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• Book Review - Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan

  - by BuckWoody

  As part of my professional development, I’ve created a list of books to read throughout the year, starting in June of 2011. This a review of the first one, called Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan. You can find my entire list of books I’m reading for my career here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/06/07/head-in-the-clouds-eyes-on-the-books.aspx  Why I Chose This Book: As part of my learning style, I try to read multiple books about a single subject. I’ve found that at least 3 books are necessary to get the right amount of information to me. This is a “technical” work, meaning that it deals with technology and not business, writing or other facets of my career. I’ll have a mix of all of those as I read along. I chose this work in addition to others I’ve read since it covers everything from an introduction to more advanced topics in a single book. It also has some practical examples of actually working with the product, particularly on storage. Although it’s dated, many examples normally translate. I also saw that it had pretty good reviews. What I learned: I learned a great deal about storage, and many useful code snippets. I do think that there could have been more of a focus on the application fabric - but of course that wasn’t as mature a feature when this book was written. I learned some great architecture examples, and in one section I learned more about encryption. In that example, however, I would rather have seen the examples go the other way - the book focused on moving data from on-premise to Azure storage in an encrypted fashion. Using the Application Fabric I would rather see sensitive data left in a hybrid fashion on premise, and connect to for the Azure application. Even so, the examples were very useful. If you’re looking for a good “starter” Azure book, this is a good choice. I also recommend the last chapter as a quick read for a DBA, or Database Administrator. It’s not very long, but useful. Note that the limits described are incorrect - which is one of the dangers of reading a book about any cloud offering. The services offered are updated so quickly that the information is in constant danger of being “stale”. Even so, I found this a useful book, which I believe will help me work with Azure better. Raw Notes: I take notes as I read, calling that process “reading with a pencil”. I find that when I do that I pay attention better, and record some things that I need to know later. I’ll take these notes, categorize them into a OneNote notebook that I synchronize in my Live.com account, and that way I can search them from anywhere. I can even read them on the web, since the Live.com has a OneNote program built in. Note that these are the raw notes, so they might not make a lot of sense out of context - I include them here so you can watch my though process. Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan: Learning about how to select applications suitable for Distributed Technology. Application Fabric gets the least attention; probably because it was newer at the time. Very clear (Chapter One) Good foundation Background and history, but not too much I normally arrange my descriptions differently, starting with the use-cases and moving to physicality, but this difference helps me. Interesting that I am reading this using Safari Books Online, which uses many of these concepts. Taught me some new aspects of a Hypervisor – very low-level information about the Azure Fabric (not to be confused with the Application Fabric feature) (Chapter Two) Good detail of what is included in the SDK. Even more is available now. CS = Cloud Service (Chapter 3) Place Storage info in the configuration file, since it can be streamed in-line with a running app. Ditto for logging, and keep separated configs for staging and testing. Easy-switch in and switch out.  (Chapter 4) There are two Runtime API’s, one of external and one for internal. Realizing how powerful this paradigm really is. Some places seem light, and to drop off but perhaps that’s best. Managing API is not charged, which is nice. I don’t often think about the price, until it comes to an actual deployment (Chapter 5) Csmanage is something I want to dig into deeper. API requires package moves to Blob storage first, so it needs a URL. Csmanage equivalent can be written in Unix scripting using openssl. Upgrades are possible, and you use the upgradeDomainCount attribute in the Service-Definition.csdef file  Always use a low-privileged account to test on the dev fabric, since Windows Azure runs in partial trust. Full trust is available, but can be dangerous and must be well-thought out. (Chapter 6) Learned how to run full CMD commands in a web window – not that you would ever do that, but it was an interesting view into those links. This leads to a discussion on hosting other runtimes (such as Java or PHP) in Windows Azure. I got an expanded view on this process, although this is where the book shows its age a little. Books can be a problem for Cloud Computing for this reason – things just change too quickly. Windows Azure storage is not eventually consistent – it is instantly consistent with multi-phase commit. Plumbing for this is internal, not required to code that. (Chapter 7) REST API makes the service interoperable, hybrid, and consistent across code architectures. Nicely done. Use affinity groups to keep data and code together. Side note: e-book readers need a common “notes” feature. There’s a decent quick description of REST in this chapter. Learned about CloudDrive code – PowerShell sample that mounts Blob storage as a local provider. Works against Dev fabric by default, can be switched to Account. Good treatment in the storage chapters on the differences between using Dev storage and Azure storage. These can be mitigated. No, blobs are not of any size or number. Not a good statement (Chapter 8) Blob storage is probably Azure’s closest play to Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). Blob change operations must be authenticated, even when public. Chapters on storage are pretty in-depth. Queue Messages are base-64 encoded (Chapter 9) The visibility timeout ensures processing of message in a disconnected system. Order is not guaranteed for a message, so if you need that set an increasing number in the queue mechanism. While Queues are accessible via REST, they are not public and are secured by default. Interesting – the header for a queue request includes an estimated count. This can be useful to create more worker roles in a dynamic system. Each Entity (row) in the Azure Table service is atomic – all or nothing. (Chapter 10) An entity can have up to 255 Properties  Use “ID” for the class to indicate the key value, or use the [DataServiceKey] Attribute.  LINQ makes working with the Azure Table Service much easier, although Interop is certainly possible. Good description on the process of selecting the Partition and Row Key.  When checking for continuation tokens for pagination, include logic that falls out of the check in case you are at the last page.  On deleting a storage object, it is instantly unavailable, however a background process is dispatched to perform the physical deletion. So if you want to re-create a storage object with the same name, add retry logic into the code. Interesting approach to deleting an index entity without having to read it first – create a local entity with the same keys and apply it to the Azure system regardless of change-state.  Although the “Indexes” description is a little vague, it’s interesting to see a Folding and Stemming discussion a-la the Porter Stemming Algorithm. (Chapter 11)  Presents a better discussion of indexes (at least inverted indexes) later in the chapter. Great treatment for DBA’s in Chapter 11. We need to work on getting secondary indexes in Table storage. There is a limited form of transactions called “Entity Group Transactions” that, although they have conditions, makes a transactional system more possible. Concurrency also becomes an issue, but is handled well if you’re using Data Services in .NET. It watches the Etag and allows you to take action appropriately. I do not recommend using Azure as a location for secure backups. In fact, I would rather have seen the examples in (Chapter 12) go the other way, showing how data could be brought back to a local store as a DR or HA strategy. Good information on cryptography and so on even so. Chapter seems out of place, and should be combined with the Blob chapter.  (Chapter 13) on SQL Azure is dated, although the base concepts are OK.  Nice example of simple ADO.NET access to a SQL Azure (or any SQL Server Really) database.  

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• Guest Post: Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the &lsquo;Hello World of WPF&rsquo;

  - by Eric Nelson

  [You might want to also read other GuestPosts on my blog – or contribute one?] On the 26th and 27th of March (2010) myself and Edd Morgan of Microsoft will be popping along to the Scottish Ruby Conference. I dabble with Ruby and I am a huge fan whilst Edd is a “proper Ruby developer”. Hence I asked Edd if he was interested in creating a guest post or two for my blog on IronRuby. This is the second of those posts. If you should stumble across this post and happen to be attending the Scottish Ruby Conference, then please do keep a look out for myself and Edd. We would both love to chat about all things Ruby and IronRuby. And… we should have (if Amazon is kind) a few books on IronRuby with us at the conference which will need to find a good home. This is me and Edd and … the book: Order on Amazon: http://bit.ly/ironrubyunleashed Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the ‘Hello World of WPF’ In my previous post I introduced, to a minor extent, IronRuby. I expanded a little on the basics of by getting a Rails app up-and-running on this .NET implementation of the Ruby language — but there wasn't much to it! So now I would like to go from simply running a pre-existing project under IronRuby to developing a whole new application demonstrating the seamless interoperability between IronRuby and .NET. In particular, we'll be using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) — the component of the .NET Framework stack used to create rich media and graphical interfaces. Foundations of WPF To reiterate, WPF is the engine in the .NET Framework responsible for rendering rich user interfaces and other media. It's not the only collection of libraries in the framework with the power to do this — Windows Forms does the trick, too — but it is the most powerful and flexible. Put simply, WPF really excels when you need to employ eye candy. It's all about creating impact. Whether you're presenting a document, video, a data entry form, some kind of data visualisation (which I am most hopeful for, especially in terms of IronRuby - more on that later) or chaining all of the above with some flashy animations, you're likely to find that WPF gives you the most power when developing any of these for a Windows target. Let's demonstrate this with an example. I give you what I like to consider the 'hello, world' of WPF applications: the analogue clock. Today, over my lunch break, I created a WPF-based analogue clock using IronRuby... Any normal person would have just looked at their watch. - Twitter The Sample Application: Click here to see this sample in full on GitHub. Using Windows Presentation Foundation from IronRuby to create a Clock class Invoking the Clock class   Gives you The above is by no means perfect (it was a lunch break), but I think it does the job of illustrating IronRuby's interoperability with WPF using a familiar data visualisation. I'm sure you'll want to dissect the code yourself, but allow me to step through the important bits. (By the way, feel free to run this through ir first to see what actually happens). Now we're using IronRuby - unlike my previous post where we took pure Ruby code and ran it through ir, the IronRuby interpreter, to demonstrate compatibility. The main thing of note is the very distinct parallels between .NET namespaces and Ruby modules, .NET classes and Ruby classes. I guess there's not much to say about it other than at this point, you may as well be working with a purely Ruby graphics-drawing library. You're instantiating .NET objects, but you're doing it with the standard Ruby .new method you know from Ruby as Object#new — although, the root object of all your IronRuby objects isn't actually Object, it's System.Object. You're calling methods on these objects (and classes, for example in the call to System.Windows.Controls.Canvas.SetZIndex()) using the underscored, lowercase convention established for the Ruby language. The integration is so seamless. The fact that you're using a dynamic language on top of .NET's CLR is completely abstracted from you, allowing you to just build your software. A Brief Note on Events Events are a big part of developing client applications in .NET as well as under every other environment I can think of. In case you aren't aware, event-driven programming is essentially the practice of telling your code to call a particular method, or other chunk of code (a delegate) when something happens at an unpredictable time. You can never predict when a user is going to click a button, move their mouse or perform any other kind of input, so the advent of the GUI is what necessitated event-driven programming. This is where one of my favourite aspects of the Ruby language, blocks, can really help us. In traditional C#, for instance, you may subscribe to an event (assign a block of code to execute when an event occurs) in one of two ways: by passing a reference to a named method, or by providing an anonymous code block. You'd be right for seeing the parallel here with Ruby's concept of blocks, Procs and lambdas. As demonstrated at the very end of this rather basic script, we are using .NET's System.Timers.Timer to (attempt to) update the clock every second (I know it's probably not the best way of doing this, but for example's sake). Note: Diverting a little from what I said above, the ticking of a clock is very predictable, yet we still use the event our Timer throws to do this updating as one of many ways to perform that task outside of the main thread. You'll see that all that's needed to assign a block of code to be triggered on an event is to provide that block to the method of the name of the event as it is known to the CLR. This drawback to this is that it only allows the delegation of one code block to each event. You may use the add method to subscribe multiple handlers to that event - pushing that to the end of a queue. Like so: def tick puts "tick tock" end timer.elapsed.add method(:tick) timer.elapsed.add proc { puts "tick tock" } tick_handler = lambda { puts "tick tock" } timer.elapsed.add(tick_handler)   The ability to just provide a block of code as an event handler helps IronRuby towards that very important term I keep throwing around; low ceremony. Anonymous methods are, of course, available in other more conventional .NET languages such as C# and VB but, as usual, feel ever so much more elegant and natural in IronRuby. Note: Whether it's a named method or an anonymous chunk o' code, the block you delegate to the handling of an event can take arguments - commonly, a sender object and some args. Another Brief Note on Verbosity Personally, I don't mind verbose chaining of references in my code as long as it doesn't interfere with performance - as evidenced in the example above. While I love clean code, there's a certain feeling of safety that comes with the terse explicitness of long-winded addressing and the describing of objects as opposed to ambiguity (not unlike this sentence). However, when working with IronRuby, even I grow tired of typing System::Whatever::Something. Some people enjoy simply assuming namespaces and forgetting about them, regardless of the language they're using. Don't worry, IronRuby has you covered. It is completely possible to, with a call to include, bring the contents of a .NET-converted module into context of your IronRuby code - just as you would if you wanted to bring in an 'organic' Ruby module. To refactor the style of the above example, I could place the following at the top of my Clock class: class Clock include System::Windows::Shape include System::Windows::Media include System::Windows::Threading # and so on...   And by doing so, reduce calls to System::Windows::Shapes::Ellipse.new to simply Ellipse.new or references to System::Windows::Threading::DispatcherPriority.Render to a friendlier DispatcherPriority.Render. Conclusion I hope by now you can understand better how IronRuby interoperates with .NET and how you can harness the power of the .NET framework with the dynamic nature and elegant idioms of the Ruby language. The manner and parlance of Ruby that makes it a joy to work with sets of data is, of course, present in IronRuby — couple that with WPF's capability to produce great graphics quickly and easily, and I hope you can visualise the possibilities of data visualisation using these two things. Using IronRuby and WPF together to create visual representations of data and infographics is very exciting to me. Although today, with this project, we're only presenting one simple piece of information - the time - the potential is much grander. My day-to-day job is centred around software development and UI design, specifically in the realm of healthcare, and if you were to pay a visit to our office you would behold, directly above my desk, a large plasma TV with a constantly rotating, animated slideshow of charts and infographics to help members of our team do their jobs. It's an app powered by WPF which never fails to spark some conversation with visitors whose gaze has been hooked. If only it was written in IronRuby, the pleasantly low ceremony and reduced pre-processing time for my brain would have helped greatly. Edd Morgan blog Related Links: Getting PhP and Ruby working on Windows Azure and SQL Azure

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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – September 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/wlscommunity Oracle Exalogic? VIDEO: Oracle Public Cloud Built on Exalogic!, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGzjDloUw_s&feature=plcp … oracleopenworld #NetBeans Community Day at #JavaOne http://ow.ly/dunFL Oracle Cloud Zone Building an enterprise Cloud? Have Oracle show you the RIGHT way to plan, deploy and monitor enterprise clouds.... http://fb.me/286978S4S OTNArchBeat? Oracle Exalogic X2-2 walk-through with Brad Cameron | @jvzoggel http://pub.vitrue.com/yE7d Oracle Technet? Stash your cash. September OTN Member Offers - discounts on books, more | OTN Blog http://pub.vitrue.com/yTr9 C2B2 Consulting? C2B2 is Speaking at @UKOUG App Server Middleware SIG Meeting 'Real Life #WebLogic Performance Tuning' http://www.c2b2.co.uk/ukoug_application_server_middleware_sig_meeting … @wlscommunity JAXenter.com? From yesterday, @smeyen offers his views on the next generation #Java - do you agree? http://jaxenter.com/next-gen-java-we-don-t-need-another-revolutionary-44334.html … Markus Eisele? Awesome: professor from ITU uploads her programming lectures to #YouTube. Programming classes without having to pay! http://bit.ly/UtkJIW Adam Bien? Real World Java EE 6 Patterns--Rethinking Best Practices Reloaded: A completely rewritten, second, iteration of ... http://bit.ly/Qc3xTH Markus Eisele [blog] #PrimeFaces Push with #Atmosphere on #GlassFish 3.1.2.2 http://goo.gl/fb/jPDzA Lucas Jellema? Forms community event at Oracle Open World - Tuesday, 2nd Oct with the BIG names in Forms - see: http://oracleformsinfo.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/ask-the-product-manager-join-us-at-the-oracle-forms-community-event-at-openworld-2012/ … WebLogic Community WebLogic & Coherence & Cloud presentations for customer meetings http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kw Adam Bien? New Book: Rethinking Best Practices with Java EE 6 is out: http://realworldpatterns.com (fully rewritten, re-edited and reformatted) WebLogic Community? Want to become and WebLogic 12c expert? free WebLogic 12c partner bootcamps &ndash;new locations: Madrid Spain http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kK WebLogic Community? Promote Your WebLogic events at http://oracle.com http://wp.me/p1LMIb-ku OracleBlogs Gartner review Oracle ADF http://ow.ly/1mgkCV Simon Haslam Next #ukoug App Server & MW SIG on 10 Oct: http://www.ukoug.org/events/ukoug-application-server-and-middleware-sig-meeting8/ … Hopefully plenty of good admin stuff! Michel Schildmeijer My book "WebLogic 12c; First look" has been reviewed again..see http://www.amazon.com/review/R28L6E3CC9RPMK/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1849687188&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag= … … Markus Eisele? #Weblogic 11g Interactive Quick Reference Map: http://bit.ly/Ugsq52 #wls #oracle #reference /via @TonyvanEsch Marc? Playing with #syslog server and #weblogic. Is there a simple how-to to configure all the logging from #WLS to #syslog-ng WebLogic Community Java update http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kI WebLogic Community top tweets WebLogic Partner Community &ndash; August 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kA Andrejus Baranovskis? Oracle University Training: ADF/WebCenter 11g Development in Depth | Andrejus Baranovskis http://fb.me/253ZTS2zp OracleSupport_WLS? How neat is a free tool that allows you to inspect and debug traffic from virtually any application? http://pub.vitrue.com/vXdP WebLogic Community WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter August 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kn OTNArchBeat Integrating Coherence & Java EE 6 Applications using ActiveCache | Ricardo Ferreira http://pub.vitrue.com/rwGg Adam Bien? Thanks for attending the #javaee #techtalk "Enterprise Java 2.0" I pushed the project and slides to: http://kenai.com/projects/javaee-patterns/sources/hg/show/hacks/techtalk2012?rev=429 … JDeveloper & ADF? How to service-enable Oracle ADF Business Components http://ht.ly/1mcfsZ OracleSupport_WLS? Do you know that #WebLogic 12.1.1.0 is certified for production with JDK 7? @ http://pub.vitrue.com/35Kn Andreas Koop? My latest upload : WebLogic Administration und Deployment mit WLST on @slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/multikoop/weblogic-administration-und-deployment-mit-wlst … OTNArchBeat? Demo for OPN: Oracle Coherence Management with EM Cloud Control 12c http://pub.vitrue.com/reoo Markus Eisele? [blog] Java Champions at #JavaOne 2012 http://goo.gl/fb/Ibb6N #javachampion OracleBlogs Buy This Book!: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Handbook http://ow.ly/1malM1 WebLogic Community? Coherence Management with EM Cloud Control 12c &ndash;demo for partners http://wp.me/p1LMIb-iE Arun Gupta? Learn how Java can help Internet of Things at Java Embedded at JavaOne: http://bit.ly/POBizh WebLogic Community? Follow WebLogicCommunity on facebook http://www.facebook.com/WebLogicCommunity … #WebLogicCommunity WebLogic Community? Building Java EE in the Cloud–Webcast August 30th 2012 https://weblogiccommunity.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/building-java-ee-in-the-cloudwebcast-august-30th-2012/ … #WebLogicCommunity #Java #oracle #opn WebLogic Community? Call for WebLogic Community newsletter content. Please send @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity OracleSupport_WLS? The #weblogic wasp: lots of tips, Q&A and examples http://pub.vitrue.com/v0bw Frank Nimphius? Free ADF Best Practices Webinar by Andrejus Baranovskis for ODTUG (18, 2012 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT) http://bit.ly/OiSWbi ADF Code Corner Webcast- Friday September 14, 8:30 AM - 9.00 AM (CET) - ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps (in English) - with Chris Muir: http://bit.ly/OiQVMb Oracle WebLogic? New blog post: Developing Custom User Principal Object http://pub.vitrue.com/ltam JAX London? Just 4days left to get in on the early bird special, don't miss out!! http://jaxlondon.com/ #JAXLondon #Java WebLogic Community Building Java EE in the Cloud&ndash;Webcast August 30th 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-kE Andrejus Baranovskis? New Record Master-Detail Validation and ADF BC Groovy Use Case http://fb.me/1D2NEIl8g JAX London? Don't miss out!!! Only 6 days left to make use of our early bird offer #JAXLondon #JAVA http://jaxlondon.com/ Michel Schildmeijer Qualogy launches Proof of Concept Center for Oracle Fusion Applications http://www.qualogy.com/qualogy-launches-proof-of-concept-center-for-oracle-fusion-applications/ … via @Qualogy_news OracleSupport_WLS ?Need to troubleshoot redeployment failure in #Weblogic? Check this http://pub.vitrue.com/auhz OracleEnterpriseMgr? Blog : Managing Oracle #Exalogic Elastic #Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center http://ow.ly/dd40e #em12c ODTUG? Want free advanced technical ADF training?Join @andrejusb for an @odtug webinar! check out his blog for more info http://bit.ly/SvKJDq chriscmuir Oracle Open World 2012 and ADF EMG http://zite.to/QyusZE OTNArchBeat? Boost your infrastructure with Coherence into the Cloud | Nino Guarnacci http://pub.vitrue.com/v3aJ WebLogic Community? Presentations & Training material OFM Summer Camps & Impressions & Feedback http://wp.me/p1LMIb-ks Arun Gupta? Java EE 6 pocket guide by O'Reilly available for pre-order from Amazon: http://amzn.to/O6YyoP and B&N: http://bit.ly/NjWLk1 OTNArchBeat Joining the Existing Cluster in Coherence | A. Fuat Sungur http://pub.vitrue.com/6uLh Andrejus Baranovskis Sample Application for Switching Application Module Data Sources http://fb.me/1PSURUzch OTNArchBeat Oracle WebLogic DevCast: Building Java EE in the Cloud - August 30 - 10am PT/ 1pm ET http://pub.vitrue.com/xXg0 OTNArchBeat? GlassFish Community Event at #javaone - Sept 30 -11am – 1pm -Moscone South. Register Now! http://pub.vitrue.com/p2f5 OracleSupport_WLS? Connecting To HTTPS Site Using Simple Java Program When Using Proxy http://pub.vitrue.com/stVv Michel Schildmeijer? Before you go to #OOW take the sneak preview of WebLogic 12c with you: http://www.qualogy.com/ga-nog-niet-naar-oow-en-neem-mee-weblogic-12c/ … via @Qualogy_news Simon Haslam? Even more great ADF content at #oow2012 this year including a packed ADF EMG day on Sunday: https://blogs.oracle.com/onesizedoesntfitall/entry/the_year_after_the_year … OracleBlogs ExaLogic trainings for partners http://ow.ly/1m6a5D Robin? First presentation on DOAG conference (thanks to @Steffen2042) "Weblogic Server for Dummies". Now I´m pretty excited :) http://www.doag.org/de/events/konferenzen/doag-2012.html … Markus Eisele There is a #facebook page for the upcoming #Java Mission Control (JRockit Mission Control for #Hotspot)! ttp://on.fb.me/Q31oyA Adam Bien? The almost free #javaee workshop in Rapperswil has only 60 registrations so far: http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/enterprise_java_2_0_swiss … What's the problem? :-) WebLogic Community ExaLogic trainings for partners http://wp.me/p1LMIb-iC OracleBlogs How to install Oracle Weblogic Server using Generic Package installer? http://ow.ly/1m5ms7 OracleSupport_WLS #Weblogic Server new blog post - Developing Custom User Principal Object http://pub.vitrue.com/ltam OracleBlogs? Architects and Architecture at JavaOne 2012 http://ow.ly/1m4oS5 WebLogic Community Are you WebLogic or Application Grid Specialized? Do you get Recognized? Get your plaque https://weblogiccommunity.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/plaques-weblogic-application-grid-specialization/ … #WebLogicCommunity #opn WebLogic Community? Plaques WebLogic & Application Grid Specialization http://wp.me/p1LMIb-iA JDeveloper & ADF? First Steps With Oracle Application Testing Suite: Recording a Test With OpenScript http://dlvr.it/222npy WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Tools of the Trade

