generalize the way how people authenticate theirselves to my systems and AppFabric ACS seemed to me like good point where to start. My first steps trying to get things work opened the door to whole new authentication world for me. As I went through different blog postings and articles to get more information I discovered that the thing I am trying to use is the one I am looking for. As best security API for .NET was found I wanted to know more about it and this is how I found Programming Windows Identity Foundation. What’s inside? Programming WIF focuses on architecture, design and implementation of WIF. I think Vittorio is very good at teaching people because you find no too complex topics from the book. You learn more and more as you read and as a good thing you will find that you can also try out your new knowledge on WIF immediately. After giving good overview about WIF author moves on and introduces how to use WIF in ASP.NET applications. You will get complete picture how WIF integrates to ASP.NET request processing pipeline and how you can control the process by yourself. There are two chapters about ASP.NET. First one is more like introduction and the second one goes deeper and deeper until you have very good idea about how to use ASP.NET and WIF together, what issues you may face and how you can configure and extend WIF. Other two chapters cover using WIF with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) band   Windows Azure. WCF chapter expects that you know WCF very well. This is not introductory chapter for beginners, this is heavy reading if you are not familiar with WCF. The chapter about Windows Azure describes how to use WIF in cloud applications. Last chapter talks about some future developments of WIF and describer some problems and their solutions. Most interesting part of this chapter is section about Silverlight. Who should read this book? Programming WIF is targeted to developers. It does not matter if you are beginner or old bullet-proof professional – every developer should be able to be read this book with no difficulties. I don’t recommend this book to administrators and project managers because they find almost nothing that is related to their work. I strongly recommend this book to all developers who are interested in modern authentication methods on Microsoft platform. The book is written so well that I almost forgot all things around me when I was reading the book. All additional tools you need are free. There is also Azure AppFabric ACS test version available and you can try it out for free. Table of contents Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction Part I Windows Identity Foundation for Everybody 1 Claims-Based Identity 2 Core ASP.NET Programming Part II Windows Identity Foundation for Identity Developers 3 WIF Processing Pipeline in ASP.NET 4 Advanced ASP.NET Programming 5 WIF and WCF 6 WIF and Windows Azure 7 The Road Ahead Index

  Read the article

• Steps for MySQL DB Replication

  - by Manish Agrawal

  Following are the steps for MySQL Replication implementation on Linux machine: Pre-implementation steps for DB Replication:   1.    Identify the databases to be replicated 2.    Identify the tables to be ignored during replication per database for example log tables 3.  Carefully identify and replace the variables and paths(locations) mentioned (in bold) in the commands given below with appropriate values 4.  Schedule the maintenance activity in odd hours as these activities will affect all the databases on Master database server       Implementation steps for DB Replication:     1.    Configure the /etc/my.cnf file on Master database server to enable Binary logging, setting of server id and configuring of dbnames for which logging should be done. [mysqld] log-bin=mysql-bin server-id=1 binlog-do-db = dbname   Note: You can specify multiple DB in binlog-do-db by using comma separated dbname values like: dbname1, dbname2, …, dbnameN   2.    On Master database, Grant Replication Slave Privileges, by executing following command on mysql prompt mysql> GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON *.* TO slaveuser@<hostname> identified by ‘slavepassword’;   3.    Stop the Master & Slave database by giving the command      mysqladmin shutdown   4.    Start the Master database by giving the command      /usr/local/mysql-5.0.22/bin/mysqld_safe --user=user&     5.    mysql> FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK; Note: Leave the client (putty session) from which you issued the FLUSH TABLES statement running, so that the read lock remains in effect. If you exit the client, the lock is released. 6.    mysql > SHOW MASTER STATUS;          +---------------+----------+--------------+------------------+          | File          | Position | Binlog_Do_DB | Binlog_Ignore_DB |          +---------------+----------+--------------+------------------+          | mysql-bin.003 | 117       | dbname       |                  |          +---------------+----------+--------------+------------------+ Note: Note this information as this will be required while starting of Slave and replication in later steps   7.    Take MySQL dump by giving the following command, In another session window (putty window) run the following command: mysqldump –u user --ignore-table=dbname.tbl_name -–ignore-table=dbname.tbl_name2 --master-data dbname > dbname_dump.db Note: When choosing databases to include in the dump, remember that you will need to filter out databases on each slave that you do not want to include in the replication process.     8.    Unlock the tables on Master by giving following command: mysql> UNLOCK TABLES;   9.    Copy the dump file to Slave DB server   10.  Startup the Slave by using option --skip-slave      /usr/local/mysql-5.0.22/bin/mysqld_safe --user=user --skip-slave&   11.  Restore the dump file on Slave DB server      mysql –u user dbname < dbname_dump.db   12.  Stop the Slave database by giving the command      mysqladmin shutdown   13.  Configure the /etc/my.cnf file on the Slave database server [mysqld] server-id=2 replicate-ignore-table = dbname.tablename   14.  Start the Slave Mysql Server with 'replicate-do-db=DB name' option.      /usr/local/mysql-5.0.22/bin/mysqld_safe --user=user --replicate-do-db=dbname --skip-slave   15.  Configure the settings at Slave server for Master host name, log filename and position within the log file as shown in Step 6 above Use Change Master statement in the MySQL session mysql> CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='<master_host_name>', MASTER_USER='<replication_user_name>', MASTER_PASSWORD='<replication_password>', MASTER_LOG_FILE='<recorded_log_file_name>', MASTER_LOG_POS=<recorded_log_position>;   16.  On Slave Servers mysql prompt give the following command: a.     mysql > START SLAVE; b.    mysql > SHOW SLAVE STATUS;         Note: To stop slave for backup or any other activity you can use the following command on the Slave Servers mysql prompt: mysql> STOP SLAVE     Refer following links for more information on MySQL DB Replication: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication-options.html http://crazytoon.com/2008/04/21/mysql-replication-replicate-by-choice/ http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqldump.html

