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• Desktop Fun: Happy New Year Icon and Font Packs

  - by Asian Angel

  With the Christmas holiday so near, New Year’s Eve and Day will not be far behind. To help you prepare those New Year’s Eve and Day celebrations we have put together a nice collection of fonts for party invitations, fliers, decorations, and more. We also have icon goodness to make your desktop all bright and shiny for the new year. Sneak Preview This is the New Year’s desktop that we put together using the Birthday Icon Set shown below. Note: The original unmodified version of this wallpaper can be found here. An up close look at the icons that we used… The Icon Packs Note: To customize the icon setup on your Windows 7 & Vista systems see our article here. Using Windows XP? We have you covered here. New Year Celebration Icon Set *.ico format only Download New Year Party Icon *.ico, .png, and .icns format Note: This icon is available for download in single file format (based on format type and/or image size). Download Celebration *.ico format only Download Birthday *.ico, .png, and .icns format Special Note: While not an official New Year’s set of icons, it will still work nicely for a New Year’s or celebration desktop setup. Download The Font Packs Note: To manage the fonts on your Windows 7, Vista, & XP systems see our article here. Cocktail Bubbly Download Fontdinerdotcom Sparkly Download Confetti Download KR Happy New Year 2002 Note: For those who are curious about this font’s shape, it is a cork popping out of a champagne bottle. Download NewYearBats *includes 52 individual characters Note: This group represents A – Z in all capital letters. Note: This group represents A – Z in all lower case letters. Download LCR Party Dings *includes 26 individual characters (A – Z), not case sensitive Special Note: This font is an all-purpose type that covers a variety of party/celebration types from New Year’s to birthdays. Download For more great ways to customize your computer be certain to look through our Desktop Fun section. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Track Weather Conditions with the Weather Underground Web App for Chrome These 8-Bit Mario Wood Magnets Put Video Games on Your Fridge Christmas Themes 4 Pack for Chrome and Iron Browser Enjoy the First Total Lunar Eclipse in 372 Years This Evening Gmail’s Free Calling Extended Through 2011 Voice Search Brings Android-Style Voice Search to Google Chrome

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• Choose Custom New Tab Pages in Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  For most people the default New Tab Page in Chrome works perfectly well for their purposes. But if you would prefer to choose what opens in a new tab for yourself then you will definitely want to have a look at the “Define your own new tab!” extension for Google Chrome. Before Unless you are using a Speed Dial (or similar) extension each time you click on the “New Tab Button” you get the same old page. It would certainly be a lot more satisfying if you could choose custom webpage(s) to open as new tabs. After Once you have the extension installed the best thing to do is click on the “New Tab Button”. That will open up the “Options Page” where you can enter one or two custom website URLs of your choosing. Once you have your custom URLs entered click on “Save”. As soon as you click on the “New Tab Button” your new custom webpage(s) will open. If you chose two webpages the first choice will open focused on the “right side” instead of the “left”. Clicking on the “Home Button” will also open the webpage(s) that you chose. The webpage(s) that you chose will also open as your starting “Home Pages” each time that you start your browser. Conclusion If you have wanted to choose your own custom “New Tab Page” then this is the extension that you have been waiting for. Links Download the Define your own new tab! extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Find Similar Websites in Google ChromeAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy WayEnable Vista Black Style Theme for Google Chrome in XPSet Custom Reload Times for Individual Webpages in ChromeEnable Auto-Paging Goodness in Google Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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• INDIA Legislation: New State 'Telangana' Added in IN_STATES System Lookup

  - by LieveDC

  With effect from June 02, 2014 the new state of Telangana will be operational in the Indian Union.Details of the new state are explained in the official gazette released on 1 March, 2014 by the Ministry of Home Affairs: http://mha.nic.in/sites/upload_files/mha/files/APRegACT2014_0.pdf This new State has been added in the IN_STATES System Lookup: a new lookup code 'TG' with meaning 'Telangana' has been added.For available patches on different R12 patch levels check out: Doc ID 1676224.1 New State Telangana Be Added In IN_STATES System Lookup.

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• Using jQuery to Insert a New Database Record

  - by Stephen Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to explore the easiest way of inserting a new record into a database using jQuery and .NET. I’m going to explore two approaches: using Generic Handlers and using a WCF service (In a future blog entry I’ll take a look at OData and WCF Data Services). Create the ASP.NET Project I’ll start by creating a new empty ASP.NET application with Visual Studio 2010. Select the menu option File, New Project and select the ASP.NET Empty Web Application project template. Setup the Database and Data Model I’ll use my standard MoviesDB.mdf movies database. This database contains one table named Movies that looks like this: I’ll use the ADO.NET Entity Framework to represent my database data: Select the menu option Project, Add New Item and select the ADO.NET Entity Data Model project item. Name the data model MoviesDB.edmx and click the Add button. In the Choose Model Contents step, select Generate from database and click the Next button. In the Choose Your Data Connection step, leave all of the defaults and click the Next button. In the Choose Your Data Objects step, select the Movies table and click the Finish button. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2010 cannot spell movie correctly :) You need to click on Movy and change the name of the class to Movie. In the Properties window, change the Entity Set Name to Movies. Using a Generic Handler In this section, we’ll use jQuery with an ASP.NET generic handler to insert a new record into the database. A generic handler is similar to an ASP.NET page, but it does not have any of the overhead. It consists of one method named ProcessRequest(). Select the menu option Project, Add New Item and select the Generic Handler project item. Name your new generic handler InsertMovie.ashx and click the Add button. Modify your handler so it looks like Listing 1: Listing 1 – InsertMovie.ashx using System.Web; namespace WebApplication1 { /// <summary> /// Inserts a new movie into the database /// </summary> public class InsertMovie : IHttpHandler { private MoviesDBEntities _dataContext = new MoviesDBEntities(); public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; // Extract form fields var title = context.Request["title"]; var director = context.Request["director"]; // Create movie to insert var movieToInsert = new Movie { Title = title, Director = director }; // Save new movie to DB _dataContext.AddToMovies(movieToInsert); _dataContext.SaveChanges(); // Return success context.Response.Write("success"); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } } In Listing 1, the ProcessRequest() method is used to retrieve a title and director from form parameters. Next, a new Movie is created with the form values. Finally, the new movie is saved to the database and the string “success” is returned. Using jQuery with the Generic Handler We can call the InsertMovie.ashx generic handler from jQuery by using the standard jQuery post() method. The following HTML page illustrates how you can retrieve form field values and post the values to the generic handler: Listing 2 – Default.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Add Movie</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input name="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input name="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { $.post("InsertMovie.ashx", $("form").serialize(), insertCallback); }); function insertCallback(result) { if (result == "success") { alert("Movie added!"); } else { alert("Could not add movie!"); } } </script> </body> </html>     When you open the page in Listing 2 in a web browser, you get a simple HTML form: Notice that the page in Listing 2 includes the jQuery library. The jQuery library is included with the following SCRIPT tag: <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> The jQuery library is included on the Microsoft Ajax CDN so you can always easily include the jQuery library in your applications. You can learn more about the CDN at this website: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/cdn.ashx When you click the Add Movie button, the jQuery post() method is called to post the form data to the InsertMovie.ashx generic handler. Notice that the form values are serialized into a URL encoded string by calling the jQuery serialize() method. The serialize() method uses the name attribute of form fields and not the id attribute. Notes on this Approach This is a very low-level approach to interacting with .NET through jQuery – but it is simple and it works! And, you don’t need to use any JavaScript libraries in addition to the jQuery library to use this approach. The signature for the jQuery post() callback method looks like this: callback(data, textStatus, XmlHttpRequest) The second parameter, textStatus, returns the HTTP status code from the server. I tried returning different status codes from the generic handler with an eye towards implementing server validation by returning a status code such as 400 Bad Request when validation fails (see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html ). I finally figured out that the callback is not invoked when the textStatus has any value other than “success”. Using a WCF Service As an alternative to posting to a generic handler, you can create a WCF service. You create a new WCF service by selecting the menu option Project, Add New Item and selecting the Ajax-enabled WCF Service project item. Name your WCF service InsertMovie.svc and click the Add button. Modify the WCF service so that it looks like Listing 3: Listing 3 – InsertMovie.svc using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; namespace WebApplication1 { [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults=true)] [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class MovieService { private MoviesDBEntities _dataContext = new MoviesDBEntities(); [OperationContract] public bool Insert(string title, string director) { // Create movie to insert var movieToInsert = new Movie { Title = title, Director = director }; // Save new movie to DB _dataContext.AddToMovies(movieToInsert); _dataContext.SaveChanges(); // Return movie (with primary key) return true; } } }   The WCF service in Listing 3 uses the Entity Framework to insert a record into the Movies database table. The service always returns the value true. Notice that the service in Listing 3 includes the following attribute: [ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults=true)] You need to include this attribute if you want to get detailed error information back to the client. When you are building an application, you should always include this attribute. When you are ready to release your application, you should remove this attribute for security reasons. Using jQuery with the WCF Service Calling a WCF service from jQuery requires a little more work than calling a generic handler from jQuery. Here are some good blog posts on some of the issues with using jQuery with WCF: http://encosia.com/2008/06/05/3-mistakes-to-avoid-when-using-jquery-with-aspnet-ajax/ http://encosia.com/2008/03/27/using-jquery-to-consume-aspnet-json-web-services/ http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/04/04/json-hijacking-and-how-asp-net-ajax-1-0-mitigates-these-attacks.aspx http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/896411.aspx http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/324917.aspx http://professionalaspnet.com/archive/tags/WCF/default.aspx The primary requirement when calling WCF from jQuery is that the request use JSON: The request must include a content-type:application/json header. Any parameters included with the request must be JSON encoded. Unfortunately, jQuery does not include a method for serializing JSON (Although, oddly, jQuery does include a parseJSON() method for deserializing JSON). Therefore, we need to use an additional library to handle the JSON serialization. The page in Listing 4 illustrates how you can call a WCF service from jQuery. Listing 4 – Default2.aspx <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Add Movie</title> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <form> <label>Title:</label> <input id="title" /> <br /> <label>Director:</label> <input id="director" /> </form> <button id="btnAdd">Add Movie</button> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnAdd").click(function () { // Convert the form into an object var data = { title: $("#title").val(), director: $("#director").val() }; // JSONify the data data = JSON.stringify(data); // Post it $.ajax({ type: "POST", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", url: "MovieService.svc/Insert", data: data, dataType: "json", success: insertCallback }); }); function insertCallback(result) { // unwrap result result = result["d"]; if (result === true) { alert("Movie added!"); } else { alert("Could not add movie!"); } } </script> </body> </html> There are several things to notice about Listing 4. First, notice that the page includes both the jQuery library and Douglas Crockford’s JSON2 library: <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> You need to include the JSON2 library to serialize the form values into JSON. You can download the JSON2 library from the following location: http://www.json.org/js.html When you click the button to submit the form, the form data is converted into a JavaScript object: // Convert the form into an object var data = { title: $("#title").val(), director: $("#director").val() }; Next, the data is serialized into JSON using the JSON2 library: // JSONify the data var data = JSON.stringify(data); Finally, the form data is posted to the WCF service by calling the jQuery ajax() method: // Post it $.ajax({   type: "POST",   contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",   url: "MovieService.svc/Insert",   data: data,   dataType: "json",   success: insertCallback }); You can’t use the standard jQuery post() method because you must set the content-type of the request to be application/json. Otherwise, the WCF service will reject the request for security reasons. For details, see the Scott Guthrie blog post: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/04/04/json-hijacking-and-how-asp-net-ajax-1-0-mitigates-these-attacks.aspx The insertCallback() method is called when the WCF service returns a response. This method looks like this: function insertCallback(result) {   // unwrap result   result = result["d"];   if (result === true) {       alert("Movie added!");   } else {     alert("Could not add movie!");   } } When we called the jQuery ajax() method, we set the dataType to JSON. That causes the jQuery ajax() method to deserialize the response from the WCF service from JSON into a JavaScript object automatically. The following value is passed to the insertCallback method: {"d":true} For security reasons, a WCF service always returns a response with a “d” wrapper. The following line of code removes the “d” wrapper: // unwrap result result = result["d"]; To learn more about the “d” wrapper, I recommend that you read the following blog posts: http://encosia.com/2009/02/10/a-breaking-change-between-versions-of-aspnet-ajax/ http://encosia.com/2009/06/29/never-worry-about-asp-net-ajaxs-d-again/ Summary In this blog entry, I explored two methods of inserting a database record using jQuery and .NET. First, we created a generic handler and called the handler from jQuery. This is a very low-level approach. However, it is a simple approach that works. Next, we looked at how you can call a WCF service using jQuery. This approach required a little more work because you need to serialize objects into JSON. We used the JSON2 library to perform the serialization. In the next blog post, I want to explore how you can use jQuery with OData and WCF Data Services.