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  I got pretty excited a couple of days ago when my new laptop arrived. “The new phone books are here!  The new phone books are here!  I’m a somebody!” - Steve Martin in The Jerk It is a Dell Precision M4500 with an Intel i7 Core 2.8 GHZ running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 15.6” widescreen, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD.  For some of you high fliers, this may be nothing to write home about, but compared to the 32–bit Windows XP laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a regular hard disk that I’m coming from, it’s a really nice step forward.  I won’t even bore you with the details of the desktop PC I was first given when I started here 5 1/2 years ago.  Let’s just say that things have improved.  One really nice thing is that while we are definitely running a lean and mean department in terms of staffing, my boss believes in supporting that lean staff with good tools in order to stay lean instead of having to spend even more money on additional employees.  Of course, that only goes so far, and at some point you have to add more people in order to get more work done, which is why we are bringing on-board a new employee and a new contract developer next week.  But that’s a different story for a different time. But the main topic for this post is to highlight the variety of tools that I use in my job and that you might find useful, too.  This is easy to do right now because the process of building up my new laptop from scratch has forced me to assemble a list of software that had to be installed and configured.  Keep in mind as you look through this list that I play many roles in our company.  My official title is Software Engineering Manager, but in addition to managing the team, I am also an active ASP.NET and SQL developer, the Database Administrator, and 50% of the SAN Administrator team.  So, without further ado, here are the tools and some comments about why I use them: Tool Purpose Virtual Clone Drive Easily mount an ISO image as a DVD Drive.  This is particularly handy when you are downloading disk images from Microsoft for your tools. SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition We are migrating all of our active systems to SQL 2008 R2.  Developer Edition has all the features of Enterprise Edition, but intended for development use. SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (BIDS ONLY) The migration to SSRS 2008 R2 is just getting started, and in the meantime, maintenance work still has to be done on the reports on our SQL 2005 server.  For some reason, you can’t use BIDS from 2008 to write reports for a 2005 server.  There is some different format and when you open 2005 reports in 2008 BIDS, it forces you to upgrade, and they can no longer be uploaded to a 2005 server.  Hopefully Microsoft will fix this soon in some manner similar to Visual Studio now allows you to pick which version of the .NET Framework you are coding against. Visual Studio 2010 Premium All of our application development is in ASP.NET, and we might as well use the tool designed for it. I’ve used a version of Visual Studio going all the way back to VB 6.0 and Visual Interdev. Vault Professional Client Several years ago we replaced Visual Source Safe with SourceGear Vault (then Fortress, and now Vault Pro), and I love it.  It is very reliable with low overhead - perfect for a small to medium size development team.  And being a small ISV, their support is exceptional. Red-Gate Developer Bundle with the SQL Source Control update for Vault I first used, and fell in love with, SQL Prompt shortly before Red-Gate bought it, and then Red-Gate’s first release made me love it even more.  SQL Refactor (which has since been rolled into the latest version of SQL Prompt) has saved me many hours and migraine’s trying to understand somebody else’s code when their indenting was nonexistant, or worse, irrational.  SQL Compare has been awesome for troubleshooting potential schema issues between different instances of system databases.  SQL Data Compare helped us identify the cause behind a bug which appeared in PROD but could not be reproduced in a nearly (but not quite exactly) identical copy in UAT.  And the newest tool we are embracing: SQL Source Control.  I blogged about it here (and here, and here) last December.  This is really going to help us keep each developer’s copy of the database in sync with one another. Fiddler Helps you watch the whole traffic stream on web visits.  Haven’t used it a lot, but it did help me track down some odd 404 errors we were finding in our own application logs.  Has some other JavaScript troubleshooting capabilities, but some of its usefulness has been supplanted by the Developer Tools option in IE8. Funduc Search & Replace Find any string anywhere in a mound of source code really, really fast.  Does RegEx searches, if you understand that foreign language.  Has really helped with some refactoring work to pinpoint, for example, everywhere a particular stored procedure is referenced, whether in .NET code or other SQL procedures (which we have in script files).  Provides in-context preview of the search results.  Fantastic tool, and a bargain price. SciTE SciTE is a Scintilla based Text Editor and it is a fantastic, light-weight tool for quickly reviewing (or writing) program code, SQL scripts, and extract files.  It has language-specific syntax highlighting.  I used it to write several batch and CMD programs a year ago, and to examine data extract files for exchanging information with other systems.  Extremely handy are the options to View End of Line and View Whitespace.  Ever receive a file that is supposed to use CRLF as an end-of-line marker, but really only has CRs?  SciTE will quickly make that visible. Infragistics Controls We do a lot of ASP.NET development, and frequently use the WebGrid, WebTab, and date picker controls.  We will likely be implementing the Hierarchical Data Grid soon.  Infragistics has control suites for WebForms, WinForms, Silverlight, and coming soon MVC/JQuery. WinZip - WITH Command-Line add-in The classic compression program with a great command-line interface that allows me to build those CMD (and soon PowerShell) programs for automated compression jobs.  Our versioned Build packages are zip files. XML Notepad Haven’t used this a lot myself, but one of my team really likes it for examining large XML files. LINQPad Again, haven’t used this one a lot, but it was recommended to me for learning and practicing my LINQ skills which will come in handy as we implement Entity Framework. SQL Sentry Plan Explorer SQL Server Show Plan on steroids.  Great for helping you focus on the parts of a large query that are of most importance.  Also great for just compressing the graphical plan into more readable layout. Araxis Merge A great DIFF and Merge tool.  SourceGear provides a great tool called DiffMerge that we use all the time, but occasionally, I like the cross-edit capabilities of Araxis Merge.  For a while, we also produced DIFF reports in HTML that showed all the changes that occurred between two releases.  This was most important when we were putting out very small, but very important hot fixes on a very politically hot system.  The reports produced by Araxis Merge gave the Director of IS assurance that we were not accidentally introducing ripples throughout the system with our releases. Idera SQL Admin Toolset A great collection of tools including a password checker to help analyze your SQL Server for weak user passwords, a Backup Status tool to quickly scan a large list of servers and databases to identify any that are overdue for backups.  Particularly helpful for highlighting new databases that have been deployed without getting included in your backup processing.  I also like Space Analyzer to keep an eye on disk space consumed by database files. Idera SQL Job Manager This free tool provides a nice calendar view of SQL Server Job Schedules, but to a degree, you also get what you pay for.  We will be purchasing SQL Sentry Event Manager later this year as an even better job schedule reviewer/manager.  But in the meantime, this at least gives me a good view on potential resource conflicts across multiple instances of SQL Server. DBFViewer 2000 I inherited a couple of FoxPro databases that I have to keep an eye on occasionally and have not yet been able to migrate them to SQL Server. Balsamiq Mockups We are still in evaluation-mode on this tool, but I really like it as a quick UI mockup tool that does not require Visual Studio, so someone other than a programmer can do UI design.  The interface looks hand-drawn which definitely has some psychological benefits when communicating to users, too. FeedDemon I have to stay on top of my WAY TOO MANY blog subscriptions somehow.  I may read blogs on a couple of different computers, and FeedDemon’s integration with Google Reader allows me to keep them all in sync.  I don’t particularly like the Google Reader interface, or the fact that it always wanted to mark articles as read just because I scrolled past them.  FeedDemon solves this problem for me, and provides a multi-tabbed interface which is good because fairly frequently one blog will link to something else I want to read, and I can end up with a half-dozen open tabs all from one article. Synergy+ In my office, I run four monitors across two computers all with one mouse and keyboard.  Synergy is the magic software that makes this work. TweetDeck I’m not the most active Tweeter in the world, but when I want to check-in with the Twitterverse, this really helps.  I have found the #sqlhelp and #PoshHelp hash tags particularly useful, and I also have columns setup to make it easy to monitor #sqlpass, #PASSProfDev, and short term events like #sqlsat68.   Whew!  That’s a lot.  No wonder it took me a couple of days to get everything setup the way I wanted it.  Oh, that and actually getting some work accomplished at the same time.  Anyway, I know that is a huge dump of info, and most people never make it here to the end, so for those who did, let me say, CONGRATULATIONS, you made it! I hope you’ll find a new tool or two to make your work life a little easier.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #039

  - by Pinal Dave

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

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• Going Paperless

  - by Jesse

  One year ago I came to work for a company where the entire development team is 100% “remote”; we’re spread over 3 time zones and each of us works from home. This seems to be an increasingly popular way for people to work and there are many articles and blog posts out there enumerating the advantages and disadvantages of working this way. I had read a lot about telecommuting before accepting this job and felt as if I had a pretty decent idea of what I was getting into, but I’ve encountered a few things over the past year that I did not expect. Among the most surprising by-products of working from home for me has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of paper that I use on a weekly basis. Hoarding In The Workplace Prior to my current telecommute job I worked in what most would consider pretty traditional office environments. I sat in cubicles furnished with an enormous plastic(ish) modular desks, had a mediocre (at best) PC workstation, and had ready access to a seemingly endless supply of legal pads, pens, staplers and paper clips. The ready access to paper, countless conference room meetings, and abundance of available surface area on my desk and in drawers created a perfect storm for wasting paper. I brought a pad of paper with me to every meeting I ever attended, scrawled some brief notes, and then tore that sheet off to keep next to my keyboard to follow up on any needed action items. Once my immediate need for the notes was fulfilled, that sheet would get shuffled off into a corner of my desk or filed away in a drawer “just in case”. I would guess that for all of the notes that I ever filed away, I might have actually had to dig up and refer to 2% of them (and that’s probably being very generous). That said, on those rare occasions that I did have to dig something up from old notes, it was usually pretty important and I ended up being very glad that I saved them. It was only when I would leave a job or move desks that I would finally gather all those notes together and take them to shredding bin to be disposed of. When I left my last job the amount of paper I had accumulated over my three years there was absurd, and I knew coworkers who had substance-abuse caliber paper wasting addictions that made my bad habit look like nail-biting in comparison. A Product Of My Environment I always hated using all of this paper, but simply couldn’t bring myself to stop. It would look bad if I showed up to an important conference room meeting without a pad of paper. What if someone said something profound! Plus, everyone else always brought paper with them. If you saw someone walking down the hallway with a pad of paper in hand you knew they must be on their way to a conference room meeting. Some people even had fancy looking portfolio notebook sheaths that gave their legal pads all the prestige of a briefcase. No one ever worried about running out of fresh paper because there was an endless supply, and there certainly was no shortage of places to store and file used paper. In short, the traditional office was setup for using tons and tons of paper; it’s baked into the culture there. For that reason, it didn’t take long for me to kick the paper habit once I started working from home. In my home office, desk and drawer space are at a premium. I don’t have the budget (or the tolerance) for huge modular office furniture in my spare bedroom. I also no longer have access to a bottomless pit of office supplies stock piled in cabinets and closets. If I want to use some paper, I have to go out and buy it. Finally (and most importantly), all of the meetings that I have to attend these days are “virtual”. We use instant messaging, VOIP, video conferencing, and e-mail to communicate with each other. All I need to take notes during a meeting is my computer, which I happen to be sitting right in front of all day. I don’t have any hard numbers for this, but my gut feeling is that I actually take a lot more notes now than I ever did when I worked in an office. The big difference is I don’t have to use any paper to do so. This makes it far easier to keep important information safe and organized. The Right Tool For The Job When I first started working from home I tried to find a single application that would fill the gap left by the pen and paper that I always had at my desk when I worked in an office. Well, there are no silver bullets and I’ve evolved my approach over time to try and find the best tool for the job at hand. Here’s a quick summary of how I take notes and keep everything organized. Notepad++ – This is the first application I turn to when I feel like there’s some bit of information that I need to write down and save. I use Launchy, so opening Notepad++ and creating a new file only takes a few keystrokes. If I find that the information I’m trying to get down requires a more sophisticated application I escalate as needed. The Desktop – By default, I save every file or other bit of information to the desktop. Anyone who has ever had to fix their parents computer before knows that this is a dangerous game (any file my mother has ever worked on is saved directly to the desktop and rarely moves anywhere else). I agree that storing things on the desktop isn’t a great long term approach to keeping organized, which is why I treat my desktop a bit like my e-mail inbox. I strive to keep both empty (or as close to empty as I possibly can). If something is on my desktop, it means that it’s something relevant to a task or project that I’m currently working on. About once a week I take things that I’m not longer working on and put them into my ‘Notes’ folder. The ‘Notes’ Folder – As I work on a task, I tend to accumulate multiple files associated with that task. For example, I might have a bit of SQL that I’m working on to gather data for a new report, a quick C# method that I came up with but am not yet ready to commit to source control, a bulleted list of to-do items in a .txt file, etc. If the desktop starts to get too cluttered, I create a new sub-folder in my ‘Notes’ folder. Each sub-folder’s name is the current date followed by a brief description of the task or project. Then all files related to that task or project go into that sub folder. By using the date as the first part of the folder name, these folders are automatically sorted in reverse chronological order. This means that things I worked on recently will generally be near the top of the list. Using the built-in Windows search functionality I now have a pretty quick and easy way to try and find something that I worked on a week ago or six months ago. Dropbox – Dropbox is a free service that lets you store up to 2GB of files “in the cloud” and have those files synced to all of the different computers that you use. My ‘Notes’ folder lives in Dropbox, meaning that it’s contents are constantly backed up and are always available to me regardless of which computer I’m using. They also have a pretty decent iPhone application that lets you browse and view all of the files that you have stored there. The free 2GB edition is probably enough for just storing notes, but I also pay $99/year for the 50GB storage upgrade and keep all of my music, e-books, pictures, and documents in Dropbox. It’s a fantastic service and I highly recommend it. Evernote – I use Evernote mostly to organize information that I access on a fairly regular basis. For example, my Evernote account has a running grocery shopping list, recipes that my wife and I use a lot, and contact information for people I contact infrequently enough that I don’t want to keep them in my phone. I know some people that keep nearly everything in Evernote, but there’s something about it that I find a bit clunky, so I tend to use it sparingly. Google Tasks – One of my biggest paper wasting habits was keeping a running task-list next to my computer at work. Every morning I would sit down, look at my task list, cross off what was done and add new tasks that I thought of during my morning commute. This usually resulted in having to re-copy the task list onto a fresh sheet of paper when I was done. I still keep a running task list at my desk, but I’ve started using Google Tasks instead. This is a dead-simple web-based application for quickly adding, deleting, and organizing tasks in a simple checklist style. You can quickly move tasks up and down on the list (which I use for prioritizing), and even create sub-tasks for breaking down larger tasks into smaller pieces. Balsamiq Mockups – This is a simple and lightweight tool for creating drawings of user interfaces. It’s great for sketching out a new feature, brainstorm the layout of a interface, or even draw up a quick sequence diagram. I’m terrible at drawing, so Balsamiq Mockups not only lets me create sketches that other people can actually understand, but it’s also handy because you can upload a sketch to a common location for other team members to access. I can honestly say that using these tools (and having limited resources at home) have lead me to cut my paper usage down to virtually none. If I ever were to return to a traditional office workplace (hopefully never!) I’d try to employ as many of these applications and techniques as I could to keep paper usage low. I feel far less cluttered and far better organized now.