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – CXPACKET – Parallelism – Advanced Solution – Wait Type – Day 7 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier we discussed about the what is the common solution to solve the issue with CXPACKET wait time. Today I am going to talk about few of the other suggestions which can help to reduce the CXPACKET wait. If you are going to suggest that I should focus on MAXDOP and COST THRESHOLD – I totally agree. I have covered them in details in yesterday’s blog post. Today we are going to discuss few other way CXPACKET can be reduced. Potential Reasons: If data is heavily skewed, there are chances that query optimizer may estimate the correct amount of the data leading to assign fewer thread to query. This can easily lead to uneven workload on threads and may create CXPAKCET wait. While retrieving the data one of the thread face IO, Memory or CPU bottleneck and have to wait to get those resources to execute its tasks, may create CXPACKET wait as well. Data which is retrieved is on different speed IO Subsystem. (This is not common and hardly possible but there are chances). Higher fragmentations in some area of the table can lead less data per page. This may lead to CXPACKET wait. As I said the reasons here mentioned are not the major cause of the CXPACKET wait but any kind of scenario can create the probable wait time. Best Practices to Reduce CXPACKET wait: Refer earlier article regarding MAXDOP and Cost Threshold. De-fragmentation of Index can help as more data can be obtained per page. (Assuming close to 100 fill-factor) If data is on multiple files which are on multiple similar speed physical drive, the CXPACKET wait may reduce. Keep the statistics updated, as this will give better estimate to query optimizer when assigning threads and dividing the data among available threads. Updating statistics can significantly improve the strength of the query optimizer to render proper execution plan. This may overall affect the parallelism process in positive way. Bad Practice: In one of the recent consultancy project, when I was called in I noticed that one of the ‘experienced’ DBA noticed higher CXPACKET wait and to reduce them, he has increased the worker threads. The reality was increasing worker thread has lead to many other issues. With more number of the threads, more amount of memory was used leading memory pressure. As there were more threads CPU scheduler faced higher ‘Context Switching’ leading further degrading performance. When I explained all these to ‘experienced’ DBA he suggested that now we should reduce the number of threads. Not really! Lower number of the threads may create heavy stalling for parallel queries. I suggest NOT to touch the setting of number of the threads when dealing with CXPACKET wait. Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and I no way claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading book on-line for further clarification. All the discussion of Wait Stats over here is generic and it varies by system to system. You are recommended to test this on development server before implementing to production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: DMV, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Building vs. Buying a Master Data Management Solution