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• Certifications in the new Certify

  - by richard.miller

  The most up-to-date certifications are now available in Certify - New Additions Feb 2011! What's not yet available can still be found in Classic Certify. We think that the new search will save you a ton of time and energy, so try it out and let us know. NOTE: Not all cert information is in the new system. If you type in a product name and do not find it, send us feedback so we can find the team to add it!. Also, we have been listening to every feedback message coming in. We have plans to make some improvements based on your feedback AND add the missing data. Thanks for your help! Japanese ??? Note: Oracle Fusion Middleware certifications are available via oracle.com: Fusion Middleware Certifications. Certifications viewable in the new Certify Search Oracle Database Oracle Database Options Oracle Database Clients (they apply to both 32-bit and 64-bit) Oracle Enterprise Manager Oracle Beehive Oracle Collaboration Suite Oracle E-Business Suite, Now with Release 11i & 12! Oracle Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management Oracle Financial Services Oracle Healthcare Oracle Life Sciences Oracle Enterprise Taxation Management Oracle Retail Oracle Utilities Oracle Cross Applications Oracle Primavera Oracle Agile Oracle Transportation Management (G-L) Oracle Value Chain Planning Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (NEW! Jan 2011) 8.9+ and SP23+ Oracle JD Edwards World (A7.3, A8.1, A9.1, and A9.2) Certifications viewable in Classic Certify Classic certify is the "old" user interface. Clicking the "Classic Certify" link from Certifications QuickLinks will take you there. Enterprise PeopleTools Release 8.49, Release 8.50, and Release 8.51 Other Resources See the Tips and Tricks for the new Certify. Watch the 4 minute introduction to the new certify. Or how to get the most out of certify with a advanced searching and features demo with the new certify. =0)document.write(unescape('%3C')+'\!-'+'-') //--

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• Certifications in the new Certify - March 2011 Update

  - by richard.miller

  The most up-to-date certifications are now available in Certify - New Additions March 2011! What's not yet available can still be found in Classic Certify. We think that the new search will save you a ton of time and energy, so try it out and let us know. NOTE: Not all cert information is in the new system. If you type in a product name and do not find it, send us feedback so we can find the team to add it!.Also, we have been listening to every feedback message coming in. We have plans to make some improvements based on your feedback AND add the missing data. Thanks for your help!Japanese ???Note: Oracle Fusion Middleware certifications are available via oracle.com: Fusion Middleware Certifications.Certifications viewable in the new Certify SearchEnterprise PeopleTools Release 8.50, and Release 8.51 Added March 2011!Oracle DatabaseOracle Database OptionsOracle Database Clients (they apply to both 32-bit and 64-bit)Oracle BeehiveOracle Collaboration SuiteOracle E-Business Suite, Now with Release 11i & 12!Oracle Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM)Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance ManagementOracle Financial ServicesOracle HealthcareOracle Life SciencesOracle Enterprise Taxation ManagementOracle RetailOracle UtilitiesOracle Cross ApplicationsOracle PrimaveraOracle AgileOracle Transportation Management (G-L)Oracle Value Chain PlanningOracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (NEW! Jan 2011) 8.9+ and SP23+Oracle JD Edwards World (A7.3, A8.1, A9.1, and A9.2)Certifications viewable in Classic CertifyClassic certify is the "old" user interface. Clicking the "Classic Certify" link from Certifications > QuickLinks will take you there.Enterprise PeopleTools Release 8.49 (Coming Soon)Enterprise ManagerOther ResourcesSee the Tips and Tricks for the new Certify.Watch the 4 minute introduction to the new certify.Or how to get the most out of certify with a advanced searching and features demo with the new certify.

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• Tips on how to notify a user of new features in your game

  - by brent777

  I have noticed a problem when releasing new features for a game that I wrote for Android and published on Google Play Store. Because my game is "stage-based" - and not a game like Hay Day, for example, where users will just go into the game every day since it can't really be finished - my users are not aware of new features that I release for the game. For example, if I publish a new version of my game and it contains a couple new stages, most of their devices will just auto-update the game and they don't even notice this and think to check out what's new. So this is why an approach like popping open a dialog that showcases the new feature(s) when they open the game for the first time after the update was done is not really sufficient. I am looking for some tips on an approach that will draw my users back into the game and then they could read more detail about new features on such a dialog. I was thinking of something like a notification that tells them to check out the new features after an update is done but I am not sure if this is a good idea. Any suggestions to help me solve this problem would be awesome.