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• Clean Code Developer & Certification in IT - MSCC 21.09.2013

  It was a very busy weekend this time, and quite some hectic to organise the second meetup on a Saturday for the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) but it was absolutely fun. Following, I'm writing a brief summary about the topics we spoke about and the new impulses I got. "What a meetup... I was positively impressed. At the beginning I thought that noone would actually show up but then by the time the room got filled. Lots of conversation, great dialogues and fantastic networking between fresh students, experienced students, experienced employees, and self-employed attendees. That's what community is all about!" Above quote was my first reaction shortly after the gathering. And despite being busy during the weekend and yesterday, I took my time to reflect a little bit on things happened and statements made before writing it here on my blog. Additionally, I was also very curious about possible reactions and blogs from other attendees. Reactions from other craftsmen Let me quickly give you some links and quotes from others first... "Like Jochen posted on facebook, that was indeed a 5+ hours marathon (maybe 4 hours for me but still) … Wohoo! We’re indeed a bunch of crazy geeks who did not realise how time flew as we dived into the myriad discussions that sprouted. Yet in the end everyone was happy (:" -- Ish on MSCC meetup - The marathon (: "And the 4hours spent @ Talking drums bore its fruit..I was doing something I never did before....reading the borrowed book while walking....and though I was not that familiar with things mentionned in the book...I was skimming,scanning & flipping...reading titles...short paragraphs...and I skipped pages till I reached home." -- Yannick on Mauritius Software Craftsmanship 1st Meet-up "Hi Developers, Just wanted to share with you the meetups i attended last Saturday - [...] - The second meetup is the one hosted by Jochen Kirstätter, the MSCC, where the attendees were Craftsman, no woman, this time - all sharing the same passion of being a developer - even though it is on different platforms(Windows - Windows Phone - Linux - Adobe(yes a designer) - .Net) - but we manage to sit at the same table - sharing developer views and experience in the corporate world - also talking about good practice when coding( where Jochen initiated a discussion on Clean Coding ) i could not stay till the end - but from what i have heard - the longer you stay the more fun you have till 1600. Developers in the Facebook grouping i invite you to stay tuned about the various developer communities popping up - where you can come to share and learn good practices, develop the entrepreneurial spirit, and learn and share your passion about technologies" -- Arnaud on Facebook More feedback has been posted on the event directly. So, should I really write more? Wouldn't that spoil the impressions? Starting the day with a surprise Indeed, I was very pleased to stumble over the existence of Mobile Monday Mauritius on LinkedIn, an association about any kind of mobile app development, mobile gadgets and latest smartphones on the market. Despite the Monday in their name they had scheduled their recent meeting on Saturday between 10:00 and 12:00hrs. Wow, what a coincidence! Let's grap the bull by its horns and pay them an introductory visit. As they chose the Ebene Accelerator at the Orange Tower in Ebene it was a no-brainer to leave home a bit earlier and stop by. It was quite an experience and fun to talk to the geeks over there. Really looking forward to organise something together.... Arriving at the venue As the children got a bit uneasy at the MoMo gathering and I didn't want to disturb them too much, we arrived early at Bagatelle. Well, no problems as we went for a decent breakfast at Food Lover's Market. Shortly afterwards we went to our venue location, Talking Drums, and prepared the room for the meeting. We only had to take off a repro-painting of the wall in order to have a decent area for the projector. All went very smooth and my two little ones were of great help. Just in time, our first craftsman Avinash arrived on the spot. And then the waiting started... Luckily, not too long. Bit by bit more and more IT people came to join our meeting. Meanwhile, I used the time to give a brief introduction about the MSCC in general, what we are (hm, maybe I am) trying to achieve and that the recent phase is completely focused on creating more awareness that a community like the MSCC is active here in Mauritius. As soon as we reached some 'critical mass' of about ten people I asked everyone for a short introduction and bio, just in case... Conversation between participants started to kick in and we were actually more networking than having a focus on our topics of the day. Quick updates on latest news and development around the MSCC Finally, Clean Code Developer No matter how the position is actually called, whether it is Software Engineer, Software Developer, Programmer, Architect, or Craftsman, anyone working in IT is facing almost the same obstacles. As for the process of writing software applications there are re-occurring patterns and principles combined with some common exercise and best practices on how to resolve them. Initiated by the must-read book 'Clean Code' by Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob) the concept of the Clean Code Developer (CCD) was born already some years ago. CCD is much likely to traditional martial arts where you create awareness of certain principles and learn how to apply practices to improve your style. The CCD initiative recommends to indicate your level of knowledge and experience with coloured wrist bands - equivalent to the belt colours - for various reasons. Frankly speaking, I think that the biggest advantage here is provided by the obvious recognition of conceptual understanding. For example, take the situation of a team meeting... A member with a higher grade in CCD, say Green grade, sees that there are mainly Red grades to talk to, and adjusts her way of communication to their level of understanding. The choice of words might change as certain elements of CCD are not yet familiar to all team members. So instead of talking in an abstract way which only Green grades could follow the whole scenario comes down to Red grade level. Different story, better results... Similar to learning martial arts, we only covered two grades during this occasion - black and red. Most interestingly, there was quite some positive feedback and lots of questions about the principles and practices of the red grade. And we gathered real-world examples from various craftsman and discussed them. Following the Clean Code Developer Red Grade and some annotations from our meetup: CCD Red Grade - Principles Don't Repeat Yourself - DRY Keep It Simple, Stupid (and Short) - KISS Beware of Optimisations! Favour Composition over Inheritance - FCoI Interestingly most of the attendees already heard about those key words but couldn't really classify or categorize them. It's very similar to a situation in which you do not the particular for a thing and have to describe it to others... until someone tells you the actual name and suddenly all is very simple. CCD Red Grade - Practices Follow the Boy Scouts Rule Root Cause Analysis - RCA Use a Version Control System Apply Simple Refactoring Pattern Reflect Daily Introduction to the principles and practices of Clean Code Developer - here: Red Grade As for the various ToDo's we commonly agreed that the Boy Scout Rule clearly is not limited to software development or IT administration but applies to daily life in general. Same for the root cause analysis, btw. We really had good stories with surprisingly endings and conclusions. A quick check about who is using a version control system brought more drive into the conversation. Not only that we had people that aren't using any VCS at all, we also had the 'classic' approach of backup folders and naming conventions as well as the VCS 'junkie' that has to use multiple systems at a time. Just for the records: Git and GitHub seem to be in favour of some of the attendees. Regarding the daily reflection at the end of the day we came up with an easy solution: Wrap it up as a blog entry! Certifications in IT This is kind of a controversy in IT in general. Is it interesting to go for certifications or are they completely obsolete? What are the possibilities to get certified? What are the options we have in Mauritius? How would certificates stand compared to other educational tracks like Computer Science or Web Design. The ratio between craftsmen with certifications like MCP, MSTS, CCNA or LPI versus the ones without wasn't in favour for the first group but there was a high interest in the topic itself and some were really surprised to hear that exam preparations are completely free available online including temporarily voucher codes for either discounts or completely free exams. Furthermore, we discussed possible options on forming so-called study groups on a specific certificates and organising more frequent meetups in order to learn together. Taking into consideration that we have sponsored access to the video course material of Pluralsight (and now PeepCode as well as TrainSignal), we might give it a try by the end of the year. Current favourites are LPIC Level 1 and one of the Microsoft exams 40-78x. Feedback and ideas for the MSCC The closing conversations and discussions about how the MSCC is recently doing, what are the possibilities and what's (hopefully) going to happen in the future were really fertile and I made a couple of mental bullet points which I'm looking forward to tackle down together with orher craftsmen. Eventually, it might be a good option to elaborate on some issues during our weekly Code & Coffee sessions one Wednesday morning. Active discussion on various IT topics like certifications (LPI, MCP, CCNA, etc) and sharing experience Finally, we made it till the end of the planned time. Well, actually the talk was still on and we continued even after 16:00hrs. Unfortunately, we (the children and I) had to leave for evening activities. My resume of the day... It was great to have 15 craftsmen in one room. There are hundreds of IT geeks out there in Mauritius, and as Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community we still have a lot of work to do to pass on the message to some more key players and companies. Currently, it seems that we are able to attract a good number of students in Computer Science... but we have a lot more to offer, even or especially for IT people on the job. I'm already looking forward to our next Saturday meetup in the near future. PS: Meetup pictures are courtesy of Nirvan Pagooah. Thanks for sharing...

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• The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

  - by Janice J. Heiss

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

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• The Java Specialist: An Interview with Java Champion Heinz Kabutz

  - by Janice J. Heiss

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

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• Taking web sites offline for demonstration

  While working in software development in general, and in web development for a couple of customers it is quite common that it is necessary to provide a test bed where the client is able to get an image, or better said, a feeling for the visions and ideas you are talking about. Usually here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. we set up a demo web site on one of our staging servers, and provide credentials to the customer to access and review our progress and work ad hoc. This gives us the highest flexibility on both sides, as the test bed is simply online and available 24/7. We can update the structure, the UI and data at any time, and the client is able to view it as it suits best for her/him. Limited or lack of online connectivity But what is going to happen when your client is not capable to be online - no matter for what reasons; here are some more obvious ones: No internet connection (permanently or temporarily) Expensive connection, ie. mobile data package, stay at a hotel, etc. Presentation devices at an exhibition, ie. using tablets or iPads Being abroad for a certain time, and only occasionally online No network coverage, especially on mobile Bad infrastructure, like ie. in Third World countries Providing a catalogue on CD or USB pen drive Anyway, it doesn't matter really. We should be able to provide a solution for the circumstances of our customers. Presentation during an exhibition Recently, we had the following request from a customer: Is it possible to let us have a desktop version of ResortWork.co.uk that we can use for demo purposes at the forthcoming Ski Shows? It would allow us to let stand visitors browse the sites on an iPad to view jobs and training directory course listings. Yes, sure we can do that. Eventually, you might think why don't they simply use 3G enabled iPads for that purpose? As stated above, there might be several reasons for that - low coverage, expensive data packages, etc. Anyway, it is not a question on how to circumvent the request but to deliver a solution to that. Possible solutions... or not? We already did offline websites earlier, and even established complete mirrors of one or two web sites on our systems. There are actually several possibilities to handle this kind of request, and it mainly depends on the system or device where the offline site should be available on. Here, it is clearly expressed that we have to address this on an Apple iPad, well actually, I think that they'd like to use multiple devices during their exhibitions. Following is an overview of possible solutions depending on the technology or device in use, and how it can be done: Replication of source files and database The above mentioned web site is running on ASP.NET, IIS and SQL Server. In case that a laptop or slate runs a Windows OS, the easiest way would be to take a snapshot of the source files and database, and transfer them as local installation to those Windows machines. This approach would be fully operational on the local machine. Saving pages for offline usage This is actually a quite tedious job but still practicable for small web sites Tool based approach to 'harvest' the web site There quite some tools in the wild that could handle this job, namely wget, httrack, web copier, etc. Screenshots bundled as PDF document Not really... ;-) Creating screencast or video Simply navigate through your website and record your desktop session. Actually, we are using this kind of approach to track down difficult problems in order to see and understand exactly what the user was doing to cause an error. Of course, this list isn't complete and I'd love to get more of your ideas in the comments section below the article. Preparations for offline browsing The original website is dynamically and data-driven by ASP.NET, and looks like this: As we have to put the result onto iPads we are going to choose the tool-based approach to 'download' the whole web site for offline usage. Again, depending on the complexity of your web site you might have to check which of the applications produces the best results for you. My usual choice is to use wget but in this case, we run into problems related to the rewriting of hyperlinks. As a consequence of that we opted for using HTTrack. HTTrack comes in different flavours, like console application but also as either GUI (WinHTTrack on Windows) or Web client (WebHTTrack on Linux/Unix/BSD). Here's a brief description taken from the original website about HTTrack: HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. And there is an extensive documentation for all options and switches online. General recommendation is to go through the HTTrack Users Guide By Fred Cohen. It covers all the initial steps you need to get up and running. Be aware that it will take quite some time to get all the necessary resources down to your machine. Actually, for our customer we run the tool directly on their web server to avoid unnecessary traffic and bandwidth. After a couple of runs and some additional fine-tuning - explicit inclusion or exclusion of various external linked web sites - we finally had a more or less complete offline version available. A very handsome feature of HTTrack is the error/warning log after completing the download. It contains some detailed information about errors that appeared on the pages and the links within the pages that have been processed. Error: "Bad Request" (400) at link www.resortwork.co.uk/job-details_Ski_hire:tech_or_mgr_or_driver_37854.aspx (from www.resortwork.co.uk/Jobs_A_to_Z.aspx)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/images/applynow.png (from www.247recruit.net/css/global.css)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/activate.html (from www.247recruit.net/247recruit_tefl_jobs_network.html) In our situation, we took the records of HTTP 400/404 errors and passed them to the web development department. Improvements are to be expected soon. ;-) Quality assurance on the full-featured desktop Unfortunately, the generated output of HTTrack was still incomplete but luckily there were only images missing. Being directly on the web server we simply copied the missing images from the original source folder into our offline version. After that, we created an archive and transferred the file securely to our local workspace for further review and checks. From that point on, it wasn't necessary to get any more files from the original web server, and we could focus ourselves completely on the process of browsing and navigating through the offline version to isolate visual differences and functional problems. As said, the original web site runs on ASP.NET Web Forms and uses Postback calls for interaction like search, pagination and partly for navigation. This is the main field of improving the offline experience. Of course, same as for standard web development it is advised to test with various browsers, and strangely we discovered that the offline version looked pretty good on Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but not in Internet Explorer. A quick look at the HTML source shed some light on this, and there are conditional CSS inclusions based on the user agent. HTTrack is not acting as Internet Explorer and so we didn't have the necessary overrides for this browser. Not problematic after all in our case, but you might have to pay attention to this and get the IE-specific files explicitly. And while having a view at the source code, we also found out that HTTrack actually modifies the generated HTML output. In several occasions we discovered that <div> elements were converted into <table> constructs for no obvious reason; even nested structures. Search 'e'nd destroy - sed (or Notepad++) to the rescue During our intensive root cause analysis for a couple of HTML/CSS problems that needed some extra attention it is very helpful to be familiar with any editor that allows search and replace over multiple files like, ie. sed - stream editor for filtering and transforming text on Linux or my personal favourite Notepad++ on Windows. This allowed us to quickly fix a lot of anchors with onclick attributes and Javascript code that was addressed to ASP.NET files instead of their generated HTML counterparts, like so: grep -lr -e '.aspx' * | xargs sed -e 's/.aspx/.html?/g' The additional question mark after the HTML extension helps to separate the query string from the actual target and solved all our missing hyperlinks very fast. The same can be done in Notepad++ on Windows, too. Just use the 'Replace in files' feature and you are settled. Especially, in combination with Regular Expressions (regex). Landscape of browsers Okay, after several runs of HTML/CSS code analysis, searching and replacing some strings in a pool of more than 4.000 files, we finally had a very good match of an offline browsing experience in Firefox and Chrome on Linux. Next, we transferred that modified set of files to a Windows 8 machine for review on Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer 7 to 10, and a Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.7 to check the output on Safari and again on Chrome. Besides IE, for reasons already mentioned above, the results were identical. And last but not least it was about to check web site on tablets. Please continue to read on the following articles: Taking web sites offline for demonstration on Galaxy Tablet Taking web sites offline for demonstration on iPad

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• The Return Of __FILE__ And __LINE__ In .NET 4.5

  - by Alois Kraus

  Good things are hard to kill. One of the most useful predefined compiler macros in C/C++ were __FILE__ and __LINE__ which do expand to the compilation units file name and line number where this value is encountered by the compiler. After 4.5 versions of .NET we are on par with C/C++ again. It is of course not a simple compiler expandable macro it is an attribute but it does serve exactly the same purpose. Now we do get CallerLineNumberAttribute  == __LINE__ CallerFilePathAttribute        == __FILE__ CallerMemberNameAttribute  == __FUNCTION__ (MSVC Extension)   The most important one is CallerMemberNameAttribute which is very useful to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface without the need to hard code the name of the property anymore. Now you can simply decorate your change method with the new CallerMemberName attribute and you get the property name as string directly inserted by the C# compiler at compile time.   public string UserName { get { return _userName; } set { _userName=value; RaisePropertyChanged(); // no more RaisePropertyChanged(“UserName”)! } } protected void RaisePropertyChanged([CallerMemberName] string member = "") { var copy = PropertyChanged; if(copy != null) { copy(new PropertyChangedEventArgs(this, member)); } } Nice and handy. This was obviously the prime reason to implement this feature in the C# 5.0 compiler. You can repurpose this feature for tracing to get your hands on the method name of your caller along other stuff very fast now. All infos are added during compile time which is much faster than other approaches like walking the stack. The example on MSDN shows the usage of this attribute with an example public static void TraceMessage(string message, [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "", [CallerFilePath] string sourceFilePath = "", [CallerLineNumber] int sourceLineNumber = 0) { Console.WriteLine("Hi {0} {1} {2}({3})", message, memberName, sourceFilePath, sourceLineNumber); }   When I do think of tracing I do usually want to have a API which allows me to Trace method enter and leave Trace messages with a severity like Info, Warning, Error When I do print a trace message it is very useful to print out method and type name as well. So your API must either be able to pass the method and type name as strings or extract it automatically via walking back one Stackframe and fetch the infos from there. The first glaring deficiency is that there is no CallerTypeAttribute yet because the C# compiler team was not satisfied with its performance.   A usable Trace Api might therefore look like   enum TraceTypes { None = 0, EnterLeave = 1 << 0, Info = 1 << 1, Warn = 1 << 2, Error = 1 << 3 } class Tracer : IDisposable { string Type; string Method; public Tracer(string type, string method) { Type = type; Method = method; if (IsEnabled(TraceTypes.EnterLeave,Type, Method)) { } } private bool IsEnabled(TraceTypes traceTypes, string Type, string Method) { // Do checking here if tracing is enabled return false; } public void Info(string fmt, params object[] args) { } public void Warn(string fmt, params object[] args) { } public void Error(string fmt, params object[] args) { } public static void Info(string type, string method, string fmt, params object[] args) { } public static void Warn(string type, string method, string fmt, params object[] args) { } public static void Error(string type, string method, string fmt, params object[] args) { } public void Dispose() { // trace method leave } } This minimal trace API is very fast but hard to maintain since you need to pass in the type and method name as hard coded strings which can change from time to time. But now we have at least CallerMemberName to rid of the explicit method parameter right? Not really. Since any acceptable usable trace Api should have a method signature like Tracexxx(… string fmt, params [] object args) we not able to add additional optional parameters after the args array. If we would put it before the format string we would need to make it optional as well which would mean the compiler would need to figure out what our trace message and arguments are (not likely) or we would need to specify everything explicitly just like before . There are ways around this by providing a myriad of overloads which in the end are routed to the very same method but that is ugly. I am not sure if nobody inside MS agrees that the above API is reasonable to have or (more likely) that the whole talk about you can use this feature for diagnostic purposes was not a core feature at all but a simple byproduct of making the life of INotifyPropertyChanged implementers easier. A way around this would be to allow for variable argument arrays after the params keyword another set of optional arguments which are always filled by the compiler but I do not know if this is an easy one. The thing I am missing much more is the not provided CallerType attribute. But not in the way you would think of. In the API above I did add some filtering based on method and type to stay as fast as possible for types where tracing is not enabled at all. It should be no more expensive than an additional method call and a bool variable check if tracing for this type is enabled at all. The data is tightly bound to the calling type and method and should therefore become part of the static type instance. Since extending the CLR type system for tracing is not something I do expect to happen I have come up with an alternative approach which allows me basically to attach run time data to any existing type object in super fast way. The key to success is the usage of generics.   class Tracer<T> : IDisposable { string Method; public Tracer(string method) { if (TraceData<T>.Instance.Enabled.HasFlag(TraceTypes.EnterLeave)) { } } public void Dispose() { if (TraceData<T>.Instance.Enabled.HasFlag(TraceTypes.EnterLeave)) { } } public static void Info(string fmt, params object[] args) { } /// <summary> /// Every type gets its own instance with a fresh set of variables to describe the /// current filter status. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam> internal class TraceData<UsingType> { internal static TraceData<UsingType> Instance = new TraceData<UsingType>(); public bool IsInitialized = false; // flag if we need to reinit the trace data in case of reconfigured trace settings at runtime public TraceTypes Enabled = TraceTypes.None; // Enabled trace levels for this type } } We do not need to pass the type as string or Type object to the trace Api. Instead we define a generic Api that accepts the using type as generic parameter. Then we can create a TraceData static instance which is due to the nature of generics a fresh instance for every new type parameter. My tests on my home machine have shown that this approach is as fast as a simple bool flag check. If you have an application with many types using tracing you do not want to bring the app down by simply enabling tracing for one special rarely used type. The trace filter performance for the types which are not enabled must be therefore the fasted code path. This approach has the nice side effect that if you store the TraceData instances in one global list you can reconfigure tracing at runtime safely by simply setting the IsInitialized flag to false. A similar effect can be achieved with a global static Dictionary<Type,TraceData> object but big hash tables have random memory access semantics which is bad for cache locality and you always need to pay for the lookup which involves hash code generation, equality check and an indexed array access. The generic version is wicked fast and allows you to add more features to your tracing Api with minimal perf overhead. But it is cumbersome to write the generic type argument always explicitly and worse if you do refactor code and move parts of it to other classes it might be that you cannot configure tracing correctly. I would like therefore to decorate my type with an attribute [CallerType] class Tracer<T> : IDisposable to tell the compiler to fill in the generic type argument automatically. class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { using (var t = new Tracer()) // equivalent to new Tracer<Program>() { That would be really useful and super fast since you do not need to pass any type object around but you do have full type infos at hand. This change would be breaking if another non generic type exists in the same namespace where now the generic counterpart would be preferred. But this is an acceptable risk in my opinion since you can today already get conflicts if two generic types of the same name are defined in different namespaces. This would be only a variation of this issue. When you do think about this further you can add more features like to trace the exception in your Dispose method if the method is left with an exception with that little trick I did write some time ago. You can think of tracing as a super fast and configurable switch to write data to an output destination or to execute alternative actions. With such an infrastructure you can e.g. Reconfigure tracing at run time. Take a memory dump when a specific method is left with a specific exception. Throw an exception when a specific trace statement is hit (useful for testing error conditions). Execute a passed delegate which e.g. dumps additional state when enabled. Write data to an in memory ring buffer and dump it when specific events do occur (e.g. method is left with an exception, triggered from outside). Write data to an output device. …. This stuff is really useful to have when your code is in production on a mission critical server and you need to find the root cause of sporadic crashes of your application. It could be a buggy graphics card driver which throws access violations into your application (ok with .NET 4 not anymore except if you enable a compatibility flag) where you would like to have a minidump or you have reached after two weeks of operation a state where you need a full memory dump at a specific point in time in the middle of an transaction. At my older machine I do get with this super fast approach 50 million traces/s when tracing is disabled. When I do know that tracing is enabled for this type I can walk the stack by using StackFrameHelper.GetStackFramesInternal to check further if a specific action or output device is configured for this method which is about 2-3 times faster than the regular StackTrace class. Even with one String.Format I am down to 3 million traces/s so performance is not so important anymore since I do want to do something now. The CallerMemberName feature of the C# 5 compiler is nice but I would have preferred to get direct access to the MethodHandle and not to the stringified version of it. But I really would like to see a CallerType attribute implemented to fill in the generic type argument of the call site to augment the static CLR type data with run time data.