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Many organizations prefer to build their own MDM solutions. The argument is that they know their data quality issues and their data better than anyone. Plus a focused solution will cost less in the long run then a vendor supplied general purpose product. This is not unreasonable if you think of MDM as a point solution for a particular data quality problem. But this approach carries significant risk. We now know that organizations achieve significant competitive advantages when they deploy MDM as a strategic enterprise wide solution: with the most common best practice being to deploy a tactical MDM solution and grow it into a full information architecture. A build your own approach most certainly will not scale to a larger architecture unless it is done correctly with the larger solution in mind. It is possible to build a home grown point MDM solution in such a way that it will dovetail into broader MDM architectures. A very good place to start is to use the same basic technologies that Oracle uses to build its own MDM solutions. Start with the Oracle 11g database to create a flexible, extensible and open data model to hold the master data and all needed attributes. The Oracle database is the most flexible, highly available and scalable database system on the market. With its Real Application Clusters (RAC) it can even support the mixed OLTP and BI workloads that represent typical MDM data access profiles. Use Oracle Data Integration (ODI) for batch data movement between applications, MDM data stores, and the BI layer. Use Oracle Golden Gate for more real-time data movement. Use Oracle's SOA Suite for application integration with its: BPEL Process Manager to orchestrate MDM connections to business processes; Identity Management for managing users; WS Manager for managing web services; Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for analytics; and JDeveloper for creating or extending the MDM management application. Oracle utilizes these technologies to build its MDM Hubs.  Customers who build their own MDM solution using these components will easily migrate to Oracle provided MDM solutions when the home grown solution runs out of gas. But, even with a full stack of open flexible MDM technologies, creating a robust MDM application can be a daunting task. For example, a basic MDM solution will need: a set of data access methods that support master data as a service as well as direct real time access as well as batch loads and extracts; a data migration service for initial loads and periodic updates; a metadata management capability for items such as business entity matrixed relationships and hierarchies; a source system management capability to fully cross-reference business objects and to satisfy seemingly conflicting data ownership requirements; a data quality function that can find and eliminate duplicate data while insuring correct data attribute survivorship; a set of data quality functions that can manage structured and unstructured data; a data quality interface to assist with preventing new errors from entering the system even when data entry is outside the MDM application itself; a continuing data cleansing function to keep the data up to date; an internal triggering mechanism to create and deploy change information to all connected systems; a comprehensive role based data security system to control and monitor data access, update rights, and maintain change history; a flexible business rules engine for managing master data processes such as privacy and data movement; a user interface to support casual users and data stewards; a business intelligence structure to support profiling, compliance, and business performance indicators; and an analytical foundation for directly analyzing master data. Oracle's pre-built MDM Hub solutions are full-featured 3-tier Internet applications designed to participate in the full Oracle technology stack or to run independently in other open IT SOA environments. Building MDM solutions from scratch can take years. Oracle's pre-built MDM solutions can bring quality data to the enterprise in a matter of months. But if you must build, at lease build with the world's best technology stack in a way that simplifies the eventual upgrade to Oracle MDM and to the full enterprise wide information architecture that it enables.

  Read the article

• ASP.NET Routing not working on IIS 7.0

  - by Rick Strahl

  I ran into a nasty little problem today when deploying an application using ASP.NET 4.0 Routing to my live server. The application and its Routing were working just fine on my dev machine (Windows 7 and IIS 7.5), but when I deployed (Windows 2008 R1 and IIS 7.0) Routing would just not work. Every time I hit a routed url IIS would just throw up a 404 error: This is an IIS error, not an ASP.NET error so this doesn’t actually come from ASP.NET’s routing engine but from IIS’s handling of expressionless URLs. Note that it’s clearly falling through all the way to the StaticFile handler which is the last handler to fire in the typical IIS handler list. In other words IIS is trying to parse the extension less URL and not firing it into ASP.NET but failing. As I mentioned on my local machine this all worked fine and to make sure local and live setups match I re-copied my Web.config, double checked handler mappings in IIS and re-copied the actual application assemblies to the server. It all looked exactly matched. However no workey on the server with IIS 7.0!!! Finally, totally by chance, I remembered the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests attribute flag on the modules key in web.config and set it to true: <system.webServer> <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"> <add name="ScriptCompressionModule" type="Westwind.Web.ScriptCompressionModule,Westwind.Web" /> </modules> </system.webServer> And lo and behold, Routing started working on the live server and IIS 7.0! This seems really obvious now of course, but the really tricky thing about this is that on IIS 7.5 this key is not necessary. So on my Windows 7 machine ASP.NET Routing was working just fine without the key set. However on IIS 7.0 on my live server the same missing setting was not working. On IIS 7.0 this key must be present or Routing will not work. Oddly on IIS 7.5 it appears that you can’t even turn off the behavior – setting runtAllManagedModuleForAllRequests="false" had no effect at all and Routing continued to work just fine even with the flag set to false, which is NOT what I would have expected. Kind of disappointing too that Windows Server 2008 (R1) can’t be upgraded to IIS 7.5. It sure seems like that should have been possible since the OS server core changes in R2 are pretty minor. For the future I really hope Microsoft will allow updating IIS versions without tying them explicitly to the OS. It looks like that with the release of IIS Express Microsoft has taken some steps to untie some of those tight OS links from IIS. Let’s hope that’s the case for the future – it sure is nice to run the same IIS version on dev and live boxes, but upgrading live servers is too big a deal to do just because an updated OS release came out. Moral of the story – never assume that your dev setup will work as is on the live setup. It took me forever to figure this out because I assumed that because my web.config on the local machine was fine and working and I copied all relevant web.config data to the server it can’t be the configuration settings. I was looking everywhere but in the .config file forever before getting desperate and remembering the flag when I accidentally checked the intellisense settings in the modules key. Never assume anything. The other moral is: Try to keep your dev machine and server OS’s in sync whenever possible. Maybe it’s time to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 R2 after all. More info on Extensionless URLs in IIS Want to find out more exactly on how extensionless Urls work on IIS 7? The check out  How ASP.NET MVC Routing Works and its Impact on the Performance of Static Requests which goes into great detail on the complexities of the process. Thanks to Jeff Graves for pointing me at this article – a great linked reference for this topic!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7  Windows  

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 761 762 763 764 765 766 767 768 769 770 771 772  | Next Page >