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• Tips on how to notify a user of new features in your game (Android)

  - by brent777

  I have noticed a problem when releasing new features for a game that I wrote for Android and published on Google Play Store. Because my game is "stage-based" - and not a game like Hay Day, for example, where users will just go into the game every day since it can't really be finished - my users are not aware of new features that I release for the game. For example, if I publish a new version of my game and it contains a couple new stages, most of their devices will just auto-update the game and they don't even notice this and think to check out what's new. So this is why an approach like popping open a dialog that showcases the new feature(s) when they open the game for the first time after the update was done is not really sufficient. I am looking for some tips on an approach that will draw my users back into the game and then they could read more detail about new features on such a dialog. I was thinking of something like a notification that tells them to check out the new features after an update is done but I am not sure if this is a good idea. Any suggestions to help me solve this problem would be awesome.

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• Linq to xml not able to add new elements

  - by Fore

  We save our xml in a "text" field in the database. So first I check if it exist any xml, if not I create a new xdocument, fill it with the necessary xml. else i just add the new element. Code looks like this: XDocument doc = null; if (item.xmlString == null || item.xmlString == "") { doc = new XDocument(new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", "yes"), new XElement("DataTalk", new XAttribute(XNamespace.Xmlns + "xsi", "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"), new XAttribute(XNamespace.Xmlns + "xsd", "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"), new XElement("Posts", new XElement("TalkPost")))); } else { doc = XDocument.Parse(item.xmlString); } This is working alright to create a structure, but then the problem appears, when I want to add new TalkPost. I get an error saying incorrectly structured document. The following code when adding new elements: doc.Add(new XElement("TalkPost", new XElement("PostType", newDialog.PostType), new XElement("User", newDialog.User), new XElement("Customer", newDialog.Customer), new XElement("PostedDate", newDialog.PostDate), new XElement("Message", newDialog.Message)));

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• New in MySQL Enterprise Edition: Policy-based Auditing!

  - by Rob Young

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} For those with an interest in MySQL, this weekend's MySQL Connect conference in San Francisco has gotten off to a great start. On Saturday Tomas announced the feature complete MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate that is now available for Community adoption and testing. This announcement marks the sprint to GA that should be ready for release within the next 90 days. You can get a quick summary of the key 5.6 features here or better yet download the 5.6 RC (under “Development Releases”), review what's new and try it out for yourself! There were also product related announcements around MySQL Cluster 7.3 and MySQL Enterprise Edition . This latter announcement is of particular interest if you are faced with internal and regulatory compliance requirements as it addresses and solves a pain point that is shared by most developers and DBAs; new, out of the box compliance for MySQL applications via policy-based audit logging of user and query level activity. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} One of the most common requests we get for the MySQL roadmap is for quick and easy logging of audit events. This is mainly due to how web-based applications have evolved from nice-to-have enablers to mission-critical revenue generation and the important role MySQL plays in the new dynamic. In today’s virtual marketplace, PCI compliance guidelines ensure credit card data is secure within e-commerce apps; from a corporate standpoint, Sarbanes-Oxely, HIPAA and other regulations guard the medical, financial, public sector and other personal data centric industries. For supporting applications audit policies and controls that monitor the eyes and hands that have viewed and acted upon the most sensitive of data is most commonly implemented on the back-end database. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} With this in mind, MySQL 5.5 introduced an open audit plugin API that enables all MySQL users to write their own auditing plugins based on application specific requirements. While the supporting docs are very complete and provide working code samples, writing an audit plugin requires time and low-level expertise to develop, test, implement and maintain. To help those who don't have the time and/or expertise to develop such a plugin, Oracle now ships MySQL 5.5.28 and higher with an easy to use, out-of-the-box auditing solution; MySQL Enterprise Audit. MySQL Enterprise Audit The premise behind MySQL Enterprise Audit is simple; we wanted to provide an easy to use, policy-based auditing solution that enables you to quickly and seamlessly add compliance to their MySQL applications. MySQL Enterprise Audit meets this requirement by enabling you to: 1. Easily install the needed components. Installation requires an upgrade to MySQL 5.5.28 (Enterprise edition), which can be downloaded from the My Oracle Support portal or the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. After installation, you simply add the following to your my.cnf file to register and enable the audit plugin: [mysqld] plugin-load=audit_log.so (keep in mind the audit_log suffix is platform dependent, so .dll on Windows, etc.) or alternatively you can load the plugin at runtime: mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN audit_log SONAME 'audit_log.so'; 2. Dynamically enable and disable the audit stream for a specific MySQL server. A new global variable called audit_log_policy allows you to dynamically enable and disable audit stream logging for a specific MySQL server. The variable parameters are described below. 3. Define audit policy based on what needs to be logged (everything, logins, queries, or nothing), by server. The new audit_log_policy variable uses the following valid, descriptively named values to enable, disable audit stream logging and to filter the audit events that are logged to the audit stream: "ALL" - enable audit stream and log all events "LOGINS" - enable audit stream and log only login events "QUERIES" - enable audit stream and log only querie events "NONE" - disable audit stream 4. Manage audit log files using basic MySQL log rotation features. A new global variable, audit_log_rotate_on_size, allows you to automate the rotation and archival of audit stream log files based on size with archived log files renamed and appended with datetime stamp when a new file is opened for logging. 5. Integrate the MySQL audit stream with MySQL, Oracle tools and other third-party solutions. The MySQL audit stream is written as XML, using UFT-8 and can be easily formatted for viewing using a standard XML parser. This enables you to leverage tools from MySQL and others to view the contents. The audit stream was also developed to meet the Oracle database audit stream specification so combined Oracle/MySQL shops can import and manage MySQL audit images using the same Oracle tools they use for their Oracle databases. So assuming a successful MySQL 5.5.28 upgrade or installation, a common set up and use case scenario might look something like this: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} It should be noted that MySQL Enterprise Audit was designed to be transparent at the application layer by allowing you to control the mix of log output buffering and asynchronous or synchronous disk writes to minimize the associated overhead that comes when the audit stream is enabled. The net result is that, depending on the chosen audit stream log stream options, most application users will see little to no difference in response times when the audit stream is enabled. So what are your next steps? Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Get all of the grainy details on MySQL Enterprise Audit, including all of the additional configuration options from the MySQL documentation. MySQL Enterprise Edition customers can download MySQL 5.5.28 with the Audit extension for production use from the My Oracle Support portal. Everyone can download MySQL 5.5.28 with the Audit extension for evaluation from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud. Learn more about MySQL Enterprise Edition. As always, thanks for your continued support of MySQL!

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• What's new in Solaris 11.1?