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• Of transactions and Mongo

  - by Nuri Halperin

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/nuri/archive/2014/05/20/of-transactions-and-mongo-again.aspxWhat's the first thing you hear about NoSQL databases? That they lose your data? That there's no transactions? No joins? No hope for "real" applications? Well, you *should* be wondering whether a certain of database is the right one for your job. But if you do so, you should be wondering that about "traditional" databases as well! In the spirit of exploration let's take a look at a common challenge: You are a bank. You have customers with accounts. Customer A wants to pay B. You want to allow that only if A can cover the amount being transferred. Let's looks at the problem without any context of any database engine in mind. What would you do? How would you ensure that the amount transfer is done "properly"? Would you prevent a "transaction" from taking place unless A can cover the amount? There are several options: Prevent any change to A's account while the transfer is taking place. That boils down to locking. Apply the change, and allow A's balance to go below zero. Charge person A some interest on the negative balance. Not friendly, but certainly a choice. Don't do either. Options 1 and 2 are difficult to attain in the NoSQL world. Mongo won't save you headaches here either. Option 3 looks a bit harsh. But here's where this can go: ledger. See, and account doesn't need to be represented by a single row in a table of all accounts with only the current balance on it. More often than not, accounting systems use ledgers. And entries in ledgers - as it turns out – don't actually get updated. Once a ledger entry is written, it is not removed or altered. A transaction is represented by an entry in the ledger stating and amount withdrawn from A's account and an entry in the ledger stating an addition of said amount to B's account. For sake of space-saving, that entry in the ledger can happen using one entry. Think {Timestamp, FromAccountId, ToAccountId, Amount}. The implication of the original question – "how do you enforce non-negative balance rule" then boils down to: Insert entry in ledger Run validation of recent entries Insert reverse entry to roll back transaction if validation failed. What is validation? Sum up the transactions that A's account has (all deposits and debits), and ensure the balance is positive. For sake of efficiency, one can roll up transactions and "close the book" on transactions with a pseudo entry stating balance as of midnight or something. This lets you avoid doing math on the fly on too many transactions. You simply run from the latest "approved balance" marker to date. But that's an optimization, and premature optimizations are the root of (some? most?) evil.. Back to some nagging questions though: "But mongo is only eventually consistent!" Well, yes, kind of. It's not actually true that Mongo has not transactions. It would be more descriptive to say that Mongo's transaction scope is a single document in a single collection. A write to a Mongo document happens completely or not at all. So although it is true that you can't update more than one documents "at the same time" under a "transaction" umbrella as an atomic update, it is NOT true that there' is no isolation. So a competition between two concurrent updates is completely coherent and the writes will be serialized. They will not scribble on the same document at the same time. In our case - in choosing a ledger approach - we're not even trying to "update" a document, we're simply adding a document to a collection. So there goes the "no transaction" issue. Now let's turn our attention to consistency. What you should know about mongo is that at any given moment, only on member of a replica set is writable. This means that the writable instance in a set of replicated instances always has "the truth". There could be a replication lag such that a reader going to one of the replicas still sees "old" state of a collection or document. But in our ledger case, things fall nicely into place: Run your validation against the writable instance. It is guaranteed to have a ledger either with (after) or without (before) the ledger entry got written. No funky states. Again, the ledger writing *adds* a document, so there's no inconsistent document state to be had either way. Next, we might worry about data loss. Here, mongo offers several write-concerns. Write-concern in Mongo is a mode that marshals how uptight you want the db engine to be about actually persisting a document write to disk before it reports to the application that it is "done". The most volatile, is to say you don't care. In that case, mongo would just accept your write command and say back "thanks" with no guarantee of persistence. If the server loses power at the wrong moment, it may have said "ok" but actually no written the data to disk. That's kind of bad. Don't do that with data you care about. It may be good for votes on a pole regarding how cute a furry animal is, but not so good for business. There are several other write-concerns varying from flushing the write to the disk of the writable instance, flushing to disk on several members of the replica set, a majority of the replica set or all of the members of a replica set. The former choice is the quickest, as no network coordination is required besides the main writable instance. The others impose extra network and time cost. Depending on your tolerance for latency and read-lag, you will face a choice of what works for you. It's really important to understand that no data loss occurs once a document is flushed to an instance. The record is on disk at that point. From that point on, backup strategies and disaster recovery are your worry, not loss of power to the writable machine. This scenario is not different from a relational database at that point. Where does this leave us? Oh, yes. Eventual consistency. By now, we ensured that the "source of truth" instance has the correct data, persisted and coherent. But because of lag, the app may have gone to the writable instance, performed the update and then gone to a replica and looked at the ledger there before the transaction replicated. Here are 2 options to deal with this. Similar to write concerns, mongo support read preferences. An app may choose to read only from the writable instance. This is not an awesome choice to make for every ready, because it just burdens the one instance, and doesn't make use of the other read-only servers. But this choice can be made on a query by query basis. So for the app that our person A is using, we can have person A issue the transfer command to B, and then if that same app is going to immediately as "are we there yet?" we'll query that same writable instance. But B and anyone else in the world can just chill and read from the read-only instance. They have no basis to expect that the ledger has just been written to. So as far as they know, the transaction hasn't happened until they see it appear later. We can further relax the demand by creating application UI that reacts to a write command with "thank you, we will post it shortly" instead of "thank you, we just did everything and here's the new balance". This is a very powerful thing. UI design for highly scalable systems can't insist that the all databases be locked just to paint an "all done" on screen. People understand. They were trained by many online businesses already that your placing of an order does not mean that your product is already outside your door waiting (yes, I know, large retailers are working on it... but were' not there yet). The second thing we can do, is add some artificial delay to a transaction's visibility on the ledger. The way that works is simply adding some logic such that the query against the ledger never nets a transaction for customers newer than say 15 minutes and who's validation flag is not set. This buys us time 2 ways: Replication can catch up to all instances by then, and validation rules can run and determine if this transaction should be "negated" with a compensating transaction. In case we do need to "roll back" the transaction, the backend system can place the timestamp of the compensating transaction at the exact same time or 1ms after the original one. Effectively, once A or B visits their ledger, both transactions would be visible and the overall balance "as of now" would reflect no change.  The 2 transactions (attempted/ reverted) would be visible , since we do actually account for the attempt. Hold on a second. There's a hole in the story: what if several transfers from A to some accounts are registered, and 2 independent validators attempt to compute the balance concurrently? Is there a chance that both would conclude non-sufficient-funds even though rolling back transaction 100 would free up enough for transaction 117 (some random later transaction)? Yes. there is that chance. But the integrity of the business rule is not compromised, since the prime rule is don't dispense money you don't have. To minimize or eliminate this scenario, we can also assign a single validation process per origin account. This may seem non-scalable, but it can easily be done as a "sharded" distribution. Say we have 11 validation threads (or processing nodes etc.). We divide the account number space such that each validator is exclusively responsible for a certain range of account numbers. Sounds cunningly similar to Mongo's sharding strategy, doesn't it? Each validator then works in isolation. More capacity needed? Chop the account space into more chunks. So where  are we now with the nagging questions? "No joins": Huh? What are those for? "No transactions": You mean no cross-collection and no cross-document transactions? Granted - but don't always need them either. "No hope for real applications": well... There are more issues and edge cases to slog through, I'm sure. But hopefully this gives you some ideas of how to solve common problems without distributed locking and relational databases. But then again, you can choose relational databases if they suit your problem.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 26, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 26, 2011Popular ReleasesDroid Builder: Droid Builder - 1.0.4194.38898: Support new type of patch package. Support plugin framework.Mosaic Project: Mosaic Alpha build 254: - Added horizontal scroll by mouse in fullscreen mode - Widgets now have fixed size - Reduced spacing between widgets - Widgets menu is scrollable by mouse now and not overlapping back button on small screens.Net Image Processor: v1.0: Initial release of the library containing the core architecture and two filters. To install, extract the library to somewhere sensible then reference as a file from your project in Visual Studio.Usage Agent: Usage Agent 9.0.8: Latest release. Changes include: - Fixes for Optus - Usage Delta statistic for BigPond - Eliminated the need for UAC prompt at every startupjQuery List DragSort: jQuery List DragSort 0.4.3: Fix item not dropping correctly on Chrome and jQuery 1.6KinectNUI: Jun 25 Alpha Release: Initial public version. No installer needed, just run the EXE.TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v3.3 [v1.0.5 Compatible]: I have added support for all the new items in Terraria v1.0.5. I have also added the ability to put your character in hardcore mode or take them out via a simple checkbox on the stats tab. If you come across any bugs, please let me know immediately.Media Companion: MC 3.409b-1 Weekly: This weeks release is part way through a major rewrite of the TVShow code. This means that a few TV related features & functions are not fully operational at the moment. The reason for this release is so that people can see if their particular issue has been fixed during the week. Some issues may not be able to be fully checked due to the ongoing TV code refactoring. So, I would strongly suggest that you put this version into a separate folder, copy your settings folder across & test MC that...Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.5: Update June 24th Made compatible with the new tiles found in Terraria 1.0.5Kinect Earth Move: KinectEarthMove sample code: Sample code releasedThis is a sample code for Kinect for Windows SDK beta, which was demonstrated on Channel 9 Kinect for Windows SKD beta launch event on June 17 2011. Using color image and skeleton data from Kinect and user in front of Kinect can manipulate the earth between his/her hands.NetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9b: Changes: - fix critical issue 262334 (AccessViolationException while using events in a COMAddin) - remove x64 Assemblies (not necessary) Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...MiniTwitter: 1.70: MiniTwitter 1.70 ???? ?? ????? xAuth ?? OAuth ??????? 1.70 ??????????????????????????。 ???????????????? Twitter ? Web ??????????、PIN ????????????????????。??????????????????、???????????????????????????。Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin (.wfx): Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin 0.8.7b: Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin version 0.8.7b. Bug fixes: - BROKEN PLUGIN by upgrading SkyDriveServiceClient version 2.0.1b. Please do not forget to express your opinion of the plugin by rating it! Donate (EUR)SkyDrive .Net API Client: SkyDrive .Net API Client 2.0.1b (RELOADED): SkyDrive .Net API Client assembly has been RELOADED in version 2.0.1b as a REAL API. It supports the followings: - Creating root and sub folders - Uploading and downloading files - Renaming and deleting folders and files Bug fixes: - BROKEN API (issue 6834) Please do not forget to express your opinion of the assembly by rating it! Donate (EUR)Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query v1.0.0.59794: This release includes the following enhancements: Added a Most Recently Used file list Added Row counts to the query (per tab) and table view windows Added the Command Timeout option, only valid for MSSQL for now - see options If you have no idea what this thing is make sure you check out http://pksoftware.net/MiniSqlQuery/Help/MiniSqlQueryQuickStart.docx for an introduction. PK :-]HydroDesktop - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Desktop Application: 1.2.591 Beta Release: 1.2.591 Beta Releasepatterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 12 - June 22, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Minor code changes. New "Introduction" chapter. New "Modularity" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Updated "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To ins...DropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.3: Added "Get links..." dialog, that provides selective public files links copying Get links link added to tray menu as the default option Fixed URL encoding .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile requiredDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.00.00 Beta: Beta 1 (Build 2300) includes many important enhancements to the user experience. The control panel has been updated for easier access to the most important features and additional forms have been adapted to the new pattern. This release also includes many bug fixes that make it more stable than previous CTP releases. Beta ForumsBlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC: BlogEngine.NET Hosting - Click Here! 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! This is a Release Candidate version for BlogEngine.NET 2.5. The most current, stable version of BlogEngine.NET is version 2.0. Find out more about the BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC here. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. To get started, be sure to check out our installation documentation. If you are upgrading from a previous version, please take a look at ...New Projects6_6_6_w_m_s_open: jwervxsdfcfcf: cfcfChairforce hackathon project: project for hackathonDot Net Nuke Ajax Modules: This is a small collection of modules I think on once in a while which intend to improve a little dnn's user experience.Gnosis Game Engine: A simple game engine for the XNA 4.0 frame work that I am working on, mostly as a learning experience. I found that XNA game engines either require you to pay or are XNA 4.0 incompatible, and so this is my solution to that problem.KA_WindowsPhone7_Samples: Sample Code for Windows Phone 7 from http://kevinashley.comKinect MIDI Controller: This tool allows you to use a Kinect Sensor as a MIDI Controller for your Digital Audio Workbench. The tool is written in C#, and uses Microsoft Kinect SDK. Mosaic Project: Mosaic is an application that brings Metro UI to your desktop by live widgets.Movie Gate: A movie database that is also able to play the movies with your favorit media player.Musical Collective: An open-source web service that enables Musicians to collaborate on songs. Written in ASP.NET MVC (C#).NcADS-MVC: Clasificados MVCPokeTD: Ein kleines 2D Pokemon Tower-Defense Spiel. Es ist in C# und XNA geschrieben.PRO-TOKOL: PRO-TOKOL Server is a Programmable Logic Controller communication driver. The project is 100% coded in .NET Managed code. So, the dll can be included in any .NET project. The project uses the Microsoft Workflow Foundation to implement the DF1 Receiver and Transmitter logic.ShumaDaf: small project for display movies info directly from file structure using mymovies.xml. program create one simple xml file and display it!Silverlight Policy Service: The windows service act as a server and listens on TCP port 943 using IPv4 and IPv6. The socket policy included in the project allows all silverlight client applications to connect to TCP ports 4502-4506.SkinObject Module Wrapper: The SkinObject Module Wrapper is a DotNetNuke module that will allow you to add any DNN SkinObject to a page dinamically as if it was a DNN Module. Without any skin modification you can now inject new SkinObjects to you pages, configure the properties and change them on the fly.SkyNet0.3: Program that one should not be able to close.Team Zero Game One: SVN for the personal project(s) of Team Zero - Game One. We are creating a free game in HTML5 canvas using the CAKE api, found here: http://code.google.com/p/cakejs/ The game is about programming a small robot to move through a maze, sneaking past guards and other obstacles, using event-based programming. We've seen a number of games that allow you to "program" a character, and thought it would be interesting to do a different take on it. The game is still in early production, and actively ...Test-Driven Scaffolding (TDS): TDS helps developers of C# function members (methods, indexers, etc.) to quickly write drivers for code under development; these can easily be converted later to NUnit tests. TDS consists of C# code that can be pasted into a new or existing project and removed when no longer needed.Usage Agent: The Usage Agent toolset is designed to help manage your ISP data usage without having to log into your ISP usage page. It can optionally monitor your network card throughput and produce reports on usage. Developed in VB.NET.

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• --log-slave-updates is OFF but some updates are still logged to the slave binary log?

  - by quanta

  MySQL version 5.5.14 According to the document, by the default, slave does not log to its binary log any updates that are received from a master server. Here are my config. on the slave: # egrep 'bin|slave' /etc/my.cnf relay-log=mysqld-relay-bin log-bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin binlog-format=MIXED sync_binlog = 1 log-bin-trust-function-creators = 1 mysql> show global variables like 'log_slave%'; +-------------------+-------+ | Variable_name | Value | +-------------------+-------+ | log_slave_updates | OFF | +-------------------+-------+ 1 row in set (0.01 sec) mysql> select @@log_slave_updates; +---------------------+ | @@log_slave_updates | +---------------------+ | 0 | +---------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) but slave still logs the some changes to its binary logs, let's see the file size: -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 37M Apr 1 01:00 /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.001256 -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 25M Apr 2 01:00 /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.001257 -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 46M Apr 3 01:00 /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.001258 -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 115M Apr 4 01:00 /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.001259 -rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 105M Apr 4 18:54 /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.001260 and the sample query when reading these binary files with mysqlbinlog utility: #120404 19:08:57 server id 3 end_log_pos 110324763 Query thread_id=382435 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333541337/*!*/; INSERT INTO norep_SplitValues VALUES ( NAME_CONST('cur_string',_utf8'118212' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci')) /*!*/; # at 110324763 Did I miss something? Reply to @RolandoMySQLDBA: If replication brought this over, then the same query has to be in the relay logs. Please go find the relay log that has the INSERT query with the same TIMESTAMP (1333541337). There is no such query with the same TIMESTAMP in the relay logs. If you cannot find it in the relay logs, then look and see if Infobright is posting the INSERT query. In that instance, the INSERT should be recorded in the binary logs of the Slave. Looking more deeply into the binary logs, I see that almost of the queries are CREATE/INSERT/UPDATE/DROP "temporary" tables, something like this: # at 123873315 #120405 0:42:04 server id 3 end_log_pos 123873618 Query thread_id=395373 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333561324/*!*/; SET @@session.pseudo_thread_id=395373/*!*/; CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE `norep_tmpcampaign` ( `campaignid` INTEGER(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0' , `status` INTEGER(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0' , `updated` DATETIME, KEY `campaignid` (`campaignid`) )ENGINE=MEMORY /*!*/; # at 123873618 #120405 0:42:04 server id 3 end_log_pos 123873755 Query thread_id=395373 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333561324/*!*/; DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `norep_tmpcampaign1` /* generated by server */ "temporary" here means that they are dropped after calculation is done. I also tells the slave not to replicate any statement matches the norep_ wildcard pattern: replicate-wild-ignore-table=%.norep_% But there is an exception table in the binary logs: # at 123828094 #120405 0:37:21 server id 3 end_log_pos 123828495 Query thread_id=395209 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333561041/*!*/; INSERT INTO sessions (SessionId, ApplicationName, Created, Expires, LockDate, LockId, Timeout, Locked, SessionItems, Fla gs) Values('pgv2exo4y4vo4ccz44vwznu0', '/', '2012-04-05 00:37:21', '2012-04-05 00:57:21', '2012-04-05 00:37:21', 0, 20, 0, 'AwAAAP////8IdXNlcm5hbWUGdXNlcmlkCHBlcm1pdGlkAgAAAAQAAAAGAAAAAQABAAEA', 0) /*!*/; Description: mysql> desc reportingdb.sessions; +-----------------+------------------+------+-----+---------------------+-------+ | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra | +-----------------+------------------+------+-----+---------------------+-------+ | SessionId | varchar(64) | NO | PRI | | | | ApplicationName | varchar(255) | NO | | | | | Created | timestamp | NO | | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | | | Expires | timestamp | NO | | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | | | LockDate | timestamp | NO | | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | | | LockId | int(11) unsigned | NO | | NULL | | | Timeout | int(11) unsigned | NO | | NULL | | | Locked | bit(1) | NO | | NULL | | | SessionItems | varchar(255) | YES | | NULL | | | Flags | int(11) | NO | | NULL | | +-----------------+------------------+------+-----+---------------------+-------+ I'm sure all these queries are posting by MySQL, not Infobright: $ mysql-ib -u root -p Enter password: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 48971 Server version: 5.1.40 build number (revision)=IB_4.0.5_r15240_15370(ice) (static) Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement. mysql> select * from information_schema.tables where table_name='sessions'; Empty set (0.02 sec) I've been trying some INSERT/UPDATE queries with testing tables on the master, it is copied to the relay logs, not binary logs on slave: # at 311664029 #120405 0:15:23 server id 1 end_log_pos 311664006 Query thread_id=10458250 exec_time=0 error_code=0 use testuser/*!*/; SET TIMESTAMP=1333559723/*!*/; update users set email2='[email protected]' where id=22 /*!*/; Pay attention to the server id, in the relay logs, server id is master's (1) and in the binary log, server id is slave's (3 in this case). Reply to @RolandoMySQLDBA: Thu Apr 5 10:06:00 ICT 2012 Run CREATE DATABASE quantatest; on the Master now, please. Tell me if CREATE DATABASE quantatest; showed up in the Slave's Binary Logs. As I said above: I've been trying some INSERT/UPDATE queries with testing tables on the master, it is copied to the relay logs, not binary logs and you can guess, IO thread copied it to the relay logs, not binary logs. #120405 10:07:25 server id 1 end_log_pos 347573819 Query thread_id=10480775 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333595245/*!*/; /*!\C latin1 *//*!*/; SET @@session.character_set_client=8,@@session.collation_connection=8,@@session.collation_server=8/*!*/; create database quantatest /*!*/; The question must probably change to: why some update queries still logged to the slave binary logs althrough --log-slave-updates is disabled? Where they come from? Here are few last: /*!*/; # at 27492197 #120405 10:12:45 server id 3 end_log_pos 27492370 Query thread_id=410353 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333595565/*!*/; CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE norep_SplitValues ( value VARCHAR(1000) NOT NULL ) ENGINE=MEMORY /*!*/; # at 27492370 #120405 10:12:45 server id 3 end_log_pos 27492445 Query thread_id=410353 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333595565/*!*/; BEGIN /*!*/; # at 27492445 #120405 10:12:45 server id 3 end_log_pos 27492619 Query thread_id=410353 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333595565/*!*/; INSERT INTO norep_SplitValues VALUES ( NAME_CONST('cur_string',_utf8'119577' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci')) /*!*/; # at 27492619 #120405 10:12:45 server id 3 end_log_pos 27492695 Query thread_id=410353 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333595565/*!*/; COMMIT /*!*/; # at 27492918 #120405 10:12:46 server id 3 end_log_pos 27493115 Query thread_id=410353 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333595566/*!*/; SELECT `reportingdb`.`selfserving_get_locationad`(_utf8'3' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci',_utf8'' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci') /*!*/; # at 27493199 #120405 10:12:46 server id 3 end_log_pos 27493353 Query thread_id=410353 exec_time=0 error_code=0 SET TIMESTAMP=1333595566/*!*/; /*!\C utf8 *//*!*/; SET @@session.character_set_client=33,@@session.collation_connection=33,@@session.collation_server=8/*!*/; DROP TEMPORARY TABLE IF EXISTS `norep_SplitValues` /* generated by server */ /*!*/;

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• Searching for Windows User SID's in C#

  - by Ubiquitous Che

  Context Context first - issues I'm trying to resolve are below. One of our clients has asked as to quote how long it would take for us to improve one of our applications. This application currently provides basic user authentication in the form of username/password combinations. This client would like the ability for their employees to log-in using the details of whatever Windows User account is currently logged in at the time of running the application. It's not a deal-breaker if I tell them know - but the client might be willing to pay the costs of development to add this feature to the application. It's worth looking into. Based on my hunting around, it seems like storing the user login details against Domain\Username will be problematic if those details are changed. But Windows User SID's aren't supposed to change at all. I've got the impression that it would be best to record Windows Users by SID - feel free to relieve me of that if I'm wrong. I've been having a fiddle with some Windows API calls. From within C#, grabbing the current user's SID is easy enough. I can already take any user's SID and process it using LookupAccountSid to get username and domain for display purposes. For the interested, my code for this is at the end of this post. That's just the tip of the iceberg, however. The two issues below are completely outside my experience. Not only do I not know how to implement them - I don't even known how to find out how to implement them, or what the pitfalls are on various systems. Any help getting myself aimed in the right direction would be very much appreciated. Issue 1) Getting hold of the local user at runtime is meaningless if that user hasn't been granted access to the application. We will need to add a new section to our application's 'administrator console' for adding Windows Users (or groups) and assigning within-app permissions against those users. Something like an 'Add Windows User Login' button that will raise a pop-up window that will allow the user to search for available Windows User accounts on the network (not just the local machine) to be added to the list of available application logins. If there's already a component in .NET or Windows that I can shanghai into doing this for me, it would make me a very happy man. Issue 2) I also want to know how to take a given Windows User SID and check it against a given Windows User Group (probably taken from a database). I'm not sure how to get started with this one either, though I expect it to be easier than the issue above. For the Interested [STAThread] static void Main(string[] args) { MessageBox.Show(WindowsUserManager.GetAccountNameFromSID(WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().User.Value)); MessageBox.Show(WindowsUserManager.GetAccountNameFromSID("S-1-5-21-57989841-842925246-1957994488-1003")); } public static class WindowsUserManager { public static string GetAccountNameFromSID(string SID) { try { StringBuilder name = new StringBuilder(); uint cchName = (uint)name.Capacity; StringBuilder referencedDomainName = new StringBuilder(); uint cchReferencedDomainName = (uint)referencedDomainName.Capacity; WindowsUserManager.SID_NAME_USE sidUse; int err = (int)ESystemError.ERROR_SUCCESS; if (!WindowsUserManager.LookupAccountSid(null, SID, name, ref cchName, referencedDomainName, ref cchReferencedDomainName, out sidUse)) { err = Marshal.GetLastWin32Error(); if (err == (int)ESystemError.ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER) { name.EnsureCapacity((int)cchName); referencedDomainName.EnsureCapacity((int)cchReferencedDomainName); err = WindowsUserManager.LookupAccountSid(null, SID, name, ref cchName, referencedDomainName, ref cchReferencedDomainName, out sidUse) ? (int)ESystemError.ERROR_SUCCESS : Marshal.GetLastWin32Error(); } } if (err != (int)ESystemError.ERROR_SUCCESS) throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("Could not retrieve acount name from SID. {0}", SystemExceptionManager.GetDescription(err))); return String.Format(@"{0}\{1}", referencedDomainName.ToString(), name.ToString()); } catch (Exception ex) { if (ex is ApplicationException) throw ex; throw new ApplicationException("Could not retrieve acount name from SID", ex); } } private enum SID_NAME_USE { SidTypeUser = 1, SidTypeGroup, SidTypeDomain, SidTypeAlias, SidTypeWellKnownGroup, SidTypeDeletedAccount, SidTypeInvalid, SidTypeUnknown, SidTypeComputer } [DllImport("advapi32.dll", EntryPoint = "GetLengthSid", CharSet = CharSet.Auto)] private static extern int GetLengthSid(IntPtr pSID); [DllImport("advapi32.dll", SetLastError = true)] private static extern bool ConvertStringSidToSid( string StringSid, out IntPtr ptrSid); [DllImport("advapi32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] private static extern bool LookupAccountSid( string lpSystemName, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPArray)] byte[] Sid, StringBuilder lpName, ref uint cchName, StringBuilder ReferencedDomainName, ref uint cchReferencedDomainName, out SID_NAME_USE peUse); private static bool LookupAccountSid( string lpSystemName, string stringSid, StringBuilder lpName, ref uint cchName, StringBuilder ReferencedDomainName, ref uint cchReferencedDomainName, out SID_NAME_USE peUse) { byte[] SID = null; IntPtr SID_ptr = IntPtr.Zero; try { WindowsUserManager.ConvertStringSidToSid(stringSid, out SID_ptr); int err = SID_ptr == IntPtr.Zero ? Marshal.GetLastWin32Error() : (int)ESystemError.ERROR_SUCCESS; if (SID_ptr == IntPtr.Zero || err != (int)ESystemError.ERROR_SUCCESS) throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("'{0}' could not be converted to a SID byte array. {1}", stringSid, SystemExceptionManager.GetDescription(err))); int size = (int)GetLengthSid(SID_ptr); SID = new byte[size]; Marshal.Copy(SID_ptr, SID, 0, size); } catch (Exception ex) { if (ex is ApplicationException) throw ex; throw new ApplicationException(String.Format("'{0}' could not be converted to a SID byte array. {1}.", stringSid, ex.Message), ex); } finally { // Always want to release the SID_ptr (if it exists) to avoid memory leaks. if (SID_ptr != IntPtr.Zero) Marshal.FreeHGlobal(SID_ptr); } return WindowsUserManager.LookupAccountSid(lpSystemName, SID, lpName, ref cchName, ReferencedDomainName, ref cchReferencedDomainName, out peUse); } }

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• Driving me INSANE: Unable to Retrieve Metadata for

  - by Loren

  I've been spending the past 3 days trying to fix this problem I'm encountering - it's driving me insane... I'm not quite sure what is causing this bug - here are the details: MVC4 + Entity Framework 4.4 + MySql + POCO/Code First I'm setting up the above configuration .. here are my classes: namespace BTD.DataContext { public class BTDContext : DbContext { public BTDContext() : base("name=BTDContext") { } protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) { base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder); //modelBuilder.Conventions.Remove<System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.IncludeMetadataConvention>(); } public DbSet<Product> Products { get; set; } public DbSet<ProductImage> ProductImages { get; set; } } } namespace BTD.Data { [Table("Product")] public class Product { [Key] public long ProductId { get; set; } [DisplayName("Manufacturer")] public int? ManufacturerId { get; set; } [Required] [StringLength(150)] public string Name { get; set; } [Required] [DataType(DataType.MultilineText)] public string Description { get; set; } [Required] [StringLength(120)] public string URL { get; set; } [Required] [StringLength(75)] [DisplayName("Meta Title")] public string MetaTitle { get; set; } [DataType(DataType.MultilineText)] [DisplayName("Meta Description")] public string MetaDescription { get; set; } [Required] [StringLength(25)] public string Status { get; set; } [DisplayName("Create Date/Time")] public DateTime CreateDateTime { get; set; } [DisplayName("Edit Date/Time")] public DateTime EditDateTime { get; set; } } [Table("ProductImage")] public class ProductImage { [Key] public long ProductImageId { get; set; } public long ProductId { get; set; } public long? ProductVariantId { get; set; } [Required] public byte[] Image { get; set; } public bool PrimaryImage { get; set; } public DateTime CreateDateTime { get; set; } public DateTime EditDateTime { get; set; } } } Here is my web.config setup... <connectionStrings> <add name="BTDContext" connectionString="Server=localhost;Port=3306;Database=btd;User Id=root;Password=mypassword;" providerName="MySql.Data.MySqlClient" /> </connectionStrings> The database AND tables already exist... I'm still pretty new with mvc but was using this tutorial The application builds fine.. however when I try to add a controller using Product (BTD.Data) as my model class and BTDContext (BTD.DataContext) as my data context class I receive the following error: Unable to retrieve metadata for BTD.Data.Product using the same DbCompiledModel to create context against different types of database servers is not supported. Instead, create a separate DbCompiledModel for each type of server being used. I am at a complete loss - I've scoured google with almost every different variation of that error message above I can think of but to no avail. Here are the things i can verify... MySql is working properly I'm using MySql Connector version 6.5.4 and have created other ASP.net web forms + entity framework applications with ZERO problems I have also tried including/removing this in my web.config: <system.data> <DbProviderFactories> <remove invariant="MySql.Data.MySqlClient"/> <add name="MySQL Data Provider" invariant="MySql.Data.MySqlClient" description=".Net Framework Data Provider for MySQL" type="MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlClientFactory, MySql.Data, Version=6.5.4.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c5687fc88969c44d" /> </DbProviderFactories> I've literally been working on this bug for days - I'm to the point now that I would be willing to pay someone to solve it.. no joke... I'd really love to use MVC 4 and Razor - I was so excited to get started on this, but now i'm pretty discouraged - I truly appreciate any help/guidance on this! Also note - i'm using Entityframework from Nuget... Another Note I was using the default visual studio template that creates your MVC project with the account pages and other stuff. I JUST removed all references to the added files because they were trying to use the "DefaultConnection" which didn't exist - so i thought those files may be what was causing the error - however still no luck after removing them - I just wanted to let everyone know i'm using the visual studio MVC project template which pre-creates a bunch of files. I will be trying to recreate this all from a blank MVC project which doesn't have those files - i will update this once i test that Other References It appears someone else is having the same issues I am - the only difference is they are using sql server - I tried tweaking all my code to follow the suggestions on this stackoverflow question/answer here but still to no avail

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• [wordpress] Loop through a specific category on single.php

  - by petrescu

  I've created a custom page and it is set as my homepage, within this custom page I am pulling out the latest post from a specific category, I've also created a form of pagination which when clicked upon will take the user to single.php. My intention for the single.php is to have two custom loops. Custom loop one I want single.php to distinguish that it has came from the homepage and loop through all of the posts tagged with the same category as the one on the homepage. Some of these posts will have to be tagged with more than one category, so the loop will have to know to ignore the other categories and just pay attention to the category in question. Does that make sense? Custom loop two If the user hasn't arrived from the homepage, single.php will just act as it normally does i.e, if the user comes from index.php (the blog) they will be taken to this second loop (blog post) However I don't seem to be able to make the distinction between the two loops, I might be over complicating matters, as I've got a loop which wraps everything together and then I have a loop for my custom pagination. Here is the code below to show you what I'm talking about custompage.php (set to home) - This works just fine but I'll post it just incase anyone is able to tidy it up <?php query_posts('cat=1'); ?> <?php $myPosts = new WP_Query(); $myPosts->query('showposts=1'); if (have_posts()) : while ($myPosts->have_posts()) : $myPosts->the_post(); ?> <script type="text/javascript">$.backstretch("<?php $key="image"; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true);?>");</script> <div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" class="info"> <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2> <ul class="nav"> <?php query_posts('posts_per_page=1&offset=1'); the_post(); ?> <li class="prev"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">Previous</a></li> <?php wp_reset_query(); ?> <li class="next"></li> </ul> </div> <!-- end .info --> <?php endwhile; endif; ?> <?php wp_reset_query(); ?> single.php - Currently broken <?php if( in_category('1') ) { ?> <!-- start --> <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> <div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" class="info"> <script type="text/javascript">$.backstretch("<?php $key="image"; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true);?>");</script> <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2> <ul class="nav"> <li class="prev"><?php previous_post_link('%link', '&nbsp;', 'true', '1') ?></li> <li class="next"><?php next_post_link('%link', '&nbsp;', 'true', '1'); ?></li> <!--li class="prev"><?php //previous_post_link('%link', '%title;', 'true', '1') ?></li> <li class="next"><?php //next_post_link('%link', '%title;', 'true', '1'); ?></li--> </ul> </div> <!-- end .info --> <?php endwhile; else: ?> <?php endif; ?> <!-- end --> <?php }else{ ?> <div id="content" class="widecolumn" role="main"> <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> <div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"> <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2> <div class="entry"> <?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this entry &raquo;</p>'); ?> </div> </div> <?php comments_template(); ?> <?php endwhile; else: ?> <p>Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.</p> <?php endif; ?> </div> <?php } ?> The problem I seem to be running into is when a post has been tagged with two categories, wordpress doesn't seem to be able to make the distinction between the two categories and instead of carrying on to the next category it breaks and defaults to the second loop.

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• What's a reliable and practical way to protect software with a user license ?

  - by Frank

  I know software companies use licenses to protect their softwares, but I also know there are keygen programs to bypass them. I'm a Java developer, if I put my program online for sale, what's a reliable and practical way to protect it ? How about something like this, would it work ? <1> I use ProGuard to protect the source code. <2> Sign the executable Jar file. <3> Since my Java program only need to work on PC [I need to use JDIC in it], I wrap the final executable Jar into an .exe file which makes it harder to decompile. <4> When a user first downloads and runs my app, it checks for a Pass file on his PC. <5> If the Pass file doesn't exist, run the app in demo mode, exits in 5 minutes. <6> When demo exits a panel opens with a "Buy Now" button. This demo mode repeats forever unless step <7> happens. <7> If user clicks the "Buy Now" button, he fills out a detailed form [name, phone, email ...], presses a "Verify Info" button to save the form to a Pass file, leaving license Key # field empty in this newly generated Pass file. <8> Pressing "Verify Info" button will take him to a html form pre-filled with his info to verify what he is buying, also hidden in the form's input filed is a license Key number. He can now press a "Pay Now" button to goto Paypal to finish the process. <9> The hidden license Key # will be passed to Paypal as product Id info and emailed to me. <10> After I got the payment and Paypal email, I'll add the license Key # to a valid license Key list, and put it on my site, only I know the url. The list is updated hourly. <11> Few hours later when the user runs the app again, it can find the Pass file on his PC, but the license Key # value is empty, so it goes to the valid list url to see if its license Key # is on the list, if so, write the license Key # into the Pass file, and the next time it starts again, it will find the valid license Key # and start in purchased mode without exiting in 5 minutes. <12> If it can't find its license Key # on the list from my url, run in demo mode. <13> In order to prevent a user from copying and using another paid user's valid Pass file, the license Key # is unique to each PC [I'm trying to find how], so a valid Pass file only works on one PC. Only after a user has paid will Paypal email me the valid license Key # with his payment. <14> The Id checking goes like this : Use the CPU ID : "CPU_01-02-ABC" for example, encrypt it to the result ID : "XeR5TY67rgf", and compare it to the list on my url, if "XeR5TY67rgf" is not on my valid user list, run in demo mode. If it exists write "XeR5TY67rgf" into the Pass File license field. In order to get a unique license Key, can I use his PC's CPU Id ? Or something unique and useful [ relatively less likely to change ]. If so let's say this CPU ID is "CPU_01-02-ABC", I can encrypt it to something like "XeR5TY67rgf", and pass it to Paypal as product Id in the hidden html form field, then I'll get it from Paypal's email notification, and add it to the valid license Key # list on the url. So, even if a hacker knows it uses CPU Id, he can't write it into the Pass file field, because only encrypted Ids are valid Ids. And only my program knows how to generate the encrypted Ids. And even if another hacker knows the encrypted Id is hidden in the html form input field, as long as it's not on my url list, it's still invalid. Can anyone find any flaw in the above system ? Is it practical ? And most importantly how do I get hold of this unique ID that can represent a user's PC ? Frank

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• form not showing for empty records

  - by Chris Hodges

  I have a relatively simple PHP page called editcustomers with 3 columns. The problem I'm having is that the form will show when there is a record in the database and the fields will be populated with that info. When no such records exists, the form is not even shown, eliminating the possibility to insert a record. My page layout is as follows: Column 1 shows a form containing customer information, allowing it to be edited. Column 2 allows ordering of products and showing how many products were ordered Column 3 shows the total paid so far, and the total owing. The code for the page I have at present: <html> <?php $id = $_GET['id']; require_once('connect.php'); $sth = $dbh->query("SELECT * FROM users where id = '$id';"); $sth->setFetchMode(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC); $eth = $dbh->query("SELECT * FROM purchases where id = '$id';"); $eth->setFetchMode(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC); ?> <div id="main"> <div id="left"> <form name="custInfo" action ="process.php" method ="post" > <input type = "hidden" name ="formType" value="custInfo"/> <?php while($row = $sth->fetch()){ ?> <p><input type = "hidden" name ="id" value="<?php echo $row["id"] ?>"/> <p><input type = "text" name ="firstName" size ="30" value=" <?php echo $row["firstName"]?>"/> <p><input type = "text" name ="lastName" size ="30" value="<?php echo $row["lastName"]?>"/> <p><input type = "text" name ="country" size ="30" value="<?php echo $row["country"]?>"/> <p></p> <input type="submit" value="Update" /> <?php }?> </div> <div id="mid"> <form name="custCosts" action ="process.php" method ="post" > <input type = "hidden" name ="formType" value="custCosts"/> <?php while($row = $eth->fetch()){ ?> <p><input type = "hidden" name ="id" value="<?php echo $row["id"] ?>"/> <p><input type = "text" name ="amountOwed" size ="30" value=" <?php echo $row["amountOwed"]?>"/> <p><input type = "text" name ="numAaa" size ="30" value="<?php echo $row["numAaa"]?>"/> <p><input type = "text" name ="numBbb" size ="30" value="<?php echo $row["numBbb"]?>"/> <p></p> <input type="submit" value="Update" /> <?php }?> </div> <div id="right"> <b>Total Balance</b> <p> Money owed: </p> <p> aaa total: </p> <p> bbb total: </p> <p> Total: </p> <input type = "text" name ="pay" size ="20" /></p> <input type="submit" value="Make Payment" /> </div> <?php $dbh =null; ?> </body> </html> And the code for all the database trickery: <?php require_once 'connect.php'; $formType = $_POST['formType']; $id = $_POST['id']; $firstName = $_POST['firstName']; $lastName = $_POST['lastName']; $country = $_POST['country']; $amountOwed = $_POST['amountOwed ']; $numAaa = $_POST['numAaa']; $numBbb = $_POST['numBbb']; if(empty($_POST['id'])) { $sth = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO customers (firstName, lastName, country) VALUES ('$firstName', '$lastName', '$country')"); $sth->execute(); } elseif(!empty($_POST['id']) && !isset($_POST['stayCost']) && $_POST['formType'] == 'guestInfo'){ $sth = $dbh->prepare("UPDATE customers SET firstName = '$firstName', lastName = '$lastName', country = '$country' WHERE id = '$id'"); $sth->execute(); }elseif(!empty($_POST['id']) && isset($_POST['stayCost']) && $_POST['formType'] == 'guestInfo'){ $sth = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO purchases (id, amountOwed, numAaa, numBbb) VALUES ('$id', '$amountOwed', '$numAaa', '$numBbb'"); $sth->execute(); }elseif(!empty($_POST['id']) && $_POST['formType'] == 'guestCosts'){ $sth = $dbh->prepare("UPDATE purchases SET amountOwed= '$amountOwed', numAaa = '$numAaa', numBbb= '$numBbb' WHERE id = '$id'"); $sth->execute(); } $dbh =null; ?> Why does the form not even display if there is no record? An error or something I might understand....but the form is still in the HTML and should still be being output, from what I can see. Why is this not the case?