  - by Karoly Vegh

  Solaris 11.1 is released. This is the first release update since Solaris 11 11/11, the versioning has been changed from MM/YY style to 11.1 highlighting that this is Solaris 11 Update 1.  Solaris 11 itself has been great. What's new in Solaris 11.1? Allow me to pick some new features from the What's New PDF that can be found in the official Oracle Solaris 11.1 Documentation. The updates are very numerous, I really can't include all.  I. New AI Automated Installer RBAC profiles have been introduced to enable delegation of installation tasks. II. The interactive installer now supports installing the OS to iSCSI targets. III. ASR (Auto Service Request) and OCM (Oracle Configuration Manager) have been enabled by default to proactively provide support information and create service requests to speed up support processes. This is optional and can be disabled but helps a lot in supportcases. For further information, see: http://oracle.com/goto/solarisautoreg IV. The new command svcbundle helps you to create SMF manifests without having to struggle with XML editing. (btw, do you know the interactive editprop subcommand in svccfg? The listprop/setprop subcommands are great for scripting and automating, but for an interactive property editing session try, for example, this: svccfg -s svc:/application/pkg/system-repository:default editprop )  V. pfedit: Ever wondered how to delegate editing permissions to certain files? It is well known "sudo /usr/bin/vi /etc/hosts" is not the right way, for sudo elevates the complete vi process to admin levels, and the user can "break" out of the session as root with simply starting a shell from that vi. Now, the new pfedit command provides a solution exactly to this challenge - an auditable, secure, per-user configurable editing possibility. See the pfedit man page for examples.   VI. rsyslog, the popular logging daemon (filters, SSL, formattable output, SQL collect...) has been included in Solaris 11.1 as an alternative to syslog.  VII: Zones: Solaris Zones - as a major Solaris differentiator - got lots of love in terms of new features: ZOSS - Zones on Shared Storage: Placing your zones to shared storage (FC, iSCSI) has never been this easy - via zonecfg.  parallell updates - with S11's bootenvironments updating zones was no problem and meant no downtime anyway, but still, now you can update them parallelly, a way faster update action if you are running a large number of zones. This is like parallell patching in Solaris 10, but with all the IPS/ZFS/S11 goodness.  per-zone fstype statistics: Running zones on a shared filesystems complicate the I/O debugging, since ZFS collects all the random writes and delivers them sequentially to boost performance. Now, over kstat you can find out which zone's I/O has an impact on the other ones, see the examples in the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29024/gmheh.html#scrolltoc Zones got RDSv3 protocol support for InfiniBand, and IPoIB support with Crossbow's anet (automatic vnic creation) feature.  NUMA I/O support for Zones: customers can now determine the NUMA I/O topology of the system from within zones.  VIII: Security got a lot of attention too:  Automated security/audit reporting, with builtin reporting templates e.g. for PCI (payment card industry) audits.  PAM is now configureable on a per-user basis instead of system wide, allowing different authentication requirements for different users  SSH in Solaris 11.1 now supports running in FIPS 140-2 mode, that is, in a U.S. government security accredited fashion.  SHA512/224 and SHA512/256 cryptographic hash functions are implemented in a FIPS-compliant way - and on a T4 implemented in silicon! That is, goverment-approved cryptography at HW-speed.  Generally, Solaris is currently under evaluation to be both FIPS and Common Criteria certified.  IX. Networking, as one of the core strengths of Solaris 11, has been extended with:  Data Center Bridging (DCB) - not only setups where network and storage share the same fabric (FCoE, anyone?) can have Quality-of-Service requirements. DCB enables peers to distinguish traffic based on priorities. Your NICs have to support DCB, see the documentation, and additional information on Wikipedia. DataLink MultiPathing, DLMP, enables link aggregation to span across multiple switches, even between those of different vendors. But there are essential differences to the good old bandwidth-aggregating LACP, see the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E28993/gmdlu.html#scrolltoc VNIC live migration is now supported from one physical NIC to another on-the-fly  X. Data management:  FedFS, (Federated FileSystem) is new, it relies on Solaris 11's NFS referring mechanism to join separate shares of different NFS servers into a single filesystem namespace. The referring system has been there since S11 11/11, in Solaris 11.1 FedFS uses a LDAP - as the one global nameservice to bind them all.  The iSCSI initiator now uses the T4 CPU's HW-implemented CRC32 algorithm - thus improving iSCSI throughput while reducing CPU utilization on a T4 Storage locking improvements are now RAC aware, speeding up throughput with better locking-communication between nodes up to 20%!  XI: Kernel performance optimizations: The new Virtual Memory subsystem ("VM2") scales now to 100+ TB Memory ranges.  The memory predictor monitors large memory page usage, and adjust memory page sizes to applications' needs OSM, the Optimized Shared Memory allows Oracle DBs' SGA to be resized online XII: The Power Aware Dispatcher in now by default enabled, reducing power consumption of idle CPUs. Also, the LDoms' Power Management policies and the poweradm settings in Solaris 11 OS will cooperate. XIII: x86 boot: upgrade to the (Grand Unified Bootloader) GRUB2. Because grub2 differs in the configuration syntactically from grub1, one shall not edit the new grub configuration (grub.cfg) but use the new bootadm features to update it. GRUB2 adds UEFI support and also support for disks over 2TB. XIV: Improved viewing of per-CPU statistics of mpstat. This one might seem of less importance at first, but nowadays having better sorting/filtering possibilities on a periodically updated mpstat output of 256+ vCPUs can be a blessing. XV: Support for Solaris Cluster 4.1: The What's New document doesn't actually mention this one, since OSC 4.1 has not been released at the time 11.1 was. But since then it is available, and it requires Solaris 11.1. And it's only a "pkg update" away. ...aand I seriously need to stop here. There's a lot I missed, Edge Virtual Bridging, lofi tuning, ZFS sharing and crypto enhancements, USB3.0, pulseaudio, trusted extensions updates, etc - but if I mention all those then I effectively copy the What's New document. Which I recommend reading now anyway, it is a great extract of the 300+ new projects and RFE-followups in S11.1. And this blogpost is a summary of that extract.  For closing words, allow me to come back to Request For Enhancements, RFEs. Any customer can request features. Open up a Support Request, explain that this is an RFE, describe the feature you/your company desires to have in S11 implemented. The more SRs are collected for an RFE, the more chance it's got to get implemented. Feel free to provide feedback about the product, as well as about the Solaris 11.1 Documentation using the "Feedback" button there. Both the Solaris engineers and the documentation writers are eager to hear your input.Feel free to comment about this post too. Except that it's too long ;)  wbr,charlie

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• Populate google.visualization.DataTable for a AnnotatedTimeLine using JSON

  - by Lucifer

  Hi I have a HttpHandler which returns some JSON in (i think) the correct format for a google.visualization.DataTable, but the AnnotatedTimeLine fails to work? This is the JSON returned by the Handler: {cols: [{id: 'DATE', label: 'Date', type: 'date'}, {id: 'KEYWORD51', label: 'vw cheltenham', type: 'number'}, {id: 'KEYWORD52', label: 'volkswagen cheltenham', type: 'number'}, {id: 'KEYWORD61', label: 'vw dealer cheltenham', type: 'number'}], rows: [{c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 13)}, {v: 20}, {v: 1}, {v: 2}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 14)}, {v: 19}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 15)}, {v: 19}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 16)}, {v: 18}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 17)}, {v: 17}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 18)}, {v: 17}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 19)}, {v: 12}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 20)}, {v: 13}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 21)}, {v: 11}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 22)}, {v: 10}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 23)}, {v: 10}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 24)}, {v: 8}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 25)}, {v: 6}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 26)}, {v: 6}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 27)}, {v: 5}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 28)}, {v: 4}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 29)}, {v: 4}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 30)}, {v: 2}, {v: 1}, {v: 1}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 1)}, {v: 2}, {v: 1}, {v: 1}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 2)}, {v: 1}, {v: 1}, {v: 1}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 3)}, {v: 2}, {v: 1}, {v: 1}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 4)}, {v: 0}, {v: 1}, {v: 1}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 5)}, {v: 0}, {v: 1}, {v: 1}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 6)}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 7)}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 8)}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 9)}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 10)}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 11)}, {v: 0}, {v: 1}, {v: 1}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 12)}, {v: 2}, {v: 1}, {v: 1}]}]} This is the Javascript, I used JQuery to get the JSON, have also tried $.getJSON() google.load('visualization', '1', { 'packages': ['annotatedtimeline'] }); google.setOnLoadCallback(loadGraph); function loadGraph() { $.get("/GraphDataHandler.axd", function(response) { drawGraph(response); }); } function drawGraph(response) { var visualization = new google.visualization.AnnotatedTimeLine(document.getElementById('chart_div')); var data = new google.visualization.DataTable(response, 0.6); visualization.draw(data, { title: 'Rankings', titleX: 'Date', titleY: 'Position', displayAnnotations: false, allowRedraw: true }); } But, if I write the same JSON to the page like below it works fine!? <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ var gData = {cols: [{id: 'DATE', label: 'Date', type: 'date'}, {id: 'KEYWORD51', label: 'vw cheltenham', type: 'number'}], rows: [{c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 13)}, {v: 20}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 14)}, {v: 19}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 15)}, {v: 19}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 16)}, {v: 18}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 17)}, {v: 17}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 18)}, {v: 17}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 19)}, {v: 12}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 20)}, {v: 13}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 21)}, {v: 11}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 22)}, {v: 10}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 23)}, {v: 10}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 24)}, {v: 8}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 25)}, {v: 6}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 26)}, {v: 6}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 27)}, {v: 5}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 28)}, {v: 4}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 29)}, {v: 4}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 3, 30)}, {v: 2}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 1)}, {v: 2}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 2)}, {v: 1}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 3)}, {v: 2}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 4)}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 5)}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 6)}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 7)}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 8)}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 9)}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 10)}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 11)}, {v: 0}]}, {c: [{v: new Date(2010, 4, 12)}, {v: 2}]}]}; //]]> </script> Please advise how I can get it to work correctly using a the JSON calls? Thanks

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• We have moved to larger offices

  - by Chris Houston

  First of all we should probably apologise for the complete lack of blogging over the last 6 months! As web developers we are constantly telling our clients that they should keep their blogs up to date and it seems we have been ignoring our own advice.That being said, we have been very busy moving offices and helping our new host QV Offices setup their new business. As well as all the moving we have not been sitting on our hands, we have built the new site for DairyMaster over in Ireland as well as a separate private website for their global distributor network.As Umbraco Gold Partners we have found more and more that we are working on projects where we are the silent development partners, so although we cannot talk publicly about a lot of the sites we develop, we have some real beauties now in our portfolio :)Now that the dust has settled in our new office ( and has been hovered up! ) we are read for the new year and are looking forward to working on some exciting projects that are currently in the pipeline.We are also intending to run some Hacking sessions for Umbraco as we now have lots of space for developers to come and work with us, so if you have any ideas of a theme for an Umbraco Hackathon then do let us know.And with that it just remains to say Happy Christmas to you all and see you in the new year!