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• UPDATE FOR BI PUBLISHER ENTERPRISE 10.1.3.4.1 MARCH 2010

  - by Tim Dexter

  Latest roll up patch for 10.1.3.4.1 is now out in the wild. Yep, there are bug fixes but the guys have implemented some great enhancements. I'll be covering some of them over the coming weeks, from collapsing bookmarks in your PDFs to better MS AD support to 'true' Excel templates, yes you read that correctly! Patch is available from Oracle's support site. Just search for patch 9546699. Here's the contents and readme, apologies for the big list but at least you can search against it for a particular fix. This patch contains backports of following bugs for BI Publisher Enterprise 10.1.3.4.0 and 10.1.3.4.1. 6193342 - REG:SAMPLE DATA FILE FOR PDF FORM MAPPING IS NOT VALIDATED 6261875 - ERRONEOUS PRECISION VALIDATION ON ONLINE ANALYZER 6439437 - NULL POINTER EXCEPTION WHEN PROCESSING TABLE OF CONTENT 6460974 - BACS EFT PAYMENT INSTRUCTION OUTPUT FILE IS EMPTY 6939721 - BIP: REPORT BUSTING DELIVERY KEY VALUES CANNOT CONTAIN SEVERAL SPECIAL CHARACTER 6996069 - USING XML DB FOR BI REPOSITORY FAILS WITH RESOURCENOTFOUNDEXCEPTION 7207434 - TIMEZONE:SHOULD NOT DO TIMEZONE CONVERSION AGAINST CANONICAL DATE YYYY-MM-DD 7371531 - SUPPORT FOR CSV OUTPUT FOR STRUCTURED XML AND NON SQL DATA SOURCES 7596148 - ER: LDAP FOR MS AD TO SEARCH FROM AD ROOT 7646139 - WEBSERVICES ERROR 7829516 - BIP STANDALONE FAILS TO BURST USING XSL-FO TEMPLATES 8219848 - PDF TEMPLATE REPORT NOT PERFORMING PAGE BREAK 8232116 - PARAMETER VALUE IS PASSED AS NULL,IF IT CONTAINS 'AND' WITHIN THE STRING 8250690 - NOT ABLE TO UPLOAD TEMPLATE VIA BIP API 8288459 - ER: QUERY BUILDER OPTION TO NOT INCLUDE TABLENAME. PREFIX IN SQL 8289600 - REPORT TITLE AND DESCRIPTION CAN'T SUPPORT MULTIPLE LANGUAGES 8327080 - CAN NOT CONFIGURE ORACLE EBUSINESS SUITE SECURITY MODEL WITH ORACLE RAC 8332164 - AN XDO PROPERTY TO ENABLE DEBUG LOGGING 8333289 - WEB SERVICE JOBS FAIL AFTER BIP STARTED UP 8340239 - HTTP NOTIFY IS MISSING IN SCHEDULEREPORTREQUEST 8360933 - UNABLE TO USE LOGGED IN BI USER AS THE WSSECURITY USERNAME IN A VARIABLE FORMAT 8400744 - ADMINISTRATOR USER DOES NOT HAVE FULL ADMINISTRATOR RIGHTS 8402436 - CRASH CAUSED BY UNDETERMINED ATTRKEY ERROR IN MULTI-THREADED 8403779 - IMPOSSIBLE TO CONFIGURE PARAMETER FOR A REPORT 8412259 - PDF, RTF OUTPUT NOT HANDLING THE TABLE BORDER AND CONTENT OVERFLOWS TO NEXT PAGE 8483919 - DYNAMIC DATASOURCE WEBSERVICE SHOULD WORK WITH SERVERSIDE CONNECTIONS 8444382 - ID ATTRIBUTE IN TITLE-PAGE DOES NOT WORK WITH SELECTACTION PROPERTY 8446681 - UI LANGUAGE IS NOT REFLECTED AT THE FIRST LOG IN 8449884 - PUBLICREPORTSERVICE FAILS ON EMAIL DELIVERY USING BIP 10.1.3.4.0D+ - NPE 8454858 - DB: XMLP_ADMIN CAN SEE ALL THE FOLDERS BUT ONLY HAS VIEW PERMISSIONS 8458818 - PDFBOOKBINDER FAILS WITH OUTOFMEMORY ERROR WHEN TRYING TO BIND > 1500 PDFS 8463992 - INCORRECT IMPLEMENTATION OF XLIFF SPECIFICATION 8468777 - BI PUBLISHER QUERY BUILDER NOT LOADING SCHEMA OBJECTS 8477310 - QUERY BUILDER NOT WORK WITH SSL ON STANDALONE OC4J 8506701 - POSITIVE PAY FILE WITH OPTIONS NOT CREATING FILE CHECKS OVER 2500 8506761 - PERFORMANCE: PDFBOOKBINDER CLASS TAKES 4 HOURS TO BIND 4000 PAGES 8535604 - NPE WHEN CLICKING "ANALYZER FOR EXCEL" BUTTON IN ALL_* REPORTS 8536246 - REMOVE-PDF-FIELDS DOES NOT WORK WITH CHECKBOXES WITH OPT ARRAY 8541792 - NULLPOINTER EXCEPTION WHILE USING SFTP PROTOCOL 8554443 - LOGGING TIME STAMP IN 10G: THE HOUR PART IS WRONG 8558007 - UNABLE TO LOGIN BIP WITH UNPRIVILEGED USER WHEN XDB IS USED FOR REPORSITORY STOR 8565758 - NEED TO CONNECT IMPERSONATION TO DATA SOURCE WITH PL/SQL FUNCTION 8567235 - EFTPROCESSOR AND XDO DEBUG ENABLED CAUSES ORG.XML.SAX.SAXPARSEEXCEPTION 8572216 - EFTPROCESSOR NOT THREAD SAFE - CAUSING CORRUPTED REPORTS TO BE GENERATED 8575776 - LANDSCAPE REPORT ORIENTAION NOT SELECTED WHEN REPORT IS PRINTED WITH PS 8588330 - XLIFF GENERATING WITH WRONG MAXWIDTH ATTRIBUTE IN SOME TRANS-UNITS 8584446 - EFTGENERATOR DOES NOT USE XSLT SCALABILITY - JAVA.LANG.OUTOFMEMORY EXCEPTION 8594954 - ENG: BIP NOTIFY MESSAGE BECOMES ENGLISH 8599646 - ER:EXTRA SPACE ADDED BELOW IMAGE IN A TABLE CELL OF TEMPLATE IN FIREFOX 8605110 - PDFSIGNATURE API ENCOUNTERS JAVA.LANG.NULLPOINTEREXCEPTION ON PDF WITH WATERMARK 8660915 - BURSTING WITH DATA TEMPLATE NOT WORKING WITH OPTION: VALUE=FALSE 8660920 - ER: EXTRACT XHTML DATA USING XDODTEXE IN XHTML FORMAT 8667150 - PROBLEM WITH 3RD APPLICATION ABOUT PDF GENERATED WITH BI PUBLISHER 8683547 - "CLICK VIEW REPORT BUTTON TO GENERATE THE REPORT" MESSAGE IS DISPLAYED 8713080 - SEARCH" PARAMETER IS NOT SHOWING NON ENGLISH DATA IN INTERNET EXPLORER 8724778 - EXCEL ANALYZER PARAMETERS DO NOT WORK WITH EXCEL 2007 8725450 - UIX 2.3.6.6 UPTAKE FOR 10.1.3.4.1 8728807 - DYNAMIC JDBC DATA SOURCE WITH PRE-PROCESS FUNCTION BASED ON EXISTING DATA SOURCE 8759558 - XDO TEMPLATE SHOWS CURRENCY IN WRONG FORMAT FOR DUNNING 8792894 - EFTPROCESSOR DOES NOT SUPPORT XSL TEMPLATE AS INPUTSTREAM 8793550 - BIP GENERATES CSV REPORTS OUTPUT FORMAT WITH EXTENTION .OUT NOT .CSV IN EMAIL 8819869 - PERIOD CLOSE VALUE SUMMARY REPORT (XML) RUNNING INTO WARNING 8825732 - MY FOLDERS LINK BROKEN WITH USER NAME THAT INCLUDES A SLASH (/) OBIEE SECURITY 8831948 - TRYING TO GENERATE A SCATTER PLOT USING THE CHART WIZARD 8842299 - SEEDED QUERY ALWAYS RETURNS RESULTS BASED ON FIRST COLUMN 8858027 - NODE.GETTEXTCONTEXT() NOT AVAILABLE IN 10G UNDER OC4J 8859957 - REPORT TITLE ALIGNMENT GOES BAD FOR REPORTS WITH XLIFF FILE ATTACHED 8860957 - ER: IMPROVE PERFORMANCE OF ANSWERS PARAMETERS 8891537 - GETREPORTPARAMETERS WEB SERVICE API ISSUES WITH OAAM REPORTS 8891558 - GETTING SQLEXCEPTION IN GENERATEREPORT WEB SERVICE API ON OAAM REPORTS 8927796 - ER: DYANAMIC DATA SOURCE SUPPORT BY DATA SOURCE NAME 8969898 - BI PUBLISHER WEB SERVICE GETREPORTPARAMETERS DOES NOT TRANSLATE PARAMETER LABEL 8998967 - MULTIPLE XSL PREDICATES ELEMENT[A='A'] [B='B'] CAUSES XML-22019 ERROR 9012511 - SCALABLE MODE IS NOT WORKING IN XMLPUBLISHER 10.1.3.4 9016976 - ER: PRINT XSL-T AND FOPROCESSING TIMING INFORMATION 9018580 - WEB SERVICE CALL FAILS WHEN REPORT INCLUDES SEARCH TYPE 9018657 - JOB FAILS WHEN LOV QUERY CONTAINS BIND VARIABLES :XDO_USER_UI_LOCALE 9021224 - PERFORMANCE ISSUE TO VIEW DASHBOARD PAGE WITH BIP REPORT LINKS 9022440 - ER: SUPPORT "COMB OF N CHARACTERS" FEATURE PDF FORM TEXT FIELDS 9026236 - XPATH DOES NOT WORK CORRECTLY IN 10.1.3.4.1 9051652 - FILE EXTENSION OF CSV OUTPUT IS TXT WHEN IT IS EXPORTED FROM REPORT VIEWER 9053770 - WHEN SENDING CSV REPORT OUTPUT BY EMAIL SOMETIMES IT IS SENT WITHOUT EXTENSION 9066483 - PDFBOOKBINDER LEAVE SOME TEMPORARY FILES AFTER MERGING TITLE PAGE OR TOC 9102420 - USE RELATIVE PATHS IN HYPERLINKS 9127185 - CHECKBOX NOT WORK ON SUB TEMPLATE 9149679 - BASE URL IS NOT PASSED CORRECTLY 9149691 - PROVIDE A WAY TO DISABLE THE ABILITY TO CREATE SCHEDULED REPORT JOB "PUBLIC" 9167822 - NOTIFICATION URL BREAKS ON FOLDER NAMES WITH SPACES 9167913 - CHARTS ARE MISSING IN PDF OUTPUTS WHEN THE DEFAULT OUTPUT FORMAT IS NOT A PDF 9217965 - REPORT HISTORY TAKES LONG TIME TO RENDER THE PAGE 9236674 - BI PUBLISHER PARAMETERS DO NOT CASCADE REFRESH AFTER SECOND PARAMETER 9283933 - OPTION TO COLLAPSE PDF OUTPUT BOOKMARKS BY DEFAULT 9287245 - SAVE COMPLETED SCHEDULED REPORTS IN ITS REPORT NAME AND NOT IN A GENERIC NAME 9348862 - ADD FEATURE TO DISABLE THE XSLT1.0-COMPATIBILITY IN RTF TEMPLATE 9355897 - ER: NEED A SAFE DIVIDE FUNCTION 9364169 - UIX 2.3.6.6 PATCH UPTAKE FOR 10.1.3.4.1 9365153 - LEADING WHITESPACE CHARACTERS IN A FIELD TRIMMED WHEN RUN VIEW OR EXPORT TO .CSV 9389039 - LONG TEXT IS NOT WRAPPED PROPERLY IN THE AUTOSHAPE ON RTF TEMPLATE 9475697 - ENH: SUB-TEMPLATE:DYNAMIC VARIABLE WITH PARAMETER VALUE IN CALL-TEMPLATE CLAUSE 9484549 - CHANGE DEFAULT FOR "XSLT1.0-COMPATIBILITY" TO FALSE FOR 10G 9508499 - UNABLE TO READ EXCEL FILE IF MORE THAN 1800 ROWS GENERATED 9546078 - EMAIL DELIVERY INFORMATION SHOULD NOT BE SAVED AND AUTO-FED IN JOB SUBMISSION 9546101 - EXCEPTION OCCURS WHEN SFTP/FTP REMOTE FILENAME DOSE NOT CONTAIN A SLASH '/' 9546117 - SFTP REPORT DELIVERY FAILS WITH NO CLASS DEF FOUND EXCEPTION ON WEBLOGIC 9.2 Following bugs are included in 10.1.3.4.1 and they are only applied to 10.1.3.4.0. 4612604 - FROM EDGE ATTRIBUTE OF HEADER AND FOOTER IS NOT PRESERVED 6621006 - PARAMNAMEVALUE ELEMENT DEFINITION SHOULD HAVE PARAMETER TYPE 6811967 - DATE PARAMETER NOT HANDLING DATE OFFSET WHEN PASSED UPPERCASE Z FOR OFFSET 6864451 - WHEN BIP REPORTS TIMEOUT, THE PROCESS TO LOG BACK IN IS NOT USER FRIENDLY 6869887 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD:4.1.4/4.1.6 OVERRIDINDG MASK /W XSLT._XDOCURMASKS /W SYMBOL 6959078 - "TEXT FIELD CONTAINS COMMA-SEPARATED VALUES" DOESN'T WORK IN CASE OF STRING 6994647 - GETTING ERROR MESSAGE SAYING JOB FAILED EVEN THOUGH WORKS OK IN BI PUBLISHER 7133143 - ENABLE USER TO ENTER 'TODAY' AS VALUE TO DATE PARAMETER IN SCHEDULE REPORT UI 7165117 - QA_BIP_FUNC:-CLOSED LIFE TIME REPORT ERROR MESSAGE IN CMD 7167068 - LEADER-LENGTH OR RULE-THICKNESS PROPRTY IS TOO LARGE 7219517 - NEED EXTENSION FUNCTIONS TO URL ENCODE TEXT STRING. 7269228 - TEMPLATEHELPER PRODUCES A GARBLED OUTPUT WHEN INVOKED BY MULTIPLE THREADS 7276813 - GETREPORTPARAMETERSRETURN ELEMENT SHOULD HAVE DEFAULT VALUE 7279046 - SCHDEULER:UNABLE TO DELETE A JOB USING API 7280336 - ER: BI PUBLISHER - SITEMINDER SUPPORT - GENERIC NON-ORACLE SSO SUPPORT 7281468 - MODIFY SQL SERVER PROPERTIES TO USE HYP DATA DIRECT IN JDBCDEFAULTS.XML 7281495 - PLEASE ADD SUPPORTED DBS TO JDBCDEFAULT.XML AND LIST EACH DB VERSION SEPARATELY 7282456 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD 4.1.9.2: CURRENCY AMOUTS SHOULD NOT BE WRAPPED. MINUS SIGN 7282507 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD4.1.2.5:DISPLAY CURRENCY AND LOCALE DERIVED CURRENCY SYMBOL 7284780 - FUSION CURRENCY BRD 4.1.12.4 CORRECTLY ALIGN NEGATIVE CURRENCY AMOUNTS 7306874 - OPP ERROR - JAVA.LANG.OUTOFMEMORYERROR: ZIP002:OUTOFMEMORYERROR, MEM_ERROR 7309596 - SIEBELCRM: BIP ENHANCEMENT REQUEST FOR SIEBEL PARAMETERIZATION 7337173 - UI LOCALE IS ALWAYS REWRITTEN TO EN WHEN MOVE FROM DASHBOARD 7338349 - REG:ANALYZER REPORT WITH AVERAGE FUNCTION FAIL TO RUN FOR NON INTERACTIVE FORMAT 7343757 - OUTPUT FORMAT OF TEMPLATES IS NOT SAVING 7345989 - SET XDK REPLACEILLEGALCHARS AND ENHANCE XSLTWRAPPER WARNING 7354775 - UNEXPECTED BEHAVIOR OF LAYOUT TEMPLATE PARAMETER OF RUNREPORT WEBSERVICES API 7354798 - SEQUENCE ORDER OF PARAMETERS FOR THE RUNREPORT WEBSERVICES API 7358973 - PARALLEL SFTP DELIVERY FAILS DUE TO SSHEXCEPTION: CORRUPT MAC ON INPUT 7370110 - REGN:FAIL WHEN USE JNDI TO XMLDB REPORT REPOSITORY 7375859 - NEW WEBSERVICE REQUIRED FOR RUNREPORT 7375892 - REQUIRE NEW WEBSERVICE TO CHECK IF REPORTFOLDER EXISTS 7377686 - TEXT-ALIGN NOT APPLIED IN PDF IN HEBREW LOCALE 7413722 - RUNREPORT API DOES NOT PASS BACK ANY GENERATED EXCEPTIONS TO SCHEDULEREPORT 7435420 - FUSION CURRENCY: SUPPORT MICROSOFT(JAVA) FORMAT MASK WITH CURRENCY 7441486 - ER: ADD PARAMETER FOR SFTP TO BURSTING QUERY 7458169 - SSO WITH OID LDAP COULD NOT FETCH OID ROLES 7461161 - EMAIL DELIVERY FAILS - DELIVERYEXCEPTION: 0 BYTE AVAILABLE IN THE GIVEN INPU 7580715 - INCORRECT FORMATTING OF DATES IN TIMEZONE GMT+13 7582694 - INVALID MAXWIDTH VALUE CAUSES NLS FAILURES 7583693 - JAVA.LANG.NULLPOINTEREXCEPTION RAISED WHEN GENERATING HRMS BENEFITS PDF REPORT 7587998 - NEWLY CREATED USERS IN OID CANT ACCESS REPORTS UNTILL BI PUBLISHER IS RESTARTED 7588317 - TABLE OF CONTENT ALWAYS IN THE SAME FONT 7590084 - REMOVING THE BIP ENTERPRISE BANNER BUT KEEPING THE REPORTS & SCHEDULES TAB 7590112 - SOMEONE NOT PRIVILEGED ACCESS BIP DIRECTLY SHOULD GET A CUSTOM PAGE 7590125 - AUTOMATING CREATION OF USERS AND ROLES 7597902 - TIMEZONE SUPPORT IN RUNREPORT WEBSERVICE API 7599031 - XML PUBLISHER SUM(CURRENT-GROUP()) FAILS 7609178 - ISSUE WITH TAGS EXTRACTED FROM RTF TEMPLATE 7613024 - HEADER/FOOTER SETTINGS OF RTF TEMPLATE ARE NOT RETAINING IN THE RTF OUTPUT 7623988 - ADD XSLT FUNCTION TO PRINT XDO PROPERTIES 7625975 - RETRIEVING PARAMETER LOV FROM RTF TEMPLATE 7629445 - SPELL OUT A NUMBER INTO WORDS 7641827 - ANALYTICS FROZED AFTER PAGE TAB WHICH INCLUDES [BI PUBLISHER REPORT] WERE CLICKE 7645504 - BIP REPORT FROZED AFTER THE SAME DASHBOARD BIP REPORTS WERE CLICKED SIMULTANEOUS 7649561 - RECEIVE 'TO MANY OPEN FILE HANDLES' ERROR CAUSING BI TO CRASH 7654155 - BIP REMOVES THE FIRST FILE SEPARATOR WHEN RE-ENTER REPOSITORY LOCATION IN ADMIN 7656834 - NEED AN OPTION TO NOT APPEND SCHEMA NAME IN GENERATED QUERY 7660292 - ER: XDOPARSER UPGRADE TO XDK 11G 7687862 - BIP DATA EXTRACTING ENHANCEMENT FOR SIEBEL BIP INTEGRATION 7694875 - ADMINISTRATOR IS SUPER USER WHETHER CONFIGURED MANDATORY_USER_ROLE OR NOT 7697592 - BI PUBLISHER STRINGINDEXOUTOFBOUNDSEXCEPTION WHEN PRINTING LABEL FROM SIM 7702372 - ARABIC/ENGLISH NUMBER/DATE PROBLEM, TOTAL PAGE NUMBER NOT RENDERED IN ENGLISH 7707987 - OUTOFMEMORY BURSTING A BI PUBLISHER REPORT BI SERVER DATA SOURCE 7712026 - ER: CHANGE CHART OUTPUT FORMAT TO PNG IN HTML OUTPUT 7833732 - THE 'SEARCH' PARAMETER TYPE CANNOT BE USED IN IE6 UNDER WINDOWS 8214839 - ER: INCREASE COLUMN SIZE IN SCHEDULER TABLE XMLP_SCHED_JOB 8218271 - ISSUES WHILE CONVERTING EXCEL TO XML 8218452 - BI PUBLISHER STANDALONE : GRAPHICS WITHOUT COLORS IF MORE THAN 33 PAGES 8250980 - USER WITH XMLP_ADMIN RESPONSIBILITY IS NOT ABLE TO EDIT REPORT IN BIP 8262410 - IMPOSSIBLE TO PRINT PDF CREATED BY BI PUBLISHER VIA 3RD PARTY PDF APPLICATION 8274369 - QA: CANNOT DELETE EMAIL SERVER UNDER DELIVERY CONFIGURATION 8284173 - FO:VISIBILITY="HIDDEN" DOESN'T WORK WITH FO:PAGE-NUMBER-CITATION 8288421 - THE VALUE OF VIEW BY GO BACK TO MY HISTORY IN SCHEDULES TAB 8299212 - REG: THE SPECIFICAL BI USER DIDN'T GET THE CORRECT REPORT HISTORY 8301767 - ORA-01795 ERROR OCCURED AFTER ACCESSING DASHBOARD PAGE WHICH INCLUDES BIP 8304944 - ADD SIEBEL SECURITY MODEL IN BI PUBLISHER 10.1.3.4.1 8312814 - QA:HOT:OBI SERVER JDBC DRIVER BIJDBC14.JAR IN XMLPSERVER.WAR IS INCORRECT 8323679 - BI PUBLISHER SENDS HTML REPORT TO OUTLOOK CLIENT AS ATTACHMENT NOT INLINE 8370794 - HISTORY OF COMPLETED SCHEDULER JOBS STILL SHOW ONE AS RUNNING ON CLUSTER ENV 8390970 - OUT OF MEMORY EXCEPTION RAISED, WHILE SAVING THE DATA 8393681 - CHECKBOX IS SHOWING UP AS CHECKED WHEN DATA IS NOT CHECKED VALUE 8725450 - UIX 2.3.6.6 UPTAKE FOR 10.1.3.4.1 UIX fixes: 6866363 - SUPPORT FOR JAVA DATE FORMAT AS PER JDK 1.4 AND ABOVE 6829124 - DATE PARAMETER NOT HANDLING DATE OFFSET AS PER JAVA STANDARDS ---------------------------- INSTALLATION FOR ENTERPRISE ---------------------------- Upgrade from 10.1.3.4.0d (patch 8284524, 8398280) and 10.1.3.4.1 does not require step 8 and step 9. 1 - Make a backup copy of the xmlp-server-config.xml file located in <application installation>/WEB-INF/ directory, where your application server unpacked the BI Publisher war or ear file. Example: In an Oracle AS/OC4J 10.1.3 deployment, the location is <ORACLE_HOME>/j2ee/home/applications/xmlpserver/xmlpserver/WEB-INF/xmlp-server-config.xml 2 - Back up all the directories under the BI Publisher repository (for example: {Oracle_Home}/xmlp/XMLP). 3 - If you are using Scheduling, back up your existing BI Publisher Scheduler schema. 4 - Shut down BI Publisher. 5 - Undeploy the BI Publisher application ("xmlpserver") from your J2EE application server. See your application server documentation for instructions how to undeploy an application. 6 - Deploy the 10.1.3.4 xmlpserver.ear or xmlpserver.war to your application server. See "Manually Installing BI Publisher to Your J2EE Application Server" secition of BI Publisher Installation Guide for guidelines for your application server type. 7 - Copy the saved backup copy of the xmlp-server-config.xml file from step 1 to the newly created BI Publisher <application installation>/WEB-INF/ directory, where your application server unpacked the BI Publisher war or ear file. Example: In an Oracle AS/OC4J 10.1.3 deployment, the location is <ORACLE_HOME>/j2ee/home/applications/xmlpserver/xmlpserver/WEB-INF/xmlp-server-config.xml 8 - Copy ssodefaults.xml to the following directory. And replace [host]:[port] with your server's information. Default values for other properties can be updated depending on your configuration. <Existing Repository>\XMLP\Admin\Security 9 - Copy database-config.xml to the following directory. <Existing Repository>\XMLP\Admin\Scheduler 10 - Restart xmlpserver application or Application Server ---------------------------------- IBM WEBSPHERE 6.1 DEPLOYMENT NOTE ---------------------------------- When users fail to log on to BI Publisher with "HTTP 500 Internal Server Error" on WebSphere 6.1, you must change Class Loader configuration to avoid the error. (bug7506253 - XMLPSERVER WON'T START AFTER DEPLOYMENT TO WEBSPHERE 6.1) SystemErr.log: java.lang.VerifyError: class loading constraint violated (class: oracle/xml/parser/v2/XMLNode method: xdkSetQxName(Loracle/xml/util/QxName;)V) at pc: 0 .... Class Loader Configuration Steps: 1 - Login to WebSphere Admin console. Click Enterprise Applications under Applications menu 2 - Click xmlpserver application name from the list 3 - Select "Class loading and update detection" 4 - Update class loader configuration as follows in Class Loader -> General Properties * Polling interval for updated files: [0] Seconds * Class loader order: [x] Classes loaded with application class loader first * WAR class loader policy: [x] Single class loader for application 5 - Apply this change and save the new configuration. 6 - Restart xmlpserver application Please refer to WebSphere 6.1 documentation for more details. "http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/info/aes/ae/trun_classload_entapp.html"> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/info/aes/ae/trun_classload_entapp.html ------------------------------------------------------- Oracle WebLogic Server 11g R1 (10.3.1) Deployment NOTE ------------------------------------------------------- If you are deploying BI Publisher to WebLogic Server 10.3.1, you must add the following setting at startup for the domain that contains the BI Publisher server in the /weblogic_home/user_projects/domains/base_domain/bin/startWebLogic.sh script : -Dtoplink.xml.platform=oracle.toplink.platform.xml.jaxp.JAXPPlatform This setting is required to enable BI Publisher to find the TopLink JAR files to create the Scheduler tables.

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• An easy way to create Side by Side registrationless COM Manifests with Visual Studio

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's something I didn't find out until today: You can use Visual Studio to easily create registrationless COM manifest files for you with just a couple of small steps. Registrationless COM lets you use COM component without them being registered in the registry. This means it's possible to deploy COM components along with another application using plain xcopy semantics. To be sure it's rarely quite that easy - you need to watch out for dependencies - but if you know you have COM components that are light weight and have no or known dependencies it's easy to get everything into a single folder and off you go. Registrationless COM works via manifest files which carry the same name as the executable plus a .manifest extension (ie. yourapp.exe.manifest) I'm going to use a Visual FoxPro COM object as an example and create a simple Windows Forms app that calls the component - without that component being registered. Let's take a walk down memory lane… Create a COM Component I start by creating a FoxPro COM component because that's what I know and am working with here in my legacy environment. You can use VB classic or C++ ATL object if that's more to your liking. Here's a real simple Fox one: DEFINE CLASS SimpleServer as Session OLEPUBLIC FUNCTION HelloWorld(lcName) RETURN "Hello " + lcName ENDDEFINE Compile it into a DLL COM component with: BUILD MTDLL simpleserver FROM simpleserver RECOMPILE And to make sure it works test it quickly from Visual FoxPro: server = CREATEOBJECT("simpleServer.simpleserver") MESSAGEBOX( server.HelloWorld("Rick") ) Using Visual Studio to create a Manifest File for a COM Component Next open Visual Studio and create a new executable project - a Console App or WinForms or WPF application will all do. Go to the References Node Select Add Reference Use the Browse tab and find your compiled DLL to import  Next you'll see your assembly in the project. Right click on the reference and select Properties Click on the Isolated DropDown and select True Compile and that's all there's to it. Visual Studio will create a App.exe.manifest file right alongside your application's EXE. The manifest file created looks like this: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xsi:schemaLocation="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 assembly.adaptive.xsd" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:asmv3="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:co.v1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v1" xmlns:co.v2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v2" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" asmv2:size="27293" hash xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" dsig:Transforms dsig:Transform Algorithm="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:HashTransforms.Identity" / dsig:Transforms dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1" / dsig:DigestValuepuq+ua20bbidGOWhPOxfquztBCU=dsig:DigestValue hash typelib tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" version="1.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" / comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file assembly Now let's finish our super complex console app to test with: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace ConsoleApplication1 {     class Program     {         static voidMain(string[] args)         { Type type = Type.GetTypeFromProgID("simpleserver.simpleserver",true); dynamic server = Activator.CreateInstance(type); Console.WriteLine(server.HelloWorld("rick")); Console.ReadLine(); } } } Now run the Console Application… As expected that should work. And why not? The COM component is still registered, right? :-) Nothing tricky about that. Let's unregister the COM component and then re-run and see what happens. Go to the Command Prompt Change to the folder where the DLL is installed Unregister with: RegSvr32 -u simpleserver.dll      To be sure that the COM component no longer works, check it out with the same test you used earlier (ie. o = CREATEOBJECT("SimpleServer.SimpleServer") in your development environment or VBScript etc.). Make sure you run the EXE and you don't re-compile the application or else Visual Studio will complain that it can't find the COM component in the registry while compiling. In fact now that we have our .manifest file you can remove the COM object from the project. When you run run the EXE from Windows Explorer or a command prompt to avoid the recompile. Watch out for embedded Manifest Files Now recompile your .NET project and run it… and it will most likely fail! The problem is that .NET applications by default embeds a manifest file into the compiled EXE application which results in the externally created manifest file being completely ignored. Only one manifest can be applied at a time and the compiled manifest takes precedency. Uh, thanks Visual Studio - not very helpful… Note that if you use another development tool like Visual FoxPro to create your EXE this won't be an issue as long as the tool doesn't automatically add a manifest file. Creating a Visual FoxPro EXE for example will work immediately with the generated manifest file as is. If you are using .NET and Visual Studio you have a couple of options of getting around this: Remove the embedded manifest file Copy the contents of the generated manifest file into a project manifest file and compile that in To remove an embedded manifest in a Visual Studio project: Open the Project Properties (Alt-Enter on project node) Go down to Resources | Manifest and select | Create Application without a Manifest   You can now add use the external manifest file and it will actually be respected when the app runs. The other option is to let Visual Studio create the manifest file on disk and then explicitly add the manifest file into the project. Notice on the dialog above I did this for app.exe.manifest and the manifest actually shows up in the list. If I select this file it will be compiled into the EXE and be used in lieu of any external files and that works as well. Remove the simpleserver.dll reference so you can compile your code and run the application. Now it should work without COM registration of the component. Personally I prefer external manifests because they can be modified after the fact - compiled manifests are evil in my mind because they are immutable - once they are there they can't be overriden or changed. So I prefer an external manifest. However, if you are absolutely sure nothing needs to change and you don't want anybody messing with your manifest, you can also embed it. The option to either is there. Watch for Manifest Caching While working trying to get this to work I ran into some problems at first. Specifically when it wasn't working at first (due to the embedded schema) I played with various different manifest layouts in different files etc.. There are a number of different ways to actually represent manifest files including offloading to separate folder (more on that later). A few times I made deliberate errors in the schema file and I found that regardless of what I did once the app failed or worked no amount of changing of the manifest file would make it behave differently. It appears that Windows is caching the manifest data for a given EXE or DLL. It takes a restart or a recompile of either the EXE or the DLL to clear the caching. Recompile your servers in order to see manifest changes unless there's an outright failure of an invalid manifest file. If the app starts the manifest is being read and caches immediately. This can be very confusing especially if you don't know that it's happening. I found myself always recompiling the exe after each run and before making any changes to the manifest file. Don't forget about Runtimes of COM Objects In the example I used above I used a Visual FoxPro COM component. Visual FoxPro is a runtime based environment so if I'm going to distribute an application that uses a FoxPro COM object the runtimes need to be distributed as well. The same is true of classic Visual Basic applications. Assuming that you don't know whether the runtimes are installed on the target machines make sure to install all the additional files in the EXE's directory alongside the COM DLL. In the case of Visual FoxPro the target folder should contain: The EXE  App.exe The Manifest file (unless it's compiled in) App.exe.manifest The COM object DLL (simpleserver.dll) Visual FoxPro Runtimes: VFP9t.dll (or VFP9r.dll for non-multithreaded dlls), vfp9rENU.dll, msvcr71.dll All these files should be in the same folder. Debugging Manifest load Errors If you for some reason get your manifest loading wrong there are a couple of useful tools available - SxSTrace and SxSParse. These two tools can be a huge help in debugging manifest loading errors. Put the following into a batch file (SxS_Trace.bat for example): sxstrace Trace -logfile:sxs.bin sxstrace Parse -logfile:sxs.bin -outfile:sxs.txt Then start the batch file before running your EXE. Make sure there's no caching happening as described in the previous section. For example, if I go into the manifest file and explicitly break the CLSID and/or ProgID I get a detailed report on where the EXE is looking for the manifest and what it's reading. Eventually the trace gives me an error like this: INFO: Parsing Manifest File C:\wwapps\Conf\SideBySide\Code\app.EXE.     INFO: Manifest Definition Identity is App.exe,processorArchitecture="x86",type="win32",version="1.0.0.0".     ERROR: Line 13: The value {AAaf2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff} of attribute clsid in element comClass is invalid. ERROR: Activation Context generation failed. End Activation Context Generation. pinpointing nicely where the error lies. Pay special attention to the various attributes - they have to match exactly in the different sections of the manifest file(s). Multiple COM Objects The manifest file that Visual Studio creates is actually quite more complex than is required for basic registrationless COM object invokation. The manifest file can be simplified a lot actually by stripping off various namespaces and removing the type library references altogether. Here's an example of a simplified manifest file that actually includes references to 2 COM servers: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name = "sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" threadingModel="apartment" / file assembly Simple enough right? Routing to separate Manifest Files and Folders In the examples above all files ended up in the application's root folder - all the DLLs, support files and runtimes. Sometimes that's not so desirable and you can actually create separate manifest files. The easiest way to do this is to create a manifest file that 'routes' to another manifest file in a separate folder. Basically you create a new 'assembly identity' via a named id. You can then create a folder and another manifest with the id plus .manifest that points at the actual file. In this example I create: App.exe.manifest A folder called App.deploy A manifest file in App.deploy All DLLs and runtimes in App.deploy Let's start with that master manifest file. This file only holds a reference to another manifest file: App.exe.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / dependency dependentAssembly assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" / dependentAssembly dependency assembly   Note this file only contains a dependency to App.deploy which is another manifest id. I can then create App.deploy.manifest in the current folder or in an App.deploy folder. In this case I'll create App.deploy and in it copy the DLLs and support runtimes. I then create App.deploy.manifest. App.deploy.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" type="win32" version="1.0.0.0" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name="sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" / file assembly   In this manifest file I then host my COM DLLs and any support runtimes. This is quite useful if you have lots of DLLs you are referencing or if you need to have separate configuration and application files that are associated with the COM object. This way the operation of your main application and the COM objects it interacts with is somewhat separated. You can see the two folders here:   Routing Manifests to different Folders In theory registrationless COM should be pretty easy in painless - you've seen the configuration manifest files and it certainly doesn't look very complicated, right? But the devil's in the details. The ActivationContext API (SxS - side by side activation) is very intolerant of small errors in the XML or formatting of the keys, so be really careful when setting up components, especially if you are manually editing these files. If you do run into trouble SxsTrace/SxsParse are a huge help to track down the problems. And remember that if you do have problems that you'll need to recompile your EXEs or DLLs for the SxS APIs to refresh themselves properly. All of this gets even more fun if you want to do registrationless COM inside of IIS :-) But I'll leave that for another blog post…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in COM  .NET  FoxPro   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• How Expedia Made My New Bride Cry