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• How to create a WHM/cPanel account, without creating a new sub-domain?

  - by Cyclops

  I have a basic VPS (full root access), with WHM/cPanel, and am learning the ropes. I'm trying to create a new account for an existing domain (mysite.com), and so far WHM won't let me - it either wants a sub-domain or fake domain, but won't allow two accounts for one domain. In the beginning, there was only the root account, and it wouldn't let me login to cPanel - a quick chat with tech support, and I am informed that I need to create a second account, which I did. So now I have an account, call it ns1me, for domain mysite.com. Now I want to create a django account. I go through the same process, but WHM won't allow me to use mysite.com as the domain for django. The docs recommend a sub-domain, so I fill the box in with django.mysite.com. I then realize that has actually created a sub-domain - going to django.mysite.com shows me its home directory, along with helpful information about what version of Apache, Python, and other mods its running (thanks, Apache). I really don't want a sub-domain, so that's out. Another chat with tech support, and they recommend a fake domain name, as it won't create anything. Sure enough, using a domain of djangomysite.com works, and WHM allows me to create a django account. But of course, I can't send email to [email protected] (where I could to [email protected]). What I want, is to be able to create a second account, associated with mysite.com (so I can run cPanel logged in as django, send email to [email protected], etc) - without creating a whole new sub-domain, or fake domain.

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• Windows Vista Context Menu>New... does not find entries

  - by Paul

  I was trying to remove a virus and foolishly did not backup registry keys I deleted because I (thought) I only deleted entries from the folders of programs I did not care about. However, I think I have done something wrong here: Now when I open a context menu (right click) in any location and hover over the "New..." option I don't get any options. It has a greyed out box saying "(Empty)". So far I have found out the the entries themselves are still there (using the locations provided here: Windows 7 - Add an item to 'new' context menu). I have also used a program recommended in that thread which also finds the entries intact and enabled. So it seems maybe I have deleted the entry which tells Vista where to look to find the files that can be created. How can I restore this so entries are shown again? I know system restore is an option but as I have said I did this when removing a (very stubborn) virus so that is the last resort.

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• What's new in Xamarin and iOS7 - webinar

  - by Wallym

  I recently did an online webinar regarding the new iOS7 and Xamarin.  In it, I covered the basics of what is new in iOS7 along with what is new in Xamarin's developer platform.  Please take some time and view this webinar.  The items that were covered include:What's new in iOS7.The XCode Design Surface.An example showing new iOS7 View Animations.What's new with Xamarin and async, await, and HttpClient.A demo of Razor Templating.The Xamarin.iOS Plugin for Visual Studio.  ** The video only works in Windows.  I don't control the content, so I have to go with what I am given. :-( **

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• Why do we need fork to create new process

  - by user3671483

  In Unix whenever we want to create a new process, we fork the current process i.e. we create a new child process which is exactly the same as the parent process and then we do exec system call to replace the child process with a new process i.e. we replace all the data for the parent process eith that for the new process. Why do we create a copy of the parent process in the first place and why don't we create a new process directly? I am new to Unix please explain in lay-man terms.

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• Microsoft&rsquo;s new technical computing initiative

  - by Randy Walker

  I made a mental note from earlier in the year.  Microsoft literally buys computers by the truckload.  From what I understand, it’s a typical practice amongst large software vendors.  You plug a few wires in, you test it, and you instantly have mega tera tera flops (don’t hold me to that number).  Microsoft has been trying to plug away at their cloud services (named Azure).  Which, for the layman, means Microsoft runs your software on their computers, and as demand increases you can allocate more computing power on the fly. With this in mind, it doesn’t surprise me that I was recently sent an executive email concerning Microsoft’s new technical computing initiative.  I find it to be a great marketing idea with actual substance behind their real work.  From the programmer academic perspective, in college we dreamed about this type of processing power.  This has decades of computer science theory behind it. A copy of the email received.  (note that I almost deleted this email, thinking it was spam due to it’s length) We don't often think about how complex life really is. Take the relatively simple task of commuting to and from work: it is, in fact, a complicated interplay of variables such as weather, train delays, accidents, traffic patterns, road construction, etc. You can however, take steps to shorten your commute - using a good, predictive understanding of a few of these variables. In fact, you probably are already taking these inputs and instinctively building a predictive model that you act on daily to get to your destination more quickly. Now, when we apply the same method to very complex tasks, this modeling approach becomes much more challenging. Recent world events clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables that would have helped to more accurately predict the behavior of global financial markets or the occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland. To make sense of issues like these, researchers, engineers and analysts create computer models of the almost infinite number of possible interactions in complex systems. But, they need increasingly more sophisticated computer models to better understand how the world behaves and to make fact-based predictions about the future. And, to do this, it requires a tremendous amount of computing power to process and examine the massive data deluge from cameras, digital sensors and precision instruments of all kinds. This is the key to creating more accurate and realistic models that expose the hidden meaning of data, which gives us the kind of insight we need to solve a myriad of challenges. We have made great strides in our ability to build these kinds of computer models, and yet they are still too difficult, expensive and time consuming to manage. Today, even the most complicated data-rich simulations cannot fully capture all of the intricacies and dependencies of the systems they are trying to model. That is why, across the scientific and engineering world, it is so hard to say with any certainty when or where the next volcano will erupt and what flight patterns it might affect, or to more accurately predict something like a global flu pandemic. So far, we just cannot collect, correlate and compute enough data to create an accurate forecast of the real world. But this is about to change. Innovations in technology are transforming our ability to measure, monitor and model how the world behaves. The implication for scientific research is profound, and it will transform the way we tackle global challenges like health care and climate change. It will also have a huge impact on engineering and business, delivering breakthroughs that could lead to the creation of new products, new businesses and even new industries. Because you are a subscriber to executive e-mails from Microsoft, I want you to be the first to know about a new effort focused specifically on empowering millions of the world's smartest problem solvers. Today, I am happy to introduce Microsoft's Technical Computing initiative. Our goal is to unleash the power of pervasive, accurate, real-time modeling to help people and organizations achieve their objectives and realize their potential. We are bringing together some of the brightest minds in the technical computing community across industry, academia and science at www.modelingtheworld.com to discuss trends, challenges and shared opportunities. New advances provide the foundation for tools and applications that will make technical computing more affordable and accessible where mathematical and computational principles are applied to solve practical problems. One day soon, complicated tasks like building a sophisticated computer model that would typically take a team of advanced software programmers months to build and days to run, will be accomplished in a single afternoon by a scientist, engineer or analyst working at the PC on their desktop. And as technology continues to advance, these models will become more complete and accurate in the way they represent the world. This will speed our ability to test new ideas, improve processes and advance our understanding of systems. Our technical computing initiative reflects the best of Microsoft's heritage. Ever since Bill Gates articulated the then far-fetched vision of "a computer on every desktop" in the early 1980's, Microsoft has been at the forefront of expanding the power and reach of computing to benefit the world. As someone who worked closely with Bill for many years at Microsoft, I am happy to share with you that the passion behind that vision is fully alive at Microsoft and is carried out in the creation of our new Technical Computing group. Enabling more people to make better predictions We have seen the impact of making greater computing power more available firsthand through our investments in high performance computing (HPC) over the past five years. Scientists, engineers and analysts in organizations of all sizes and sectors are finding that using distributed computational power creates societal impact, fuels scientific breakthroughs and delivers competitive advantages. For example, we have seen remarkable results from some of our current customers: Malaria strikes 300,000 to 500,000 people around the world each year. To help in the effort to eradicate malaria worldwide, scientists at Intellectual Ventures use software that simulates how the disease spreads and would respond to prevention and control methods, such as vaccines and the use of bed nets. Technical computing allows researchers to model more detailed parameters for more accurate results and receive those results in less than an hour, rather than waiting a full day. Aerospace engineering firm, a.i. solutions, Inc., needed a more powerful computing platform to keep up with the increasingly complex computational needs of its customers: NASA, the Department of Defense and other government agencies planning space flights. To meet that need, it adopted technical computing. Now, a.i. solutions can produce detailed predictions and analysis of the flight dynamics of a given spacecraft, from optimal launch times and orbit determination to attitude control and navigation, up to eight times faster. This enables them to avoid mistakes in any areas that can cause a space mission to fail and potentially result in the loss of life and millions of dollars. Western & Southern Financial Group faced the challenge of running ever larger and more complex actuarial models as its number of policyholders and products grew and regulatory requirements changed. The company chose an actuarial solution that runs on technical computing technology. The solution is easy for the company's IT staff to manage and adjust to meet business needs. The new solution helps the company reduce modeling time by up to 99 percent - letting the team fine-tune its models for more accurate product pricing and financial projections. Our Technical Computing direction Collaborating closely with partners across industry and academia, we must now extend the reach of technical computing even further to help predictive modelers and data explorers make faster, more accurate predictions. As we build the Technical Computing initiative, we will invest in three core areas: Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will play a leading role in bringing technical computing power to scientists, engineers and analysts through the cloud. Existing high- performance computing users will benefit from the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable 'just-in-time' processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed-reliably, consistently and quickly. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores, but most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and trouble shoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today's modern computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We are delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop... to the cluster... to the cloud. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: We know scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power and simplified tools to increase the speed of their work. We are building a platform to do this. Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration. This will allow them to spend more time on their work and less time wrestling with complicated technology. Thinking bigger There is so much left to be discovered and so many questions yet to be answered in the fascinating world around us. We believe the technical computing community will show us that we have not seen anything yet. Imagine just some of the breakthroughs this community could make possible: Better predictions to help improve the understanding of pandemics, contagion and global health trends. Climate change models that predict environmental, economic and human impact, accessible in real-time during key discussions and debates. More accurate prediction of natural disasters and their impact to develop more effective emergency response plans. With an ambitious charter in hand, this new team is ready to build on our progress to-date and execute Microsoft's technical computing vision over the months and years ahead. We will steadily invest in the right technologies, tools and talent, and work to bring together the technical computing community. I invite you to visit www.modelingtheworld.com today. We welcome your ideas and feedback. I look forward to making this journey with you and others who want to answer the world's biggest questions, discover solutions to problems that seem impossible and uncover a host of new opportunities to change the world we live in for the better. Bob