  - by Lance Robinson

  Tweet this? Email Expedia and ask them to give me and my new wife our honeymoon? When Expedia followed up their failure with our honeymoon trip with a complete and total lack of acknowledgement of any responsibility for the problem and endless loops of explaining the issue over and over again - I swore that they would make it right. When they brought my new bride to tears, I got an immediate and endless supply of motivation. I hope you will help me make them make it right by posting our story on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, on Expedia itself, and when talking to your friends in person about their own travel plans.   If you are considering using them now for an important trip - reconsider. Short summary: We arrived early for a flight - but Expedia had made a mistake with the data they supplied to JetBlue and Emirates, which resulted in us not being able to check in (one leg of our trip was missing)!  At the time of this post, three people (myself, my wife, and an exceptionally patient JetBlue employee named Mary) each spent hours on the phone with Expedia.  I myself spent right at 3 hours (according to iPhone records), Lauren spent an hour and a half or so, and poor Mary was probably on the phone for a good 3.5 hours.  This is after 5 hours total at the airport.  If you add up our phone time, that is nearly 8 hours of phone time over a 5 hour period with little or no help, stall tactics (?), run-around, denial, shifting of blame, and holding. Details below (times are approximate): First, my wife and I were married yesterday - June 18th, the 3 year anniversary of our first date. She is awesome. She is the nicest person I have ever known, a ton of fun, absolutely beautiful in every way. Ok enough mushy - here are the dirty details. 2:30 AM - Early Check-in Attempt - we attempted to check-in for our flight online. Some sort of technology error on website, instructed to checkin at desk. 4:30 AM - Arrive at airport. Try to check-in at kiosk, get the same error. We got to the JetBlue desk at RDU International Airport, where Mary helped us. Mary discovered that the Expedia provided itinerary does not match the Expedia provided tickets. We are informed that when that happens American, JetBlue, and others that use the same software cannot check you in for the flight because. Why? Because the itinerary was missing a leg of our flight! Basically we were not shown in the system as definitely being able to make it home. Mary called Expedia and was put on hold by their automated system. 4:55 AM - Mary, myself, and my brand new bride all waited for about 25 minutes when finally I decided I would make a call myself on my iPhone while Mary was on the airport phone. In their automated system, I chose "make a new reservation", thinking they might answer a little more quickly than "customer service". Not surprisingly I was connected to an Expedia person within 1 minute. They informed me that they would have to forward me to a customer service specialist. I explained to them that we were already on hold for that and had been for nearly half an hour, that we were going on our honeymoon and that our flight would be leaving soon - could they please help us. "Yes, I will help you". I hand the phone to JetBlue Mary who explains the situation 3 or 4 times. Obviously I couldn't hear both ends of the conversation at this point, but the Expedia person explained what the problem was by stating exactly what Mary had just spent 15 minutes explaining. Mary calmly confirms that this is the problem, and asks Expedia to re-issue the itinerary. Expedia tells Mary that they'll have to transfer her to customer service. Mary asks for someone specific so that we get an answer this time, and goes on hold. Mary get's connected, explains the situation, and then Mary's connection gets terminated. 5:10 AM - Mary calls back to the Expedia automated system again, and we wait for about 5 minutes on hold this time before I pick up my iPhone and call Expedia again myself. Again I go to sales, a person picks up the phone in less than a minute. I explain the situation and let them know that we are now very close to missing our flight for our honeymoon, could they please help us. "Yes, I will help you". Again I give the phone to Mary who provides them with a call back number in case we get disconnected again and explains the situation again. More back and forth with Expedia doing nothing but repeating the same questions, Mary answering the questions with the same information she provided in the original explanation, and Expedia simply restating the problem. Mary again asks them to re-issue the itinerary, and explains that doing so will fix the problem. Expedia again repeats the problem instead of fixing it, and Mary's connection gets terminated. 5:20 AM - Mary again calls back to Expedia. My beautiful bride also calls on her own phone. At this point she is struggling to hold back her tears, stumbling through an explanation of all that has happened and that we are about to miss our flight. Please help us. "Yes, I will help". My beautiful bride's connection gets terminated. Ok, maybe this disconnection isn't an accident. We've now been disconnected 3 times on two different phones. 5:45 AM - I walk away and pleadingly beg a person to help me. They "escalate" the issue to "Rosy" (sp?) at Expedia. I go through the whole song and dance again with Rosy, who gives me the same treatment Mary was given. Rosy blames JetBlue for now having the correct data. Meanwhile Mary is on the phone with Emirates Air (the airline for the second leg of our trip), who agrees with JetBlue that Expedia's data isn't up to date. We are informed by two airport employees that issues like this with Expedia are not uncommon, and that the fix is simple. On the phone iwth Rosy, I ask her to re-issue the itinerary because we are about to miss our flight. She again explains the problem to me. At this point, I am standing at the window, pleading with Rosy to help us get to our honeymoon, watching our airplane. Then our airplane leaves without us. 6:03 AM - At this point we have missed our flight. Re-issuing the itinerary is no longer a solution. I ask Rosy to start from the beginning and work us up a new trip. She says that she cannot do that. She says that she needs to talk to JetBlue and Emirates and find out why we cannot check-in for our flight. I remind Rosy that our flight has already left - I just watched it taxi away - it no longer matters why (not to mention the fact that we already knew why, and have known why since 4:30 AM), and have known the solution since 4:30 AM. Rosy, can you please book a new trip? Yes, but it will cost $400. Excuse me? Now you can, but it will cost ME to fix your mistake? Rosy says that she can escalate the situation to her supervisor but that will take 1.5 hours. 6:15 AM - I told Rosy that if they had re-issued the itinerary as JetBlue asked (at 4:30 AM), my new wife and I might be on the airplane now instead of dealing with this on the phone and missing the beginning (and how much more?) of our honeymoon. Rosy said that it was not necessary to re-issue the itinerary. Out of curiosity, i asked Rosy if there was some financial burden on them to re-issue the itinerary. "No", said Rosy. I asked her if it was a large time burden on Expedia to re-issue the itinerary. "No", said Rosy. I directly asked Rosy: Why wouldn't Expedia have re-issued the itinerary when JetBlue asked? No answer. I asked Rosy: If you had re-issued the itinerary at 4:30, isn't it possible that I would be on that flight right now? She actually surprised me by answering "Yes" to that question. So I pointed out that it followed that Expedia was responsible for the fact that we missed out flight, and she immediately went into more about how the problem was with JetBlue - but now it was ALSO an Emirates Air problem as well. I tell Rosy to go ahead and escalate the issue again, and please call me back in that 1.5 hours (which how is about 1 hour and 10 minutes away). 6:30 AM - I start tweeting my frustration with iPhone. It's now pretty much impossible for us to make it to The Maldives by 3pm, which is the time at which we would need to arrive in order to be allowed service to the actual island where we are staying. Expedia has now given me the run-around for 2 hours, caused me to miss my flight, and worst of all caused my amazing new wife Lauren to miss our honeymoon. You think I was mad? No. Furious. Its ok to make mistakes - but to refuse to fix them and to ruin our honeymoon? No, not ok, Expedia. I swore right then that Expedia would make this right. 7:45 AM - JetBlue mary is still talking her tail off to other people in JetBlue and Emirates Air. Mary works it out so that if Expedia simply books a new trip, JetBlue and Emirates will both waive all the fees. Now we just have to convince Expedia to fix their mistake and get us on our way! Around this time Expedia Rosy calls me back! I inform her of the excellent work of JetBlue Mary - that JetBlue and Emirates both will waive the fees so Expedia can fix their mistake and get us going on our way. She says that she sees documentation of this in her system and that she needs to put me on hold "for 1 to 10 minutes" to talk to Emirates Air (why I'm not exactly sure). I say ok. 8:45 AM - After an hour on hold, Rosy comes on the line and asks me to hold more. I ask her to call me back. 9:35 AM - I put down the iPhone Twitter app and picks up the laptop. You think I made some noise with my iPhone? Heh 11:25 AM - Expedia follows me and sends a canned "We're sorry, DM us the details".  If you look at their Twitter feed, 16 out of the most recent 20 tweets are exactly the same canned response.  The other 4?  Ads.  Um - #MultiFAIL? To Expedia:  You now have had (as explained above) 8 hours of 3 different people explaining our situation, you know the email address of our Expedia account, you know my web blog, you know my Twitter address, you know my phone number.  You also know how upset you have made both me and my new bride by treating us with such a ... non caring, scripted, uncooperative, argumentative, and possibly even deceitful manner.  In the wise words of the great Kenan Thompson of SNL: "FIX IT!".  And no, I'm NOT going away until you make this right. Period. 11:45 AM - Expedia corporate office called.  The woman I spoke to was very nice and apologetic.  She listened to me tell the story again, she says she understands the problem and she is going to work to resolve it.  I don't have any details on what exactly that resolution might me, she said she will call me back in 20 minutes.  She found out about the problem via Twitter.  Thank you Twitter, and all of you who helped.  Hopefully social media will win my wife and I our honeymoon, and hopefully Expedia will encourage their customer service teams treat their customers properly. 12:22 PM - Spoke to Fran again from Expedia corporate office.  She has a flight for us tonight.  She is booking it now.  We will arrive at our honeymoon destination of beautiful Veligandu Island Resort only 1 day late.  She cannot confirm today, but she expects that Expedia will pay for the lost honeymoon night.  Thank you everyone for your help.  I will reflect more on this whole situation and confirm its resolution after our flight is 100% confirmed.  For now, I'm going to take a breather and go kiss my wonderful wife! 1:50 PM - Have not yet received the promised phone call.  We did receive an email with a new itinerary for a flight but the booking is not for specific seats, so there is no guarantee that my wife and I will be able to sit together.  With the original booking I carefully selected our seats for every segment of our trip.  I decided to call into the phone number that Fran from the Expedia corporate office gave me.  Its automated voice system identified itself as "Tier 3 Support".  I am currently still on hold with them, I have not gotten through to a human yet. 1:55 PM - Fran from Expedia called me back.  She confirmed us as booked.  She called the airlines to confirm.  Unfortunately, Expedia was unwilling or unable to allow us any type of seat selection.  It is possible that i won't get to sit next to the woman I married less than a day ago on our 40 total hours of flight time (there and back).  In addition, our seats could be the worst seats on the planes, with no reclining seat back or right next to the restroom.  Despite this fact (which in my opinion is huge), the horrible inconvenience, the hours at the airport, and the negative Internet publicity that Expedia is receiving, Expedia declined to offer us any kind of upgrade or to mark us as SFU (suitable for upgrade).  Since they didn't offer - I asked, and was rejected.  I am grateful to finally be heading in the right direction, but not only did Expedia horribly botch this job from the very beginning, they followed that botch job with near zero customer service, followed by a verbally apologetic but otherwise half-hearted resolution.  If this works out favorably for us, great.  If not - I'm not done making noise, Expedia.  You owe us, and I expect you to make it right.  You haven't quite done that yet. Thanks - Thank you to Twitter.  Thanks to all those who sympathize with us and helped us get the attention of Expedia, since three people (one of them an airline employee) using Expedia's normal channels of communication for many hours didn't help.  Thanks especially to my PowerShell and Sharepoint friends, my local friends, and those connectors who encouraged me and spread my story. 5:15 PM - Love Wins - After all this, Lauren and I are exhausted.  We both took a short nap, and when we woke up we talked about the last 24 hours.  It was a big, amazing, story-filled 24 hours.  I said that Expedia won, but Lauren said no.  She pointed out how lucky we are.  We are in love and married.  We have wonderful family and friends.  We are both hard-working successful people who love what they do.  We get to go to an amazing exotic destination for our honeymoon like Veligandu in The Maldives...  That's a lot of good.  Expedia didn't win.  This was (is) a big loss for Expedia.  It is a public blemish for all to see.  But Lauren and I did win, big time.  Expedia may not have made things right - but things are right for us.  Post in progress... I will relay any further comments (or lack of) from Expedia soon, as well as an update on confirmation of their repayment of our lost resort room rates.  I'll also post a picture of us on our honeymoon as soon as I can!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 06, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 06, 2010Popular ReleasesAura: Aura Preview 1: Rewritten from scratch. This release supports getting color only from icon of foreground window.myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingmytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta: mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta web Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.4, MVC3 RC WARNING For run and debug mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src download and ...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.3 Beta: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Moved menu management and keyboard navigation code to the new PopupMenuManager class - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.0: First public releaseMiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (December 2010): The release is targetted for stable daily use. With improved performance and enhanced compatibility with several latest PHP open source applications; it makes this release perfect replacement of your old PHP runtime. Changes made within this release include following and much more: Performance improvements based on real-world applications experience. We determined biggest bottlenecks and we found and removed overheads causing performance problems in many PHP applications. Reimplemented nat...Chronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.26.7024: Fixed updater; Fixed MegauploadDJ - jQuery WebControls for ASP.NET: DJ 1.2: What is new? Update to support jQuery 1.4.2 Update to support jQuery ui 1.8.6 Update to Visual Studio 2010 New WebControls with samples added Autocomplete WebControl Button WebControl ToggleButt WebControl The example web site is including in source code project.LateBindingApi.Excel: LateBindingApi.Excel Release 0.7g: Unterschiede zur Vorgängerversion: - Zusätzliche Interior Properties - Group / Ungroup Methoden für Range - Bugfix COM Reference Handling für Application Objekt in einigen Klassen Release+Samples V0.7g: - Enthält Laufzeit DLL und Beispielprojekte Beispielprojekte: COMAddinExample - Demonstriert ein versionslos angebundenes COMAddin Example01 - Background Colors und Borders für Cells Example02 - Font Attributes undAlignment für Cells Example03 - Numberformats Example04 - Shapes, WordArts, P...ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit: November 2010 - v2.1: ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit v2.1 Added Windows Phone 7 build. 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• SQL Developer Q&A from ODTUG Tips & Tricks Webcast

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Another great webcast yesterday – if you’re a paying member of ODTUG you can watch the show for yourself in their archives. If not, you can get my slide deck off of SlideShare. About 150 of you brave souls sat through an entire hour of me talking and then 10 more minutes of Q&A. We went through everything rapid-fire style, so I thought I would post the questions and my refined answers here for your perusal. In the order in which I received them: You showed the preference to choose between resultsets in same tab or ain a new tab. I understand that we can not have it both using different hotkeys? For example: F5 run and resultset to same tab, ctrl-f5 same but to new tab? Sometimes you want the one other times the other. The questioner is asking about this preference, Tools Preferences Database Worksheet ‘Show query results in new tabs.’ This is an all or nothing proposition. But, there’s another, perhaps better way: the document PINs. If you have a result set you don’t want to lose, ‘pin it.’ Pin multiple result sets or plans for review and comparisons. You mentioned that sometimes it’s hard to remember where a certain preference is. I agree. So enhancement request: add a search-box to the preferences window. Maybe like in, for example, UltraEdit. It shows you all preferences containing your search criteria. Actually, we do have a search mechanism type the search string, we auto-filter the preferences Is there a version of SQL Developer that will connect to an 8i database (Yes, I realize how old that database version is!) Sorry, no. We also don’t have a version that will run on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups…probably. How do we access your blog? Carefully, and with much trepidation. When you’re ready, go to http://www.thatjeffsmith.com Is there a way to get good formatting with predefined settings? I believe the questioner is referring to the script output a la SQL*Plus formatting commands. Yes, there is. You can build your formatting commands into your login.sql script, and those will be applied for your script execution sessions. Example here. Why this version 4.0 doesn’t support external plugins? It does, it just requires the plugin developer to re-factor it for OSGi. This came about when we updated the JDeveloper framework to the later 11g/12c stuff. Any change in hookup with SVN? The only change with Subversion is that internally we’re using 1.7 stuff now. You can use SQLDev to work with a 1.8 SVN server, but if you get a working copy with a 1.8 client SQLDev won’t be able to do anything with it… Command line utilities ? improvements Yes! The long answer is here. Is that a Hint or a Comment?? /*CSV*/ It’s a comment – the database won’t recognize it, but SQLDev does when it goes through our statement pre-processor. We’ll redirect the output through our CSV formatter before displaying the results in the Script Output panel. That’s why this will ONLY work in SQL Developer. Are you selecting “”Run Script”" to get that CSV or HTML output, rather than “”Run Statement”"? Yes, the formatter hints like the CSV one mentioned above only make sense in a script output panel vs a grid. How do you save relational models once they’re defined? I’ve had trouble with setting one up, “”saving”" it, then the design work I did is longer there when loading it later. File – Data Modeler – Save. If you’re running the Modeler inside of SQL Developer, the menu’ing interface can get a bit tricky. That’s why I recommend using the stand along if you’re doing anything with a model that takes more than 5 minutes. See how the Data Modeler menus are folded up under the SQL Dev menus? Can u unplug and plug into another container in a database with only sqldeveloper? Yes, you can ‘Detach’ a multitentant 12c Database ‘pluggable’ and plug it into another instance. You have the option to copy or move the files. This isn’t a trivial operation, pay attention Can you run APEX code directly on the adopter? No, at least not as I understand your question. Give me an example and I can give you a better example. Is there a way that when u click on a particular table it wouldn’t show the table with the info but just to see the columns underneath clicking on the node? Yes, another one of my tips! Disable Tools Preferences Datbase ObjectViewer ‘Open Object on Single Click.’ Is there a patch to allow a double click on a procedure on an open package body to take you to that procedure in the editor? This has been fixed for EA3 – to be released soon. Can you open the spec with the body? You can open the spec or the body, and then also open the other. But you can’t open both with a single click. So if you want you can set it to CSV but can you also see it as a regular result set in rows and then click in the results to export to excel? If you run your query as a statement with Ctrl-Enter, you can send the data to Excel via the Export dialog. Will it do intellisense like using the alias and pop up the column, object names? Yes! You can select more than one column… Can a DBA turn off items from a high level for users so the only thing they can perform would be selects? A DBA should turn things ON, not OFF. Create a user with only CONNECT and required SELECT privs and you’re good to go, regardless of which application they are using. I use PL/SQL Developer from allround automations and was SQL Developer illiterate and now I like this for myself as a DBA. Now I get to train developers on this tool since they have been asking how to use this tool. Thank you. No, THANK YOU! Can you run multi queries in the worksheet after you added it to the worksheet? Yes, highlight what you want to run, and hit Ctrl-Enter. Can you export the result sets to excel, etc. Yes. In version 4.0 and going forward, I recommend you use the XLSX option for exports. It will run faster and consume much, much less memory. Will this be available after the webinar? If you are a ODTUG member, check out the webinar recordings in the archives. That’s worth the $99 right there. Ask your boss if they have $99 in their training budget for you. If not, maybe time to look for another job? Can you run command lines from this tool? Like executes without issuing a command line prompt? Ok, I’m stumped on this one. Not sure what you’re asking. You can setup external tools under the Tools menu, and from there you could probably rig what you’re looking for, but I’m not sure what you’re looking for… This maybe?Where and when to put the program Is there any way to save a copy database command set (certain tables/views etc) in a script? Yes! Create a cart with the objects you want to be used in the Copy. Then use the new command-line interface to kick off SQL Developer to do the copy of those said objects. How can we export the preference and then import them into different or same version of SQL Developer ? Today, there’s no interface for this. But you could copy the files around manually…Kris Rice has a cool idea where you can set your preferences to be saved to your local drop box folder and then you can use SQL Developer from anywhere with the same preferences What happens to SQL*Plus commands like COL & BREAK Nothing. Those are not currently supported. Is there a place where all “”hotkey”" functionality is listed? thanks Yes. Tools – Preferences – Shortcut Keys. And you can change them! Any tips for the DBA side of things? will the SQL generated for objects have more information (e.g. user privileges) in v4? You can get this now. In Tools – Preferences – Database – Utilities – Export, check ‘Grants.’ Voila! You now have the code necessary to recreate your object privileges Is there a limit on the number of rows that could be imported / exported from/to excel ? The only hard-coded limit lies in Excel. For best performance, use v4 and XLSX formats for Exports. Is there a way to see/watch active sessions to see current SQL and the explain plan being used, etc. Kind of like that frog product. Cough, yes. Tools – Monitor Sessions. Click on session, see SQL and plan. The plan was added in v4. If you’re not in version 4, use the Reports – Active Sessions to get the plans. In the DBA section is there a way to manage say tablespaces to add data files, shrink, edit profiles, etc. Yes, we support all of that. View – DBA. Connect, go to the Storage node. Are you (Jeff) available for a live presentation at our Oracle User Group here in Indiana? Maybe. Email me and we’ll see, [email protected] Where do I go to download sql developer 4.0? The Internet of course! Can you directly edit query results? Nope. But what I think you’re asking is, can I edit the data in the tables that are reflected in my query results? You can change the query results by changing your query of course. Or this. Can you show html example? Sure. I’d embed the HTML here, but it’s a lot of code, try it for yourself! How can I quickly close many SQL worksheet windows, but not all? Window – Documents. Multi-select, hit the ‘Close Document(s)’ button. What does the vertical red line denote? That’s the margin. Tells you when you’ve typed too far and it’s time for a carriage return. Did DBA/Database Status/Instance Viewer make it officially into 4.0? It was sort-of included in the first EA. I have NO idea what you’re talking about, WINK-WINK. No, it’s not in v4.0. Is there a “”handy”" way to debug trigger code? Yes, open your trigger. Hit the debug button. Works great as long as it’s a DML trigger. Will you make your presentation file available for us ( in PPT and/or PDF format ) ? It’s on SlideShare. How do you get SqlDeveloper to escape ‘ correctly when you use the wizard to export data as insert statements? If it’s not doing that, it’s a bug. I’ll take a look at that scenario ASAP.

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