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• Smart Grid Gateway and New Meter Data Management released

  - by Anthony Shorten

  Two products have just been released and are available from edlivery.oracle.com. Smart Grid Gateway 2.0.0 - A new product to integrate to Smart Grid networks Meter Data Management 2.0.1 - A new version of the Meter Data Management product. These products are the first products to use the brand new version of the Oracle Utilities Applicaton Framework (V4.1). The new framework builds up on FW2.2 and FW4.0.2 to add exciting new features (this is just a subset): Support for Database Vault Enhancements to Business Object Maintenance Batch Statistics Portal for benchmarking Custom template user exit support File permissions now consistent with other Oracle products Use of Universal Connection Pool for all database pool access Ability to manage the batch data cache Over the next few weeks I will be publishing articles and updates to existing whitepapers to highlight all the new features.

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• New Enhanced Visual WebGui WINWEB and .NETHTML5 Versions

  - by Webgui

  After a long wait and huge anticipation from the Visual WebGui community, I am happy to announce the release of new versions for the WINWEB and .NETHTML5 branches. The new 6.4.0 Release d and 6.4.0 beta3 versions are available after an extensive work on core capabilities of Visual WebGui including extension of existing controls and adding new controls such as Strip Controls, RibbonBar, DataGridView, ComboBox, PropertyGrid and RadioButton, DataGridView, ComboBox, PropertyGrid and RadioButton, as well as some major enhancements to both versions in terms of cross-browser support and performance.We apologize for the delay in the release of those most expected versions, but we believe that the extra time lead to a more mature and complete product. As you can see the changelog is pretty long and includes a list of enhancements, new features and bug fixes: http://visualwebgui.com/Developers/KB/tabid/654/article/w_changelogs/Default.aspx The new versions are available for all versions with open source and for The new versions are available for all versions with open sources for Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010. You are welcome to download the WINWEB Free Trial and the Free .NETHTML5 beta on the downloads page.

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• Ubuntu 11.10 Gnome Shell new window focus problem

  - by grafthez

  I'm using gnome shell with new ubuntu for few days now and have experienced really annoying behaviour with new windows. Sometimes when I use another window and press e.g. Alt Ctrl T to open new terminal window, I don't get this window being brought to front. Instead I get notification at the bottom that "New terminal window is ready to use". The same is with Pidgin being integrated with gnome shell (via extension). Every time I get new message, window pops up but doesn't show. I need to either Alt Tab it or click the notification. Is there any way to have new windows being always brought to front, and remove those annoying "Window is ready" notifications?

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• Transition to new site

  - by James Hill

  I'm almost finished rewriting the website for a non-profit organization. The existing site receives ~5,000 a month. The new site is being written in ASP.Net and the existing site is PHP. The current hosting provider does not support .Net hosting, so I'll be switching providers. My question revolves around the transition from the old site to the new. I would really like to get the new site up at the new hosting provider and do thorough testing before changing the DNS records for the domain. Question: How can I put the new site up, test it, make any changes/additions necessary before updating the domain DNS to point to the new IP without Google indexing the content? Also, what SEO repercussions should I be aware of when making such a drastic change to the content that exists under the domain name?

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• Sometimes new windows don't come to the front when launched

  - by grafthez

  I'm using gnome shell with new ubuntu for few days now and have experienced really annoying behaviour with new windows. Sometimes when I use another window and press e.g. Alt Ctrl T to open new terminal window, I don't get this window being brought to front. Instead I get notification at the bottom that "New terminal window is ready to use". The same is with Pidgin being integrated with gnome shell (via extension). Every time I get new message, window pops up but doesn't show. I need to either Alt Tab it or click the notification. Is there any way to have new windows being always brought to front, and remove those annoying "Window is ready" notifications? UPDATE - gconftool-2 --search-key focus_new_windows (as severin asked): /schemas/apps/metacity/general/focus_new_windows = Schema (type: `string' list_type: '*invalid*' car_type: '*invalid*' cdr_type: '*invalid*' locale: `C') /apps/metacity/general/focus_new_windows = smart

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• What is "top new free" on GooglePlay

  - by Lumis

  On Android Market i.e. GooglePlay, there used to be a page with the latest new games. So every game had a chance to get noticed and make its way up especially if it was good. But now I see "top new free" page and no more the latest apps. I don't understand how can be "top new" Anybody knows how this works? If there are no more pages with the very latest uploaded games then the new apps will be barely seen to exist even if they are excellent, and new programmers have very little chance of getting noticed. Any good advice how to promote a new Android app these days?

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• New features of C# 4.0

  This article covers New features of C# 4.0. Article has been divided into below sections. Introduction. Dynamic Lookup. Named and Optional Arguments. Features for COM interop. Variance. Relationship with Visual Basic. Resources. Other interested readings… 22 New Features of Visual Studio 2008 for .NET Professionals 50 New Features of SQL Server 2008 IIS 7.0 New features Introduction It is now close to a year since Microsoft Visual C# 3.0 shipped as part of Visual Studio 2008. In the VS Managed Languages team we are hard at work on creating the next version of the language (with the unsurprising working title of C# 4.0), and this document is a first public description of the planned language features as we currently see them. Please be advised that all this is in early stages of production and is subject to change. Part of the reason for sharing our plans in public so early is precisely to get the kind of feedback that will cause us to improve the final product before it rolls out. Simultaneously with the publication of this whitepaper, a first public CTP (community technology preview) of Visual Studio 2010 is going out as a Virtual PC image for everyone to try. Please use it to play and experiment with the features, and let us know of any thoughts you have. We ask for your understanding and patience working with very early bits, where especially new or newly implemented features do not have the quality or stability of a final product. The aim of the CTP is not to give you a productive work environment but to give you the best possible impression of what we are working on for the next release. The CTP contains a number of walkthroughs, some of which highlight the new language features of C# 4.0. Those are excellent for getting a hands-on guided tour through the details of some common scenarios for the features. You may consider this whitepaper a companion document to these walkthroughs, complementing them with a focus on the overall language features and how they work, as opposed to the specifics of the concrete scenarios. C# 4.0 The major theme for C# 4.0 is dynamic programming. Increasingly, objects are “dynamic” in the sense that their structure and behavior is not captured by a static type, or at least not one that the compiler knows about when compiling your program. Some examples include a. objects from dynamic programming languages, such as Python or Ruby b. COM objects accessed through IDispatch c. ordinary .NET types accessed through reflection d. objects with changing structure, such as HTML DOM objects While C# remains a statically typed language, we aim to vastly improve the interaction with such objects. A secondary theme is co-evolution with Visual Basic. Going forward we will aim to maintain the individual character of each language, but at the same time important new features should be introduced in both languages at the same time. They should be differentiated more by style and feel than by feature set. The new features in C# 4.0 fall into four groups: Dynamic lookup Dynamic lookup allows you to write method, operator and indexer calls, property and field accesses, and even object invocations which bypass the C# static type checking and instead gets resolved at runtime. Named and optional parameters Parameters in C# can now be specified as optional by providing a default value for them in a member declaration. When the member is invoked, optional arguments can be omitted. Furthermore, any argument can be passed by parameter name instead of position. COM specific interop features Dynamic lookup as well as named and optional parameters both help making programming against COM less painful than today. On top of that, however, we are adding a number of other small features that further improve the interop experience. Variance It used to be that an IEnumerable<string> wasn’t an IEnumerable<object>. Now it is – C# embraces type safe “co-and contravariance” and common BCL types are updated to take advantage of that. Dynamic Lookup Dynamic lookup allows you a unified approach to invoking things dynamically. With dynamic lookup, when you have an object in your hand you do not need to worry about whether it comes from COM, IronPython, the HTML DOM or reflection; you just apply operations to it and leave it to the runtime to figure out what exactly those operations mean for that particular object. This affords you enormous flexibility, and can greatly simplify your code, but it does come with a significant drawback: Static typing is not maintained for these operations. A dynamic object is assumed at compile time to support any operation, and only at runtime will you get an error if it wasn’t so. Oftentimes this will be no loss, because the object wouldn’t have a static type anyway, in other cases it is a tradeoff between brevity and safety. In order to facilitate this tradeoff, it is a design goal of C# to allow you to opt in or opt out of dynamic behavior on every single call. The dynamic type C# 4.0 introduces a new static type called dynamic. When you have an object of type dynamic you can “do things to it” that are resolved only at runtime: dynamic d = GetDynamicObject(…); d.M(7); The C# compiler allows you to call a method with any name and any arguments on d because it is of type dynamic. At runtime the actual object that d refers to will be examined to determine what it means to “call M with an int” on it. The type dynamic can be thought of as a special version of the type object, which signals that the object can be used dynamically. It is easy to opt in or out of dynamic behavior: any object can be implicitly converted to dynamic, “suspending belief” until runtime. Conversely, there is an “assignment conversion” from dynamic to any other type, which allows implicit conversion in assignment-like constructs: dynamic d = 7; // implicit conversion int i = d; // assignment conversion Dynamic operations Not only method calls, but also field and property accesses, indexer and operator calls and even delegate invocations can be dispatched dynamically: dynamic d = GetDynamicObject(…); d.M(7); // calling methods d.f = d.P; // getting and settings fields and properties d[“one”] = d[“two”]; // getting and setting thorugh indexers int i = d + 3; // calling operators string s = d(5,7); // invoking as a delegate The role of the C# compiler here is simply to package up the necessary information about “what is being done to d”, so that the runtime can pick it up and determine what the exact meaning of it is given an actual object d. Think of it as deferring part of the compiler’s job to runtime. The result of any dynamic operation is itself of type dynamic. Runtime lookup At runtime a dynamic operation is dispatched according to the nature of its target object d: COM objects If d is a COM object, the operation is dispatched dynamically through COM IDispatch. This allows calling to COM types that don’t have a Primary Interop Assembly (PIA), and relying on COM features that don’t have a counterpart in C#, such as indexed properties and default properties. Dynamic objects If d implements the interface IDynamicObject d itself is asked to perform the operation. Thus by implementing IDynamicObject a type can completely redefine the meaning of dynamic operations. This is used intensively by dynamic languages such as IronPython and IronRuby to implement their own dynamic object models. It will also be used by APIs, e.g. by the HTML DOM to allow direct access to the object’s properties using property syntax. Plain objects Otherwise d is a standard .NET object, and the operation will be dispatched using reflection on its type and a C# “runtime binder” which implements C#’s lookup and overload resolution semantics at runtime. This is essentially a part of the C# compiler running as a runtime component to “finish the work” on dynamic operations that was deferred by the static compiler. Example Assume the following code: dynamic d1 = new Foo(); dynamic d2 = new Bar(); string s; d1.M(s, d2, 3, null); Because the receiver of the call to M is dynamic, the C# compiler does not try to resolve the meaning of the call. Instead it stashes away information for the runtime about the call. This information (often referred to as the “payload”) is essentially equivalent to: “Perform an instance method call of M with the following arguments: 1. a string 2. a dynamic 3. a literal int 3 4. a literal object null” At runtime, assume that the actual type Foo of d1 is not a COM type and does not implement IDynamicObject. In this case the C# runtime binder picks up to finish the overload resolution job based on runtime type information, proceeding as follows: 1. Reflection is used to obtain the actual runtime types of the two objects, d1 and d2, that did not have a static type (or rather had the static type dynamic). The result is Foo for d1 and Bar for d2. 2. Method lookup and overload resolution is performed on the type Foo with the call M(string,Bar,3,null) using ordinary C# semantics. 3. If the method is found it is invoked; otherwise a runtime exception is thrown. Overload resolution with dynamic arguments Even if the receiver of a method call is of a static type, overload resolution can still happen at runtime. This can happen if one or more of the arguments have the type dynamic: Foo foo = new Foo(); dynamic d = new Bar(); var result = foo.M(d); The C# runtime binder will choose between the statically known overloads of M on Foo, based on the runtime type of d, namely Bar. The result is again of type dynamic. The Dynamic Language Runtime An important component in the underlying implementation of dynamic lookup is the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), which is a new API in .NET 4.0. The DLR provides most of the infrastructure behind not only C# dynamic lookup but also the implementation of several dynamic programming languages on .NET, such as IronPython and IronRuby. Through this common infrastructure a high degree of interoperability is ensured, but just as importantly the DLR provides excellent caching mechanisms which serve to greatly enhance the efficiency of runtime dispatch. To the user of dynamic lookup in C#, the DLR is invisible except for the improved efficiency. However, if you want to implement your own dynamically dispatched objects, the IDynamicObject interface allows you to interoperate with the DLR and plug in your own behavior. This is a rather advanced task, which requires you to understand a good deal more about the inner workings of the DLR. For API writers, however, it can definitely be worth the trouble in order to vastly improve the usability of e.g. a library representing an inherently dynamic domain. Open issues There are a few limitations and things that might work differently than you would expect. · The DLR allows objects to be created from objects that represent classes. However, the current implementation of C# doesn’t have syntax to support this. · Dynamic lookup will not be able to find extension methods. Whether extension methods apply or not depends on the static context of the call (i.e. which using clauses occur), and this context information is not currently kept as part of the payload. · Anonymous functions (i.e. lambda expressions) cannot appear as arguments to a dynamic method call. The compiler cannot bind (i.e. “understand”) an anonymous function without knowing what type it is converted to. One consequence of these limitations is that you cannot easily use LINQ queries over dynamic objects: dynamic collection = …; var result = collection.Select(e => e + 5); If the Select method is an extension method, dynamic lookup will not find it. Even if it is an instance method, the above does not compile, because a lambda expression cannot be passed as an argument to a dynamic operation. There are no plans to address these limitations in C# 4.0. Named and Optional Arguments Named and optional parameters are really two distinct features, but are often useful together. Optional parameters allow you to omit arguments to member invocations, whereas named arguments is a way to provide an argument using the name of the corresponding parameter instead of relying on its position in the parameter list. Some APIs, most notably COM interfaces such as the Office automation APIs, are written specifically with named and optional parameters in mind. Up until now it has been very painful to call into these APIs from C#, with sometimes as many as thirty arguments having to be explicitly passed, most of which have reasonable default values and could be omitted. Even in APIs for .NET however you sometimes find yourself compelled to write many overloads of a method with different combinations of parameters, in order to provide maximum usability to the callers. Optional parameters are a useful alternative for these situations. Optional parameters A parameter is declared optional simply by providing a default value for it: public void M(int x, int y = 5, int z = 7); Here y and z are optional parameters and can be omitted in calls: M(1, 2, 3); // ordinary call of M M(1, 2); // omitting z – equivalent to M(1, 2, 7) M(1); // omitting both y and z – equivalent to M(1, 5, 7) Named and optional arguments C# 4.0 does not permit you to omit arguments between commas as in M(1,,3). This could lead to highly unreadable comma-counting code. Instead any argument can be passed by name. Thus if you want to omit only y from a call of M you can write: M(1, z: 3); // passing z by name or M(x: 1, z: 3); // passing both x and z by name or even M(z: 3, x: 1); // reversing the order of arguments All forms are equivalent, except that arguments are always evaluated in the order they appear, so in the last example the 3 is evaluated before the 1. Optional and named arguments can be used not only with methods but also with indexers and constructors. Overload resolution Named and optional arguments affect overload resolution, but the changes are relatively simple: A signature is applicable if all its parameters are either optional or have exactly one corresponding argument (by name or position) in the call which is convertible to the parameter type. Betterness rules on conversions are only applied for arguments that are explicitly given – omitted optional arguments are ignored for betterness purposes. If two signatures are equally good, one that does not omit optional parameters is preferred. M(string s, int i = 1); M(object o); M(int i, string s = “Hello”); M(int i); M(5); Given these overloads, we can see the working of the rules above. M(string,int) is not applicable because 5 doesn’t convert to string. M(int,string) is applicable because its second parameter is optional, and so, obviously are M(object) and M(int). M(int,string) and M(int) are both better than M(object) because the conversion from 5 to int is better than the conversion from 5 to object. Finally M(int) is better than M(int,string) because no optional arguments are omitted. Thus the method that gets called is M(int). Features for COM interop Dynamic lookup as well as named and optional parameters greatly improve the experience of interoperating with COM APIs such as the Office Automation APIs. In order to remove even more of the speed bumps, a couple of small COM-specific features are also added to C# 4.0. Dynamic import Many COM methods accept and return variant types, which are represented in the PIAs as object. In the vast majority of cases, a programmer calling these methods already knows the static type of a returned object from context, but explicitly has to perform a cast on the returned value to make use of that knowledge. These casts are so common that they constitute a major nuisance. In order to facilitate a smoother experience, you can now choose to import these COM APIs in such a way that variants are instead represented using the type dynamic. In other words, from your point of view, COM signatures now have occurrences of dynamic instead of object in them. This means that you can easily access members directly off a returned object, or you can assign it to a strongly typed local variable without having to cast. To illustrate, you can now say excel.Cells[1, 1].Value = "Hello"; instead of ((Excel.Range)excel.Cells[1, 1]).Value2 = "Hello"; and Excel.Range range = excel.Cells[1, 1]; instead of Excel.Range range = (Excel.Range)excel.Cells[1, 1]; Compiling without PIAs Primary Interop Assemblies are large .NET assemblies generated from COM interfaces to facilitate strongly typed interoperability. They provide great support at design time, where your experience of the interop is as good as if the types where really defined in .NET. However, at runtime these large assemblies can easily bloat your program, and also cause versioning issues because they are distributed independently of your application. The no-PIA feature allows you to continue to use PIAs at design time without having them around at runtime. Instead, the C# compiler will bake the small part of the PIA that a program actually uses directly into its assembly. At runtime the PIA does not have to be loaded. Omitting ref Because of a different programming model, many COM APIs contain a lot of reference parameters. Contrary to refs in C#, these are typically not meant to mutate a passed-in argument for the subsequent benefit of the caller, but are simply another way of passing value parameters. It therefore seems unreasonable that a C# programmer should have to create temporary variables for all such ref parameters and pass these by reference. Instead, specifically for COM methods, the C# compiler will allow you to pass arguments by value to such a method, and will automatically generate temporary variables to hold the passed-in values, subsequently discarding these when the call returns. In this way the caller sees value semantics, and will not experience any side effects, but the called method still gets a reference. Open issues A few COM interface features still are not surfaced in C#. Most notably these include indexed properties and default properties. As mentioned above these will be respected if you access COM dynamically, but statically typed C# code will still not recognize them. There are currently no plans to address these remaining speed bumps in C# 4.0. Variance An aspect of generics that often comes across as surprising is that the following is illegal: IList<string> strings = new List<string>(); IList<object> objects = strings; The second assignment is disallowed because strings does not have the same element type as objects. There is a perfectly good reason for this. If it were allowed you could write: objects[0] = 5; string s = strings[0]; Allowing an int to be inserted into a list of strings and subsequently extracted as a string. This would be a breach of type safety. However, there are certain interfaces where the above cannot occur, notably where there is no way to insert an object into the collection. Such an interface is IEnumerable<T>. If instead you say: IEnumerable<object> objects = strings; There is no way we can put the wrong kind of thing into strings through objects, because objects doesn’t have a method that takes an element in. Variance is about allowing assignments such as this in cases where it is safe. The result is that a lot of situations that were previously surprising now just work. Covariance In .NET 4.0 the IEnumerable<T> interface will be declared in the following way: public interface IEnumerable<out T> : IEnumerable { IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator<out T> : IEnumerator { bool MoveNext(); T Current { get; } } The “out” in these declarations signifies that the T can only occur in output position in the interface – the compiler will complain otherwise. In return for this restriction, the interface becomes “covariant” in T, which means that an IEnumerable<A> is considered an IEnumerable<B> if A has a reference conversion to B. As a result, any sequence of strings is also e.g. a sequence of objects. This is useful e.g. in many LINQ methods. Using the declarations above: var result = strings.Union(objects); // succeeds with an IEnumerable<object> This would previously have been disallowed, and you would have had to to some cumbersome wrapping to get the two sequences to have the same element type. Contravariance Type parameters can also have an “in” modifier, restricting them to occur only in input positions. An example is IComparer<T>: public interface IComparer<in T> { public int Compare(T left, T right); } The somewhat baffling result is that an IComparer<object> can in fact be considered an IComparer<string>! It makes sense when you think about it: If a comparer can compare any two objects, it can certainly also compare two strings. This property is referred to as contravariance. A generic type can have both in and out modifiers on its type parameters, as is the case with the Func<…> delegate types: public delegate TResult Func<in TArg, out TResult>(TArg arg); Obviously the argument only ever comes in, and the result only ever comes out. Therefore a Func<object,string> can in fact be used as a Func<string,object>. Limitations Variant type parameters can only be declared on interfaces and delegate types, due to a restriction in the CLR. Variance only applies when there is a reference conversion between the type arguments. For instance, an IEnumerable<int> is not an IEnumerable<object> because the conversion from int to object is a boxing conversion, not a reference conversion. Also please note that the CTP does not contain the new versions of the .NET types mentioned above. In order to experiment with variance you have to declare your own variant interfaces and delegate types. COM Example Here is a larger Office automation example that shows many of the new C# features in action. using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Linq; using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel; using Word = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word; class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var excel = new Excel.Application(); excel.Visible = true; excel.Workbooks.Add(); // optional arguments omitted excel.Cells[1, 1].Value = "Process Name"; // no casts; Value dynamically excel.Cells[1, 2].Value = "Memory Usage"; // accessed var processes = Process.GetProcesses() .OrderByDescending(p =&gt; p.WorkingSet) .Take(10); int i = 2; foreach (var p in processes) { excel.Cells[i, 1].Value = p.ProcessName; // no casts excel.Cells[i, 2].Value = p.WorkingSet; // no casts i++; } Excel.Range range = excel.Cells[1, 1]; // no casts Excel.Chart chart = excel.ActiveWorkbook.Charts. Add(After: excel.ActiveSheet); // named and optional arguments chart.ChartWizard( Source: range.CurrentRegion, Title: "Memory Usage in " + Environment.MachineName); //named+optional chart.ChartStyle = 45; chart.CopyPicture(Excel.XlPictureAppearance.xlScreen, Excel.XlCopyPictureFormat.xlBitmap, Excel.XlPictureAppearance.xlScreen); var word = new Word.Application(); word.Visible = true; word.Documents.Add(); // optional arguments word.Selection.Paste(); } } The code is much more terse and readable than the C# 3.0 counterpart. Note especially how the Value property is accessed dynamically. This is actually an indexed property, i.e. a property that takes an argument; something which C# does not understand. However the argument is optional. Since the access is dynamic, it goes through the runtime COM binder which knows to substitute the default value and call the indexed property. Thus, dynamic COM allows you to avoid accesses to the puzzling Value2 property of Excel ranges. Relationship with Visual Basic A number of the features introduced to C# 4.0 already exist or will be introduced in some form or other in Visual Basic: · Late binding in VB is similar in many ways to dynamic lookup in C#, and can be expected to make more use of the DLR in the future, leading to further parity with C#. · Named and optional arguments have been part of Visual Basic for a long time, and the C# version of the feature is explicitly engineered with maximal VB interoperability in mind. · NoPIA and variance are both being introduced to VB and C# at the same time. VB in turn is adding a number of features that have hitherto been a mainstay of C#. As a result future versions of C# and VB will have much better feature parity, for the benefit of everyone. Resources All available resources concerning C# 4.0 can be accessed through the C# Dev Center. Specifically, this white paper and other resources can be found at the Code Gallery site. Enjoy! span.fullpost {display:none;}

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